A Blog Around The Clock

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Antony Williams from ChemSpider to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Hi Bora…thanks for the invitation to connect! Where do I come from? When people meet me they’ll interpret my mongrel accent in many ways assuming that I am from Australia commonly (especially the Canadians) or from England (which is of course the common term for the United Kingdom over here). Well, I am from the UK but I am Welsh, not English. Earlier in life I was going to be a Welsh teacher but it’s been almost 30 years since I had a conversation in Welsh! I grew up in a small village in Wales of less than a hundred people. From there I went to Liverpool University to do a degree in Chemistry. I found Organic Chemistry very easy but really struggled with Physical Chemistry, especially spectroscopy. I found it very challenging but something in my personality, my friends call it a defect, has me prefer a challenge over something that it easy. I tend to take on those things that challenge me and push me rather than those things that are easy. So, naturally, I focused on physical chemistry, specifically spectroscopy, and in my final year of my degree did a summer project on NMR and got hooked. From there I went to London University to do my PhD looking at the effects of High Pressure on Lubricant Related Systems by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, funded by Shell Oil. I engineered my own High Pressure Vessel made from non-magnetic titanium to stick into a magnet and apply pressures of up to 5kbar to liquids and look at the molecular dynamics under pressure. I was writing software to analyze the data and fit to specific models. Fun times – engineering, chemistry, computing – the type of diversity I like in a project.
From there I went to Ottawa, Canada to work at the National Research Centre (NRC) labs switching from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to Electron Spin Resonance for about 18 months. It was a great place to work and I truly enjoyed the switch to a new type of spectroscopy. However, NMR definitely had more applications so I switched back to NMR and went to the University of Ottawa to run their NMR Facility, again for about 18 months. Lack of funding and the inability to get new equipment in to run even some of the more mundane modern NMR experiments had me look for other opportunities and move South to the United States to work at Kodak in Rochester as their NMR Technology Leader. There I had the responsibility to set the technology vision for NMR and manage a number of their NMR labs. During that period I was focused on the development of walk-up technologies to provide access to modern analytical technologies in the hands of chemists in a “walk-up” environment delivering robotic control, offline data access and processing and an “analytical LIMS” – a laboratory information management system to track samples, structure and spectra through our lab. We build the first web-based LIMS system, called WIMS (Web-based Information Management System) on Netscape Navigator (remember that?) and got a lot of attention and visits from the LIMS vendors. We developed software systems under the simple adage of “The Web is the Way”…how right we were. That work was done in 1996.
From Fortune 500 America I joined a small start-up chemistry software company called Advanced Chemistry Development. I joined as their product manager for NMR and over the next few years grew the product line into the industry leader for NMR prediction, for third party NMR processing and databasing and, one of the best undertakings of my scientific career, a platform for Computer Assisted Structure Elucidation. I had the opportunity to work with some of the best small molecule NMR jocks in the world, an incredible team of developers and scientists at ACD/Labs and then move my skill set outside of NMR. I managed the development of an entire analytical data management system (ADMS) covering Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Mass Spectrometry, Chromatography, Infrared Spectroscopy and a myriad of other analytical techniques. I managed the structure drawing software, ChemSketch, that has had over a million downloads as it is now freeware, and the nomenclature product line for generating systematic names from structures and converting names to structures. The product lines became so successful that we had to bring in a group of other product managers who could focus on the individual product lines. I became their Chief Science Officer with a major focus on business development but always kept my hands in direct product management, marketing and sales. My passion remained the application of software to data handling, manipulation and delivery to scientists and trying to extract as much information as possible from available data.
A few years ago I floated an idea inside ACD/Labs regarding how it might be possible to index chemical compounds within an organization. Not just ones sitting inside a structure database but those represented in documents, reports, papers, publications, patents and represented by chemical names and structure images. It would require the culmination of multiple technologies including entity extraction techniques to find chemical identifiers, algorithms and look-up dictionaries to convert names to structures and software to convert structure images to structures. The intention was to index inside a central database and provide a tool to structurally index the network. We never moved the project forward because there was too much going on.
A couple of years later I was working extreme hours, focused a lot on sales, marketing and business. While it was fun there was a creative part of me not being exercised and I decided to start a hobby project to stress that particular muscle. I’d been watching what was going on with PubChem and a number of other online databases such as DrugBank. Web technologies had come a long way and I implicitly still believed in the “web is the way”. The concept of spidering an organization’s network had expanded to spidering the internet. Admittedly a major undertaking, a lot of the tools were coming together to allow it to happen. A few of my friends and I got together to create a platform for centrally indexing chemistry on the internet with the intention of linking chemical compounds to related resources on the web. And so ChemSpider was born.
