And...it's here. UW announced tenure clock extension options for junior faculty last week.

Leadership frames this as part of their deep support to junior faculty. But how, exactly, is more time (& delayed promotion) are meaningful support in response to reduced & uncertain research resources?

Wow, I really wasn't expecting this paper to become so relevant again, so soon - but I've been hearing conversations about extending tenure clocks AGAIN. What about a four-year clock extension? 🤔 I'm sure there could be no downsides . . . .

MOOD

That's great to hear! I did talk to a few colleagues who felt they were held to clear standards like that but unfortunately it was not the majority...but it does show it's possible!

Thank you to all the colleagues who chatted with me privately about this over the past ~year. I'm happy to play a role in bringing this conversation into the public view! (6/6)

We wanted to bring some light to these experiences and share some policy suggestions: (5/6)

My coauthors and I wrote based on the literature and our personal and shared experiences. This phenomenon is not discussed much publicly but in trusted spaces you hear the same stories over and over and over (4/6)

And when faculty try to opt out of the extensions they're eligible for, they're viewed as going up "early" (3/6)

Extensions are becoming more and more common (e.g. COVID) and they're accumulating for some faculty (2/6)

New paper I'm extremely proud of: "Extended time, elevated expectations: The unappreciated downsides of pausing the tenure clock". We argue that extensions should be treated as a safety net, not insurance policy (1/6) www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

A two-proof day. First Springer removed all the italics from in vivo/ex vivo/in silico, then OUP replaced all my spelled-out numbers with digits (e.g. "2 local peaks" and "8 species"). You see, academic publishing costs so much because of the aDdEd VaLuE 🙄

I love Gradescope in general, but their data visualization is COMICALLY bad.

Behind every seemingly sane early stage professor, there is a slack of other ESIs shitposting through it with her...you know who you are.

why would researchgate name itself after an academic scandal that hasn't happened quite yet

When Hiroshi and I first talked, he described us as "climbing the same mountain from different sides". I'm very much looking forward to seeing what we find at the top!

We submitted our proposal to NSF (and a similar version, in Japanese (!!) to an agency in Japan), but it was picked up for funding by NINDS. I'm very grateful for their support as well as the Japanese NICT. I'm also happy to talk about my experience with CRCNS!

CRCNS (Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience) is a weird program that definitely had some administrative/logistic challenges - but it is so cool that a mechanism exists to fund international collaborations like this.

Ever since I met one of Prof. Kawasaki's students at SfN in 2019, which I attended to find experimental collaborators, I knew that we could do cool things together. First, we published an awesome paper in PLOS Comp. Bio, and then I found the funding mechanism to let us keep working together!

Just awarded my first R01! With our collaborator Hiroshi Kawasaki, we're going to investigate the role of astrocytes in cortical folding via a combined computational and experimental approach!

A wise man once said “every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time”. (B. Gibbard, 2005)

But these days w/little kids it’s more like “every plan is a tiny prayer to our immune systems” and let me tell you they are an uncaring lot.