Today, I asked Kelly Chi to answer a few questions.

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m a freelance science writer based in Cary, North Carolina, but I spent most of my life thinking that I would one day become a scientist. It turns out that I am terrible at experiments. Although I realized this during my first year of graduate school, I kept going – for three years on the PhD track, stubbornly – with the thought that one day it wouldn’t matter that my hands shake during rat brain surgery. And I could be a professor, think of new experiments, write papers and teach.

During graduate school, I started writing for the college newspaper and realized that I loved writing about science. Short-term deadlines fit me perfectly, I also learned. So I left my PhD, got a master’s and started the science and medical journalism program at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2006.

Leaving my PhD was really difficult for me, not only because I hate the idea of quitting but because it seemed risky to pursue an entirely new career path. But since that time, I’ve learned that there are a whole bunch of writers and editors out there who are also just like me.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I wish that freelancing offered more of a career trajectory, but in the past several years I have focused on getting (and keeping) clients and trying different sorts of writing and editing.

While pursuing a master’s at UNC, for example, I worked with the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center on an exhibit for kids called Zoom In, which tackled diverse topics like cystic fibrosis and outer space. The best part of this project was working with a team of educators and designers. We got paid to talk about mucus– who wouldn’t love that?

Last year, I got my first long-ish feature, ‘Disappearing before Dawn,’ published in The Scientist magazine. That became one of the most popular articles on the website in 2009, and that’s probably because you linked to it, Bora. In 2009, I also wrote a small book that I refuse to call a booklet for London-based NGO International Institute for Environment and Development that appeared at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Besides the usual freelancing, I’ve been taken a position at Medscape Medical Students as a freelance clinical editor. My goal, for the next six months, will be to help build the website’s blogs, columns and discussions. This content will, I hope, help medical students survive rotations and choose their specialties.

I also manage editorial content for the Amgen Scholars Program website. It’s funded by the Amgen Foundation, and the program gives undergraduates the chance to do scientific research at one of more than 10 host universities across the U.S. and Europe. As part of this work, which is through my client Faculty of 1000, I encourage students to blog about their research experiences in the Program’s private online community. I’ve been able to meet and interact with some really bright and talented undergraduates. These kids are great. They sometimes make me feel old, but that’s okay.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Like many of my writer friends and colleagues, I care about making science accessible to people. Most of my work is geared for somewhat specialized audiences, like physicians or scientists or students, but these folks are everyday people in many ways. I try to assume that they won’t have the time or willpower to unpack a mess of jargon. That said, I like knowledge for its own sake, so sometimes jargon will nerdily make its way into my writing. I’m lucky to have patient editors who remind me to fish it out.

Related to the Amgen Scholars and Medscape Medical Students work I’m doing, I am also deeply interested in building online communities and helping make them better somehow. With this goal in mind, I plan to attend ScienceOnline 2011 and absorb as much as I can. Because building communities is not easy, and I need all the help I can get.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I have to admit that I spend more time finding and encouraging others to blog than I do blogging. Motivated by my own hypocrisy, I started a website and attached a blog to it. Besides posting and linking to my own articles, I hope to find time to write about science and health tidbits that interest me. Luckily, no one reads my blog yet (except for my mother and my friend Penny), so no pressure.

I do use Twitter and Facebook, but I find myself posting for different audiences. On Facebook, it’s my family and friends. On Twitter, it’s my colleagues and people who are too interesting to ignore. Most of this online activity is a net positive, I’d say, because it has given me story ideas and the ability to procrastinate in the most productive way possible.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, because it makes me feel technologically challenged, but for me the coolest part about the conference was the undercurrent of chatter on the #scio10 Twitter feed. Attendees used Twitter to sum up the presentations, ask questions, make wisecracks and agree or disagree with the presenters. All in real time. I have to admit that before this conference I avoided Twitter because I thought of it as a giant time suck. Now I think of it as not only not a time suck but, at least in a conference setting, as a way to understand the same presentation through someone else’s more experienced eyes — like internet-o-vision. The experience was kind of a revelation for me. Twitter’s also great for networking: when I started tuning into the conference-related tweets, I got introduced to many attendees in a short amount of time.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. And I’ll see you in January!

Today, I asked Marla Broadfoot to answer a few questions.

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I live in a big old farmhouse in Wendell, a little town east of Raleigh. My husband’s great great great grandfather Dr. Henry Avera built it in 1870-something, so the house has been in the family for nine generations. I’m more of a city girl myself, but it has grown on me, high ceilings, cold winters, busted plumbing, mice, and all. I love doing my interviews from my antique desk, looking out at our resident groundhog as she suns herself in the yard. It’s not such a bad place to muse and write.

I was a research scientist before I was a writer. I had always thought I wanted to be a scientist, until I was one. The way it was laid out in textbooks, science was a beautiful and surprisingly simple thing. But once I delved deeper into the discipline, doing research of my own, I found that nothing was as simple as it seemed. Take that elegant DNA double helix that Watson and Crick first described. It doesn’t always look that way – often it is twisted like a rope, and sometimes it is completely reversed!