Once ChemSpider went online as a structure searchable database of about 10 million chemicals we expanded the database by adding data from various other data sources, added functionality to query the data in various ways and added various services to allow organizations to tap into the resource we were building. Our target shifted over the next couple of years to one of building a structure centric community for chemists and, as we started to assemble and index the public chemistry on the internet it became clear that there was an enormous quality issue in the majority of the public compound databases we wanted to link too. There were so many errors in these databases it was quite shocking. As we assembled our database we were inheriting these errors and it was clear that we would need to curate these data in both robotic and manual ways. We built a curation platform to allow crowdsourced curation of the data so that users of ChemSpider could help us clean up the data. We added a deposition system for users to deposit their own chemistry and we added a series of tools to allow users to annotate the data and add supplementary information. The database today is almost 25 million unique entities assembled from over 300 data sources. We’ve truly built a community of chemists around ChemSpider with thousands of users coming to the site everyday and with a number of these users curating, annotating and adding data on an ongoing basis.
In June of last year the Royal Society of Chemistry acquired ChemSpider and that is where I am now as the Vice President of Strategic Development.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Our focus remains consistent with the original goal of building a central portal for chemists to facilitate traversing the web to find chemistry related data, information and knowledge. At present we remain focused on linking together structure-based data and resources but will eventually expand this out to chemical compounds that cannot be explicitly defined by a chemical structure table…things such as polymers, minerals and mixtures (coal tar, mineral oil, etc.). We busy building curated disambiguation dictionaries and use them as the basis of chemical name (entity) extraction and recognition so that we can perform semantic markup and linking. We continue to expand the breadth and improve the quality of the data on the database with the intention of being able to query and link to every structure-based database that can be accessed via the internet. Chemists have different personae – there are synthetic chemists, analytical scientists, medicinal chemists, chemistry students and teachers to name just a few. While each of these would want to access different types of data for their work and research a Venn Diagram would provide a specific set of query overlaps – let them search by chemical name, chemical structure/substructure and properties. From there they would layer on different expectations about what to do with the result set. The goal is simple…make the internet structure-searchable and provide interfaces and services to allow chemists to query and use the results.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
One specific area of interest I have right now is to encourage crowdsourced collaboration in chemistry. My bias at present is to present an environment whereby members of the chemistry community can give/share/contribute/educate/enable/improve chemistry on the internet. In our terms this means allowing them to add their data to the ChemSpider database, annotate what’s already online, validate and curate out the junk. By applying their skills and contributing they can build their own professional profile in the community and bring benefit to other chemists. We are intending to layer on recognition and rewards systems and allow chemists to form connection networks of collaboration. We ourselves are already immersed into the network of Open Notebook Science providing access to services and data allowing others to perform their research. One of our areas of focus right now is ChemSpider SyntheticPages, an online database of synthetic procedures built for the community by the community. There is so much chemistry, so many chemical reactions that are performed in labs across the world but the synthetic details and associated analytical data never sees light of day and never gets published. It might make it into a thesis but then that will get put on the supervisors shelf or in a library somewhere. Despite the fact that these can be electronically enabled and discoverable the reality is it hardly happens. If we can get just a fraction of the chemistry community to donate one SyntheticPage a week the database will explode. As it’s a free resource chemists have much to benefit. The challenge is to how to encourage a chemist to invest some of their time in writing up their procedure and putting it online. Contributors to date have commented that if its already in electronic format it might add another 15-30 minutes to their day but the result is public exposure of the work, a permanent record of value to other chemists, a public profile for the submitted (including a digital object identifier for the resume!), and an opportunity to engage the community as they can provide feedback and comments. Everyone wins.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work?
I don’t blog as much as I used to simply because I don’t have as much time on my hands. When ChemSpider started I was “dragged” into blogging because of some attacks made on ChemSpider made by very vocal members of the blogosphere. I couldn’t figure out how to defuse some of the misinformation and accusations being made about our efforts with ChemSpider except to become a participant in the blogosphere. I found that blogging became a great way for me to engage the ChemSpider users and get their feedback on ideas for improving the service, to communicate new functionality in the system, to express my views of things going on in the community and to generally release creative expression again through writing.
