Part I. Why Should You Study the Nervous System?
1. In a lecture, Sir Charles Sherrington stated, “It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.” Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 225. Rodolfo Llinás called the brain an “electrical storm” in his book, I of the Vortex. Many people call the brain a “three-pound blob” (or something similar) in their personal statements.
2. Phrenology was slightly more complicated than this, but we’re going to let that slide.
1. Why Did You Pick Up this Book?
1. Technically, his last name is Ramón y Cajal, but he is commonly referred to as “Cajal.” Oh, and that “j” actually reads like an “h”—cahal.
2. Edward O. Wilson, Letters to a Young Scientist (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2013), 25.
3. Shoot, I guess I did just (sort of) give marital advice.
4. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice to a Young Investigator, trans. Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999; originally published in Spanish in 1897).
2. This Isn’t Your Grandmother’s Neuroscience
1. You can find definitions for bold terms in the glossary.
2. The world’s most pressing binary problems, such as, “What’s better, chocolate or vanilla?” are almost always answered with “both.” For an interesting read on this battle over whether the nervous system is electrical or chemical, see Elliot S. Valenstein, The War of the Soups and the Sparks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
4. W. Maxwell Cowan, Donald H. Harter, and Eric R. Kandel, “The Emergence of Modern Neuroscience: Some Implications for Neurology and Psychiatry,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 23, no. 1 (March 2000): 343–91, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.23.1.343.
5. Eszter Boldog et al., “Transcriptomic and Morphophysiological Evidence for a Specialized Human Cortical GABAergic Cell Type,” Nature Neuroscience 21, no. 9 (September 2018): 1185–95, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0205-2.
7. Tatsuji Inouye, “Die Sehstorungen Bei Schussverletzungen Der Kortikalen Sehsphare,” Nach Beobachtungen an Verwundeten Der Letszten Japanischen Kriege, 1909; Reviewed in Mitchell Glickstein and David Whitteridge, “Tatsuji Inouye and the Mapping of the Visual Fields on the Human Cerebral Cortex,” Trends in Neurosciences 10, no. 9 (January 1987): 350–53, https://doi.org/10.1016/0166-2236(87)90066-X.
8. Elizabeth Warburton, Cathy J. Price, Kate Swinburn, and Richard J. S. Wise, “Mechanisms of Recovery from Aphasia: Evidence from Positron Emission Tomography Studies,” Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 66, no. 2 (February 1999): 155–61, https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.66.2.155.
9. The report about this man absolutely dumbfounds me and many other neuroscientists. He might have had an intact cerebellum, though. This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that there are numerous accounts of people born without a cerebellum (a condition known as cerebellar agenesis). Lionel Feuillet, Henry Dufour, and Jean Pelletier, “Brain of a White-Collar Worker,” Lancet 370, no. 9583 (July 2007): 262, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61127-1.
10. The ideas here largely derived from Patricia Churchland, Christof Koch, and Terrance Sejnowski, “What Is Computational Neuroscience?” in Computational Neuroscience, ed. Eric L. Schwartz, 46–55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
11. For a rather entertaining and philosophical viewpoint on this dilemma, see Michael S. Gazzaniga, “Neuroscience and the Correct Level of Explanation for Understanding Mind,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 7 (July 2010): 291–92, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.04.005.
12. Churchland, Koch, and Sejnowski, “What Is Computational Neuroscience?,” 53.
13. This breakdown of different subfields is still tenuous, and there are many exceptions. For example, you will find psychologists who are studying neural circuits and geneticists trying to understand behavior.
17. If the article was “Why Our Brains Love Corgis,” no judgment here. I love corgis. But I think we just love them because they are unequivocally really, really adorable. And probably dopamine.
18. In the interest of not offending lung or cardiovascular enthusiasts, our actions are also dependent on having a semicomplete system of viable organs, air, blood flow, etc.
19. Peter W. Kalivas, “Predisposition to Addiction: Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, and Brain Circuitry,” American Journal of Psychiatry 160, no. 1 (January 2003): 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.1.
20. Although really, for both of these things, eating well and exercising goes a long way. But you can’t sell that on a billboard.