Not that I detest complex topics – actually, some of my favorite things to write about are the most basic of basic sciences, which are hardly ever simple. But I did feel like every time I attempted some feat at the bench, the complexities of the science made it take ten times longer than I thought it should. Some people embrace those complications, delving into every detail of the problem they are working on. But I was just too impatient for that. I wanted answers, and I wanted them right away.

I found myself enjoying reading up on the science, presenting the science and writing about the science more than doing the science. I dabbled a bit in science writing, creating a couple of pieces for American Scientist and Endeavors, the research magazine at UNC, where I was in graduate school. I enjoyed the writing immensely, but wasn’t sure I was willing to jump off the track that I had laid out for myself so many years before. So I applied for a very competitive fellowship in clinical molecular genetics at the National Human Genome Research Institute. There was only one spot available, so I figured if I got it that meant I should stick with research; if I didn’t, then clearly writing was my new path. Well, I got it, and once I got over the boost to my ego, I realized I would have to keep doing research. I loved the fellowship, even though there was a huge learning curve as I was one of only a few PhDs in a group of MDs. And then there was that week where I thought I had Marfan syndrome (which Abraham Lincoln may have had) because I could reach around my back with one arm and touch my belly button (I learned in class that was one of the signs of the disease). Turned out it was just part of the hypochondria that sets in after reading up on clinical disorders for hours at a time.

But the research still frustrated me, so I finally admitted to myself (and my mentor) that I was going to take the leap and leave research altogether. I finished my fellowship, passed the boards (a qualification I never used) and let my country mouse of a husband “drag” me down to this quirky old home. I wrote for Duke full-time for a little over a year, most of which it seems I spent pregnant, and then left to pursue freelancing and motherhood. Now I spend my time switching between two completely different worlds: one, where I am often alone on my computer translating scientific jargon and the other, where I am being jumped upon by one little body or another. Both jobs are fun and challenging, though in completely contradictory ways.

I love the concrete nature of writing. I am no longer working with molecules too tiny for the eye to see – I’m manipulating words that I can see transform into something real and telling right there on the page. I love it that I don’t have to hear about the failures or pitfalls of science – no colony contamination or troubleshooting PCR conditions make it into my articles. Because of my stint in research, I have a strong admiration for scientists and the dedication it takes to succeed in the discipline. I also think I can be even more critical of the work I report on because I know how science is done, how it can be manipulated even unintentionally, and how it is ever changing.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

Over the last year and a half I have been working on a series on Women in Science for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Many women go into science, but just like me, leave around the time of starting their own lab. Russ Campbell at the BWF, God bless him, gave me free reign to completely delve into the problem of why more women don’t make it to the high ranking positions in academia. I pored over the literature and talked with about twenty researchers at all different stages of their careers. The result was a four-part series on a variety of topics from equity issues to mentoring to the biological clock to institutional biases. I found that outright discrimination may be mostly in the past, but subtle biases still exist, and accumulate over time, putting women at a disadvantage for awards, tenure and promotions. And men aren’t solely to blame – women and men alike tend to undervalue the contributions of female scientists. So we may have come a long way, baby, but there is a long way yet to go. Russ and I are putting the four articles and just as much supplemental material into a mini-novella of sorts that we are going to distribute nationally to continue to raise awareness about the issue.

I have also become interested in the idea of translational medicine. According to one statistic, it takes about 17 years to turn a mere 14 percent of research findings into changes in care that benefit patients. To me, that just seems too little too late. When I was in graduate school, I discovered a sort of cure for beta-thalassemia, a Mediterranean blood disorder. Essentially, I obliterated the disease in a Petri dish, published my papers, and then graduated. Patients were contacting me to find out when the treatment would reach them, and all I could see were the nearly insurmountable steps before it would ever get there. I have been writing a number of articles about a large national effort underway to cut down on those steps, and to make those that must remain at least a little less daunting. Right now I think the public is hungry to see some return on their investment. I read somewhere that it is the National Institutes of “Health,” not the National Institutes of “Scientific Publications.” Clearly the bar for success as a scientist has to change.