The ChemSpider blog remains a way to communicate what we’re up to in terms of new developments on ChemSpider and other Cheminformatics projects internal to RSC. It also gives me a voice to comment on what’s going on in chemistry that interests me, what’s happening in the world of Open Science and engaging our users in dialog.
How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Facebook for me, at present, is more of a personal tool in terms of interacting with my friends and family in the UK and around the world. I use Twitter quite regularly (as @ChemSpiderman) and certainly while I am sitting in conferences and seminars. I have found Twitter surprisingly useful, more than I had ever imagined when it first showed up on the scene. My interactions via Friendfeed are certainly useful and I stay connected to certain groups of people on there and stay connected and informed. While each of these takes time it is definitely a net positive, though I would clarify, not a necessity for what I do. I am definitely an advocate for LinkedIn and find the networking aspects of that platform in particular very enabling.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs when I was dragged into the blogosphere by some particularly negative commentaries that were being made about ChemSpider. Lots of judgments, the majority of them not fact-based, were made about what we were trying to achieve with ChemSpider. As they say however, “no press is bad press” and once the fire was lit I entered the blogosphere to respond to the accusations. Without doing so I feel that our reputation would have been very negatively tarnished. It is one of the downsides of the blogosphere unfortunately…people get to say whatever they want, whatever they perceive and, in certain cases have no facts or data to back up their claims. That is when things get very interesting and engaging though!
My Google Reader follows a number of bloggers from my domain. I have a particular appreciation for the insights of Derek Lowe on his “In the Pipeline” blog. I follow Cameron Neylon, Jean-Claude Bradley, Egon Willighagen, Milkshake’s “Org Prep Daily“, Paul Docherty’s “Totally Synthetic” and many others of a similar nature. I had to slim down what was feeding the reader recently as following too many people was becoming overly distracting. I didn’t start following any particular blogs after the ScienceOnline conference but I do watch a lot more people via Twitter now and, when they tweet a post of interest, I navigate over to their blog. Twitter has become another way to link me into blogposts of interest without me overpopulating my reader.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
ScienceOnline was fun. I attend a lot of conferences in a year but the energy at ScienceOnline is simply contagious. The level of engagement and contribution far outweighs that I have experienced at any other conference other than the two SciFoo meetings I have attended. Participants at these types of meeting are there to do more than listen. They want to speak…they want to engage and they want to share their opinions. At many conferences there are blocks of time when I am not in sessions. At ScienceOnline there were too many sessions I wanted to sit in on and couldn’t. A much better situation! I walked out of the meeting with new connections, new collaborations and new possibilities. Definitely worth attending.
My one embarrassing moment was when I stood up to do the Lightning (Ignite) Talk at the dinner and hadn’t read the rules of engagement as it were. A pure oversight on my part regarding the flow of the Ignite Talk it actually worked for some strange and unknown reason. Keep the Ignite Talk format next year at the dinner…they were great fun.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Emily Fisher from Oceana to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I grew up in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, and moved to Washington, DC about three years ago. I’m a writer and editor, not a scientist, but I’ve become more and more interested in science the last few years, which has surprised me. In school, science was always my least favorite subject and the one I did the worst in. The worst grade I ever got in high school was a C in physics, and that was after crying regularly during office hours. As an English major in college, I only took one science class: astronomy, and that was so I could go to UNC’s great planetarium.
I’ve always loved reading, writing and spending time in nature, so I’ve come around to science as an environmentalist. I want to spend my life helping protect the environment through writing and editing, so I’ve come to appreciate that I need to know the science behind what’s happening to the planet – and I’m increasingly curious about it. Scientific thinking doesn’t come easy to me, but maybe that’s also part of its appeal.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My first job out of college was as an assistant editor for a small non-profit publisher that focused mostly on neuroscience. I learned a lot about the brain, though ironically I can’t remember most of it now…
After that I worked for a news aggregator web start-up called Brijit.com. We took long-form journalism (articles from the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, etc.) and published 100-word abstracts of the articles. It was like a thinking person’s Digg. It was a tremendously fun atmosphere — there were just a few of us editors, sitting around one big table in a one-room apartment in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of DC. We were churning out around 100 abstracts a day — we had it down to a science, really — and having a great time. We had a really cool thing going, but unfortunately the money ran out.

For the past two years I’ve worked for the ocean conservation organization Oceana as the web editor. I’ve learned so much about the threats facing the ocean, from ocean acidification to shark finning to bottom trawling, and I’ve become an ocean advocate myself.
