I am happy to announce that I have accepted a tenure track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I'm going back home! Thank you to the many mentors, friends, and family who got me through this epic journey.
Folks! I am excited to share that I have been selected for the K99/R00 MOSAIC award! I have worked so hard toward my goal of becoming an investigator and it feels so good to be acknowledged by the
#NIH
. A big thank you to my mentors who support me!
#NIHMOSAIC
Well, I’m going on the job market this year. No more saying, “I’m not ready”. I’m preparing my vision for the Mendoza lab and putting faith in myself and my training. The next several months are going to be insane. Send me all your good juju, and better yet, send me your favorite
CU gave me back my old email address from when I was an undergrad there. Upon reactivating it, I was welcomed into my inbox with 13k old messages that accumulated since 2011. 😬
I've been seeing a lot of talk about mentoring on here lately so I wanted to give my comments. Also, because being selected for the Outstanding Postdoc Mentor Award gave me a lil' boost of confidence to discuss my viewpoint at this point in my life. So- a 🧵
Being a first-gen scientist can be interesting sometimes. Been scraping by financially my whole life. Now as an (almost) asst. prof who is suddenly spending a ton of money on professional and personal purchases is just wild. My instinct to ration is really kicking in hard.
Been digesting
@drstarbird
's post about merit and I want to expound on my thoughts about two things, which at face value seem innocuous, but IMO are actually code words for exclusion. The words merit and productivity fly around quite a lot in our biz, huh? We have assigned
Hey science peeps! Can anyone recommend a human cell line that are large cells? I’m looking to image the cells with the biggest lysosomes I can find. Wondering if there is anything bigger than what I see with HEK293’s. Please RT.
This is how I try to do my part to make academia a better place. Feel free to discuss or disagree, but please be kind.
1. Prioritize people before science. Find out what they care about, what their goals are, and what they need to achieve them. I encourage spending time with
OUT NOW!!! My latest paper with the Kornfeld lab,
Lysosome-related organelles contain an expansion compartment that mediates delivery of zinc transporters to promote homeostasis. A 🧵
It's my great pleasure to announce the phenomenal 2023
@DukeLeaders
cohort! Please join us to learn more about their research & scientific vision as future faculty & welcome them to campus. So excited to host you & become part of your path to the professoriate!
@DukeMedSchool
In my fantasy, reimbursement for travel expenses for conferences that I have to pay up front doesn’t exist. In my fantasy I have a card with a direct line to grant accounts. The invoice never hits my personal bank account. Oh well. There is probably stuff wrong with that too.
One thing trainees need to know about being a scientist is that you need to be able to talk about your research to anyone, any time, anywhere. Communicate it according to your audience. Capitalize on that opportunity!
@ADiaz_PhD
Me!! I’m Adelita and I study the role of lysosomes in zinc homeostasis using C.elegans and human models systems. I use advanced imaging, genetics, and molecular biology, and x-ray physics techniques in my work.
Rough day yesterday. I watched my husband who uses a wheelchair, get hit by a van. It happened so fast. He was pushed over by the van and he hit the pavement as he crossed the street. He’s scraped up, but ok. Hold your loved ones close. 😢🥺
I'm happy to share that I have been selected to participate in the NASA STAR (Spaceflight, Technology, Applications, and Research) course STAR-21 pilot cohort! I will get to learn how to prepare experiments for spaceflight!
#wormsinspace
#zinc
#celegans
just reality.
3. I pay attention to how they react to stress. Trainees might shut down, dig deeper, or be just fine. If I see a stress reaction, we sit down and talk about it. No suffering in silence! We strategize!
4. I think because of my intersectional identity, I pay
@davidvanvalen
Right. Members from underrepresented communities have to be extraordinary to be respected and seen. Maybe that’s part of the reason why it feels like we carry so much emotional weight.
expect trainees to be focused, prepared, and ready to work hard. To succeed in academia, you have to work hard. There is no way around that. If you are part of an underrepresented community, you are judged on how you perform on your worst day. It's not fair. It's not right. It's
I previously tweeted my thoughts on mentoring. Now I want to discuss being a mentee/trainee because it is a role we pretty much find ourselves in automatically when we step into a research lab. How can we make the mentee experience an enriching one that can benefit us?🧵
6. I don't judge them by their skill deficiencies. The point of being in this environment is to teach them and grow their skills, not expect them to have them already.
7. I have buffered trainees from racist and sexist comments. They don't need that shit.
attention to the mentee’s family situation, culture, financial needs, health needs, and ability to communicate with me about any of those things. It is critical that communication is open and honest. Build that bridge!!!
5. Whenever possible, I teach by the show one, share one,
Come hear my talk tomorrow at 10:53 am!! I will be discussing lysosome-related organelle zinc-dependent remodeling, a novel expansion compartment, zinc transporters CDF-2 and ZIPT-2.3, and their role in zinc homeostasis!
#CeDev2022
family and doing other things that are not lab-related. It's not my place to tell them how to live their lives or to think that lab is the most important thing they have going on. In my book, health and family are
#1
, not the dang qPCR.
2. While they are in the lab though, I
do one method. We walk through the protocol together while I demo. Next, they do the protocol with my supervision. Then they are on their own with me close by for questions. It's some version of that depending on how quickly they catch on or how complicated the protocol is.
who has a disability, so I am a wife in an interracial relationship and a caregiver. I operate at multiple intersectionalities. I am now 41 at the end of my post-doc. I have mentored and trained over a dozen hs, undergrad, graduate, MD's, and post-doc trainees.