Another thing I have particularly enjoyed doing is creating an “Ask a scientist” series for the SciTech page of the Charlotte Observer and News & Observer. The series explores relatively basic questions that many of us may have heard about but only have enough knowledge to be dangerous. Topics like “What is ozone?,” “How does chemotherapy work?,” and “Why does Thanksgiving dinner make us sleepy?” The scientists I have talked to really revel in the opportunity to revisit old topics and allay some common misconceptions about science. A lot of the questions are inspired by my kids, who like all kids are innately curious and always want to know more. Plus I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from adult readers, asking for more details and suggesting new topics.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Honestly, most of my time is taken up by my two little rugrats, Marilyn age 4 and Viola “Vi” age 2. I remember when Vi was just a baby I flew to Seattle to cover a meeting for aids2031, a group of all these brilliant researchers from around the world who were trying to cure HIV. I was immersed in highly technical discussions and worked 12 hour days practically every day that week. Yet I got more rest than I had in a long, long time. Being a parent is definitely the most exhausting thing I have ever done. Personally, I find writing more exhilarating than exhausting. I know it sounds trite, but sometimes it really feels like a hobby I get paid to do. I frankly don’t have time for any other hobbies – a little yoga, a little reading, but if I have free time, I write, because that is what I love to do. So I guess with regard to my career, my goals are quite simple. To keep getting paid to do what I love to do, for people to read my work, and for it to make them think, perhaps even look at the world a little differently than they did before. But I guess when it comes to what matters most in my life, it is that I raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids. Let them save the world.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Practically every major issue facing the world today – global warming, the economic crisis, universal health care – has some aspect of science within it and will likely require the critical thinking and technological advances of science to solve. I personally think that science communication is an excellent vehicle to educate the public, not necessarily so that everyone can name the four bases of DNA, but more so that people can see how science can change their lives. I have always thought science was incredibly cool, and I want to impart that same excitement to those around me. My focus is on biomedical research, so I am constantly trying to explain how even the most basic research can have far-reaching implications (yes, I think fruit fly studies in France are worthwhile). But I also think it is important not to make false promises about the speed with which science is likely to progress or blow the effects of small studies out of proportion, no matter how sexy the question being tackled. That is a risk that has increased as so many dedicated science reporters have been cut from staff rooms, but hopefully the burgeoning number of independents reviewing and writing about science online can pick up the slack.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I read fellow NASW member Tabitha Powledge’s blog break-down every week. I use Twitter mainly to pick up on interesting topics in science and science journalism that I might have missed through (more) traditional channels. And I use Facebook almost entirely to share the cute or horrifying things my kids did that day. I enjoy having social media in my life, especially considering that on the days when I am working it can be the only social interaction I get. But I don’t dedicate a lot of my time to it – I mostly lurk on the sites and read a little, rarely posting myself.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I didn’t get a chance to attend many of the sessions, so I hope I will have the opportunity to go to more of them this year. I enjoyed hearing Michael Specter talk, particularly the discussion afterwards on how a journalist knows when they have talked to enough experts and done enough research to do a particular story justice. I have grappled with that same question myself, sometimes wondering if I should include the other side in a story even when that other side represents a small minority of scientific opinion. I recall one of the participants saying that scientists do the same thing as journalists, accumulating data until they think a story is complete and then submitting it to a particular academic journal. I guess scientists and journalists aren’t all that different, we just have to use our best judgment in how we present our work and the work of others.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you willl be there again next January.

Today, I asked Dr. Anne Jefferson to answer a few questions.

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m a hydrologist – meaning I study water – and an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. My pursuit of groundwater and rivers has taken me all over the country from my childhood in Minnesota, east to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for my undergraduate degree, back to Minnesota for a MS, out west to Oregon State University for a PhD and post-doc, and now to the south. My interaction with on-line communication has similarly meandered; I learned HTML and created a website as a high school student but only came to science blogging a few years ago.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’m fascinated by the way that surface water, groundwater and landscapes interact at all timescales, from a single rain storm to millions of years. What controls whether a rain drop ends up running over or through the soil into a stream channel within hours to weeks versus sinking down and becoming groundwater that spends years to centuries underground before maybe emerging in that same stream at a spring? How does that partitioning of water between surface and ground affect the way landscapes erode? And how does that partitioning affect the hydrologic behavior of streams and their sensitivity to floods, droughts, and climate change? Those are the sorts of questions I began exploring in the geologically young volcanic rocks of Oregon and I’m now trying to translate to the old, fractured crystalline rocks of North Carolina. Plus, Iiving in the rapidly growing Southeast, I’ve begun asking how human landscapes overlay on natural hydrologic processes. I’m really excited about a project I’m working on with a stream biogeochemist and ecologist to look at how stormwater management practices affect the hydrology, temperature, and ecology of small urban streams. (Come work with me on the project!)

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

My job consists of a wonderfully stimulating mix of research, advising graduate students, and teaching. I sometimes think that each of those activities is enough for a full-time job – but they are all part of one pre-tenure assistant professor job description! My goals are to do and teach good, interesting science with my students and help them succeed, because I know that in their success lies my own. I’m also the single parent of an energetic three (and a half) year old, so my second shift involves learning dinosaur paleontology and explaining viral versus bacterial illnesses in non-technical terms.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I’m interested in how the Internet can serve as an important community and resource for individuals who might otherwise feel isolated or disconnected from others like themselves. This might be the lone geologist in a physics department at a liberal arts college, it might be a Latina hydrologist in the northwest, or it might be a woman graduate student struggling to figure out how she’s going to combine her plans for an academic career with her desire to have a family. I teamed up with Kim Hannula, Pat Campbell, and Suzanne Franks to look at how women geoscientists use blogs for mentoring and professional development, and we published a paper summarizing our findings and recommendations for the way we could improve the potential for on-line communities to support diverse geoscientists. (You can read more about it – and the open-access paper here).

I’m also interested in how the Internet, and science blogging, can create opportunities for informal, life-long science education and supplement the traditional science classroom. When I write posts for Highly Allochthonous, I’m trying to write for the non-scientist, or at least non-hydrologist, who is interested enough in water or geology to Google the right keywords over her morning cup of coffee.

