Space.

Recently, Apple revealed the blueprints for its headquarters 2.0. The doughnut-shaped behemoth is set to become the shiny/new worktime home of 12,000 programmers, researchers, executives, and their respective cats (I'm guessing), and promises to be a boon to the economy of Cupertino, California, where it is to be built. Reading about this at my OHSU workstation that I share with fourteen people, I am struck by the marked similarities between the present-day campuses (capai?) of Apple, Inc. & Oregon Health & Science University. Or was it someone's elbow...

Once upon a time, an impulsive railroad company purchased a plot of land in Portland, OR. "It's Portland," I imagine them reasoning, "how bad could it be?" One wonders why it took them thirty years to discover that the top of a hill is not a great place for a railroad. "But it is for a hospital!" I imagine the OHSU founding fathers cheering up the downcast railroad tycoons, "one single-lane road provides plenty of room for traffic and hurried ambulances alike! Or is it ambulai?"

And the rest, as they say, is history. Nearly 100 years after the start of our beloved Marquam Hill campus, we've managed to realize the impossible dream: a massive modern hospital that overlooks the pristine landscape that is Portland, Oregon. An intellectual Mount Olympus overlooking its domain and calling it good. A biomedical statue of liberty calling out with silent lips:

Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
Your adequately insured
Your non-smokers
But come by public transportation
Parking up here can be tricky

"Oh, Kyle," my faithful readers are likely to think, "you're being pretty dramatic and unrealistic. Look at the view! It's not that bad up here! " It's not that bad. Answer me this: deep down, aren't all OHSU employees afraid of the day when the Tram Operators realize they could fit way more morning commuters inside if they stacked them horizontally? I know I am. And the view up here is pretty fantastic, I agree. Myself and my fourteen desk-mates managed to get the top level of the bi-level cubicle, so if cubicle block D adjusts their computer monitor just right, we can almost make out one of the trees adjacent to the Library. But I digress. I come bearing solutions! An OHSU 2.0 for us all!

I submit Figure 1. Now, keep in mind that this is a bit of a rough draft, and our Behavioral Neuroscientists will need to train the pigeons to keep things afloat, but I think this could really be the space-giving solution we've all been looking for.

Work Smarter, not Harder

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about productivity. At a talk last week, a friend & fellow Fellow with the National Library of Medicine gave an enjoyable talk entitled, "Work Smarter, not Harder." In it, he outlined a few key areas where researchers can improve their efficiency & streamline their workflow. There were about 25 of us present, so as I waited for him to get started, I was excited to be able to discuss my own opinions of productivity & workflow management with a fellow enthusiast. I'm the sort of person who loves The Container Store. I walk by Storables, & they pretend to be closed. So I both enjoyed his talk for the information he covered, as well as for the camaraderie I felt, seeing someone discuss a topic as close to my heart as productivity & organization. When he reached his last slide & opened up the floor for a question & answer time, I was surprised to see that he had clearly touched on something that resonated with each person there. Five minutes became ten, which in turned stepped aside for twenty, & soon we were completely over time & needing to yield the room to the next group (spuriously?) claiming to have it reserved. It wasn't so much that others shared my interest that surprised me, rather that it was clear we had all spent time thinking about ways--either technological in nature, or otherwise--that we might increase our productivity, particularly regarding reference management.In my opinion, it is only in recent years that reference managers have moved from a necessary evil to being software that can actually help you to stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were. Let's learn a bit about ourselves through some word association:

SCENARIO 1
Me: What do you think of when I say reference management?
95% of you: EndNote.
Me: Good. Very good. EndNote is a very popular reference management system.

SCENARIO 2
Me: What do you think of when I say reference management?
95% of you: EndNote. & terrible, terrible headaches.
Me: Good. Very good. EndNote is a very popular reference management system that is one of the most common causes of academic-related headaches. Here, have some Ibuprofen.