1. George B. Koelle, “Otto Loewi 1873–1961,” Trends in Pharmacological Sciences 7 (January 1, 1986): 290–91, https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-6147(86)90356-1. (Note: His autobiography claims the year was 1920; other sources say 1921.)
2. E. D. Adrian and D. W. Bronk, “The Discharge of Impulses in Motor Nerve Fibres: Part I. Impulses in Single Fibres of the Phrenic Nerve,” Journal of Physiology 66, no. 1 (September 18, 1928): 81–101, https://doi.org/10.1113/jphysiol.1928.sp002509. (Note: Some mentions of this paper will cite the year as 1929; technically, the year of their very first publication in this series was in 1928).
3. Hans Berger, “Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen,” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 87 (December 1929):527–570.
5. Kenneth S. Cole and Howard J Curtis, “Electric Impedance of the Squid Giant Axon during Activity,” Journal of General Physiology 22, no. 5 (1939): 649–70, https://doi.org/10.1085/jgp.22.5.649; A. L. Hodgkin and A. F. Huxley, “Action Potentials Recorded from inside a Nerve Fibre,” Nature 144, no. 3651 (1939): 710–11, https://doi.org/10.1038/144710a0. It’s worth noting that the very first intracellular membrane recording was actually in plants, by Karl Umrath in “Untersuchungen über Plasma und Plasmaströmung an Characeen,” (1930).
6. Allison Abbott, “Neuroscience: One hundred years of Rita” Nature 458 (April 1, 2009): 564-567.
7. Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5, no. 4 (December 1943): 115–33, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478259.
8. Kenneth S. Cole, “Dynamic Electrical Characteristics of the Squid Axon Membrane,” Archives des Sciences Physiologiques 3 (1949): 253–58.
12. Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann, “Single-Channel Currents Recorded from Membrane of Denervated Frog Muscle Fibres,” Nature 260, no. 5554 (1976): 799–802, https://doi.org/10.1038/260799a0.
14. Hugo Besedovsky, Adriana Del Rey, Ernst Sorkin, and Charles A. Dinarello, “Immunoregulatory Feedback between Interleukin-1 and Glucocorticoid Hormones,” Science 233, no. 4764 (August 8, 1986): 652–54, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.3014662.
17. Edward S. Boyden, Feng Zhang, Ernst Bamberg, Georg Nagel, and Karl Deisseroth, “Millisecond-Timescale, Genetically Targeted Optical Control of Neural Activity,” Nature Neuroscience 8, no. 9 (September 14, 2005): 1263–68, https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1525. It’s worth noting that—as with every scientific discovery—there were many important developments before Boyden and colleagues published this paper. This was one of the first to demonstrate the potential of optogenetics, particularly for the mouse model.
18. Misha B. Ahrens, Jennifer M. Li, Michael B. Orger, Drew N. Robson, Alexander F. Schier, Florian Engert, and Ruben Portugues, “Brain-Wide Neuronal Dynamics during Motor Adaptation in Zebrafish,” Nature 485, no. 7399 (May 24, 2012): 471–77, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11057.
19. Jonathan Keats, “The $1.3B Quest to Build a Supercomputer Replica of a Human Brain,” Wired, May 14, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/05/neurologist-markam-human-brain/; Obama, Barack, “President Obama Speaks on the BRAIN Initiative and American Innovation,” Obama White House, filmed April 2, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJuxLDRsSQc.
3. Who Are All of the Neuroscientists?
1. Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen, “Science Is Getting Less Bang for its Buck,” Atlantic, November 16, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/575665/. Although this article contains useful data, I don’t agree with its cynicism.
2. Of course, I’m not immune to any of this—I’ve got my own share of anxieties, habits, and emotional complexities. It’s this psychological patchwork that makes us who we are.
4. Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open (New York: Scribner, 2004), 211.
5. Ben A. Barres, “Does Gender Matter?” Nature 442, no. 7099 (July 2006): 133–36, https://doi.org/10.1038/442133a, also tackles the question of whether there are less women in science due to innate differences. I’d highly recommend Barres’s posthumous autobiography, The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), for more insight into his life and experiences.