Twice I’ve gone to the coast of North Carolina (Bald Head Island) to write about sea turtles for our blog and magazine — once I documented sea turtles hatching and once I wrote about nesting mothers. Both were incredible experiences.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
At Oceana, I’m focused on making our website and blog the most readable and engaging place for ocean conservation information. I would love to make us the number one place online for the oceans.
More specifically, right now in light of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, we are trying to get 500,000 people to sign our petition to Obama and Congress stop new offshore drilling. So far we’ve gotten nearly 33,000 signatures.
I’m also passionate about sustainable food, so in my free time I spend a lot of time at the farmers’ market and trying out new recipes with friends. I also do a lot of yoga and am attempting to learn how to play the guitar.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging is a big part of what I do on a daily basis. I aim to post one blog a day on Oceana’s blog, The Beacon, and sometimes I do more. In the last few weeks, for example, I’ve been posting two, three, four posts a day because of the oil spill. I think a lot of folks at Oceana have recognized what an asset the blog is at a time like this, when we want to react swiftly to the crisis and get our voice out there.
I started our Twitter account last year, and a friend and colleague of mine has pretty much taken it over along with Facebook. She’s doing a great job getting people engaged in our work.
I think blogging and social media are a crucial part of our communications work at Oceana — it’s our primary method of interacting directly with our activist base, or Wavemakers, and hearing their ideas, concerns and questions. Our CEO, Andy Sharpless, is even tweeting now, at @Oceana_Andy.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I really enjoyed finally meeting people that I had online relationships with but never met in person, like Miriam Goldstein and the guys from Deep Sea News and Southern Fried Science. I also met some great new people, like the web editor from the New England Aquarium.
At the session about the future of science journalism, I realized that the line between blogger and journalist is truly blurred now. Similarly, at the session about social media from the Pacific Garbage Patch, I was impressed to see how science can be documented using social media tools like blogging and Twitter, even from the middle of the ocean. It was really striking to hear that the journalist’s New York Times story about the garbage patch was less effective and reached fewer people than her personal blog did.
I also really enjoyed the “blog to book” session. It’s my dream to write a book one day, and while a book project itself seems overwhelming, blogging doesn’t. It made a book seem like an achievable goal — some day.
It was so nice to see you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Amy Freitag from Southern Fried Science to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Well, first, the basics: I’m a PhD student at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC. My research looks at different types of knowledge relating to water quality out here on the coast and how they do and don’t mesh to form a cohesive, scientifically-based policy to protect our estuarine resources for future generations. My scientific philosophy is a bit different than your standard empiricist, a discussion I and my co-bloggers have had in great detail and in print on the blog. Since humans and their behavior and decisions are a large part of my research, I tend to have a difficult time separating research from activism and have to pay constant attention to my role in my research community, as it extends far beyond just observation. This creates both opportunities and responsibilities.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’m interdisciplinary at heart. I never could decide if I’d rather be out talking to people or in the field counting critters. But really, the unifying factor is the observational, exploratory nature of the research, something I’d like to continue. Whether doing interviews or planting data loggers in the intertidal, it’s a field experience – a type of lifestyle where surprises are the norm. You set out with a mission to study one thing and your dissertation ends up being on something completely different that emerged from experiences during the research process. That’s what keeps me ticking – those surprises keep life interesting.
One of my favorite research projects arose from a “study abroad” experience in Alaska Native territory. The motivation initially was to get to Alaska and pay for my adventures by doing fieldwork. A forestry professor hired me to help with a prescribed burn about 45 minutes outside of Fairbanks that he and “the hotshots” from the forest service were planning. My role was to hike out every day for a few weeks and basically map out what the forest looked like pre-burn – size and types of trees, animal paths, type of understory, topography, etc. Fairly basic forestry science, which had been part of my academic history as I had spent a summer as an intern in a sugar maple plantation. However, the summer was a wet one and after I was done with all those measurements, the burn was declared postponed until the following summer. I was offered the opportunity to be a roving field hand and help with any of the projects going on at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) that needed help.
After project-hopping for a few weeks, I was invited to come along to Venetie, a small village of roughly 200 people at the foothills of the Brooks Range in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge that was concerned about their subsistence resources and had asked for research help from an anthropologist at UAF. I flew into town and got the tour, through a dusty general store and around the village, where there were no cars and the town activity for the day was to build a house for a recently married couple who had decided to move back to their hometown to raise their coming child.
