Spring Grants and Peer Review

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Susan Baxter

It’s been a quiet month on the blog, but April is an important month at CSUPERB so we need to celebrate!

We announced the CSUPERB “major grant” awards and the Presidents’ Commission Scholars this week. The Faculty-Student Collaborative Research Grants and the Presidents’ Commission Scholars are two of the most popular CSUPERB programs, as gauged by campus participation. So our normally quiet office enjoyed the email buzz from students, PIs, chairs and deans this week!

Campus participation defined by applications received from each campus to CSUPERB grant program, award program or as symposium registration. Data shown for AY06/07 – AY12/13.

CSUPERB made 36 grant awards totaling $574,685 to CSU faculty at 17 CSU universities. Awards were made as part of four competitive CSUPERB grant programs: New Investigator, Research Development, Entrepreneurial Joint Venture and Programmatic Development. Faculty review panels evaluated 95 proposals from principal investigators (PIs) at 19 different CSU campuses. Averaged across the four programs, awards were made to 38% of the proposals received.

I use the scare quotes around “major grants” because these are the largest awards CSUPERB makes, but they are all seed grants that pay out $15,000 – 25,000 spent over 18 months. The aim of these programs is to support preliminary work that can lead to follow-on funding from external agencies and organizations. These follow-on grants support collaborative faculty-student research, innovative educational programs, and knowledge and technology transfer. The reality of biotechnology-related scholarship is that significant funds (>$15k/year) are needed to support research programs. Students gain deep learning opportunities working with PIs or participating in courses that are built on faculty scholarship. As a consequence grant-getting is fundamental to biotechnology education and research. We wish all our new PIs the best of luck in the lab, field and clinic!

Sixteen undergraduate researchers, the 2013 Presidents’ Commission Scholars, will be carrying out faculty‐mentored biotechnology research projects on 12 different CSU campuses this summer. CSUPERB provides $8000 to support these summer research projects. This year’s request for proposals invited applications from CSU students early in their academic career. The majority of applications were still from students in or starting their junior (3rd) year, but the selection committee funded freshman and sophomores as well. Jaimey Homen, a chemistry student finishing her first year at Sonoma State University, will be working with Dr. Carmen Works to characterize photochemically activated molecules. The group’s long-term goal is to engineer molecules that deliver carbon monoxide (CO) to specifically protect certain biological tissues. For context, CO has been shown previously to improve organ transplant survival rates. Ms. Homen became interested in undergraduate research opportunities and met Dr. Works by participating in SSU’s Freshman Learning Community. We hope Ms. Homen and the other 2013 Scholars have a wonderful summer!

CSUPERB’s peer review process starts in February when proposals are received. This spring 57 faculty from 20 CSU campuses worked on six different proposal review panels. The major grants were reviewed at meetings April 13-14 in San Jose; four different panels discussed and evaluated proposals that weekend. The travel grants and Presidents’ Commission Scholar applications are reviewed by panels working on the internet and by teleconference. Overall our faculty reviewers do a great job selecting promising research projects to fund. For every major grant dollar awarded by CSUPERB between 2004 and 2010, PIs went on to win $14 (a 1400% fiscal “return on investment”) in grants from external organizations. This, of course, is a direct credit to the excellent and competitive faculty scholars at work in the CSU.

We celebrate and justify our grant programs by pointing to the fiscal return-on-investment, but we also monitor student impact and knowledge transfer (publications, collaborations). But any measure of peer review “success” must come with an acceptance of failure as well. Not all the engineered strains survive, not all the experiments work, not all the hypotheses pan out. Not all the PIs write well-crafted follow-on grant proposals, not all the research collaborations hold together, not all the innovative ideas find a good fit at a funding agency or an angel investing group. Some ideas are ahead of their time, some skate too close to the bleeding edge, some are out of step with prevailing opinions. We teach our students and assistant professors that their success will depend on their ability to shake off failure and move on to write the next draft, design the next experiment, or repeat the test until it’s significant. Some of those successes will come within the year, but scientific triumphs often take longer than we expect or come later in a career than hoped.

Expert scientists, engineers and clinicians are familiar and comfortable with these truths. None of us can predict the research projects that will work or have the greatest impact on society. But if we don’t talk about the failures inherent in scientific research and development, unintended and “disastrous”* consequences result.

Scientific peer review came under increased congressional scrutiny this week.** Rep. Lamar Smith challenged the National Science Foundation (NSF) peer review processes and proposed new review criteria. Rep. Smith went on to request access to the “scientific/technical reviews and Program Officers Review Analysis” for five specific NSF grants. Yesterday President Obama defended scientific peer review during a talk at the National Academy of Science, stating, “I will keep working to make sure that our scientific research does not fall victim to political maneuvers or agendas that in some ways would impact on the integrity of the scientific process.”

Faculty reviewers and PIs probably don’t think often enough on the integrity underlying our peer review systems. More often we grumble about nit-picking reviewers, the lack of high-risk, high-impact ideas, program officers’ insistence on well-written, on-time reviews, and the dearth of funds needed to support biotechnology innovation. But if we sit back and ponder the implications of Rep. Smith’s requests to NSF, we suddenly see the wonder and power of our grass-roots, peer-driven national science agenda. This is a process that serves to select the best science as-we-see-it, to plant the seeds of new technologies and therapies, and to train generations of the nation’s best-and-brightest scientists, engineers and clinicians. The U.S. peer review systems underlying our research and development enterprise aren’t always pretty or perfect or innovative, but like our democracy, they’re highly regarded worldwide despite inherent incrementalism and consensus-building. The corollary is that the aggregate outcome of peer review is the aggregate outcome*** of our nation’s research enterprise that remains envied worldwide.