But the person I picture in my head is the middle or high school science teacher who is looking to go beyond the textbook and bring richer context into her teaching or learn more about earth science to be able to do a better job answering inquisitive students’ questions. Having worked with science teachers in the past, I am acutely aware how few resources are available in many schools, and that’s part of why I’m so thrilled to be helping out with the DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students drive through our Highly Allochthonous Earth Science Challenge.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

Blogging, tweeting, and reading blogs and twitter actually helps me stay somewhat up-to-date with the scientific literature in a much broader sense than if I were solely reading journal articles. I’m also increasingly finding that blogging affects the way I teach. For example, this semester I’m teaching a seminar on climate change science that meets a university communication requirement, and I’ve had students do critical analyses of news media reporting on climate change. My choice of that assignment and my approach to doing it has been heavily influenced by discussions I’ve seen and participated in on blogs. I think some on-line presence, even if it is just a well-crafted and up-to-date web page, is a necessity for a young academic, so that people reading your articles and prospective students can find out more about what you do. But beyond that I think there are corners of academia that view online presence as a distraction. I just hope that my tenure committee will see that my online activities are not detrimental to my research productivity and are instead a valuable form of outreach. I’ll let you know in a couple of years.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I started reading science blogs in about 2006, but didn’t start writing at Highly Allochthonous until 2008 or so. The geoblogosphere is a great, tight-knit community, so it’s hard to pick favorites, but if you forced me to pick one, I’d go with Eruptions by Erik Klemetti. Erik and I actually went to grad school together at Oregon State and it’s been great to reconnect through blogging and to feed my volcano addiction with his frequent updates and always gorgeous photos. At the Saturday night banquet, I had the pleasure of hanging out with the Deep Sea News crew, and making their acquaintance was certainly a highlight of the conference.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

There are two particularly memorable parts of ScienceOnline2010 for me. First was the realization that despite the vastness of the science blogosphere I knew, it was only a small part of online science communication efforts – which range from open-access publishing to podcasting and beyond. The second memorable part of ScienceOnline2010 was the session I moderated on “Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM.” We had a great unconference-y discussion with lots of thoughtful contributions from the audience. Among the points that stick out in my brain were discussions of the challenges of continuing mentoring relationships beyond the time a student is in a particular program and of spot-lighting the work of minority scientists without forcing them into being role models or spokespeople if that’s not what they want to do. I find these sorts of discussions from diverse viewpoints incredibly helpful as I continue my on-line and off-line efforts to increase the recruitment and retention of women and minorities in the geosciences.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

2010 has been an exciting year in science, in the developments of the Web, and in the media (including science journalism). The past year’s events, coupled with the growing reputation of our conference around the world, prompted us to make the conference bigger than last year: we expect as many as 500 participants to convene over the three full days of exciting discussions, conversations and events.

One of the most interesting developments in the second half of 2011 is the explosive growth of the science blogosphere, especially formation of new blogging networks (one of which will be developed by one of us). To help you navigate the new science blogging ecosystem, we started developing a website that aggregates it all in one place: Scienceblogging.org.

As in all the previous years, the meeting will be held in an ‘Unconference’ style – the Program is built beforehand with the help of participants on the wiki, and the sessions are designed to foster conversations and discussions rather than a more traditional lecture approach.

You can get prepared ahead of time and help us make the conference great by looking around the site, volunteering to help, or volunteering to lead sessions. You can also follow us on Twitter – either the hashtag #scio11 or our official account @scio11 – or join the discussion in our official FriendFeed room. You can help us get a feel for the number of people intending to attend by indicating your interest on our Facebook event page.

The aim of the book is twofold: first, to showcase the quality of science blogging to the audience that does not read blogs and perhaps has a negative opinion of blogs due to the anti-blog propaganda in the mainstream media, and second, to build and strengthen the science blogging community.

The idea for the compilation came from a discussion between Anton Zuiker and a representative of the Raleigh-based online book publisher Lulu.com. They were trying to find a fun and useful way for the company to sponsor the first ScienceOnline conference (then called Triangle Science Blogging Conference). As it was late December 2006 there were only about four weeks left until the conference, so they thought there was not sufficient time to collect and publish such a book and have it ready in time for the meeting.

But I thought it could be done if the project was completely crowdsourced. I posted a call for submissions on my blog and e-mailed hundreds of science bloggers asking them to recommend either their own or other people’s best posts which they promptly did. I then asked several science blogging friends to help me read and evaluate all the entries. This narrowed the field from 218 submissions down to 62. Out of those 62 finalists, I picked 50 essays, making sure that different areas of science, as well as different formats and styles, were represented in the final version. I contacted the authors and, with huge help from Anton Zuiker on the technical side of things, put the book together and had it published just in time for the first Conference. You can buy the first edition here.

The book was an instant success – both among the bloggers and in reviews published in several media outlets and journals (including in Nature). It became obvious that this had to become an annual project. But it was also obvious that this project is too big for one person to handle alone.

Thus, for the second anthology, I asked Reed Cartwright to act as the 2007 guest editor. The number of entries doubled, so his help in setting up the technology for submission, judging and sorting the entries was invaluable. His technical skills also made the book look much better. Thus, the second book was born. You can buy it here.

In 2008, guest editor Jennifer Rohn brought her editorial skills (as well as skills in persuading several other people to help) to produce an even more professionally edited and prettier book – you can find it here.