The next day we met with the council of elders to discuss research needs and clarify the arrangement of intellectual property between UAF and the tribe. That evening, we went with one of the elders on a moose hunt, modern style – on the back of an ATV with a large rifle that could both spot and shoot across Big Lake. We didn’t see any moose that night, but did take home a duck for dinner. From a couple days’ experience, I became aware of the need for socially relevant research and collaboration with the residents in the area so carefully studied for the ecological literature. The project that resulted for me was a GIS analysis of changing subsistence resources (moose, caribou, berries, waterfowl, timber for wood stoves) under various models of increased fire due to climate change. From that, the tribe could predict which villages were the most vulnerable to resource shortages and plan for either moving them or subsidizing their needs from other villages.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
As for a lot of PhD students, most of my time goes towards my research, which is luckily also a passion of mine. I’m very much in planning stages for my life for the next three years, which is both exciting and a little bit nerve-wrecking as well. Part of that is making the friends and contacts I will need in order to get good interviews over the next few years, gaining rapport within the community. That’s often just a fun social science excuse to get out and do fun things 🙂 And hopefully, after my time here is done, I will have “an ethnography of water quality”.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Science communication is crucial to both my research and commitment to broader impacts. It’s critical for transfer of knowledge and the collaboration that is necessary for effective policy. Beyond my particular interests, though, I’m often baffled by how many scientific articles are difficult to penetrate even for people who know the lingo. My undergrad advisor once said that if you can’t explain what you do to a fourth grader, taking into account their attention span, you aren’t doing good science. I’ve taken that as a mission in my life and the use of the Web is a great way to reach all the fourth graders out there.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I find blogging a good way for me to practice and refine my writing and keep my brain grounded in the real world in terms of the jargon I use. It’s a great way to extricate myself from the ivory tower. In addition, I find it super useful to have a blog up and running and respected when the time comes to write broader impacts statements. Through the summer, I will be blogging about my first time on a research cruise on the open ocean and potentially a trip to the Gulf of Mexico. In these cases, it’s both positive and necessary to blog and get immediate feedback. I credit our commenters and my Twitter friends for making me a better scientist.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs through friends, first the Cornell Mushroom Blog and then the one I now write for, Southern Fried Science. To be honest, I was more familiar with the political blogs, especially of the DC area where I grew up. It was a welcome find to discover science blogs and I am still surprised how welcoming the community has been. Like many before me have said, ScienceOnline is a great forum to put a face to a name on a blog and a personality behind the writing. It’s critical to keeping the community going and creating traditions and camaraderie between blogs (from singing sea shanties with the other ocean bloggers to planning Carnival of the Blue and swapping blog stories). I’ve met a number of awesome people just from one year attending ScienceOnline that are all easy to keep in touch with because we’re active over Twitter (like Jeff Ives of the New England Aquarium and Miriam Goldstein of Deep Sea News). These connections will definitely help me both professionally and personally in the future.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The tweeting of all five parallel sessions by practically everyone in them was a change of conference culture for me, but one I would like to see occur elsewhere. It brought unity to the conference and made one fluid conversation happen as people drifted from session to session. I can’t wait to go back next year!
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Jason Hoyt from Mendeley to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)?
I am from the San Francisco Bay Area, but split my time between San Francisco and London for work. Such a commute obviously has advantages and disadvantages. Sticking with the positives, I love how this provides two wonderfully contrasting perspectives on science and technology when I speak to people on either side of the pond. You also quickly see what people have in common, regardless of location, with where they want to see science to go.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I did my doctoral research in genetics, and more specifically, gene and stem cell therapy using non-viral vectors. This was done in what might be considered the best department in the world for doing such research, the Stanford University Genetics Department…though I might be a little bias. Despite loving the bench, even before I entered graduate school I knew that I wanted to be more on the entrepreneurial side of science. I think I am accomplishing that with what I am doing now, building software for researchers at Mendeley.
Sure, telling people I work on adult stem cells to cure genetics diseases of the blood sounds a whole lot sexier than software guy, but I think the impact I am making is bigger than I could be achieving at this point in my career if I had stuck to the bench. If I can create a tool that 10 scientists use to advance their research, then that is 10x the impact I would make as a pure scientist. That is obviously a simplistic view, but that attitude is essential to have if you decide upon a non-traditional science career.