Can we improve the system? Sure. Even at CSUPERB we evaluate our programs, iterate our processes, and tune the strategic intent of our grant programs. We do that with significant input from the expert science and engineering faculty involved with the program. We adjust to the budgets supplied by the taxpayers via the California legislature and the governor. We keep our eyes on how biotechnology is defined by the external life science community. But – as of yet – we have not had to change how and what biotechnology research we fund in response to political pressure of any kind.

I understand the politicians in Washington, D.C. hold the purse-strings, but I sincerely hope political committees will not dictate how and what American science is done going forward. To go that unscientific and undemocratic route would, indeed, be disastrous to our research and development enterprise.

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* Characterization attributed to Bruce Alberts at Nature Blogs.

**The blogosphere is just getting heated up about this political power-grab of peer review, but some good context is provided by Derek Lowe and The AmericanScience bloggers.

***U.S. research outcomes can be reported many different ways, for example, see NSF’s measures and outcomes and Ben Bernanke’s take.

Assessing Entrepreneurial Education

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Susan Baxter

We’re getting ready to kick off the 2014 CSUPERB – Idea-to-Product (I2P(R)) Early-Stage Biotechnology Commercialization Challenge. But I want to put a wrap on the 2013 Challenge. It was a doozy and is worthy of its own blog post (here’s the official (draft) 2-pager almost ready for next week’s kick-off).

Working behind the scenes I saw the incredible passion and verve the student teams brought to the competition in Anaheim. But I also had the fly-on-the-wall view of the entire process and can attest these students (and their faculty mentors) travelled along an exceedingly steep (and sharp) learning curve. This is no competition for tired, risk-adverse biotechnologists.

CSUPERB is by no means the only organization looking for effective and meaningful formats for entrepreneurial education.* When we began evaluating platforms and formats, there were many models for technology commercialization throughout the California State University from which to learn. San Diego State and CSU San Bernardino partnered on CCAT, a federally funded project to commercialize technologies critical to homeland security and national defense. That project team can report out on its effectiveness in terms of leveraged funding, sales, license agreements and merger and acquisition (M&A) activity. Likewise many CSU campuses host Small Business Development Centers; several have technology expertise and assist with the commercialization of technology product or services. These groups judge success based on new company formation and capital financing, among other metrics.

But when surveyed, the CSU biotechnology community focused firmly on educational needs and outcomes, not financing to cross valleys of death or infrastructure to accelerate new company formation. The most common question posed by CSU researchers was, “What is needed to take a life science idea to a commercial product?” Students and faculty asked CSUPERB to reduce the gap in knowledge (& culture) between basic researchers and their commercial world counterparts.

Faculty and administrators at San Jose State University and CSU East Bay had experience with the University of Texas at Austin’s Idea-to-Product competition platform. Terri Swartz (dean of business at CSU East Bay, now retired) introduced us to Steven Nichols at UT Austin. The two of them thought the I2P format would work well for biotechnology commercialization; they had seen a handful of biotech teams compete successfully in the global competition. I2P coordinators define program success as improved skills working in multidisciplinary teams, increased understanding of the technology commercialization process and the bolstering of cross-disciplinary collaborations on campus. That seemed like a good match for the CSU biotech community’s needs.

The main advantage of the I2P format in our two years’ of experience is that it’s not a business plan competition. We like to think we’re special in biotechnology. When biotech product developers address unmet needs related to human health and nutrition, they face unique regulatory hurdles and complicated markets. Students need to understand the exceedingly high standards of product safety. But it’s usually customer definition that derails student entrepreneurs. Scientists and engineers fall in love with their technologies; they are typically motivated by the need to “help people.” But rarely does a patient buy a drug or device or medical supply directly from a company. There are layers upon layers of buyers and agencies between patients and companies. Each year we see I2P teams run into this “buzz-saw” as they figure out who exactly their initial customers really are. It is this initial market and customer definition (and refinement!) that characterizes the biotech I2P competition and knocks teams out.

Again, we are not the first to recognize this as the most important hurdle technology entrepreneurs must surmount. Many of us who limped out of the early 2000′s biotech bubble burned alarming amounts of cash refining product concepts (and business plans) on the fly. Steve Blank and colleagues developed the Lean LaunchPad framework and curriculum (open, free access!) based on their belief that entrepreneurs needed greater agility. The NSF I-Corps Nodes offer entrepreneurial education to researchers based on Lean LaunchPad; Bay Area universities just won a new award and will use the framework for biotechnology commercialization. Because Blank and his colleagues are firmly focused on new company formation, I’ll be curious to see if they are (more) successful “spinning” out successful biotech companies than normal. Biotech is a slow, cruel, expensive and risky sector compared to social media, computer hardware, wireless applications and other (more) direct markets (yes, we’re special).

So – how well did the 2014 CSUPERB-I2P challenge meet the CSU’s need for entrepreneurial education?** I’m going to focus on student learning outcomes here (one of these days I’ll write about faculty learning as well!).

