PhD Talk

I'm back with a quick bonus episode on the small university journals that are publish open access without any article processing charge.
Please check out 

• AmeliCA
• Redalyc
• Open Journal Systems
• ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierias
• Latindex

A few grumblings on why it does not make sense to try to speed up our literature review using ChatGPT - a little nugget of Opinions while we prepare for the next season of the podcast.

• What does your work setup look like? What does your setup look like at home and in the office, and how do you divide your time between both
• How do you take care of your mental health in academia
• Advice for transitioning in and out of academia (between academia and industry)?
• How can I get accepted into a PhD position?

• Citavi 
• The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works - Ziad W. Munson (Chicago University Press)
• Kadril - La Jolie Flamande
• Fellowship - The Saberlight Chronicles
• Haken - Fauna
• The Ezra Klein Podcast
• Why is this happening? - Chris Hayes
• Self-compassionate professor
• Adobe Audition
• Goodway coffee

In today's episode, we interview Dr. Kalin Kiesling. She is a nuclear engineer at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Lab where she develops the software that other engineers use to design and analyze new nuclear reactor concepts. She earned her PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022, from which she also holds a bachelors and masters in nuclear engineering. We learn about her background and career path, and how she choose to get all her degrees at the same university. We also learn about her research and the methods she used during her PhD and the programming she carries out in her job, as well as about the timeline of the PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the various milestones in the program. We also learn about how she landed her position at Argonne, and how the pandemic influenced her life values and career aspirations.

Outside of her technical area in nuclear engineering, Kalin is passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the nuclear industry, broader STEM field, and academia in general. At Argonne National Lab she is on a DEI council where she advocates for her colleagues and works with leadership to make impactful changes. We learn about the state of DEI in the nuclear industry and the changes occurring in the field, as well as Kalin's best advice on how to foster DEI in STEM and academia.

Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her family (husband and almost 4 year old daughter) and getting lost in one of her many hobbies (usually some form of crafting or gardening). As an academic parent of a baby, the pandemic certainly hit Kalin's research hard. We learn about Kalin's journey as an academic parent, the support provided by her university and advisor, and how her parenting journey coincided with the pandemic.

We round off the episode learning about Kalin's best advice for PhD students, how she sets boundaries around work, reflecting on the impact of COVID-19 and what a day in the life looks like for her.

References

• Kalin on Twitter  
• Kalin on  LinkedIn 

In today's episode, we interview Emily Hoppe. Emily is a  psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner and PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland. Before starting her PhD, Emily practiced as a staff nurse and psychiatric nurse practitioner at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland for eight years. Her clinical practice focused on the mental health of young children with behavioral and emotional concerns, supporting parents, and diagnosis and treatment of children and adolescents with OCD. Before going to nursing school, Emily got a BA in English. We learn about her career path, and how she decided to return to academia while being in practice, and how she decided to go to Johns Hopkins for her PhD.

Emily's research focuses on parents' adverse and childhood experiences' impact on parenting practices, and the role of neighborhood safety in parenting. We learn about her mixed methods research, and how it fits within the timeline of her PhD program. We also learn about the major milestones of the PhD program in nursing at Johns Hopkins.

Emily is also an academic parent. We learn about how the birth of her child impacted her career decisions, the type of support she got as a practicing nurse, and the support system she has as a doctoral candidate and parent in her PhD program. We also discuss how the pandemic influenced her experience at the beginning of her PhD.

We round off the interview with learning about Emily's best advice for doctoral candidates, how she sets boundaries around work, and what a day in the life looks like for her.

References

•  Dr. Debbie Gross
• Johns Hopkins University 
• Johns Hopkins PhD program in nursing

In today's episode, Phil interviews Eva about grant writing. We learn about Eva's various sources of funding, the funding she has applied for in the past, and what has worked and what not. We also look at how helpful the feedback and grading of a proposal can be.

Then, we get into our best practices for grant writing. In summary, these are:

• Try various different funding sources
• Try both personal and consortium grants
• Think national and international
• EU funding is not impossible (although it is also really not the best-funded funding, but it is prestigious and thus good for your CV)
• Work with experienced grant writers in consortium
• Learn from the experience of your colleagues
• Get help from the grant writing office at your university

We also look at particular advice for early career scholars on getting their research funded, and when to quit an idea. We also discuss the difference between depending on funding for our salaries versus having a tenured position where we may not need to be paying our salaries out of our project.

In today's episode, we interview Jacqueline Shaia. She is a second year PhD student at Case Western Reserve University in the Clinical Translational Science PhD program. We learn about how she decided between going into the career path of a practicing physician and researcher, and how her background shaped her choices in her research and methods.

Her current work focuses on ocular disorders, especially the rare idiopathic intracranial hypertension, a vision threatening disease that mainly affects women of a reproductive age.  We learned about the disease itself, the treatment options, and how it disproportionately affects Black women.

In addition to her research, Jacqueline is passionate about inspiring the next generation of scientists and showcasing the many different ways someone can have a research career. We talk about her use of social media and blogging, and the benefits of being more visible online.

We round off learning about her advice for doctoral candidates, setting boundaries around work, the impact of COVID-19 on her applications and start of the PhD, and what a day in the life looks like.

References

• Jacqueline's website 
• Jacqueline's instagram 
• Jacqueline's Twitter
• Interview with Jacqueline 
• Translational science
• Case Western Reserve University
• Clinical Translational Science PhD program.
• Training T32 grant within the NIH 
• Trinetx

In today's episode, we talk about presenting at conferences. We look at what's the point of conferences in the first place, and how digital conferences can recreate the opportunities for networking (or not), and for whom.

We also look at conferences as a genre, what the difference between writing a conference paper and presenting this conference paper is all about. This topic leads us into our best tips for presenting at conferences, and the use of visual information during presentations. We want to sell our research and ourselves, and have a take-home message for our audience.

To round off, we find that our take home message for today's episode is that one should have a take-home message for the conference presentation.

References

• Increase understanding at conferences - Ep. 106
• Attending your first conference - Ep. 68
• Virtual conferences - Ep. 22