Five years as a junior faculty member

In 2010, after one year as a junior faculty member, I wrote up that year in numbers, and in 2012, at three years as junior faculty, I wrote this. The last two years have been different, mostly due to having a small baby to look after (fewer conferences), but also due to a shift in the lab as it became established (less grant writing, more research paper writing). Now I have finished five years as junior faculty, so I can be quantitative about my entire tenure-track period:

265: the number of grants I have reviewed for various foundations
119: the number of articles I have reviewed for different journals

85: the number of grants submitted (27 project grants, 33 fellowship applications and 17 grants as collaborator)
        31: grants accepted (15 project grants, 11 fellowships and 5 grants as collaborator)
        46: grants rejected (12 project grants, 22 fellowships and 12 as collaborator)
        5: grants pending (tenure application and 4 fellowships)
€5.7 million: euros given to the lab in project grants
€4.1 million: euros spent in research

46: invited talks
19: conferences
8: lectures

97: article submissions and resubmissions
        53: articles published or in press (31 primary papers, 15 reviews, 6 book chapters)
3: number of edited volumes

22: number of lab members
      12: PhD projects ongoing
       1: Masters projects ongoing
       19: number of full-time researchers in the lab 
(34: number of ex-lab members)

0: still the number of days I've spent doing experiments

So what is an average month for me? Well, I'll typically submit one grant, with nearly a 50% acceptance rate. I'll submit 1-2 papers, and have one accepted. I spend a fair bit of time reviewing - 4 grants and 2 papers per month, not counting favours for friends. I'll go give an invited talk or attend an international conference. My lab will spend ~€70,000 each month (not counting fellowships), and one new person will start or an old person will leave.

Next week I find out whether this is enough to get tenure at the University of Leuven.

Lab move

Just a few last minute changes to the architectural plans, and we are nearly ready to move...

Scientific writing for the biomedical sciences

Professional writing is something that is absolutely critical for becoming a scientist, yet it is typically just assumed that students will pick it up somehow during their research. 

Here are my tips for writing papers, but the most important of them is very simple - read a lot of papers of the type you would like to publish.

Scientific spam

I get an enormous amount of scientific spam. There are the obligitory emails to attend conferences in China to give talks on topics I don't work on, and endless spam from new online journals inviting me to submit my research on equally obscure topics (why yes, of course I will consider the Online Journal of Mycology for my next submission). Then there are the companies that spam you to make knockout mice or antibodies against any gene you have published on. It is all harvested from papers automatically, and very poorly at that - this company even mixed up the author name and gene name in their spam generation!

Flow cytometry Core Manager job vacant

The University of Leuven Flow Cytometry Core is currently looking for a unit manager. Extensive experience in operating BD FACS machines is essential. Details on Nature Jobs. 

AIG lab in the news

from Knack

Being a post-doc means...

...you love science more than an income.

Research topics in the lab

As defined by the titles from our papers:

Henceforth, we shall be known as the "Mouse-Thymus-Autoimmune-Treg-microRNA laboratory".

Journals

The journals the lab publishes in:

Coauthors

An interesting idea from our head of Department - all of my coauthors in a word cloud: