Monthly Archives: April 2012

Timeline for stress-free grant writing

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Clay Clark

Clay Clark - @biochemprof

It takes significant time and effort to write a research grant, and the process can be very stressful. If you’re a new faculty, you may have little experience planning a grant proposal and writing each section before the deadline. If you’re a more seasoned faculty, you may need help finding time in your busy schedule to write a grant.

Let us help. Follow our easy-to-use timeline for a stress-free grant writing experience. We show you when to complete each section, and we help you plan for a few incidentals that may come up before submission.

We can’t help you get funding, but we can make the grant-writing experience more pleasant.

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Will Tamiflu save the world from the avian flu?

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Joe Magliocca

Joe Magliocca

No one wants to catch the flu! At the very least, it will put you out of commission for a week, and it can also cause ResearchBlogging.org life-threatening infections – pneumonia is the most common, although other bacterial diseases like bronchitis are common too. Most people don’t think about problems with secondary infections after catching the flu, but a deadly form of the flu could be just around the corner.

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Setting priorities as a new faculty

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Clay Clark

Clay Clark - @biochemprof

So, in the past year (or two) you’ve been through several interviews for faculty positions; you’ve finally been offered a tenure-track position; you’ve been given (or at least promised) a nice start-up package; and you’re ready to start your new job as a junior faculty at Research U.

You’ve now been at your new job for three months, and you’re still unpacking boxes. You spend a lot of your time trying to convince graduate students to take a chance on you and join a new lab. You’re ordering equipment, dealing with vendors, secretaries, and administrators. And, you still think that you have time to do experiments. Based on the stories you’re telling yourself about lack of production in those three months and the extrapolations you’re making into the future, and realizing that you have only 5-7 years before you come up for tenure, your life is now very stressful.

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Another reason to love mass spectrometry

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Laura Edwards NCSU Biochemistry graduate student

Laura Edwards

Many scientists out there want to know about the ResearchBlogging.org dynamics of a protein or how a protein binds to small molecules. But sometimes that information is hard to get using classical techniques such as X-ray crystallography or NMR.

Maybe your protein is too large (NMR won’t work) or maybe it just won’t crystallize. A mass spec technique called hydrogen/deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) can be useful when you have almost given up and can’t think of anything else to try!

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Using zebrafish to find human cancer drugs

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Clay Clark

Clay Clark - @biochemprof

My lab in the Department of Molecular & Structural Biochemistry and Dr. Jeff Yoder in the Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences at NC State University applied for an award from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) at NCSU.

We use zebrafish to screen small molecule drug libraries as a method to characterize potential anti-cancer drugs.

The project was selected as one of three finalists for the Outstanding Faculty Award at the Stewards of the Future: Research for Human Health & Global Sustainability conference.

As a token of encouragement and appreciation, the Board of Directors of the NC Agricultural and Life Sciences Research Foundation offers the first Stewards of the Future Research Awards.  This competition is designed to help showcase the ingenuity and innovation of CALS scientists, and to provide a small award of flexible funding to help support awardees’ research programs.

The other two finalists in the Faculty category are Ignazio Carbone and Jun Tsuji. Each finalist has submitted a two minute video on the project.

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