For the 2009 edition, guest editor SciCurious refined the judging method further and the result was, again, a great improvement. You can see it for yourself here.

The work on the 2010 book is in progress. The guest editor is Jason Goldman. The Submission form is here and the instructions for submitting are here. You can buy all four annual collections here and you can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.

I post the full updated listing of all the submissions every Monday morning. This serves as a reminder for bloggers to submit their (and other people’s) posts, and to some extent prevents duplicate entries. But most importantly, it presents a growing listing of some of the most exciting work on science blogs. This is a weekly post where bloggers can discover each other and discover blogs they were not previously aware of. Thus it is also a promotion for all the bloggers involved.

The complete transparency of the process and the community involvement in the entire project are the biggest strength of it. Everyone in the science blogging world feels a little bit of pride in it and a little bit of ownership in it. Competition is tough, but everyone is very sportman-like when the final winners are announced in late December or early January, everyone congratulates the winners and everyone helps promote the book to their friends and families. Thus the project serves both as a glue for the community and as a means for the community to promote itself to the people outside of it, including people who are not online at all. Thus both the science and the world of blogging gain new readers from the project.

Today, I asked Morgan Giddings to answer a few questions.

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I am presently situated geographically in the center of North Carolina, specifically the Triangle area. If someone has already done it, then I’m bored with it. If the answers are already known, then I’m looking somewhere else.

My scientific background combines degrees in Physics, Computer Science, and a PhD focused on bioinformatics from UW Madison. After that, I got introduced to proteins and proteomics, and ever since have been tinkering with systems and approaches for combining proteomics, genomics, and computing to do hopefully useful things like helping to annotate the genes on the human genome.

My philosophy is that academic science has boxed itself into a bit of a corner with the direction it’s been headed. The “single pathway or system” focus that worked so well 20 years ago no longer works. We are in the era of “integration” but nobody knows how to do it. I am working on a book that touches on this.

Mid-career I had a realization that we scientists are horrible marketers for our work. I had this realization after co-founding a sustainable lifestyles bike shop, and trying to apply my “academic scientist” mentality to selling bikes. It didn’t work. After re-programming myself to market better, I realized that this also applies to everything I do in running a science lab.

That is the basis of my book “Four Steps To Funding” and another upcoming book, “The Golden Ticket in Science”.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I started in computer science and physics, then jumped ship as I started pursuing a PhD in computer science. I realized that pure computer science was a bit too dry for me. I joined a lab developing DNA sequencing technology, fell in love with combining computers and biology, and never looked back. After developing software for interpreting DNA sequencing data, I moved onto the harder problem of interpreting protein data from Mass spectrometers (so called proteomics). That opened up a lot of interesting projects, including:

- Contributing to a deep annotation of the Human Genome using protein/proteomic data

- Modeling bacterial systems with “agent based models” to uncover the basis of behaviors like chemotaxis and competence switching

- Developing methods to find posttranslational modifications on proteins from mass spectrometry data

- Examining the mechanisms that lead to antibiotic resistance in the bacterium P. aeruginosa

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

My time is split between standard academic duties, and my true passion, which is figuring out the “meaning of life” and writing books about it.

After I finish my next book on science careers, I’ll move onto my most ambitious project, which is a book that ties together consciousness, evolution, computing, and creativity. More on that when the time comes.

I also spend some fair bit of time helping scientists advance in their careers through consulting and training on things like how to get more grants and less rejections.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I love blogging and writing. I love giving talks, and figuring out how to convey a message to an audience for the maximal effect possible.

This is why I think “marketing” is so powerful. Marketers have studied how to convey effective messages to people for as long as there have been goods to sell. In particular, the last 100 years have seen many studies of human behavior in the context of how we receive (or don’t) messages.

While some might only associate marketing with nefarious purposes, I take the strong view that it is a value neutral activity. You can use it to promote bad things or good things.

Since most science is good to some extent, I believe that applying marketing could more effectively convey the value of science to other scientists, and the rest of the populace.

Considering that science funding is ever more in doubt, this couldn’t come a moment too soon. All of us scientists should be out telling people what benefit science brings to their lives, and doing so in the most effective way possible. I believe that if we don’t get our act in gear on this point, then science funding will continue to dwindle.

Hence, I am well on my way to becoming a definitive go-to resource on how to “market” one’s science, whether it is in writing a grant proposal, or talking to a member of congress.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I use blogging both to report on some of my science work, as well as to opine about matters related to “science marketing” and science careers. I use social networks to achieve further reach for some of the ideas, but frankly, I don’t have enough time to do that with regularity.

I find that the blogging (both my own and others’) is essential for forward progress, particularly in discussing matters that don’t get published in journal articles – like how to grow and manage a lab, or how to get a grant funded in a competitive environment.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I discovered them through tweets by Bora Zivkovic, sometime in 2009.

I like A Blog Around The Clock, and a wide variety of other science blogs. I’m more focused on finding blog-posts with relevant content than following specific blogs.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I realized how far I have to go in conveying the notion to my peers that we, as scientists and science communicators, must up our game on “marketing” our work. For example, I attended a session on how to get published with several authors. While it was clear that the authors were ahead of most of the audience in “figuring out” the marketing game for their books, there is a lot of content elsewhere in the world on how to do this successfully that hasn’t filtered into the science community. It was also clear from the questions that were asked by the audience that everyone is still stuck in thinking of book publishing in the traditional model of: get an agent, have the agent find a publisher, then have the publisher publish, promote, and distribute the book.