And for those exploring alternative careers, my advice would be to let it find you. I started building software tools as a graduate student in my “spare time” to help my research. I was amazed to find how passionate I was about it and that other people were interested in using those tools. I would have failed if I had taken the other approach of asking, “what tool could I build to launch a career?” Instead, look for what is missing in your life that you would like to have. That passion will lead you.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
We recently announced an Open API platform on Mendeley. Beyond the personal excitement about it, this is huge for science and more generally, academia. We definitely are not the first to have an API about academic literature or the metadata surrounding it, but I think we are the first to make that data easily accessible to everyone.
The Internet came about through a need for academics to remotely collaborate. Yet, somehow Silicon Valley technologists are the ones who really took advantage of it. Academia left it behind once out of the R&D stage. Why not use the creativity and development power of Silicon Valley to improve science and get academia back into the game? That’s what these new APIs do; they finally link the backbone originally built for academics to people who can really sex it up.
As we move forward, I want to make academic data more open, more translatable, so that either academics or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can build and create. Everyone will benefit from that.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I have TweetDeck open all of the time, so that I can keep on top of science and tech news, as well as opinions. I have a million RSS feeds that I follow in Google Reader. Staying on top of the news and opinions of the crowd is essential for what I am doing for work and personally. I’ll be honest though, it is often information overload, even when it is a high signal to noise ratio. That said, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to look beyond just the on goings of science. Looking cross-sector into the tech industry is really inspiring when you are thinking about how to improve science.
As for blogging, it isn’t essential to my work, but it is both gratifying and almost feels like a moral obligation as a trained scientist to be a communicator for science. I realize how that sounds a little too much like “mad man claiming to receive revelation.”
Going off on an alternative science career means I have a perspective that some people may want or even need to hear about, whether they agree or disagree with my opinions. For example, there was tremendous feedback both on the blog and around the social networks over an article I wrote asking if there are too many PhDs.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
Really disappointing that when I was in grad school, science blogs were never a part of the curriculum. It was an outsider activity back then and there were very few regular bloggers. That’s all changing. It’s exciting to see professors really getting into things. One of my recent favorites is Vincent Racaniello out of Columbia. He does “This week in virology” podcasting and blogging, and also makes his blog a part of the courses that he teaches.
Another great one is Academic Productivity blog. How awesome that would have been to read while I was a student. It’s still a fantastic read as a graduate.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
ScienceOnline2010 had a great blend of conference with “unconference” or the so-called barcamp style. There was enough structure so that open discussions didn’t end up a giant tangent that wasted your time, but also informal enough to prevent a repeat of topics you’ve heard a million times. For instance, every science conference these days has some section on social networking. Great! You’re telling me what I’ve known for years. ScienceOnline, since it’s all about, well science online, goes deeper. I hope to see more technologists invited out to future events. The style and content suits them well and would really complement the current audience.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Tom Linden from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My passion always has revolved around journalism. When as a scrawny 13-year-old, I failed to make the starting nine on my JV high school baseball team, I was devastated. Rather than wait for my body to catch up to my aspirations, I jumped into journalism, eventually becoming my high school newspaper’s sports editor and editor-in-chief. I loved words and stories and so continued on my writing path through college where I was a columnist and editor for the Yale Daily News. As a senior at Yale, I covered for the Los Angeles Times the pretrial hearings of several Black Panthers accused of murder in New Haven, Conn. After graduation I worked on the city desk of the Times.
After taking a year off to do research for a book (that never materialized), I suffered a case of writer’s block and decided to pursue a career that would give me tools to travel around the world and practice a new craft… medicine. Within weeks of registering for med school, I realized that the journalism bug never left me. I completed med school and a residency in adult and child psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation, then in Topeka, Kans., and started a private practice in which I subsidized what I would call my “journalism addiction.” I worked at a small local television station in the northern Sacramento Valley where I became the health reporter and eventually the 5 o’clock news anchor. In 1989 CNBC hired me to join their start-up cable news venture as both a medical and environmental reporter and a financial news anchor. For the next eight years I worked for a variety of television stations and networks, including the Financial News Network, KRON-TV (San Francisco), Fox-11 (Los Angeles) and Lifetime Medical Television. I also started anchoring Journal Watch Audio, produced by the Audio-Digest Foundation and the Massachusetts Medical Society. In 1995 I co-authored one of the first books on the medical Internet, Dr. Tom Linden’s Guide to Online Medicine. In 1997 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hired me to start a medical journalism program in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
As part of our program in medical and science journalism, my students and I have produced a couple documentaries with an environmental focus and more than 25 feature stories for North Carolina Public Television. I also just authored a book, The New York Times Reader: Health and Medicine, published by CQ Press. The book is both a compendium of great stories from The Times and a how-to manual for aspiring medical and health writers.