We need to extend more grace to the Black and brown folks doing DEI work. Half of those folks are burnt out and simply trying to survive. The other half are traumatized from being the token. It’s not their fault they are the token, it is that of the system which tokenized them.
That’s a wrap on
#CellBio2022
! It was my first time attending and I had a blast. I was happy to finally meet mentors and colleagues face to face that I had originally met on this bird app and in other spaces. I particularly noticed the efforts made to support ECR’s. So long DC!
8. I emulate the positive aspects I experience with my own mentors. I have a VILLAGE of mentors. I mean it.
9. I share my personal success and failures.
10. Set clear expectations and timelines! They need to know where they stand.
What I don't get about academia is the chronic lack of celebration. It is hard to get & maintain grant funding, hard to get papers accepted without Faustian bargains, hard to be a great mentor, & hard to maximize trainee success. All of it is hard. We should celebrate everything.
Today is International Day of Women and Girls in Science! Women are an important part of scientific discovery, however, less than 30% of researchers worldwide are women. If you know a woman scientist, talk to her about her research!
#WomenInScience
#UN70212
could EAT. I am hungry though, to make this career work. I will do what I have to to get to where I need to be. Folks, the world isn't the same for all of us and this merit and productivity TRAP is edging towards being weaponized. Don't fall for it.
Before I say anything I need to tell you about the lens through which I see things. I'm a
#firstgen
, Chicana. I did community college and earned 2 BAs from a public R1 institution. I was a lab tech for a year. I started my Ph.D. at age 29. While doing that I met my now husband,
… Adelita Mendoza (
@AdelitaMendoza7
, Kornfeld Lab), talking about fate specification in the nervous system, dendritic branching, parasitic worm drug resistance, and zinc storage. So much great science!
@drstarbird
I saw this figure today on this bird app and this is one piece of the problem. I hate how merit is used as as though all things are equal. They are not. It really hits hard when I think about how much shit we had to overcome.
Exercise is my lifeline. I was feeling anxious about my job talk practice presentation until I knocked out my endurance workout while running through the slides in my mind. Now I feel ready.
for reduced productivity and the perception by others that members of underrepresented groups got their spot just because of their (pick your favorite BS reason) and not their talent. Some of us make it through, despite this pile on top of us, but it still comes at a cost.
Meet Adelita Mendoza
@AdelitaMendoza7
, a postdoc
@WUSTL
for this edition of How Cell Biologists Work. Click thru to find out how persistence and passion has fueled her scientific career
Certain types of sea urchins will pick up a shell with their tube feet and ‘wear’ it, with a behavior known as “covering reaction”, mainly because they shy away from light.
So aquarium enthusiasts 3D-printed tiny hats and they actually wear them.
One of my favorite things about being a microscopist is showing trainees fluorescently labeled proteins in worms/cells for the first time. Watching their heads explode and the smile form on their faces is so fun. I should start making reaction videos.
and productivity what we start doing is binning people into categories and those categories are of members from excluded populations. Things like familial socio-economic status, family educational background, parenthood, and disability (affected individuals and caregivers) have
I am a caregiver. To keep up with the demands I take my work EVERYWHERE. I've worked on presentations and grants while my spouse was in surgery and docs appointments. I am in therapy to deal with all of these things. I had to work a side hustle when I started my post-doc so I
@drstarbird
@DisabledStem
It’s instances like these that we realize what we are up against. We wrestle with wanting to stay and fight the good fight and make change for the benefit of others or leaving and saving our sanity. All I can say is you are not alone. Some of us are here fighting too.
GSA is excited to announce the latest cohort of students and postdocs joining the Early Career Scientist Leadership Program! They will serve on committees working to understand the needs, interests, and challenges of our
#EarlyCareerScientist
members.
Can we just talk for a minute about the emotional investment we make when we do our research? I just put every last drop of my energy/hope/excitement into it every day, knowing that I have to check myself and be realistic about how long experiment optimization takes? How long
a profound impact on how we conduct science day to day. Now layer on top of that other external factors (the isms- racism, ableism etc.), the competitive environment, the workload, and the fact that trainees are underpaid and sometimes exploited by PIs and we now have a recipe
Similar for me. I couldn’t afford to take time off. It even got worse because of the moving expenses I had to deal with thereafter. I had to take a second job at the start of my post-doc to pay the bills. It was stressful, and a bad start.
Yep. I went directly into my postdoc from PhD. Only had 2 weeks from postdoc to professorship because the change was over Christmas break. Being first gen with no family money/support is tough.
I've confronted this myself multiple times in multiple facets of my work. I am doing well, and when I said it comes at a cost I meant it. I deal with bad anxiety that conveniently surfaces when I give public talks. I deal with casual sexist and racist comments from others.
I watched the first 20 minutes of the Netflix movie Mother of the Bride. I quit watching it because within the first 10, the mother, who is a research scientist renewed her grant over the phone by complaining to the person on the other end of the line. I guffawed uncontrollably.
I am always grateful for my amazing mentors and their guidance. Some days I just sit back and reflect on how lucky I am to be doing well, and that my mentors really support me.
After receiving really good tips for clothes shopping I just purchased some great stuff. Watch out! Dr.Mendoza’s brand of professional style is loading!!!!
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#DEHEM21
(1/3)
Today is my anniversary. Each year I take a minute to pause and reflect on it. I do this because academia can be brutal. It is hard to distinguish yourself and easy to compare yourself to others. This photo helps me reset and remind myself that I am
@ashgomez03
It’s amazing that she has the fire to fight for you. Not all mom’s do. I imagine she will be in the front row at your graduation just beaming.