I am working with AI more and more. It saves me a lot of time, a great deal of time. One example is the slides for our AI course. Once I have drafted a plan, the content and the flow of a training (in this case together with Claude), all it currently costs me is…
Just recently I read an interview in DER SPIEGEL with Matthias Schranner. He started out as a police officer, trained as a negotiator with the police and the FBI, and for the past 20 years has advised the UN, global companies and political parties when negotiations get difficult. When I read it, I felt like…
Two weeks ago, my post on the back-to-office debate referenced an episode of The Curiosity Shop by Brené Brown and Adam Grant. Somewhere in that conversation they reached for the iceberg model, which I touched on briefly in the post but did not have room to do justice. It is a tool I use regularly…
For three years, I kept submitting a grant for what I still think is the best science to come out of my lab. And for three years it didn’t get funded. It scored 20th percentile at one point, which felt close, and then on the next round it went back to not discussed. Not the…
Two or three years ago, when the back-to-office wave started rolling, I wrote a blog post about why I thought the whole thing was BS. I never published it. At that time the controversy was heavy, and the data was too thin. I had a clear position at the time, but with no real data…
By the end of November, I had that familiar, quiet dread that creeps in when you are a high-functioning person (hopefully) who has been doing all the things and still cannot point to enough outcomes that feel satisfying. You know the feeling: you can account for the work, the hours, the revisions, the decisions and…
You’re leading yourself, other humans, and a system inside an institution. No wonder it feels hard. I (and I suppose you also) didn’t become a PI because we were dying to run meetings, build onboarding systems, or mediate conflict between team members. I became a PI because I’m curious and I care about the science.…
by Stefanie In our blog post last week, we talked about why our inner Mr. Hyde keeps showing up. Why we In those second scenarios, it’s our inner Mr. Hyde at work. The “protector” who reacts fast and hard the moment it smells danger. I described this idea based on Dr. Jill Bolte’s model last…
It was 11 p.m., and I was furious. I’d spent the past three hours sending increasingly frustrated messages to a former student, trying to track down samples that had mysteriously disappeared. We were 24 hours from a manuscript deadline and suddenly nobody knew where critical samples were, labels were missing or illegible, and some tissue…
In our last Research Management Mastery group coaching, as always, we discussed many interesting topics and had lively conversations, but this time a big chunk of this discussion was centered on quality. Today, I, Robert, want to highlight two points that directly affect the quality of our results and that can make your work life…