The students involved this year started out as true biotech newbies. I’ll say it here – there was no performance difference whatsoever between graduate students and undergraduates; they are on equal footing in this arena (others have noted the same!). Only one student reported having a family member working in a biotechnology company. A surprising percentage (73%) had never worked on a biotechnology project before! They signed up for the CSUPERB-I2P challenge for a variety of reasons (click on the chart below to see a bigger version). Most students credit the influence of a faculty mentor; only one student team dragged their mentor into the fray (he says he was merely a point-of-contact and didn’t help them at all; my guess is he’s vastly underestimating his contributions). Lesson learned: Faculty remain the major influencers and mentors leading to team success.

The teams reported on their tactics after the competition ended. The successful teams definitely put more hours ( > 80 hrs/each) into the competition than other finalists. Lesson Learned: As teams form true time and effort expectations should be set and agreed upon by all. Corollary: I2P “teams” can involve more than four students up to the “team declaration” deadline.

Lesson Learned: The hallmark of successful I2P competitors is the strength of their expert network and customer outreach. We were somewhat surprised at how little some teams did on that front (again, click on the next image below to make it bigger). Unlike the Lean LaunchPad platform, the I2P format is not built on a series of classes or lectures. The I2P Challenge is designed as a “layer” on top of entrepreneurial infrastructure (clubs or courses or collaborations) already in place on campus for students to tap into. We encourage mentors to help knit together a community for student teams. As Warren Smith (2-time winning CSUPERB-I2P mentor) says, “it takes a village.” For the 2014 challenge, CSUPERB is lining up help from Small Business Development Centers to provide “instant” or “pop-up” expert networks for student teams. We’d encourage alumni networks to form around campus teams, as well.

Surprisingly the two finalist teams – Thrombin from Sac State and Abiotic from Cal Poly – were built on completely different infrastructures. Sac State has an enviable entrepreneurial infrastructure in place now; Thrombin took full advantage of it. Abiotic on the other hand had “nothing” according to their mentor (of course, his investment in that team shines through!). Their effort was entirely student-fueled – including connections to an entrepreneurs’ club and the Pasadena Bioscience Collaborative, a biotech incubator (and the 2013 competition sponsor).

We asked both faculty mentors and student team members to report out on learning gains. This is a self-reported data, of course, but I was thrilled to see that nearly everyone (93%) agreed they experienced large or very-large gains in understanding biotechnology customers and initial markets. I am intrigued that only 47% reported a (large or very large) gain in confidence (feeling like a scientist/engineer/entrepreneur). The finalist teams competing in Anaheim made tremendous, goose-bump-inducing gains in communication skills, presentation effectiveness and broad-based understanding of their product concept between Thursday’s preliminary round and Saturday’s final presentation. We saw one team member correct a judge on a regulatory issue; the student contestant was mortified….but she was correct and the judge made sure she heard that in the final feedback session. My guess is that any and all of the I2P finalists gained a realistic understanding of what is needed to commercialize biotechnologies; that’s a humbling realization with which many venture capitalists might identify! Lesson Learned: Teams will continue to evolve product concepts and learn in real time after the preliminary judging at the symposium. Corollary: Teams should expect to work around the clock at the symposium. Corollary 2: The CSUPERB-I2P finalists are some of the most “coachable” management teams with which I’ve worked.

Lastly we asked students how the 2013 I2P experience might have impacted their career plans. A third of them are running away from biotech and into a job unrelated to the buzz saw they experienced. We know that 80% of the students involved in the competition are within a year of completing their degree programs; it’s certain that at least a third of these accomplished students might already have a career path in finance, accounting and other engineering fields worked out. I’d like to think some of them might “come back” after stints in consulting firms and social media companies! I say that because 73% of students report they can see themselves working on technology commercialization teams in the future. Lesson Learned: Most students viewed the CSUPERB-I2P challenge as a “capstone” educational opportunity.

These outcomes are pretty exciting to me personally; I think this year’s judges would agree. We’ve been a-buzz since the January finals, making contacts and building expert networks for the 2014 CSUPERB-I2P Challenge. We’ve already lined up sponsors for the 2014 Challenge; Pasadena Bioscience Collaborative and the Tech Futures Group have signed on a sponsors (Many thanks! We’re open to more sponsors, of course!).

Oh – and did I mention that one company formed as a result of the competition and it has purchase orders from customers in hand? Other teams received about $50,000 in financing after the competition. So – there are true business outcomes from the CSU biotechnology entrepreneurial education challenge. We wish all 2013 CSUPERB-I2P student finalists the very best…our economy and society will depend on this next generation; something innovation pundits, college professors and basic researchers all agree upon! Lesson Learned: You can’t keep self-motivated, sharp and brave student entrepreneurs down.

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*If you still are curious about all this & have access to Science magazine – David Malakoff wrote a nice article, The Many Ways of Making Academic Research Pay Off,” in Science (15 February 2013) Vol. 339 no. 6121 pp. 750-753

**Because our “n” is very small, this blog post is categorized as “opinion.”

See Arr Oh’s Chem Coach Carnival

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Susan Baxter

To celebrate National Chemistry Week, the chemistry blogger See Arr Oh has challenged us chemists to speak up about what it’s like to work as a chemist.

Since I jumped on the Ada Lovelace bandwagon last week and I’ve convinced a few chemists near-and-dear to me to answer See Arr Oh’s challenge, I owe it to my chemistry roots to answer this call as well.

