Mollie Woodworth

I have spent time this summer overhauling my reading system (previous system: throwing PDFs into a black hole titled “Papers to Read”). It’s working! Except that every paper I read leads me to download 3 more.

We are also hiring a tenure-track computational chemist/biochemist with a separate job listing: apply.interfolio.com/170206

We're hiring a tenure-track biochemist at Bates this year! I'm on the search committee and am happy to field ?s about the department or STEM faculty life at a SLAC. Come teach enthusiastic undergrads and do research as part of our fantastic community! apply.interfolio.com/170205 #chemsky #chemjobs

Submitting some rec letters for the SfN Trainee Professional Development Award travel grants. How you know SfN has been to this dealing-with-academics rodeo before: "Recommendation letters over one page will void the entire application."

I got really into spices (which has completely changed my cooking and eating habits) because I read The Devil and the Dark Water, a murder mystery that takes place on a Dutch ship coming back from Batavia in 1634.

We would sure love to have our IDeA NOA for the year here in Maine! Maybe we could look into getting funding out the door for existing meritorious science, even!

Dear random Mainers who stop me in Whole Foods to chat about my college hoodie: I have a particular set of skills, acquired over a long career (growing up Midwestern, being a cheerleader). You will call Susan Collins and yell about university funding by the time I’m done with you. Not sorry.

Screenshot: "I’d first like to thank the Bates College Neuroscience Department for the incredible opportunity to conduct a lab-based empirical thesis in just one semester. I loved having a project I could call my own — one that was still part of a larger group of amazing people researching the regeneration of retinal neurons. In just a few months, I experienced the full range of emotions you can feel in science: feeling overwhelmed with unfamiliar concepts, frustrated by intricate techniques (the cryostat), and totally lost trying to figure out how to turn the confocal microscope on — but also, over time, becoming a mini-expert on my topic, gaining surprising dexterity in the most expensive micro-deli slicer I’ll ever lay my lands on, and capturing images beautiful enough to make it all with it."

In the midst of end-of-semester stress, senior thesis mentoring, (badly) balancing research and teaching, and *waves hands at surroundings*, I am grateful to be given the opportunity to see the work through the eyes of my students.

I did probably about the same -- 20 minutes in each of my two courses. They were extremely engaged (and also horrified that funding rates are so low).

This was my first science job -- NIAAA, summer of 2003, studying the genetics of alcohol use disorder. An incredible and formative experience for me, and one I'd hoped some of my students would be able to have this summer.

A calendar event for 6-7pm on Wednesday, January 22: "Cook the chicken, eat it later"

Taking my bits of joy where I can: when the thesis students accidentally put their personal events on the shared lab calendar

Needed to propose a new neuroscience course for the fall (when I'm teaching a 3-load so I can take pre-tenure leave in the winter). Stroke of genius: realized I could repurpose a bunch of my Human Physiology material from when I was a biology adjunct simply by proposing a course on the hypothalamus.

In fact it is the profoundest wonder we can still imagine and accept, and at the same time so unusual that we have to force ourselves to wonder about the wondrousness of this wonder.” -Miroslav Holub

Hooked my neural development students on day 1 with my favorite development quote: "Between the fifth and tenth days [in the mouse] the lump of stem cells differentiates into the overall building plan of the embryo and its organs. It is a bit like a lump of iron turning into the space shuttle...

Me, starting my reappointment dossier teaching statement: how can they possibly expect me to write five whole pages about my teaching philosophy
Me, six pages in: how can they possibly expect me to write only five pages about my teaching philosophy

Does a lunch of a cookie and cereal from the dining hall count as eating food?

SLAC life: last day of class today, got to science briefly in the lab, submitted a conference abstract with a student, inhaled cafeteria dinner, sang first soprano in the choir’s fall concert

Reasons I became a professor:
1. So I could blast Christmas music in my own lab the day before Thanksgiving

I tried to argue for retinal ganglion cells in a neuro department discussion about which cell type is the most beautiful, but I lost to the person who studies Purkinje cells. :(

I find it particularly frustrating because I simply don't think of students comparatively in the way the scales seem to want me to. Is this student in the top 25% of students I have ever met? The top 5%? The top 1%? How *on earth* would I keep that information in my mind.

I hope Lauren conveyed my love to you like I asked her to! I'm always so proud when I see our students presenting. They look so grown-up!

When I was 5, I loved science, which I took to be planets and magnets and chemicals and shit.

Soon I realized science was a collective human activity, and these were just the objects of its attention.

Anyway, whenever I read an OpEd on how science isn't political, I think "Are you 5 years old?"

I would love to see it!

A chart where 8 students/staff/me rank 13 flavors of Japanese Kit-Kats. No one likes apple; dark chocolate is widely praised; matcha and milk tea are controversial.

Data collection going on in my office: I bought a variety pack of Japanese Kit-Kats, and everybody is ranking them on a 1-5 scale. Conclusions: I am an easy grader; students will eat infinite Kit-Kats

Annoying thing about starting a new lab: you know you need a thing, you know what it does, you just don't know what it's called so you can order it. (Definitely not related: those butterfly needles with a stopcock so you can attach two syringes for perfusion are called...?)

I did get an instructor copy! It’s just, you know, sitting under a pile of ungraded work and whatnot. Thanks!

Have you used this book before/do you like it? I’m teaching a genetics course for the first time next semester (mainly Mendelian human neuro disease) and am still browsing books.

Particularly aggressive of the campus bookstore to come at the faculty by asking, during fall midterm week, which textbooks we're using for winter.

Me, please!

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, it's going in the syllabus.