Scott Rich, Ph.D.

Nearly a week and still stuck on a “Decision in Progress” status… I’ve never experienced a stall like this at this stage! By the time I get a decision it’ll be four full months, which seems unusually slow even for these unprecedented times 🫠🫠🫠

The first time my Dad duties have helped my work: my baby girl’s poop explosion just reset my brain enough to write the perfect sentence for an idea I had been agonizing over for the previous hour 😂😂😂

The anti-jinx never fails.

Omg this worked back into happy anxiety mode GO TIGERS

After 3+ months in review, the status on the lab’s first manuscript has finally progressed.

Cue the anxiety spike to every email until the decision comes. 😅🤔😂

🤞🤞🤞

In all my years of having my mental health disproportionately determined by sports (yes I’m aware of the problem!), I’ve never felt so… RESIGNED to the end of a once promising season like I am with these Detroit Tigers.

May this skeet anti-jinx them into playing actually competitive baseball.

First grant as a Dad submitted!

Ok, it was an LOI.

But on newborn-addled levels of sleep and time to work, I’m still counting this as a big win… regardless of the outcome 😀

#AcademicSky #neurosky #compneurosky #NewPI

Agreed. This is one of those situations where one would hope secure(ish) tenured faculty would carry the water for their more vulnerable non-tenured colleagues. One can dream…

Should You Be on a Gluten-Free Diet? — Scientific American Unless you have celiac disease, there are few health benefits to a gluten-free diet This article was made possible by the support of Yakult and produced independently by Scientific American‘s board of...

Counterpoint: the never-ending gluten-free fad creates so many more options to those of us who ACTUALLY have Celiac 😂

apple.news/AGhFj5SStQb2...

This snippet is from an article on the “AI bubble” (apple.news/AYexgL6UdTrO...), but next time a University proposes slashing support staff in response to budget challenges we should all wave it in their faces.

See? I wasn’t kidding! 😉

bsky.app/profile/rich...

Anti-jinxing this until the cows come home.

This is gonna be fun. #GoBlue

The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A — The Atlantic In the era of grade inflation, students at top colleges are more stressed than ever.

“That easy A’s would lead students to phone in their coursework should have been predictable. What’s surprising is that the system has also failed to reduce stress. The percentage of first-year students who have received counseling has nearly tripled in the past decade.”

apple.news/AlZopGWfBSL-...

The podcast I make semi-regular cameos hosting interviewed Jon Scheyer today. Not surreal at all.

The Story 2025: Please Put The Car In Park things fall apart; put them back together

If @mgoblog.bsky.social can be excited for college sports after this, then I feel so much less guilty about my plans to use football season to ignore the dismantling of American science for at least one day a week.

Worth a read by everyone, sports fan or no.

Go Blue.

mgoblog.com/content/stor...

Every mentor I ever had warned me about this, and I STILL wasn’t prepared for how much of my life is emails.

Especially when I’m lecturing to ~300 young premeds…

Welllllll there goes any optimism I had after the congressional budget news.

I’m not sure how we’re supposed to survive amidst all this chaos, independent of needing money to do the actual science.

Tenure-track job postings specifically for COMPUTATIONAL neuroscience are few and far between. Great to see one here!

A reminder: Black Mirror concepts are meant as warnings, NOT AS SUGGESTIONS! 🤦‍♂️

Ummm… is this good news?!??

Also (minus the one obviously dated bit) this exchange lives rent free in my head:

youtu.be/uqyDP_6yFFM?...

Life in #AcademicSky in a nutshell. Futurama science for the win, always.

No easy answers 😖😠😡

Sincere question about this (purposefully?) confusing policy: as a #NewPI am I better off stalling some grant resubmissions until this stabilizes? Are the funding rates this year going to be so low that it isn’t worth it?

#AcademicSky #NeuroSkyence

Not what I want to read about my alma mater.

As researchers we need to do better not only making the broad argument for our importance, but the SPECIFIC one that higher education needs us.

E.G., future doctors need exposure to biomedical research as undergrads, etc…

When I begrudgingly left 🇨🇦 for my (wonderful!) TT job, one way I justified the decision was how challenging it was to get CIHR funding.

Now, I think most US neuroscientists would kill for a 15% funding rate, even with all the caveats considered…

#Neuroskyence #CompNeuroSky #NewPI

H- and m-channel overexpression promotes seizure-like events by impairing the ability of inhibitory neurons to process correlated inputs Author summary How a vast array of insults to the healthy brain can all lead to the same pathological endpoint of seizure remains one of the most perplexing questions in epilepsy research. Historicall...

A quick update from inside my new Dad bunker: the final paper from my postdoc at @kbi-uhn.bsky.social @kcnhub.bsky.social is officially published 😀

We worked on this computational model of seizure-like events for 5+ years and it yielded some fascinating insights!

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Will keep posting this to make sure we don’t collectively jinx something good.