My current job.

I am the Executive Director of the CSU’s system-wide biotechnology program. I also serve as a board member for regional biotech industry associations and an early-stage regenerative medicine company.

What you do in a standard “work day.”

First – let’s get this out of the way. I don’t work “at the bench” any longer. As a result I meet the occasional person who looks incredulous when I say I’m a chemist. I am confident I would still do well in lab, but the last cryofill I did was in 2003.

In a typical day I work with groups of scientists, engineers and business people crafting multi-campus grant proposals, working on multi-campus projects, piloting new educational programs, or talking about product development. Much of what I do involves getting people to talk with each other to find out if there’s a reason to work together – industry folks, academics, chemists, physicists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists. In any given day I talk with a few CSUPERB-funded PIs and students. The most glamorous part of the job is the “making grants” part; it’s truly exciting to invest in new technologies, new ideas, young scientists and promising faculty….and seeing what happens next.

What kind of schooling / training / experience helped you get there?

I have bachelor’s, masters and doctoral degrees in chemistry. I’ve held a number of positions in both academia, research institutes and industry. It’s not weird, OK? My first research experience I worked as a summer intern developing methods and running gas chromatography assays as part of a formulations team characterizing new products. I loved seeing new products scaled up successfully (but pilot plants can be white-knuckle environments!). I can’t resist working on hard problems so I have worked on both the research and development sides of the equation. It can be the R or the D that deep-sixes or floats a project. It can also be luck and financing. I love seeing all the parts come together to make something work or succeed. That ability to see the big picture serves me well these days.

How does chemistry inform your work?

I think chemistry trains you to break things down and figure out how things work. Memorization only takes you so far (roughly the fall term of a junior year in my experience). Attention to detail makes the difference between a successful reaction or a sulfurous stinky mess (in chemistry, business or policy!). My experience solving problems, troubleshooting and analyzing things as a bench chemist still serves me today.

Finally, a unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about your career*

When I applied to graduate schools, I worked as an analytical chemist in industry. I was fascinated by the interplay between research and policy because…well… let’s just say the regulatory agencies drove a lot of my day-to-day in those days. I applied to two schools who had great graduate programs in both chemistry and policy. Both rejected me because I wasn’t focused enough. Here I am using both my chemistry (with a hefty dose of biology) and learning policy on the fly in my day-to-day job. Go figure.

Finding Ada Lovelace

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Susan Baxter

Today (October 16th) is Ada Lovelace Day. The organizers want people around the globe to share “stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM.” (Twitterers are using the hashtag #findingada). The story of Ada herself is an interesting one.

I guess my own story is rather typical. As a 10th grader in Richmond, Virginia, I had to choose a biology topic on which to report. Most of my classmates chose systems (plants, humans) to study. My biology teacher saw my lack of inspiration. She took me aside and walked me through a list of the “top ten discoveries” that year. With a twinkle in her eye, she told me that molecular biology was the wave of the future. She tutored me on a few of concepts (genes, proteins, etc. – remember these were dissect-a-worm days in high school biology!), even showing me papers from the scientific literature. I completely bit on the hype around interferon‘s promise as a cure for cancer (let’s just say this was in the 70s...). The antiviral function of interferon left me a bit cold, but its anticancer properties were fascinating to me. Back then interferon had not yet been cloned, so its utility as a human therapeutic was still comic book fantasy. In those days a Finnish group cultured human leukocyte cells at large-scale and challenged them with a virus to produce human interferon. I remember being fascinated by protein drugs and the heroics needed to produce and validate them. My engagement showed; I received an “A” on my first high school science term paper. In college I remembered those heroics and aimed toward small molecule drug discovery instead. I majored in chemistry, not biology, laying down the interdisciplinary tracks I’ve been on ever since. A winding track I was inspired to take by my high school biology teacher – a woman biologist keeping up with the scientific literature in the days when women could work as teachers or nurses.

The Ada Lovelace Day organizers want to encourage women to enter “male-dominated” fields. Globally we bemoan the lack of women undergraduates in engineering, math and computer sciences. Because so many women enter the biomedicine and biology fields as undergraduates, it seems surreal that they might still be considered male-dominated. But just this week I posted a story on hiring bias in academia on the CSUPERB Facebook page. In September Jo Handelsman, well-known for her Scientific Teaching efforts, was the lead author on a shocking PNAS publication exposing bias against hiring women scientists. This is a deeply rooted, complex social issue reaching far beyond girls playing dress-up and boys playing as soldiers.

We know that academia is not an egalitarian workplace. We tolerate well-funded PIs who demand more lab space, we lift teaching responsibilities off talented physicians, we recruit highly-cited rising stars. But within academia we persist in seeing ourselves as an open-minded community. We should be shocked that we collectively value female scientists less than their male counterparts.

Handelsman and her coauthors suggest, “that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.” Mike Goldman (FCG/SPC Chair) invited Sue Rosser, San Francisco State University’s provost, to speak on these topics to the Faculty Consensus Group. She’s graciously agreed to join us at the winter meeting January 6th in Anaheim. Bring your open minds!

Meanwhile – tell stories to a girl in your life about the remarkable women scientists, engineers, or mathematicians you’ve known.

Branching in life science career pathways – a push or pull phenomenon?