But things are rapidly changing. For example, e-books are a great alternative to the above model that provide a lot more flexibility to the author (and potentially profit, too). And there are lots of ways to self-publish a physical book as well, without having to go through a “gatekeeper”.

After having self-published my first book, I’d never do it any other way. I can see going with a publisher only if/when I’ve sold enough copies and had enough feedback that I really have strong evidence that it is a concept worth producing thousands of copies of.

In fact publishers are going towards this model as well. They prefer taking successful self-published titles, because it reduces their risk.

But the key to self-publishing is understanding how to market one’s work. Anyone who tries to self publish without understanding that will fail.

So the options for those who wish to publish their ideas in a book, without having to do any promotion or marketing, are becoming very scarce. This means that everyone needs to better learn to market their ideas. By marketing I mean “making the content and message relevant to the audience.”

I’d like to see more discussion on this point at a future conference.

The other thing I notice is that the people who attended the conference are the leaders in science communication. Many scientists are mostly (or completely) oblivious to the rapidly changing nature of science communication. I believe it will be important to spread the message more widely to working scientists as to why modern science communication is so important. I think that the conference could play a role in that.

It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Thanks for the opportunity!

Today, I asked Jennifer Williams to answer a few questions.

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

Hi Bora, thanks for including me in the ScienceOnline2010 interviews. I am jazzed to hear that plans for 2011 are already in full swing! I definitely want to attend again next year (it will be my 4th year) so I’ll keep the date reserved. Attending is pretty easy for me since I live in the North Carolina Triad. I work & blog for the online company OpenHelix. My PhD and post-doc were in yeast disease research, but for about the last 10 years I have worked virtually either curating for bioscience databases, or creating tutorials on them for OpenHelix.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

To paraphrase Blanch Du Bois, in my career “I have always relied on the encouragement of colleagues” – and it has led me to wonderful jobs that have allowed me to move with my husband’s career, to be both a mother and a scientist, and to accomplish many other professional and personal goals.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Of course my job takes up large amounts of time and it is one that I am passionate about – teaching researchers how to efficiently and effectively use the public databases and other bioscience resources that are freely available online. We just got a paper published on sources (many free) for informal learning in bioinformatics, entitled “OpenHelix: bioinformatics education outside of a different box”. I am passionate about education outside of work as well, and volunteer some of my efforts to the Early College at Guilford College, and try to give career talks whenever and wherever I am invited to do so. As a goal I’d like to be able to promote alternative careers in science, such as those I’ve been involved with.

My main focus and experience is with online work for stay-at-home parents. However I really enjoy learning about any ‘oddball’ ways to be a scientist. Being a tenure-track professor at a research institution just isn’t the best way for everyone to be a scientist: not only aren’t there enough jobs, but it just ISN’T in everyone’s temperament or life-style goals. And science is SUCH a COOL thing to do! I truly believe there is some version of a science career that is absolutely perfect for just about anyone even half way considering it – it is just a matter of finding the perfectly fitting ‘oddball science career’ (Hey, could that be the beginnings of a title for a session? Hmm I wonder…)

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

That’s easy – learning to be better at it! I really related to your interview with Andrea Novicki when she said “As a confirmed introvert, I find blogging difficult.”! I blog as part of my job at OpenHelix & my blog partners, Mary & Trey, are great! They allow me to contribute tips, and other posts when I get the bug, but they are absolute pros at it (Mary has been chosen for inclusion in The Open Laboratory 2008) & I am learning from them. I (of course) also learn new stuff every year at the ScienceOnline conference & I think I may be sowing the seeds of interest (with Mary’s help) in my offspring.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I ended up getting value from every ScienceOnline event that I attended last year, from the Friday night Gala at the RTP headquarters thru the “Connections with mathematics and programming through modeling” session Sunday morning. The thing that I find so remarkable about the conference is how often I refer to it in casual conversations, even 7 months later – there were SO many topics and conversations that were noteworthy both scientifically, and just for life in general. And it is not just last year’s sessions. I’ve been attending for the last 3 years now and I’m still growing & learning based on some of my conversations in years past. I am very much looking forward to ScienceOnline2011!

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview.

The second session, much more un-conference in style, was a panel “Old Media in a New Media World” with Scott Huler, Misha Angrist and Patric Lane. After lunch, the tone became more somber, talking about money, as Sabine Vollmer and Robert Panoff showed us the data – some of it grim, some very encouraging – in their session “Science and Society: The Business Side of Research in the Triangle”.

Finally, the meeting ended with a completely uncoference-style session (moderated by me, with help from Anton Zuiker): after discussing what topics were of interest to all the attendees, we all set in a circle and discussed blogging, state of science journalism, pros and cons of social media, definitions of what counts as “interactive” in education and museum exhibits, and the difficulties of writing brief text plates for museum exhibits.