6. Levi-Montalcini has a string of publications from 1949 onward describing the role and mechanisms of nerve growth factor. For a historical summary, see Luigi Aloe, “Rita Levi-Montalcini: The Discovery of Nerve Growth Factor and Modern Neurobiology.” Trends in Cell Biology 14, no. 7 (July 2004): 395–99, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcb.2004.05.011.
8. There are various ways to tackle the question of equity and inclusion in science. In 2017, women made up about 47 percent of the workforce but only held 24 percent of jobs in STEM careers (Ryan Noonan, “Women in STEM: 2017 Update. ESA Issue Brief #06-17,” ERIC (November 13, 2017): 1, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED590906. In graduate programs, about 58 percent of students are women, and this equal representation at the graduate level has been true for over a decade. (Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey: Academic Year 2016–2017 [Washington, DC: McKinley Advisors, 2017], https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/Survey-Reports/NDP-Final-Report.pdf?la=en&hash=1E45A7DC64D847DBB9BF61BD8699522F5BF055B9; Raddy L. Ramos, Karina Alviña, and Luis R Martinez, “Diversity of Graduates from Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral Degree Neuroscience Programs in the United States,” Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education 16, no. 1 [2017]: A6–13. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29371835.) According to Bias Watch Neuro, of the graduate students and postdocs that attend the Society for Neuroscience conference, about half are female. However, when we look across faculty members, these numbers drop: about 31 percent of neuroscience faculty are women, even fewer than that at the senior level (BiasWatchNeuro, “Neuroscience base rates,” https://biaswatchneuro.com/base-rates/neuroscience-base-rates/, accessed June 10, 2020).
9. Jennifer Raymond, “Most of Us Are Biased,” Nature 495, no. 7439 (March 2013): 33–34, https://doi.org/10.1038/495033a; Corinne A. Moss-Racusin et al. “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students,” PNAS 109, no. 41 (October 2012): 16474–79, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211286109.
12. Many people face the question of when to have kids during a research career. If you identify as a woman and are thinking about having children, know that many researchers have had children at various points of their careers. Many universities have understanding policies for maternal and paternal care, but others are more limited. This is a really important thing to research when you’re at that point in your life and career.
4. Where Neuroscience Is Headed
1. Barack Obama, “President Obama Speaks on the BRAIN Initiative and American Innovation,” Obama White House, April 2, 2013, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJuxLDRsSQc. For more information on the BRAIN initiative, see https://braininitiative.nih.gov or the commentary in Anna Devor et al., “The Challenge of Connecting the Dots in the B.R.A.I.N,” Neuron 80, no. 2 (October 2013): 270–74, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.09.008.
4. For critiques, see Yves Frégnac, “Big Data and the Industrialization of Neuroscience: A Safe Roadmap for Understanding the Brain?” Science 358 no. 6362 (October 2017): 470–77, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan8866. For a related discussion about big data and the advancement of techniques in neuroscience, see Terrence J. Sejnowski, Patricia S. Churchland, and J. Anthony Movshon, “Putting Big Data to Good Use in Neuroscience,” Nature Neuroscience 17, no. 11 (November 2014): 1440–41, http://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3839.
6. R. Quian Quiroga, L. Reddy, G. Kreiman, C. Koch, and I. Fried, “Invariant Visual Representation by Single Neurons in the Human Brain,” Nature 435, no. 7045 (June 2005): 1102–1107, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03687. This might seem like a frivolous study, but it’s actually scientifically quite interesting. Single cells in our brain fire in response to specific ideas, faces, and places. Those same cells likely also respond to other things, but the idea that such complex information could be represented in a single cell was groundbreaking.
8. Not to be confused with Peeta, from The Hunger Games. This is peta: 1015. Estimate from Florian Engert, “The Big Data Problem: Turning Maps into Knowledge,” Neuron 83, no. 6 (September 2014): 1246, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.09.008.
9. If you’re interested in seeing this kind of data for yourself, check out https://eyewire.org. You can actually help them analyze electron microscopy data!
10. Engert, “The Big Data Problem.”
11. Anupam K. Garg, Peichao Li, Mohammad S. Rashid, and Edward M. Callaway, “Color and Orientation Are Jointly Coded and Spatially Organized in Primate Primary Visual Cortex,” Science 364, no. 6447 (June 2019): 1275–79, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw5868.
