If your society is serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion, you need to keep having online conferences

(Also, obviously, online conferences have lower carbon footprints) Many traditionally in-person scientific meetings have shifted to virtual formats during the COVID-19 pandemic. As an attendee (and organizer) at several virtual conferences over the last two years, I heard a lot of people talking about how they look forward to conferences being “back to normal” next…

Stepping up to do the work in an academic society

Today, the Ecological Society of America is dropping its ballot for a new round of seats on the Governing Board. I’m hoping to serve the society as the VP for Education and Human Resources. If elected, I’ll begin a 3-year term in summer 2021.

Benefits of virtual conferences for ecology and conservation research

Note: This is a guest post by Lauren Kuehne and co-authors of Kuehne et al. 2022. Hot on the heels of Catherine Scott’s excellent post in early February, where she summarized Skiles et al. 2021 on how virtual conferences shifted conference attendance, we want to share a brand new article in Conservation Biology related to…

NSF needs more non-R1 GRFP reviewers, please sign up!

I have a little something to admit. I just registered as a potential reviewer for the NSF GRFP for the first time. (That’s the Graduate Research Fellowship program, for the noobs). I’ve been on here for years talking about the program: how it works, how the outcomes are inequitable, how we can do our part…

Why it is icky to offer free conference registration for student volunteers

Some academic societies do this thing where they offer free conference registration to a limited number of students, and in turn, those students earn their keep by donating their labor for to help run the conference (at registration tables, projection tech support, etc). I think this is problematic. You might think that this increases accessibility…

Play The Game, or Change The Rules?

I feel a dilemma — or rather, a tradeoff — when I think about investing time, money, and effort into supporting undergraduates to gain admission to graduate programs. On one hand, we all know that the system is rigged, such that students who come from whiter and wealthier backgrounds have a huge leg up.

Update on fixing a racist common name for an ant (and a moth)

A couple years ago, I shared with y’all about an old screwup of mine, and how I was planning to take steps to fix it. To make the long story short, I explained how I had coined a new official common name for the ant Aphaenogaster araneoides, back in a prior decade. I only realized…

Can we talk about Field Camp?

A few years ago, I was spending time with some geologists and they were telling me about Field Camp. That it’s a standard requirement of most Geoscience programs, but also that it’s highly problematic. I just googled a bit, here’s what I learned. According to UW Milwaukee, “Field camp is a tradition in the education…

On the exodus of faculty

A lot of folks, with tenured positions, are choosing to get out of the university game to do other kinds of work. A recent issue of Nature has a particularly strong piece of journalism that dives into “the great resignation.” This article has resonated with a lot of people. Perhaps we’ve only seen the the…

When to use the terms PUI, SLAC, MSI, HSI, RPU, etc.?

We’ve got an acronym problem when it comes to classifying colleges and universities. No, it’s not that we have too many acronyms. Our problem is that the commonly used acronyms rarely capture the distinctions that we’re trying to specify. While I’ve already taken a stab at describing institutions with a typology that I think holds…

Are REUs always good for students enrolled in MSIs? It’s complicated.

In my department, we have a complicated relationship with REU (Research Experience for Undergraduate) programs. We have several well-funded active labs on my campus that provide quality mentored research opportunities to biology undergrads, so students in our department do who want to have impactful research experience have access to them. However, it’s still valuable for…

Fit goes both ways

The problem isn’t the concept of fit. The problem is when we place the full onus on the candidate to fit the institution. It’s the job of the institution to change their shape, so that they are capable of fitting the candidates that the institution needs. Fit goes both ways.

Adjusting scholarship expectations after the pandemic ends

For most of us, academic productivity has taken a huge hit over the past year. And that’s fine. If you’re working from home full time while raising young children doing remote schooling, I can’t imagine how you have done anything above the bare minimum. For the rest of us, it’s entirely reasonable to have not…

What are the reasons we have for dropping the GRE?

Dropping the GRE is not enough, not even close. Sure, pat yourself on the back for dropping the GRE — briefly — and then roll up your sleeves.

What’s up with the new NSF GRFP priority areas?

The new solicitation for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program arrived last night with NSF’s daily digest bulletin. There were eight items they brought to our attention as changes from last year, but when I was going through it late this morning, the soundtrack screeched to a halt: 4. Although NSF will continue to fund…

Help us to diversify and humanize biology courses!

a guest post by Project Biodiversify (www.projectbiodiversify.org @biodiversifying) We contain multitudes. Our courses should reflect this. We contain multitudes. Like an ecological niche, a person’s identity is composed of infinite dimensions that make up a person or group’s collective identity space (Figure 1). However, in science – a discipline that has historically valued objective and…

“How do we diversify our seminar series?”

Most scientists are not actually beating seminar invites away with a stick — that’s just a curse for people with high visibility. There are a ton of great speakers who aren’t that famous.

Science Has an Intellectual Elitism Problem

This is a guest post by Joshua M.A. Stough. Over the last few weeks, science twitter has been…let’s say “discussing”, the place of religious faith and spiritualism in the scientific community and society in general. The source of the argument is a simple, but often aggressive assertion that religion is antithetical to science, presented as…

Getting lots of competitive REU applications from URM students

So we did this thing that worked. Let me tell you about it.

Why privilege should be part of our conversations as natural scientists?

This is a guest post by Edauri Navarro Pérez. During my years as an undergraduate student I noticed that different sciences have been moving forward to do more interdisciplinary work and because of this movement, I had the opportunity to work with amazing scientists that redirect the traditional scientific perspective and integrate it with other…

Please focus more on inclusion so that diversity recruitment efforts can work

If your space is not actively good for minoritized scholars, please stop recruiting them until you get your crap together.

Small Pond Science

Research, teaching, and mentorship in the sciences

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