To me, EndNote, along with the Microsoft Office entourage, occupies the difficult (if lucrative) position of being used because everyone else uses it. Rather than conforming to one's workflow, it forces one to adopt what it thinks is the best way to write manuscripts & do research. I said as much, in an email conversation between graduate students in OHSU's Biomedical Informatics program (DMICE) that had begun shortly after the end of my friend's talk.


I lambasted EndNote for its mostly-absent APIs, & its rigid adherence to an ancient idea of what it means to have a workflow. What I didn't realize, though, was that at some point earlier in the email thread, someone had inadvertently cc'd all DMICE distance students on our conversation. & I hit reply all.


Fun fact about DMICE: we have a substantial distance learning program. Thanks, in large part, to the work of our Department Chair, Dr. Bill Hersh & his passion for extending Informatics education to new populations, there are lots of DMICE students. Like, several hundred. The email backlash I received from the gaggle of Informaticians was...startling. &, based on my accidental, if informal, survey, I can tell you with a reasonable degree of certainty that a many academics both use & hate EndNote.

As an Informatician & all-around Psychology geek, the fact that people both use & hate a bit of software fascinates me. Has EndNote talked people into service contracts, preventing them from using other reference managers? There are, of course, any number of perfectly reasonable explanations for why someone might hold these seemingly disparate views: perhaps they don't know of any other alternative, maybe their employers require them to use it, perhaps the amount of time & energy they've invested in making the software work for them & their workflow is such that making a switch, at this point, seems unrealistic. Dr. Hersh, a long-time EndNote user, falls into this last category. "I am an avid user of EndNote," he said, "but part of my reason for that is that once you get down the road like I have, with three books, a couple hundred scientific papers, years of teaching materials, etc., it is very hard to switch." Dr. Hersh, rather than cautioning new members of the academic community from using EndNote or encouraging toward it (although he does say that EndNote is one of the few things he does with a computer that actually save him time), he has different advice. "Select an option carefully. You might be stuck with it for a long time."

Dr. Hersh is exactly right. Early in one's career, it's important to examine the research workflow one is creating for oneself--be it the software you choose to help you, the way you organize your data for long-term management, or how you go about literature searches. These are all common--even essential--components to a successful career as a Research Scientist. & yet, they are so rarely scrutinized. An Excel spreadsheet of data becomes two, two spreadsheets become a handful, & sooner than you'd think, you an entire directory of 100 ambiguously-named files, one of which contains information you need. Maybe all such situations can't be avoided entirely, but I propose that the majority of them can, by simply making intentional choices about the way you do work. Sometimes work is hard, but the smartest way to work is by making sure all the hard parts are science-related.