14. “Facts and Figures About the LHC,” CERN, Resources, accessed April 5, 2020, https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc. See also Mélissa Gaillard, “CERN Data Centre passes the 200-petabyte milestone,” CERN News, July 6, 2017, https://home.cern/news/news/computing/cern-data-centre-passes-200-petabyte-milestone.
15. For a beautifully done documentary on the development of the LHC, check out the 2013 documentary Particle Fever.
17. Karel Svoboda, email communication with the author, September 2019.
18. This is in addition to their other institutes, which also collect data on genetics and cell types.
20. You can find a really great list of open source scientific datasets here: https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets. It is important to note, though, that not every open access dataset is created equally. You’ll find that some datasets are very well curated and documented well, but others are not. This will hopefully get better as our standards for sharing improves. There’s a reasonably updated repository for data, software, and hardware here: https://open-neuroscience.com/, but much of this conversation happens on social media or dedicated neuroscience messaging channels (e.g., on Slack or ResearchGate).
21. Many people use the term glam labs to describe large labs with a lot of funding. People will also often call some publications glam journals. Neuroscientists love glam.
22. Engert, “The Big Data Problem,” 1247.
23. Probably because neurons and sheep serve the same purpose in the universe, which scientists have yet to discover but likely involves the quantum mechanics and microfabricated biomaterials. Or, I just pulled a statistic from “Sheep Numbers by State,” Australian Wool Innovation Limited, the Woolmark Company, accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.wool.com/market-intelligence/sheep-numbers-by-state/.
Part 2. Graduate School in Neuroscience
1. Maxwell W. Cowan, Donald H. Harter, and Eric R. Kandel, “The Emergence of Modern Neuroscience: Some Implications for Neurology and Psychiatry,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 23, no. 1 (March 2000): 346–47, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.23.1.343.
2. The Harvard website claims the year was 1966 (“Home | Neurobiology,” Harvard Medical School, accessed June 11, 2020, https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/), but in Cowan, Harter, and Kandel, “The Emergence of Modern Neuroscience” the year is 1967 (page 346). Believe what you will.
5. For countries where we have data, the percentage of PhDs is typically around 1 percent (OECD, “Doctorate holders”, in OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2015: Innovation for growth and society, OECD Publishing, Paris, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1787/sti_scoreboard-2015-10-en).
5. Why You Should (or Shouldn’t) Get a PhD in Neuroscience
3. See part 4 for many more details about salaries across fields.
5. There’s much more about this in chapter 6 under “Structure and Content.”
6. Chris Woolston, “PhDs: The Tortuous Truth,” Nature, November 13, 2019, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03459-7; Teresa M. Evans, Lindsay Bira, Jazmin Beltran Gastelum, L. Todd Weiss, and Nathan L. Vanderford, “Evidence for a Mental Health Crisis in Graduate Education,” Nature Biotechnology 36, no. 3 (March 6, 2018): 282–84.
6. What Is a Neuroscience Graduate Degree, Anyway?
2. For an example of such a master’s in science program, check out the University of Oxford’s MSc program, which can be followed by their doctoral program.
7. Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey.
8. Examples of these programs include Vanderbuilt Univeristy’s law and neuroscience program, and University of Wisconsin’s neuroscience and public policy degree programs.
9. Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey.
10. Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey. This might seem like a long time, but it’s actually a bit lower than the average across biomedical fields, which is more like 6.5 years (Shulamit Kahn and Donna K Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training on Early Careers in Biomedicine,” Nature Biotechnology 35, no. 1 [January 2017]: 90–94, https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3766).
11. Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey, 11.
13. Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey, 32, 33.
7. Paths to Graduate School
2. Christopher Rochon, Gonzalo Otazu, Isaac L. Kurtzer, Randy F. Stout, and Raddy L. Ramos, “Quantitative Indicators of Continued Growth in Undergraduate Neuroscience Education in the US,” Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education 18, no. 1 (2019): A51–56, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31983900; for older data and trends over time, see Raddy L. Ramos, Georgia J. Fokas, Ankur Bhambri, Phoebe T. Smith, Brian H. Hallas, and Joshua C. Brumberg, “Undergraduate Neuroscience Education in the U.S.: An Analysis Using Data from the National Center for Education Statistics,” Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education 9, no. 2 (2011): A66–70, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23493915.