The main take-home message from the meeting is how fortunate we are in North Carolina, where science, technology and media meet. With the UNC system and numerous state and private organizations devoted to scientific research, education, reporting and outreach, North Carolina – and especially the Triangle area – is at the forefront not just in research but also in new endeavors in communicating that research to local and global residents.

With the foundation of the Research Triangle Park 50 years ago, the region was provided with a structure not just for supporting academic research, but also for industrial research, technological development (including in communications) and the improved communication and collaboration between science and technology institutions in the area.

With technology companies, like IBM, making their home in the Park, it is also not surprising that the state is a home to pioneers in the use of online technologies in communication, including some of the earliest bloggers in history, and other innovators in the field. Triangle Tweetups attract several hundred attendees every three months. Science Cafes in Raleigh and Durham are monthly affairs that are always packed. Events like Ignite, Pecha Kucha and TEDx are now a regular part of the local scene.

Both online and offline science communication has really taken off in the state over the past few years. In addition to the old stalwarts, like American Scientist, the excellent popular science magazine published by Sigma Xi, located smack in the middle of the RTP, there are all sorts of new endeavors. The members of SCONC are busy building all kinds of new communications channels.

There is, of course, the site you are on right now – Science In The Triangle – the hub of local science and technology news. Several months ago, The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer started producing a collaborative Science/Technology page on Mondays, often featuring interviews with science bloggers. Radio in Vivo is the local science radio program. The first ever blog carnival was invented in Chapel Hill, NC. ScienceOnline is an internationally renowned annual conference (now preparing for its fifth meeting next January, in RTP) on science and the Web. The North Carolina Science Festival and The Triangle Science Festival are in the making. The Open Laboratory, annual anthology of best writing on science blogs is produced in the Triangle and published by Triangle-based Lulu.com. ResearchBlogging.org, the aggregator of blog posts covering peer-reviewed research, was conceived in Davidson, NC. Those are just some of the most notable examples – there are many more.

Last week, another such project was unveiled – Scienceblogging.org. It is an aggregator of notable feeds from science blogs, aggregators and services. Just like general media watchers use services like JournalismNews, Memeorandum and Mediagazer, we felt a service like that is needed for watchers of science news.

It is not meant to be comprehensive (that is impossible), nor does it try to decide which blogs are “better” than others, but is designed as a good one-stop-shopping place where a busy journalist can, in a couple of minutes, glean what is new in the world of science, i.e., what has percolated up from the blogging community to a number of such sites and networks. The site contains the feeds for all the major science blogging networks, some of the media-hosted science blogs, and a few aggregators and news services. Interesting stuff from the thousands of independent blogs also shows up on the page, e.g., in the feeds for ResearchBlogging.org, Blog Carnivals, and several group-feeds of independent bloggers. More such combined blog feeds (as well as Twitter and Flickr feeds, etc.) are in the making for the future. The site is in Beta – it started with what was easy to gather and include – but we are asking the community to help with suggestions, technical know-how and whatever they are willing to do to help the site evolve over time into something that is useful both for the media and for other users. Read the posts on the site’s blog for updates, and post comments with your own suggestions or offers to help.

Today, I asked Stephanie Willen Brown to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m Stephanie Willen Brown, aka CogSciLibrarian living in the Triangle area in North Carolina. I’ve been a librarian since 1996, and I started calling myself the CogSciLibrarian in 2004, when I was the librarian for the School of Cognitive Science at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. I started the blog as a way of sharing cool cognitive science stories and books that I thought my colleagues would enjoy.

My scientific background is limited to that of a librarian, supporting faculty and students working in cognitive science, communications, and psychology over the years. I’d grown up intimidated by math and science, but cognitive / brain / neuroscience is so interesting AND there is so much good, accessible writing about it that I have become a fan.

My current reading interests include the effect of mindfulness on the brain, the development and use of language, and concussions in NFL and other athletes.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’m thrilled to be working at my dream job, as director of the Park Library at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It incorporates many of my interests, such as library science, journalism, marketing, and advertising. I am a consumer of mass media, and I love to be around academics who are studying various aspects mass communication.

My first love is helping students and colleagues find resources that will enhance their research, and the work is double-plus good when it involves subject matter I find interesting as well as amazing library colleagues at the UNC Libraries.

I do miss supporting cognitive and communication science, as I don’t have much interaction with my all-time favorite database PsycINFO. It’s got great content and robust metadata (did you know you could limit your search to age group of subjects studied? Or that you can limit results to just empirical studies or literature reviews?), though it’s not the go-to database of choice for mass communication.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Science needs good public relations right now, and I agree with @ErinBiba’s essay in the May issue of Wired “Why Science Needs to Step Up Its PR Game.” I’d like to play a small part in the merger of science and PR by training public relations professionals to do good research and generally supporting their academic endeavors. Libraries and news* (newspapers, news outlets, etc.) need good public relations too, but that’s for another post.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

One of the great things about my job is that I feel empowered – even obligated! – to read about social networking and participate in various social networks professionally and personally. I promote the Park Library via Twitter (@JoMCParkLib and Facebook and have dabbled in FriendFeed.

I believe we in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication should be teaching our students to use social networks in their professional work, so I think of myself as modeling good professional use of social networks.