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Susan Baxter

We’re gathering data for our annual report due at the end of the month. We’ll sprinkle some of our data and analysis into the blog to save space in the report for faculty, partner and student profiles!

We know high-impact practices, like undergraduate research experiences, improve students’ persistence and graduation rates. And, as we’ve noted before, team-based research experiences are the #1 biotechnology workforce need. Accordingly, the majority of CSUPERB’s programs aim to increase the CSU’s biotechnology research capacity so that more students can get an outstanding education on our campuses. We now have five years of reporting data and, while the numbers are not huge, we’re starting to see interesting graduation rate and career path trends.

Between 2007-2011 CSUPERB supported research experiences for 266 CSU students (139 undergraduates and 127 master’s students). This set of students was funded by faculty-student seed grants and Howell-CSUPERB Research Scholar awards. 71% of the supported undergrads graduated; 17% haven’t graduated yet, but are continuing in their degree programs (the status of 12% is unknown – darn the changed email address tracking problem!). On the very good side, these retention and graduation rates are ~3 times higher than the CSU’s average.

Where are the graduates (99 of 139) now? The first chart below breaks out their last known status (click on the chart to take a closer look). On the worrisome side, I wish we knew the status of those “unknown” graduates to better compare our CSUPERB-supported graduates’ career paths to the national averages. If the “unknowns” (18%) are unemployed, our student outcomes overall would mirror this generation’s unemployment crisis (one in five 20- to 24-year olds are jobless for over a year). Regardless this data is interesting because it illustrates the branching career options for students with degrees in biotechnology-related fields and who have also gained research experience. Comparing apples and oranges, we might also say it maps in some ways to David Lopatto’s 2003 and 2010 findings, but more of our students are taking jobs (“working first”) compared to his data on reported plans of undergraduate researchers.

53% of the supported masters students completed their programs; 22% haven’t completed yet, but are continuing in their degree programs (the status of 13% is unknown or attrition). Compared to the bachelors graduates, a greater (2-3X) percentage of masters degree holders take jobs in the life science industry (second chart below).

This data is encouraging. Not only are CSUPERB-supported students completing their college programs, they are finding jobs or gaining admission to graduate school at heartening rates. A new Bayer USA report suggests that the undergraduate college years are the “chokepoint” in the STEM workforce pipeline. By getting students into research labs and other “authentic” biotech-related settings, perhaps we can ease this chokepoint. That said, we know there are many more students interested in research experiences than the CSU has capacity to accommodate or support. We need to increase our capacity and find external partners willing to offer internships and coop experiences to scale our efforts. We’ll also continue to organize career networking sessions at the annual symposium so students can make informed career decisions.

But should we push more CSU students into biotechnology careers? While we were gathering CSUPERB data, the Washington Post (July 7) published a scathing front-page article about the oversupply of biology and chemistry researchers. As a result the blogosphere and punditry are up-in-arms about prospects for the future STEM workforce. As one blog commenter wrote, “the biggest problem with these ‘not enough scientists’ articles is that they lump all scientists and engineers together. Different industries are in completely different economic environments.”

I’ve written before about the false “pull” NSF and NIH training and funding policies have on the supply of PhDs and postdocs, especially in the biomedical sciences. I know that science and engineering frontiers can be pushed back and sustainable companies can be built by creative, hard-working and lucky teams of bachelors-, masters- and doctoral-degreed professionals. From my perspective, federal STEM training programs should not focus the majority of training funds on doctoral degree attainment. NIH-funded PIs should not staff their labs solely with doctoral-degreed professionals. I think that Change the Equation makes a good point when they blog, ”Who said those youths were destined to get PhD’s in science or anything else? A passion for, and strong grasp of, science is important for more than just the doctoral class.” Well, in the biomedical sciences too many mentors, thought leaders and funders insist doctoral degrees should be the goal for talented researchers. That said, I also think the Change the Equation folks should be more nuanced and transparent in their cheerleading for more STEM graduates as a “lump.” Biology and chemistry are some of the most popular fields for students “K to gray,” especially among women and underrepresented communities. The hard lift for the national “need more STEM graduates” conversation is to convince these same students to consider other technical fields when they enter college.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep cheering for our CSU graduates and finding ways to support bachelors and masters-level biotechnology researchers. I’m personally convinced their skill sets, scholarship and talents will be useful to California and the country. I’m just not convinced all our graduates need to get PhDs to do that.

Recognizing wisdom on this topic from a previous generation, I’ll give the last word to Vannevar Bush: “The Government should provide a reasonable number of undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships in order to develop scientific talent in American youth. The plans should be designed to attract into science only that proportion of youthful talent appropriate to the needs of science in relation to the other needs of the nation for high abilities.” (from page 2 of the NIH Biomedical Research Workforce Working Group Report)

Related Reports of Interest:

Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier, 1945

American Chemical Society annual employment survey: http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/i23/Starting-Salaries.html

Bayer Facts of Science Education XV (2011): http://bayerus.online-pressroom.com/index.cfm/events/bayer-facts-of-science-education-survey-xv/

NIH Biomedical Research Workforce Working Group Report. See also Sally Rockey’s blog entry (& associated comments) about the report: http://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2012/06/22/so-what-does-the-biomedical-research-workforce-look-like/

The Joy of Microbes

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Susan Baxter

I trained as a chemist and managed to complete my classroom schooling without dealing with much biology, except for the enzymes presented in biochemistry lectures.