3. Kira M. Pinard-Welyczko, Anna C. S. Garrison, Raddy L. Ramos, and Bradley S. Carter, “Characterizing the Undergraduate Neuroscience Major in the U.S.: An Examination of Course Requirements and Institution-Program Associations,” Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education 16, no. 1 (2017): A60–67, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29371843.
4. Huda Akil, Rita Balice-Gordon, David Lopes L. Cardozo, Walter Koroshetz, Sheena M. M. Posey Norris, Todd Sherer, S. Murray Sherman, and Edda Thiels, “Neuroscience Training for the 21st Century,” Neuron, June 1, 2016, 918, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2016.05.030.
5. This varies tremendously by school. Neuroscience programs in the United States receive anywhere between 5 and 875 program applicants — 170 on average (Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey, 13.). At the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the admit rate is about 5.7 percent (MIT Institutional Research, “Graduate Education Statistics,” accessed June 11, 2020, http://ir.mit.edu/graduate-education-statistics). For Weill Cornell’s Neuroscience PhD program, it’s about 22 percent (Weill Cornell Medicine, “Trainee Statistics and Outcomes,” accessed June 11, 2020, https://gradschool.weill.cornell.edu/cngls). You can get admissions information from many schools on this Coalition for Next Generation Life Science database: http://nglscoalition.org/coalition-data/.
9. Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey.
12. Linda K. McLoon and A. David Redish, “Demystifying Graduate School: Navigating a PhD in Neuroscience and Beyond,” Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience 16, no. 3 (2018): A203–209, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30254532.
13. Society for Neuroscience, Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey.
14. See chapter 17, for more details on how to write an email to a professor.
17. Anne Churchland, email communication with the author, August 2019.
18. But please, please, do not start your personal statement with some version of, “The brain is a three-pound mass of blubber….”—We know. We know it is.
20. If your code is publicly available, include the link in your CV!
8. Choosing a Graduate School and Advisor
2. According to an SfN survey (2016), U.S. PhD programs enrolled an average of ten students each year, with a range from 0 to 29.
3. If you still don’t have much of an idea of what kind of research you’d like to do, skip ahead to part 3 to read about types of research, and then check back.
4. Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (New York: Norton, 1985), 341.
5. There’s plenty to say on this topic; for more detailed advice, see Ben Barres, “How to Pick a Graduate Advisor,” Neuron 80, no. 2 (October 2013): 275–79, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.10.005. as well as chapter 18.
6. Someone, somewhere, will probably try to tell you that there is such a thing as healthy competition among lab members and that having some competition encourages people to work harder. Don’t believe them. Science is competitive enough. People are naturally competitive enough. You don’t need to add any competition to the insecurity party that is early career science. Collaboration is what you want, and it will make you a better scientist.
7. For an idea of what a lab philosophy might look like, see the Wilke & DeNardo lab’s example: https://wd2labs.org/lab-philosophy. Relatedly, some labs will have publicly available lab manuals, which can give insight into how they carry out their research (and how organized they are).
9. Herding Cats, or Making the Most of Your Committee
1. The following discussion on thesis committees largely applies to thesis committees within U.S. graduate programs. Beyond the United States, students may not have a thesis committee. Instead, many PhDs will be supervised by one advisor, occasionally alongside a coadvisor.
2. For more about sending professional emails in general, see chapter 17.
10. The Beauty of Self-Care
2. According to self-reports, more than half of scientists are in the lab more than forty hours a week: Chris Woolston, “Workplace Habits: Full-Time Is Full Enough,” Nature 546 (June 2017): 175–77, https://www.nature.com/articles/nj7656-175a. In a recent study I conducted (unpublished data), graduate students (n = 138) reported being in the week about forty-eight hours, on average.
3. John Pencavel, “The Productivity of Working Hours,” Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (October 2013).
4. Teresa M. Evans et al., “Evidence for a Mental Health Crisis in Graduate Education,” Nature Biotechnology 36, no. 3 (March 2018): 282–84, https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4089.
5. Working in bed is also a pretty terrible habit in terms of sleep hygiene. Your brain needs to be conditioned that certain places are sleepy places. You can work at a bar, at a park, on a merry-go-round, whatever—just don’t work in your bed.
