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It was the day of my defense, and as I prepared to give the biggest talk of my life thus far, I looked out into the audience, and saw Ben Barres walk into the room. Normally, this would have been a totally unremarkable event. Ben was one of the members on my committee. Except these circumstances were not normal. Ben was diagnosed with terminal cancer just over a year earlier.
Read MoreWe offer a tribute to Dr. Ben Barres, whose groundbreaking science and refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice served as an inspiration to many. This piece and its companion piece by David Lipton are the final installments in our series about inequality in STEM.
Read MoreJosiah Leong shares a poetic reflection on addiction and addiction research.
Read MoreFor years, we thought we had one advantage over the jumping spiders: the ability to hear. Now, fascinating new research suggests that Mother Nature leveled the playing field by giving some spiders a bizarre way to sense its enemies. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Read MoreAs a graduate student, I would give my right arm to be a fully functioning human being with little to no sleep. Alas, even Aristotle in 350 BCE observed a seemingly simple truth -- all animals sleep. Much to the frustration of sleep scientists, we still do not fully understand why we need sleep or why there is so much variation between species in sleep behavior. We are, however, beginning to gain an understanding of what may be regulating sleep and how it may have evolved over time, in some cases even making use of unusual model organisms such as Astyanax mexicanus, or the Mexican cavefish.
Read MoreMore than five million individuals are affected by Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) in the United States. This dementia is the sixth leading cause of death nationwide, and one of every three seniors dies from AD or a related dementia…
Research has primarily sought to understand the biology underlying early-onset familial Alzheimer’s, using genes with well-defined autosomal dominant mutations. However, familial early-onset AD occurs in less than ten percent of Alzheimer’s Disease cases. The majority of cases are sporadic, late-onset, and associated with “risk genes”, particularly APOE.
Read MoreWhen we’re walking from place to place, we have full control of when and how fast to go. But how does the brain tell the leg muscles to start walking? Speed up? Slow down?
Read MoreIn STEM fields women are underrepresented both in numbers of senior faculty and participation metrics [1,2,3]. Women leave STEM fields at all transition points, a phenomenon known as “the leaky pipeline.” … In this post, we highlight a study by Professor Gregory Walton and his colleagues, where they characterize feelings of exclusion, and attempt to mitigate these feelings through the development of simple intervention strategies [6].
Read MoreFrom courtroom sentencing to graduate school admissions, from voting on the president to choosing who to sit next to on the bus, our biases play a role in the decisions we make and the actions we take. Most interventions designed to combat implicit bias do not hold up over time or simply do not reduce bias. Amidst these unsuccessful interventions, Mel Slater’s group at the University of Barcelona found one method that did reduce implicit bias of white people against black people and whose effects persisted for an unusually long time.
Read MoreBiased beliefs about the abilities of underrepresented groups in science can lead to inequality in hiring, promotions, admissions, funding, and more. Given that diversifying the STEMM academy is both just and beneficial to scientific progress, it’s hard to argue against efforts to promote diversity in hiring. In light of this issue, two groups of researchers recently sought to develop and rigorously test evidence-based interventions for counteracting natural human biases, with the specific goal of decreasing the bias against women in the academic STEMM faculty hiring process.
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