As a graduate student I met my first microorganism, a particularly finicky strain of Streptomyces that expressed the antibiotic we studied. My advisor fed and coddled the Streptomyces with an exotic yellow dal not available in the Sigma catalog. As a postdoc E.coli strains were the minions I used to produce the proteins I wanted to study by NMR spectroscopy. I became adept at smelling culture flasks to predict how much protein they were producing in their “washing machine world.”(1) I despaired when the plated bacterial colonies were shiny or slimy. I have to admit the little guys appealed to the crafting, nurturing and magical thinking parts of my personality (isn’t bacterial transformation just miraculous and way more fun than tuning an NMR?). But the “Woeseian revolution” (2) going on all around me merely provided another tool to produce sturdy, robust archaeal varieties of proteins for NMR studies. I continued to shun seminars about phylogenetics and I still hate the word homologous. It wasn’t until I was an assistant professor that the molecular evolution bug finally bit me. Discovering that a single amino acid in a protein could actually confer the ability to bind DNA still gives me goose bumps.*

I’ve been thinking about the joy of scientific discovery because a high school-aged friend of mine, Nathalie, is thinking she might want become a scientist. We have been pointing her here and there to hone in on what particular scientific discipline might interest her most. Last week Stanley Maloy** stopped in my office to gift me with the new book he’s edited with Roberto Kolter, Microbes and Evolution: The World That Darwin Never Saw. (3) The collection of essays celebrates the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of the Species. Maloy and Kolter challenged their colleagues to write “short, personal essays” for the general public. I decided to give Nathalie this book because I don’t think I’ve read such a delightful set of essays by working, accomplished scientists. The book also brings to life the ongoing scientific paradigm shift(s) driven by this generation of microbiologists.

Most of the authors refer not only to Darwin, but also to Carl Woese’s work that led to the current representation of earth’s biodiversity as only three branches of an evolutionary tree.*** I could tell many of the writers sat through the same contentious, eye-roll-inducing and wrenching phylogenetic seminars I did. Challenging scientific paradigms is for persistent, patient and strong scientists. Even Mitchell Sogin confesses he “took a 30-year hiatus and turned my attention to other more tractable problems consistent with receiving a graduate degree in my lifetime.” (4) As you read through the essays you pick up on the current and continuing semantic kerfuffles in the field (horizontal vs. lateral gene transfer, species definition, whether viruses are an organism, etc.). I think these glimpses into the evolution of science are invaluable for students starting out, science enthusiasts and policy makers alike.

The book also introduced me to the idea that the minions I used in lab might be the engineers that crafted our world. Dianne Newman (5) and Andrew Knoll (6) describe their view of the fossil record, where microorganisms owned the earth for 85% of time and left their tracks in banded iron formations. When I retire maybe I’ll do a postdoc in one of their labs.

The particular delight in the book for me wasn’t picking up on the controversies in the field or learning to think about microorganisms in a more respectful way. Rather the scientists’ voices shine through the prose to reveal motivations and joy. Perhaps graduate students should ask for personal essays from faculty, in addition to listening to seminars or reading scientific manuscripts, before selecting mentors (there might be better personality matches made as a result)! Some writers focus squarely on the details of their work, some talk about the wonder of the natural world, some reflect the motivating force in proving naysayers wrong, some reference their mothers or an inspiring mentor. The authors’ motivations are as diverse as the microorganisms and populations they’re studying. If you’re already a scientist, you’ll thrill in these writings. Who knew Miroslav Radman’s (7) favorite paper is his least cited? I laughed out loud several times reading Ford Doolittle’s essay, “Postphylogenetics.” (2) Not only does Kevin Young also fall back on churro imagery, but he describes my goose-bumps of discovery when “our experiments and thinking fall into place, when everything begins to ‘make sense.’”(1) If you have a scientist’s heart, you’ll recognize yourself in these pages and find plenty of inspiration to spur you along to your next postdoc.

(1) Kevin D. Young, The Ship That Led to Shape, Chapter 36, pp. 263- 268. In Microbes and Evolution: The World That Darwin Never Saw (2012) Edited by Roberto Kolter and Stanley Maloy.

(2) W. Ford Doolittle, Postphylogenetics, Chapter 37, pp. 269- 274. In Microbes and Evolution: The World That Darwin Never Saw.

*A result from one of my least cited papers.

**Full disclosure to those perhaps reading this as an unbiased book review: Stanley Maloy is a member of CSUPERB’s Strategic Planning Council.

(3) Microbes and Evolution: The World That Darwin Never Saw (2012) Edited by Roberto Kolter and Stanley Maloy. American Society of Microbiology (ASM) Press (estore.asm.org), Herndon, VA. Doi:10.1128/9781555818470.

***Chant with me, “bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes…”

(4) Mitchell L. Sogin, Trying to Make Sense of the Microbial Census, Chapter 4, p.33. In Microbes and Evolution: The World That Darwin Never Saw.

(5) Dianne K. Newman, In Pursuit of Billion-Year-Old Rosetta Stones, Chapter 29, pp. 209-215. In Microbes and Evolution: The World That Darwin Never Saw.

(6) Andrew H. Knoll, The Deep History of Life, Chapter 30, pp. 217-223. In Microbes and Evolution: The World That Darwin Never Saw.

