HPI DIVISION ANNOUNCEMENTS

• A big Thank you goes to Karin Sack, who put together an amazing resource that will be exceptionally useful to faculty and trainees alike.  Karin developed a grants resource website (here is the link) http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/root/vumc.php?site=raa.  
  This link ecnompasses whatever you need for a successful submission (remember that long list of last month's myHPI feature?), as well as links to available funding opportunities on the federal and private sector.  
  
• The M & I orientation day for incoming graduate students is August 21st. 
  
• Welcome Tracy Bradford, our new administrative assistant for the division of HPI.  She will be taking over many of the jobs that Matt Bruckse handled. Her Office: A-5301A

  Telephone: 343-9939. Email: tracy.y.bradford@vanderbilt.edu 

  Let's all welcome Tracy  into our  department. 

• HPI division primary and secondary faculty publications that appeared since the last installment of myHPI are listed below. Please follow the links to browse through our colleagues' findinngs. Note: Searches are set up to run automatically on a specific date, and gathered information is compiled 4 days prior to myHPI launch. If we have missed anyone, we apologize! Please contact us and we will rectify our mistake. 
  
• Congratulations to Dr. Louise Rollins-Smith and her colleagues for their Nature publication and cover!
  
• HPI Division Meeting: August 26, 2014 at 3pm, MCN A5305. Chalk Talk- Edward Sherwood, MD., Ph.D.
  
• 2nd Friday Happy Hour: 08/08 at MCN A5305, 5:00pm - Hosted by the Lacy and Spiller Labs
  
• ArchivedMyHPI can be found at:
    http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/root/vumc.php?site=vmcpathology&doc=45508

   

Science and the social media: Should you tweet this?

Thoughts from Dr. Seth Bordenstein

It's no secret anymore. Science has embraced social media in a way that will have many early adopters saying "I knew this was going to happen" and those yet to adopt it saying "What's all the fuss about? How can I get involved?" 

Using social media for science is like any other aspect of life that needs diligence and training. If you don't care about it or don't know what to care about, you'll be missing all the fun and rewards. I had the same journey. I questioned the value of spending bits of time on twitter or why people would blog - that seemed like a major time sink. But when scientists that i respected were so involved with social media, i felt compelled to figure out what they got out of it. There are far more virtues of social media that one could list in a short blurb about it. So I will boil some of my favorite aspects of social media down to three key points.

1. Staying in touch with the current literature - If you don't use twitter, then you likely stay on top of new articles by pubmed searches, table of content emails, and word of mouth. Twitter makes these methods seem archaic as following experts and their tweets brings the literature directly to you rather than you searching for it. It also comes filtered directly from the experts rather than through luck of finding the articles in a random search. Many tweets are just links to really cool articles that you would have seen six months later in a pubmed search; but because luminary X on twitter caught it first, you get to see it and integrate it into your science far faster. Also, sometimes the tweets to publications come with a fatal criticism or major complement - helping you to see where the community places the work. 

2. Staying in touch with conferences - It seems like there are more and more conferences that we all want to go to every year, but we don't have the budget to attend all of them. Twitter users will use hashtags (i.e., #ASM2014 for this year's American Society of Microbiology meeting) that you can click on and follow the conference in a virtual way that brings you the most exciting talks and key points right to your desktop or phone. Following conference hashtags has been of such tremendous value to me that I have at times questioned the need to go to conferences all that often. Moreover, if you're not at a conference, you can interject into conference happenings by tweeting to conference goers or using the hashtag to virtually place your ideas and "self" in the conference. 

3. Giving your research wings - Both twitter and blogs are venues to disseminate your research and the stories behind that research to those that care. You can hope that someone reads a table of contents and finds your most recent publication or they search for your work in pubmed, but why not cast your paper into their world directly through social media. In this fast-moving and competitive world of science, getting your student's work out there is important. Or for the assistant professor, how about expediting the growth of your international reputation by connecting with tweeters from across the world.

I like to think that twitter is my Department of the World in which collegiality by proximity is replaced by collegiality without boundaries. I can tweet research or informatics questions, follow my peer's work, go to conference seminars, talk about latest results, promote students all in the social media world. It takes far less time that non-users think, it is far more valuable too, and the only question left to ask is "How can you afford to not be on social media?"

What are your thoughts? Feel free to muse by sending us an email (maria.hadjifrangiskou@vanderbilt.edu, helen.chomicki@vanderbilt.edu)