christine liu / two photon art

This seems like a great time to finally announce that 🙌I got my dream job!! 🙌 The Christenson Wick lab is open for business at the University of Oregon's Knight Campus!!

Huge congrats to @vikaassohal.bsky.social for being elected to the national academy of medicine! Vikaas is an amazing scientist and mentor who leads with creativity, kindness, and torus-shaped treats for lab meeting. So happy to see him being recognized at the national level!

News for SfN peeps: I'll have a small show in a gallery very close to the meeting from 11-18 November #sciart

New preprint up! How do brain networks generate flexible behavior? Insula-prefrontal communication helps mice shift behavioral strategies, specifically when the new strategies use odor cues. Gamma synchrony between insula & PFC PV neurons enables this coordination! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The real American 🇺🇸 “brain drain” isn’t that a few established scholars might get new jobs outside the US, it’s the enormous number of grad students - particularly international grad students - who can’t or won’t study in the US now or in years to come. That’s the body blow.

A mini blue mitosis watercolor #sciart artologica.etsy.com/listing/4562...

The final version of our paper describing the development of iGlo, a glutamine biosensor, is now available. All plasmids are on Addgene! pubs.rsc.org/cb/article/d...

We’ve done one project I proposed. Most of the lab is working on things I never thought about when preparing my application.

In a chalk talk we basically want to see that you can engage in rigorous scientific thinking live, not just produce a polished job talk - you need to be prepared to engage with questions about your proposed work thoughtfully and not defensively. These are often extremely revealing.

To some extent I was trying to thread the needle on “here are some very fundable things that are virtually guaranteed to work” with the short term and “here are big picture ideas that may not work, but we’ll figure it out one way or another” for the long term.

for my short term plan I had a full R01 already mapped out with detailed experiments. Mid term stuff used new tools I had in hand but only a bit of “proof of concept” data. The “long term” was just a vision of the types of questions I wanted to answer and broad outlines of how I would do it

kinda loosely doing things I talked about (I think?) didn't propose super precise experiments but themes of ideas all related. can share my stuff if you want and happy to look! already 2 years in we are doing stuff i never imagined doing so thats the more fun part

Hahahahaha. I work at 'water resources' institute and my research program is currently focused on invasive forest pests.

MIRA or R01? I'd definitely go the renewal route

This is reassuring to hear!! I've been wondering how NIGMS considers accountability when weighing whether to renew or just submit a new grant (and trying not feeling shame that I completed like 1.25 of the aims during the time of the grant 😅)

Haha I intended to do the work I proposed, but people who joined the lab had great ideas and I went with them! And I’m very happy we went this way!

I’ve not even started yet, but I can provide recent corollary info. Both of my advisors and at least one person at each of my interviews made a point to say the research statement is not your contract. It’s just a way for them to see how you think and what part of the sandbox you plan to play in.

Maybe 1/3. I’m just now coming back to something I first proposed 15 years ago because it’s more feasible now. Figuring out when to triage or table a project is a really important part of the job.

The short term projects (years 1-3) all got completed; the mid-term (years 3-7) ones were about 50/50; the long term (years 7+) ideas went nowhere because we pivoted to new, more interesting questions based on new directions/tech that were unknowable at the time I started.

Don't be too conservative - part of the appeal at the start is in the potential and the capacity to try new things. If you manage to do well, nobody in the end will check if that is exactly what you planned initially.

However, I once had an Army Breast Cancer Grant and they literally wanted you to do exactly what you proposed. I had to write a long explanation about why the switch in direction that led to a paper in Nature was a good idea :)

Things change every day, and we follow the science. At least in the olden days (2 years ago), NIGMS was happy if you did something cool, and your Aims from the last grant were irrelevant. 1/n

Tenure at an R1 comes down mostly to grants and papers. If you are productive with those no one generally cares about topics. I guess if you completely changed fields they might.

I think for job market statements, the research statement should propose things it is clear you *can* do (high feasibility as demonstrated by your description of your prior research), and that are interesting and plausibly fundable. After you're hired, success speaks for itself.

You should be aware though that some TT interviews will include a chalk talk where you have to basically present and defend what your 1st R01 would be. Doesn't mean you have to stick w/ it - more a test of your scientific thinking. But you do need to be prepared for that.

@hhmi-science.bsky.social has several upcoming competitions for scientists at various career stages. Here is a list (pl share whatever you feel will be useful): 1) Rising college juniors & seniors in summer 2027 can apply to the Cech Fellows program (www.hhmi.org/programs/cec...) Deadline: Nov 10

Early on a program officer told me that my grant was not a contract and the best thing to do was “follow the science”.

Definitely no one is going to go back and look at your application documents for tenure! It isn't a contract, it is more to show that you are thinking programmatically about future lines of research. You will write new statements for your tenure dossier.

0%. At my promotion talk I literally said, “I hope none of you remember my job talk, because I didn’t do any of that!”

Most of the time, it's in everyone's best interest (funders, you, your lab, society) for you to do what you think is the most interesting / best next thing NOW, now what you thought it would be 5+ years ago when you were writing about it. At least, that's how I have come to see it.

Great question! I usually start by trying to follow the proposed plan, bc it seemed like the best direction at the time when I was thinking hard about it. But for a 5-yr grant, it's rare that the best thing to do in y5 was clear in y0 or y(-1) - if so, what have you really learned about the system?

I didn't fully appreciate how, sometimes, the story that comes to a point first is actually your side hustle. Or how, when you're limited in terms of your lab's experience/abilities, you're doing the experiments that are *possible* (which might not always be the most immediately interesting)

for grants? 2/3. I used what I wrote in my research statement as the foundation for my NIH/NSF proposals (kudos to my postdoc PI for telling me to stress test these ideas with the lab!) but for science? 0.5/3 😅. The first two papers from my lab were not at all what I thought we'd be doing...

I haven't looked at it since I was hired (which probably tells you something). Some of the major outlines yes, but certainly not the details, and we now have whole funded lines of research I couldn't have anticipated at all. Science is meant to evolve.

🧪

About 80%, I saw my proposal as my blueprint for my lab: things I really wanted to do and questions that excited me. WE rejected some of the hypotheses, so while we worked on it, it was a dead end. But then other things came up, and we did correct course. You know, we scienced.

I barely know what I’m doing tomorrow, much less in 5 years. Ha… but also, what’s the future of science and how will you incorporate it into your research program?

it was a combination of 1) independent students and postdocs who wanted to pursue projects of their own devising, 2) new research areas opening up with the advent of the fly connectome(s), and 3) collaborations (to a lesser extent). Funding for non-proposed work followed on the above.

reasonably closely — we did maybe 80% of what I proposed. And maybe 40% of what we've done is something I proposed?

🧵 What if one reason fertility declines with age isn’t just genetic-but mechanical? Thrilled to share our new paper in @NatureCellBio : Elevated contractility drives implantation failure in mouse embryos from aged females… here’s what we found 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/11

And finally—a bit of personal news: 🔬 I’m on the faculty job market this year! I’m looking for tenure-track opportunities where I can build a lab at the intersection of developmental biology, mechanobiology, reproductive biology & aging.

Ha… I don’t fully recall what I wrote in my research statement… but maybe like 20-25%? Despite your best efforts, some things just don’t work out the way you thought they would. Pivoting is fun tho!