(7) Miroslav Radman, Darwin in My Lab: Mutation, Recombination and Speciation, Chapter 21, p. 156-157. In Microbes and Evolution: The World That Darwin Never Saw.

End of Year Doings

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Susan Baxter

It’s graduation season across the California State University. For faculty, staff and administrators on campus, it is a bittersweet experience. Students’ enthusiasm, creativity and eagerness fuel university classrooms, laboratories and projects. But past the electricity students bring to campus, they are also scholars. The familiar faculty lament goes something like, “…they are just now synthesizing all they’ve learned, they’ve become true collaborators, and now I have to say good-bye!” My postdoc advisor was famously morose and sentimental each spring during “lab turnover” when undergraduates graduated, graduate students moved on to postdocs, and postdocs finally moved into jobs. Letting go is hard.

The sweet part of graduation season is the pride we feel in students’ accomplishments and career trajectories. Commencement signals the beginning of “annual reporting season” in the CSUPERB program office. We’re reading final reports from the principal investigators and student scholars supported by CSUPERB grants and awards. In these reports we find out “what’s next” for the graduating students.* Every year these reports reignite my enthusiasm for higher education, even as my heart is heavy.

This graduation season the CSUPERB program office is a bit sadder than usual. Zhazil, the student assistant who worked with us these past three years, is graduating from San Diego State University this weekend. While we support over 400 students a year systemwide, we don’t actually get to see them all that often (and when we do, we see 300+ of them at the symposium all at once!)! Zhazil represented the students’ perspective in the CSUPERB program office. We’re going to miss her competence, her “can-do” attitude and the energy she brought to our quiet office. We are certain she’ll excel in graduate school and wish her every success!

We are hoping our biotechnology graduates keep in touch with their mentors, their schools and CSUPERB. We find that alums are proud of their CSU roots. This week we’ve started recruiting CSU alums as speakers and participants at the 25th Annual CSU Biotechnology Symposium (January 4-5, 2013). The enthusiastic response has overwhelmed (we need a four-day symposium!) CSUPERB and the faculty mentors involved. We have an incredible snapshot of where our graduates have gone, career-wise and science-wise since they left the CSU (CEO’s, professors, inventors; wireless health, drug development, crop improvement – all of biotechnology is represented!). We look forward to a grand reunion.

*CSUPERB supported students are headed to graduate school and jobs at UC Davis, Genentech, St. Louis University, Harvard, the USDA, U. Massachusetts, Tufts, UCSF, among others.

Vision and Change Leadership Fellow Applications – Due July 9

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Susan Baxter

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have banded together to fund 40 “Vision and Change (V&C) Leadership” Fellows this year. I think CSUPERB-affiliated faculty and deans are highly qualified to apply and I hope one or more of them win a voice at the V&C table.

NIH, NSF and HHMI are collaboratively funding PULSE, an acronym for “Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education.” PULSE wants to “convene a group of 40 Vision and Change (V&C) Leadership Fellows. The V&C Fellows* will be thoughtful chairs, former chairs, deans or equivalent level faculty members who share a passion for undergraduate biology education, concern for its future, and the desire to act at the local and national levels. Fellows will participate in an exciting year-long facilitated process to identify solutions and prototype change. These outcomes will inform future investments by NSF, NIH and HHMI.”

It is that last italicized sentence (emphasis mine) that should catch your interest. The possibility that these funding agencies and organizations might put (more) resources into undergraduate life science education is a very good thing, indeed. Public, comprehensive, regional universities like the CSU are facing tremendous budgetary headwinds these days. Even as policy makers strive to cut student costs by subsidizing tuition and providing low-cost loans, the campuses themselves face crippling budget cuts. Any and all support for life sciences curriculum modernization, reform or re-design is welcome. Any investment in CSU students’ success on campus is welcome.

Public, comprehensive, regional universities, like the 23 CSU campuses, educate a large proportion of the life science undergraduates across the U.S. The CSU educates 44% of the life science graduates in California. After graduation many go on to graduate school, medical school, postdocs and faculty positions where they do compete successfully for NIH, NSF and HHMI funding (and jobs!). That said, the NIH and NSF spend the majority of their training funds on post-baccalaureate education.** HHMI focuses science education funding on “research universities” and “leading researchers,” but also a select list of “undergraduate-focused colleges and universities.” The Committee for Economic Development recently advocated for greater support of regional comprehensive universities to answer the national call for more STEM graduates. I sincerely hope a thoughtful, informed*** CSU faculty member is selected as a V&C Leadership Fellow to represent the “44% perspective” on undergraduate life science education. Based on the cadre of CSUPERB faculty already involved in PKAL, CUR, HHMI, NSF and NIH supported activities, I am certain we have knowlegeable and eligible candidates!

* What will a V&C Fellow do or be? The PULSE website includes an FAQ that outlines about 200 hours of service and activities over the year-long fellowship. Good luck, applicants!

**You’ve read it here before, but remember 80% of professionals working in the life science industry have bachelor’s or master’s degrees. NIH and NSF focus on training future researchers (not patent lawyers, business development professionals or project managers), but I think the emphasis on training doctoral level researchers is still out of sync with the current academic and industrial job market.

*** The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is hosting the Fellows competition. AIBS is home to the Introductory Biology Project. V&C Fellow applicants can hone their familiarity with authentic and participatory learning and learning research by checking out some of the literature at the CSUPERB website (including the 2011 Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education report).