6. A great example of this is the UC Davis Incubator Group: http://davisig.org/). You can read more about it in Kyle Francovich’s profile in chapter 25.
11. The Dissertation
12. Types of Neuroscience Research
2. Anne Churchland, email communication with the author, August 2019.
3. Ben Throesch, email communication with the author, January 2020.
5. Adam Michael Stewart, Oliver Braubach, Jan Spitsbergen, Robert Gerlai, and Allan V. Kalueff, “Zebrafish Models for Translational Neuroscience Research: From Tank to Bedside,” Trends in Neurosciences 37, no. 5 (2014): 264–78, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2014.02.011.
7. Bart Ellenbroek, and Jiun Youn, “Rodent Models in Neuroscience Research: Is It a Rat Race?” Disease Models & Mechanisms 9, no. 10 (October 2016): 1079–87, https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.026120.
8. Kristen J. Brennand et al., “Modelling Schizophrenia Using Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells,” Nature 473, no. 7346 (April 2011): 221–25, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09915.
11. Grace Lindsay, Twitter discussion with the author, 2019.
15. Stewart et al., “Zebrafish Models for Translational Neuroscience Research,” 264–78.
18. Daniel Wagenaar, “A Classic Model Animal in the 21st Century: Recent Lessons from the Leech Nervous System,” Journal of Experimental Biology 218, no. 21 (November 2015): 3353–59, https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.113860.
19. Berrack Uger, Kuchuan Chen, and Hugo J. Bellen. “Drosophila Tools and Assays for the Study of Human Diseases,” Disease Models & Mechanisms 9, no. 3 (March 2016): 235–44, https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.023762. The “Drosophila Workers Unite” manual is also a terrific resource for information about Drosophila research: Michelle Markstein, “Drosophila Workers Unite! A Laboratory Manual for Working with Drosophila,” MarksteinLab (website), accessed May 10, 2020, http://marksteinlab.org/dwu/.
2. Massimo Scanziani, email communication with the author, August 2019.
5. Copublication is actually quite common once you start recognizing it. For example, a 2011 publication out of my graduate lab came out in the same issue of Neuron as similar work by another lab.
6. Several of these points are modern adaptations of Ramón y Cajal’s ideas in Advice to a Young Investigator.
14. You Can Learn How to Code (and You Probably Should)
1. Kay Tye, Twitter discussion with the author, 2019.
2. There are other annoying things about sharing MATLAB code, such as differences in MATLAB versions. However, MATLAB does have many nice packages that can make things like acquiring data from a camera or signal processing quite easy.
3. Edward O. Wilson, Letters to a Young Scientist (New York: Liveright, 2013), 32.
5. Lisa S. Blackwell, Kali H. Trzesniewski, and Carol Sorich Dweck, “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention,” Child Development 78, no. 1 (February 2007): 246–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00995.x; Heidi Grant and Carol S. Dweck, “Clarifying Achievement Goals and Their Impact,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 3 (September 2003): 541–53, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.3.541.
6. There is an entire body of research on this. For examples, see: Quintin Cutts, Emily Cutts, Stephen Draper, Patrick O’Donnell, and Peter Saffrey, “Manipulating Mindset to Positively Influence Introductory Programming Performance,” in SIGCSE’10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 431–35 (New York: ACM, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1145/1734263.1734409; Sapna Cheryan, Victoria C Plaut, Paul G Davies, and Claude M Steele, “Ambient Belonging: How Stereotypical Cues Impact Gender Participation in Computer Science,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 6 (2009): 1045–60, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016239; Polina Charters, Michael J. Lee, Andrew J. Ko, and Dastyni Loksa, “Challenging Stereotypes and Changing Attitudes: The Effect of a Brief Programming Encounter on Adults’ Attitudes toward Programming,” in SIGCSE 2014 - Proceedings of the 45th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 653–58. New York, New York, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1145/2538862.2538938; Colleen M. Lewis., Ruth E. Anderson, and Ken Yasuhara, “ ‘I Don’t Code All Day’: Fitting in Computer Science When the Stereotypes Don’t Fit,” in ICER 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, 23–32. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1145/2960310.2960332.