I tweet as @CogSciLibrarian as well, which is where I keep up with my science buddies and science news.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I discovered science blogs years ago as I began my own blog, though I read science librarian blogs such as John Dupuis’ Confessions of a Science Librarian more than practicing scientist blogs. I met science documentarian Kerstin Hoppenhaus at ScienceOnline2010 and really enjoy her More Than Honey blog.

I’ve since migrated to Twitter for most of my online / science interactions, and I follow some great science folks there, including @SteveSilberman , @tdelene (DeLene Beeland), @VaughanBell (contributor to Mind Hacks), and my favorite psychology radio show @allinthemind (Australia’s Natasha Mitchell).

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

Gosh, I loved #scio10! It was great to be exposed to so much science in a casual, friendly environment, and I enjoyed spending time with like-minded librarians like Christina Pikas, John Dupuis, and Bonnie Swoger . I was also happy to meet Irtiqa’s Salman Hameed and Tom Linden’s Master’s students in UNC’s Program in Medical & Science Journalism. There were many more as well, but the most amazing aspect of ScienceOnline is the interaction with interesting and interested science, journalism, and library professionals. I have just put #scio11 on my calendar and look forward to meeting more interesting folks!

Thank you so much for the interview. I hope to see you soon, and of course at the next conference in January.

Today, I asked William Saleu to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

My name is William Saleu and I blog at BomaiCruz. I am from Papua New Guinea (PNG), an independent island nation making up the eastern part of the island of New Guinea which lies immediately north of Australia. I am a research fellow at the Duke University Marine Lab (DUML) in Beaufort, North Carolina.

I am part of a team that studies population structure and species connectivity among invertebrates from hydrothermal vent systems from the western Pacific. Most of our samples were collected from PNG so as you can imagine I have naturally taken up a personal interest in this subject. My ultimate goal is to be able to use the results of this research and other similar work to help identify and design conservation strategies for these unique ecosystems in PNG.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

So one might wonder how I ended up doing this. To answer that question I will have to take you back to my final days as an undergraduate at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG). I was a biophysics major and was almost at the end of my program when I realized that my options for employment after college were very slim and I decided to look at opportunities for post grad research at UPNG. I spoke to my physics advisor but he was not so enthusiastic about having me on his projects but told me to come up with my own project.

I was sitting in a microbiology class when I heard the professor say something about chemosynthetic bacteria and how they were the basis of life at hydrothermal vents but she went on to say that because of the extreme conditions they lived in, not much was known about them as it was very hard to culture them. I also found out then that we had hydrothermal vent systems in PNG that geologists were so interested in studying. This was it, this was the project I was looking for. I decided I was going to build an incubator that would house pressure sensors and thermometers and could go all the way down to the sea floor, collect these bacteria and bring them to the surface at similar conditions to that of their sea floor habitats, little did I know that people in the developed world have already invented deep sea submersibles and remotely operated vehicles that did the same thing. Anyway, my proposal never went through as no one in PNG ever took it seriously.

I ended up in the streets like so many other Papua New Guineas before me who had gone through college but could not find anything to do. Then, one day while reading a newspaper, I came across an advertisement for people with advanced degrees in science to submit applications for a semester long traineeship at Duke University Marine Lab (DUML). I did not have an advanced degree but one of the requirements was that applicants should have sound knowledge in molecular biology and lab work skills and I knew I could use this to my advantage as I had been an intern at the PNG Institute of Medical Research’s molecular and virology labs and this was the only lab in PNG doing molecular work.
Well, I submitted an application and got the opportunity and came over for the traineeship and went home but thanks to the network I have set up before, I am back now as a research fellow studying the same things that I wanted to work with when I was an undergrad.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

As far as my blogging family tree goes, I guess I will look up to Southern Fried Science as my blog parent and Deep Sea News as the granny. These guys have been awesome at helping me in everything from day one of BomaiCruz. The name ‘Bomai’ hails from the Simbu language of PNG and would translate for someone from the deep jungles, while ‘Cruz’ is from tok pisin, one of the three main languages of Papua New Guinea. ‘Cruz’ actually means to wonder around, hence, BomaiCruz, “someone from the deep jungles wondering around.”

I did not know about blogging, Twitter or Facebook before coming to the USA but am now on Twitter as BomaiBlat and on Facebook too. All this is very exciting for me but keeping up to speed with every one of them can be quite a hassle. I have found that networking can be quite addictive but is also so much fun and is a great way of sharing information and learning about what is going on in the world or just to take part in arguments and discussions. Personally, I have learnt so much more from networking and socializing with other members however, my only word of advice here is that networking and socializing can be so much fun as long as you know how to control its use.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I know this is not going to go down well with other bloggers but I was lucky enough to attend the ScienceOnline conference just a few weeks after I posted the first blog post on my wall. Unfortunately I cannot make comparisons with past science online conferences but from what I saw in this year’s conference, I should say that it was one of the best conferences I have been to in terms of organization and set up. There are two sessions I will remember for a very long time, first was Rebecca Skloot where she was talking about her book and the second and I should say, the one I really liked was the Open Access talk. I think the importance of Open Access as outlined by the speakers is one thing I will take away with me and make sure to pass on to others that I might end up working with.

It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.