Enriching Undergraduate Education

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Susan Baxter

Over the last 30 years the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) members designed studies, authored papers, and issued reports that together established undergraduate research as a “well-developed, well-understood, well-integrated and essential component of a quality college education.”* As part of National Undergraduate Research Week, CUR hosted a webinar to raise awareness of their new report, “Characteristics of Excellence in Undergraduate Research.” Yes, that translates into the acronym COEUR. The COEUR report is a compilation of data and best practices related to “highly effective undergraduate research environments” and is available to CUR members. As regular readers of this blog know, CSUPERB agrees that undergraduate research is the “heart” of a quality biotechnology education.

Despite monographs like COEUR, participatory (or discovery-based) learning is not as integrated into the undergraduate college curriculum as we’d like. 50 minute lectures by instructors are still offered on our campuses, especially in first and second year “introductory courses.” Over the last five years, CSUPERB faculty (many of whom are CUR and PKAL participants) organized workshops to educate biotechnology faculty and administrators about engaged learning, online platforms and tools for individual learning, and research-based courses. At this year’s symposium we turned the conversation to issues, challenges and barriers that campuses face in trying to enrich science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) undergraduate education. Almost 100 CSU and CCC faculty, administrators and invited speakers attended the symposium workshop. I am slow at publishing meeting reports, but here (finally) is the workshop report.

Hopefully the opinions and recommendations in this informal workshop report are useful to campuses evaluating undergraduate STEM education. The report is not all-inclusive – there are many issues, challenges and barriers the CSUPERB workshop participants did not have time to discuss (When are new STEM faculty educated about effective teaching and research on learning? during postdocs? during new faculty orientation?). Read the COEUR report – among many others – for more perspectives.

CUR is on the minds of many within CSUPERB for another reason. For the last five years Elizabeth (Beth) Ambos has been an effective advocate for student and faculty researchers across the CSU in her role as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research and Partnerships. In May Beth is moving to Washington, D.C. to become Executive Director at CUR. She’s been a great friend, a steady counselor, a strategic thinker and a willing partner for over 30 (yes, I counted them!) CSUPERB projects. We can’t thank her enough for her support and encouragement. She will be greatly missed by me and the CSUPERB staff, faculty and administrators. That said, it’s good to know she’ll have a “bully pulpit” from which to educate policy makers and faculty about the value and effectiveness of undergraduate research.

*MA Baenninger, Introduction, COEUR, Council on Undergraduate Research, 2012.

The Slippery Slope between Hope and Fraud

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Susan Baxter

When scientists socialize we often find ourselves talking shop like any profession, I imagine. This weekend I heard of a young scientist who was fired by a biotech company. When control sample data differed from “the right answer,” the young employee added a mathematical “fudge factor” so that the control data – and all the associated sample data – would come out “right.” A coworker discovered the instrument was out of tune (I’ll spare you the technical details) and stumbled upon the young scientist’s flawed data analysis. The young scientist was warned and re-schooled on how to maintain the instrument and conduct the assay properly. Unfortunately a couple of months later, coworkers discovered the scientist was still fudging the data and so was fired. Those of us hearing the sad tale were flabbergasted – did the employee really not understand the scientific method, or was this a dishonest character, or was the supervisor putting pressure on the young scientist to get data?

These days “Big Datasets” in biology and biomedical science are the next new thing. Thought leaders, pundits and excitable sorts are harking the beginning of the personalized medicine age. Armed with an individual patient’s human genome data, the hope is that physicians can treat that person’s disease with the right drug at the right time. To be sure, progress is being made. Most work to date correlates subsets of the genome (biomarkers or gene variants or expression profiles) with a particular disease or treatment regimen. I’ve worked with these datasets in my previous two jobs. Luckily I had top-notch biostatisticians, instrument technicians and database administrators at my side. These datasets are big, complex, and as confusing and confounding as human biology. How easy might it be for a dishonest scientist to fudge or over-interpret this data?

Last night 60 Minutes delved into that question. They featured the Anil Potti scandal. Potti and his colleagues at Duke Medical School used Big Genomic Data Sets to guide a clinical trial for lung cancer. It turns out that Potti manipulated the data underlying the clinical trial design (not to mention a series of high-profile publications). Yes – that’s right – a dishonest scientist fudged data and then used that data to treat cancer patients (there is no WordPress formatting that can adequately convey my dismay!). Some patients’ families are suing the university, but Duke decided to cooperate with 60 Minutes as a cautionary tale. Yes, Potti was fired but he’s still practicing medicine and treating patients somewhere in South Carolina. Yes, Potti’s supervisor is contrite, but he assures us the patients involved were provided proper medical care.

This is a horrible story that damages the trust patients and the public put in research hospitals and science. But we all bear responsibility for these stories when we hype a new technology before its time (Especially to patients – but also to Governors, voters and investors). We bear responsibility when we give scant attention to best practices or the “boring” infrastructure of scientific research – that is – the controls, the statistical analysis, the data management. (The Duke Review Board IGNORED warnings from two respected biostatisticans!). We bear responsibility when we tie career advancement or company goals to the “right” data or publication. I’m fairly certain the Potti Case will provide plenty fodder for scientific ethics classes and research review committees across the CSU this year. It would be a mistake to analyze it as a case involving only one dishonest scientist.

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