15. No One Wants to Talk About Authorship
1. Friend does not constitute reason for authorship, I am sorry to report.
16. Communicating Your Science
1. This is largely based on Randy Olson’s “And, But, Therefore” framework. You can read more about how to use it in your research in his book, Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
3. Thankfully, there’s also some useful guidance out there: Brett Mensh, and Konrad Kording, “Ten Simple Rules for Structuring Papers,” ed. Scott Markel, PLOS Computational Biology 13, no. 9 (September 2017): e1005619, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005619; Todd C. Peterson, Sofie R. Kleppner, and Crystal M. Botham, “Ten Simple Rules for Scientists: Improving Your Writing Productivity,” ed. Scott Markel, PLOS Computational Biology 14, no. 10 (October 2018): e1006379, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006379.
4. Pro tip: bring good shoes.
5. There is also a lot of clear advice in Matt Carter, Designing Scientific Presentations (Cambridge: Academic Press, 2013): 313–343
17. Networking Is Not a Bad Word
1. John Reynolds, email communication with the author, July 2019.
2. I actually have a similar story—though without an elevator. When I was a grad student, I attended a course called the Dynamic Brain sponsored by the Allen Brain Institute. I was going largely because of the fantastic group of instructors that they’d corralled for the course, and I was ready. On the first day, I saw Anne Churchland at her laptop at the back of the room and introduced myself and my current research project. She immediately showed me some of her lab’s recent data, and we were off, talking like longstanding colleagues. A couple of years later, I started a postdoc in her lab.
Part 4. Where Do All the Neuroscientists Go?
1. Mark Humphries, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Nottingham, disagrees with this, citing the lack of replicators as the main disappointment of the present day.
3. In 2016, about 72 percent of neuroscience graduates in United States moved immediately to a postdoctoral position after graduating, but there is a wide range between programs (Society for Neuroscience. Report of Neuroscience Departments & Programs Survey, 29). Across biomedical PhD graduates, the percent of PhD students who start a postdoc after graduating is typically about 80 percent (Shulamit Kahn and Donna K Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training on Early Careers in Biomedicine,” Nature Biotechnology 35, no. 1 [January 2017]: 90–94, https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3766).
19. General Tips for Getting a Job After Graduate School
1. See Chapter 60 in Karen Kelsky, The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. into a Job (New York: Three Rivers, 2015) for over 100 examples.
20. Academia
1. Maximiliaan, Schillebeeckx, Brett Maricque, and Cory Lewis, “The Missing Piece to Changing the University Culture,” Nature Biotechnology 31, no. 10 (2013): 938–41, https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2706.
2. Shulamit Kahn and Donna K Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training on Early Careers in Biomedicine,” Nature Biotechnology 35, no. 1 (January 2017): 92, https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3766.
4. Kahn and Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training,” 93.
8. Kahn and Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training.” Although, other data from the National Institutes of Health suggests that the proportion of PhDs pursuing postdoctoral fellowships has actually dropped in recent years (see figure 3 in Huda Akil et al., “Neuroscience Training for the 21st Century,” Neuron, June 1, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2016.05.030, 921).
9. Kahn and Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training,” 92.
10. Kahn and Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training,” 93.
12. Kahn and Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training,” 91.
13. Kahn and Ginther, “The Impact of Postdoctoral Training,” 91.
14. In the UK and most of Europe, lab funding is typically project-based, and therefore postdoc positions are more likely to be advertised positions with known durations and clear project descriptions. The opaqueness of postdoc hiring in the United States is a big problem for diversity and equitable hiring processes, as others have pointed out. See Terry McGlynn, “How the Opaque Way We Hire Postdocs Contributes to Science’s Diversity Problem,” ChronicleVitae, June 17, 2019, https://chroniclevitae.com/news/2212-how-the-opaque-way-we-hire-postdocs-contributes-to-science-s-diversity-problem.
16. Alex Naka, phone interview with the author, 2019.
17. If you’re interested in learning more about industry and government postdocs, see the interviews with Alex Naka and Kachi Odoememe in chapter 25.
18. To hear about more clinical research, see Vindia Fernandez’s interview in chapter 25.
19. The distribution of these responsibilities depends largely on career stage and institution. For example, early career PIs are exempt from significant teaching and service responsibilities. Folks at medical schools or private institutions typically do not need to teach if they do not want to.