For the future I’m interested in producing a sequel to our Environmental Heroes documentary and continuing to help educate medical and science journalists.
Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?
I grow most of my own vegetables and fruit from May through November. I’ve just planted seven fig trees that I cloned over the winter and have more starter tomatoes, peppers and eggplants than I know what to do with. I voraciously follow the news and love walking in the forests of North Carolina. My family loves to travel, but travel and maintaining a major garden (small farm) don’t always mesh. I also love to hear good music. In North Carolina there’s lots of it.
Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)?
I was born in California and have lived on both coasts and on the Plains (Kansas) which is very oceanic if you live in the countryside. If I had unlimited resources, I would live by the sea. Philosophically, I am a skeptic and question just about everything.
What is your (scientific) background?
As I said above, I went to medical school and took the usual courses. Science used to intimidate me, but does no longer. I’ve learned more about medicine by reporting on it, than I did in the hours and days that I spent studying it.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?
Writing The New York Times Reader: Health & Medicine took most of my free time over the last year and a half. Now that the book has been published, I’m looking for a new project. I keep getting drawn to environmental issues since climate change and the destruction of the earth’s natural habitats loom as the biggest issues facing humankind. The challenge is to find stories that inspire action and not just induce fear.
What are your goals?
I’d like to see young people (i.e., everyone under the age of 30) do a better job of taking care of the planet than their parents and grandparents. I’d like to help them do that in any way that I can.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Clearly the Web is the pipeline through which knowledge will travel over the next couple decades. I’m looking for ways to reach non-scientists with information that will both engage and inform them. As a television journalist, I see video as probably the most powerful tool to reach masses of people. The challenge is to how tell video stories in ways that both entertain and educate.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I have a blog, “Dr. Tom Linden’s Health Blog“, but am still trying to figure out what my blog voice is. I’ve taken a little hiatus in updating the blog during the course of writing my latest book, but hope to post more often in the days ahead. In tweeting a lot at a recent conference of the <a href="” target=”_blank” title=””>Assn. of Health Care Journalists, I got an appreciation for how much fun tweeting is.
Online activity is both a joy and a burden. I love staying connected with what’s happening around the world, but find it hard to control the beast. If you’re a journalist, you need to be comfortable with the entire toolkit.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
David Kroll (Abel Pharmboy) and Anton Zuiker were my first science blogging mentors. I’m a fickle blogging reader and will follow a link at anything that piques my interest.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I love the networking that goes on at ScienceOnline. After each session I pore over the Web reading about the people I’ve just met. I liked Ivan Oransky’s suggestion in a previous Q&A about having full disclosure for all speakers and panel members at future conferences. Also, it would be nice to get back to the un-conference mode of the first few ScienceOnline meetings. Keep up the great work, Bora, David, Anton and everyone else who brings us this ScienceOnline gift every year.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you soon.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Tyler Dukes to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a journalist working as a Web producer for News 14 Carolina in Raleigh, N.C., and I do freelance science writing on the side. I grew up mostly in eastern North Carolina, not too far from the Outer Banks, and I’ve lived in the South my entire life. I wanted to be an engineer when I left for N.C. State University. But that changed after 2-and-a-half years of class, a rapidly declining GPA and an increased leadership role at the student newspaper.
Looking back now, I think I bristled at specialization. I loved understanding the basics of complicated science and technical topics, but when I dove deeper I thought about all the other neat science I was missing out on. That curiosity is a skill in journalism, especially science journalism; but in engineering, it’s a distraction.
In short, I’m a southern science storyteller, which means I wax poetic about the chemistry of barbecue while I’m out cooking a pig for a football tailgate.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
When I came back for a victory lap (read: fifth year) at N.C. State after four years and a stint as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, I got the gig as Science & Tech editor there. That meant a whole year of chasing stories about campus research and science issues affecting the community. I covered the phenomenon of disappearing bees, interviewed the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and sprinkled in some in-depth general news stories along the way.

In the months while I languished between graduation and full-time employment, I discovered blogging and podcasting. I even created a short-lived series on beer in the Triangle (another one of my passions). In late 2009, I revamped my personal blog, Write -30-, which is all about the changes in the journalism industry.
