The last 7 days have been crazy, so this post will be dedicated to three main topics.

The 2019 Experimental Biology (EB) conference

EB was a lot of fun! I was invited to join the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) mentoring network program, and I met a lot of great people in the program! I attend workshops on publishing scientific articles and on emerging topics in pharmacology (HIV affects the brain/cognition because most antiretroviral therapies can’t cross the blood brain barrier!)

I personally prefer large conferences, and while this meeting isn’t as big as the Society for Neuroscience conference (which has 40,000+ attendees) I had a blast! My personal areas of interest are pharmacology, biochemistry, and molecular biology, so attending EB was a no brainer for me. What’s cool is that this conference covers a wide breadth of biology related areas: pharmacology, physiology, microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology.

I also won 3rd place in the graduate student/postdoc poster competition! I was surprised when I found out, since I felt like every other poster had more data than I did. My poster was chosen as a “Blue-ribbon pick” by ASPET before the conference even started, so I was very excited to see how the ASPET community would receive my project.

Unfortunately, I had to leave a few days early, since I was invited to participate in the NIH’s Diversity Scholar Professional workshop

Visiting the National Institute of Health (NIH)

During the workshop, we had the opportunity to speak with program officers and institute directors in person, which is something most students don’t get. We also got a crash course on how to apply for research funding and received advice on how to ultimately become an independent investigator in an academic environment. We also got to present our research and network with various NIH staff.

Applying for NIH funding is a daunting process; its not something you can do well on short notice. My F31 (predoctoral fellowship) was over 65 pages, with dozens of revisions that both my PI and my Co-sponsor had to sign off on. That leads me to my last topic…

Why my F31 was not discussed

Getting a grant funded by the NIH is a huge accomplishment. Depending on which institute you apply to, the success rate could be 10-20%. Not do you have to be a great candidate and a great scientist, but your science must match with the vision/mission/objective of the institute that you’re applying for, which requires a lot of thought and creativity.

Coincidentally, I got the summary statement (the review essentially) for my F31 on the same morning that the workshop started! One obvious issue that I ran into was my lack of publication record. Since my application, we’ve submitted an article for which I’m a co-author on, and we are now drafting my first 1st author publication (i.e. a publication/paper where I performed most of the work and wrote/edited most of the paper.) We also plan on revising our research plan, as the reviewers brought up some good points about the project, which will make the science stronger.

While the application wasn’t discussed this round, I’m still very optimistic about our re-submission!

A few final lessons I wanted to share from this past week:

· Always apply for everything! Conferences, grants, etc.

· Network network network

· If you want to apply for NIH funding, its never too early to contact an institute’s program officer (think of them like a funding manager). They help you determine your likelihood for success, and are always available to help

· Look all possible funding mechanisms. I recently learned about an F99/K00 award, which covers the end of the predoctoral career and the beginning of the postdoctoral track