Collaborator, Friend, Whiteboard

There are very few places where I feel more at home than here at OHSU. It's a welcoming environment, to be sure, &, although the cynic in me is quick to point out that, having been a Ph.D. student here since 2005, I have spent more time on campus than I have in my actual apartment, I like to think it has more to do with the welcoming bit.
Like many graduate students, my work space is designed to evoke a panoply of hyphenated adjectives in the happy passerby. Care-worn. Lived-in. Pell-mell. I imagine people passing by on their way to something sciencey, & feeling reinforced: "Yes," they'll think, "OHSU is a place knowledge goes to be found."
It wasn't until my third year here on the hill that I felt my workspace really came into its own, sending what I hoped were all the right messages to all the right people. To the new graduate student, it would instill excitement for discovering the many opportunities of graduate school. "Oh!" I like to imagine them actually saying out loud, "do we all get to successfully complete an Integrity Education Booster course?" & I smile knowingly, having misheard them: "I think you mean you GET to." To my Dissertation Committee members, my cubicle space boasts the tattered remnants of conferences attended--evidence of successful networking & fruitful fact-finding missions. To my advisor, it speaks of progress being made, of a dedicated student dedicatedly juggling a variety of academic balls, all while carefully walking the line between productive member of society & hypnagogic day-walker.
Over the years, R.A. (my whiteboard; figure 1) has become something of a valued collaborator on my research endeavors. Maybe I've spent too much time alone in the library building, or maybe it's some previously undocumented side effect of the fumes released by an over-clocked CPU, but I sometimes like to think of him as having a personality of his own. I said as much during his most recent performance review, complimenting him on the long hours he put in, in preparation for our recent manuscript submission.
"I'd like to take this opportunity to let you know how pleased I am with the work you've put in this past year," I said, interpreting his silence a polite appreciation of my compliment. It was genuine, too: I learned early on in my graduate student life to place a high priority on having a temporary receptacle for my thoughts--something less permanent-feeling than a moleskin notebook, but somehow with more credibility than a scrap of paper.
An interesting consequence of the seemingly thrown-together chemistry involved in creating my particular cost-effective brand of dry erase marker is that the longer R.A. holds onto my red- or black-colored thoughts, the less likely he is to ever let them be removed. As such, he serves as an interesting longevity-weighted snapshot of my passing interests--a sort of whiteboard equivalent of examining tree rings. The careful eye can still see evidence of my teachings in statistical learning theory & Behavioral Economics, though long gone is any evidence of my passing interests in the Hormetic theory of drug response. Gone, too, is the early draft of my science rock opera about a rag-tag collective of Microbiology Ph.Ds with no regard for regard for the status quo. At present, R.A. is remembering a condensed cheat sheet on symbolic logic, & a bird's-eye-view of my dissertation project outline.
Recently, I must confess, I've taken R.A, a bit for granted. The economic down-turn has been hard on us all, & I just don't see funds in my budget to continue supporting a full-time Research Assistant. My recent experiments with the EverNote application on my Android phone, I can tell, have left R.A. feeling neglected. & so I was only a bit hurt, rather than surprised & a bit hurt, when I received R.A.'s two week notice this past week. Having already accepted a higher paying R.A.2 position in the Orthopaedic Research Group, my research workflow will soon have a void that, deep down, I always knew EverNote could never fill. But it is the nature of gradstudentdome to be filled with comings & goings; I know I must power on.

So...what is it you do again?

Like most Ph.D. students, I am wired for academic obsession. Being able to toil over the unanswered questions in life is something of an asset in this particular line of work, but is not without liability.

What do I do? It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Pursue my dreams? Plunge the depths of the biomedical unknown? Boldly go where no Informatician has gone before? After two years in Oregon Health & Science University's Bioinformatics Ph.D. program, I have yet to discover an answer to this question that lets both conversational parties walk away satisfied.

"So...what is it you do again?"

The first time I was asked this after starting my research, I treated my audience to a long-winded oration in which I carefully laid out a chronologically-organized argument documenting the place for Informatics in the Neurosciences. Beginning in the nineteenth century, with Ramon & Cajal's foundational research on the microarchitecture of the nervous system, & culminating in a crescendo of enthusiasm when finally arriving at Olaf Sporn's work on brain connectivity mapping--I was in my element. & when the dust settled, I realized that nearly thirty minutes had gone by, & I had completely killed a party. This would not be the first social gathering to fall victim to unrestrained enthusiasm for academic science, nor would it be the last.

"So...what is it you do again?"

The pendulum quickly swung the other way. Concision was my new M.O. Not a few weeks later I was given the chance at redemption: "oh, computers & neuroscience, & [inaudible]."

"You mean like tech. support?"

I nodded vaguely, as the conversation turned to something I'll never remember. Tech. support? Really? Was this what I had become? A sell-out, ashamed of my own passions? A scared little scientist petrified at the prospect of entering into dialogue with another human? For the time, yes.

I would go on to claim several other parties. My friends would go on to invite me to fewer parties. I would go on further to show up at said parties anyway to practice my 10-second job description on the unsuspecting newcomer. Eventually, I would learn to gauge the true level of interest held by my audience before answering the dreaded question. During this process, I also discovered it to be a doorway to one of graduate school's greatest pleasures.

"So...what is it you do again?"

"I do research on how artificial intelligence can be used to make Neuroscience research more efficient."

"Oh, do you mean like Neuroinformatics?"

Yes! Instant kinship. The bond shared by academics embarked upon similar journeys is like none other--a surprise oasis within a desert of awkward conversations.