I’ve also spent the last two years at News 14 trying to figure out how to use social media to make the journalism at the station better. I’ve learned a lot, but as a side effect I’ve met a crazy amount of awesome people. It’s actually how I first learned about ScienceOnline.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now, I’m doing more freelance science writing in my free time, which is even more fun than I figured it would be. I’m also periodically blogging about whatever journalism topics that happen to interest me at any given moment.
At some distant point in my career, I’d love to be a staff writer for a science and technology magazine. But the future of journalism is really hard to foresee right now, so I’m a bit unsure about what jobs will exist in 10 years and which ones I’ll be qualified for. Regardless of the medium, I’ll be happy enough to continue my vain attempts to satisfy my insatiable curiousity.
I’m also planning my wedding in June, which is way less fun than I figured it would be. But my soon-to-be wife is awesome, so it’s definitely worth it.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I love how science communication requires you to think like both a scientist and a writer (at least if you do it right). I spent a long time in college rewiring my brain to understand Java, electron physics and differential equations, so I feel like I’d be doing my student loans a disservice if I didn’t put that partially rewired brain to good use.
When it comes to the Web, I love the chaos it creates. News organizations, for the most part, have taken their credibility for granted. Reporters and editors assume, right or wrong, that it’s the newspaper masthead and the history behind it that gives them that credibility. They’ve seldom been challenged or forced to prove why anyone should trust them, and the result is a rapid decline in their audience’s confidence.
Bloggers, on the other hand, are forced to prove to their readers why they should be trusted. It’s not enough to have a Web site. They have to build their audience and their credibility over time, and the result of that process tends to be a more quality product in a lot of ways.
This is a really valuable exercise for science journalists and reporters in general, and we’re seeing it reflected even with more traditional reporters. That’s why there’s more and more emphasis on reporters working to build their “personal brand,” independent of a newspaper or television station.
The Web has made credibility more personal, and that’s a good thing for everybody.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
When I first started at News 14 Carolina, our social media presence was nonexistant. We had a few blogs here and there, but there was no unifying strategy or plan to embrace these technologies. We started small, with a few Twitter accounts and a Facebook Page where we really worked to engage our audience in actual conversation. What we really wanted to do is show the news directors and our general manager that these were valuable uses of our time that needed to be integrated into the station’s workflow. The case we made, with both research on how people use social media and actual data from our own social media brand, was that we needed to bring our content where people are on the Web.
After about a year, the impact was really clear. Facebook grew from one of our top-20 referring sites to our No. 1 referring site. That’s higher than Yahoo and Google. Now that we’ve made our case, a lot more of the newsroom has started to come on board. More people are signing up for Twitter and creating fan pages on Facebook with the intention of connecting with viewers. They don’t see it as extra work, but as a way to make their work more valuable. That’s very rewarding to me.
Personally, I’ve found my blog, Twitter and Facebook to be invaluable tools for reaching out and connecting with more people in journalism and science. These are people I might never come into contact face to face, and I’ve really been amazed by how accessible this technology makes everyone.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
Most of the science blogs I read before ScienceOnline were the offshoots of more traditional news publications. Short Sharp Science on New Scientist and Wired Science were some of my favorites. I’ve also followed technology blogs, like TechCrunch, Engadget and Gizmodo, for a while.
Many of my favorite blogs now I discovered after meeting the bloggers at ScienceOnline. Your own Blog Around the Clock, Deep Sea News, Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science and Ben Young Landis’ blog are all in my Google Reader now.
Oddly enough, I came across Deep Sea News back in June 2009 when I was researching a story I did on the Cameron Village sewer monster. They had a story (and identification) on the creepy lifeform before any traditional media outlets. Now I’m a pretty frequent reader.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I’m a big fan of journalism conferences. There’s nothing like getting out of the newsroom for a few days to rub elbows with some great reporters and editors and draw inspiration from their advice and work.
But the thing I loved about ScienceOnline was that it pulled together three very different groups — scientists, science communicators and science journalists — for some very frank (and often contentious) conversations about a shared goal: how to use the Web to increase the public’s understanding of science. Through Twitter, blogs and Facebook, those conversations started before the conference even began. By the time we all showed up, people were familiar with each other’s work, which helped the discussion flow more freely. That conversation continues today, and I can honestly say I got more out of ScienceOnline than any conference I’ve ever attended.
It was so nice to see you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.