20. In particular, people recommend At The Helm: Leading Your Laboratory by Kathy Barker (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2010). Also see the advice in Elisabeth Pain, “The Surprises of Starting as a New PI,” Science, September 4, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.caredit.aav3101.
21. Kay Tye, email communication with the author, August 2019.
22. For additional tips, see John S. Tregoning, and Jason E. McDermott, “Ten Simple Rules to Becoming a Principal Investigator,” PLOS Computational Biology 16, no. 2 (February 2020): e1007448, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007448.
24. Bruce Alberts, Marc W. Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus. “Rescuing US Biomedical Research from Its Systemic Flaws,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 16 (April 2014): 5773–77, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1404402111; Steven Hyman, “Biology Needs More Staff Scientists,” Nature, May 16, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1038/545283a.
21. Industry Research
1. For a recent review of the neurotechnology field, see Oliver Müller and Stefan Rotter, “Neurotechnology: Current Developments and Ethical Issues,” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 11, no. 93 (December 2017): https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2017.00093.
2. Check out my interview with David Raposo in chapter 25 for more information on DeepMind.
3. Kate Kelland, “Analysis: Neuroscience Under Threat as Big Pharma Backs Off,” Reuters, February 11, 2011, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-neuroscience-pharma-idUSTRE71A2E120110211; Lydia. Hamsey, “2017 Will Be a Make-or-Break Year for Neuroscience Drugs,” Business Insider, January 14, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/future-of-neuroscience-drugs-pharma-2017-1.
23. Data Science
4. For a useful review of the scope of drug diversion, see Mark Fan, Dorothy Tscheng, Michael Hamilton, Bridgett Hyland, Rachel Reding, and Patricia Trbovich, “Diversion of Controlled Drugs in Hospitals: A Scoping Review of Contributors and Safeguards,” Journal of Hospital Medicine 14, no. 7 (July 2019): 419–28, https://doi.org/10.12788/jhm.3228.
7. Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/learn/overview): Kaggle hosts data science competitions and has various open-access datasets and a whole set of free online courses that you can take. These will not fully prepare you to apply for a job, but they can at least give you a taste for what doing data science is like as well as give you experience with nonacademic projects.
8. Insight also has fellowships in data engineering, health data, and more. You can find more details about it here: https://www.insightdatascience.com/ or in the interview with Kyle Frankovich in chapter 25.
9. Kyle Frankovich, phone interview with author, August 2019.
10. Kyle Frankovich, phone interview with author, August 2019.
24. Science Communication and Policy
1. My personal favorites are Ed Yong, Oliver Sacks, Mary Roach, and Carl Zimmer.
2. Caitlin Vander Weele, phone interview with the author, September 2018. Skip ahead to Caitlin’s profile (chapter 25) if you’d like to hear more about what this type of work is like.
3. Skip ahead to the interview with Jean Mary Zarate (chapter 25) for more information on being a science editor.
25. A Cast of Neuroscience Characters
1. The interviews that provided the basis for these vignettes were all conducted on the phone from September 2018 to February 2020. Although their career trajectories are fairly up to date as of June 2020, these folks are movers and shakers, and it’s highly likely that many of them have since moved onto the next amazing step in their careers. Most of the interviewees have public-facing LinkedIn pages or social media accounts—I’d encourage you to connect with them there if you’re curious about what they’re up to now.
2. The Insight Data Science Fellowship is specifically designed for people who have just finished their PhD. It’s a one-year fellowship located in multiple cities, and it is completely free. Insight also has fellowships in data engineering, health data, and more. You can find more details about it here: https://www.insightdatascience.com/.
4. Esther A. Odekunle et al., “Ancient Role of Vasopressin/Oxytocin-Type Neuropeptides as Regulators of Feeding Revealed in an Echinoderm,” BMC Biology 17, no. 60 (July 2019): https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-019-0680-2; Tatiana D. Mayorova et al., “Localization of Neuropeptide Gene Expression in Larvae of an Echinoderm, the Starfish Asterias Rubens,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 10, no. 553 (December 1, 2016): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2016.00553.