Tejus Shinde

We are happy to welcome Tejus Shinde @ShindeTejus from the @moissl_lab to our research group for the next six months. Tejus will be investigating microbial interactions within the human respiratory tract!

Definitely! My paper with negative results from 10 years ago is one of my most cited and often people have thanked us for how much wasted time we saved them. I almost risk arguing that a good paper with negative results might benefit society the most.

📢 NEXT #MVIF #27 with Curtis Huttenhower @hutlab Full program to be announced soon! Registration now open at ⬇️ microbiome-vif.org/en-US/-/future…

1/ 5 papers all computational biologists should read: 1. A Quick Guide to Organizing Computational Biology Projects buff.ly/2YiLMTc

Excited to be a part of this! Tune in to the live telecast to watch this microbiome conference, held in the heart of Austria #Graz #TES2024 #microbiome #research

We are Moissl-Eichinger Lab, where curiosity meets the microscope! 🔬✨ Join us on a journey into the unseen world of microbiome research. #microbemagic #lablife #Archaea

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

3D illustration workshop for researchers!🎨🔬 Registration started! Enroll now! 👇 blender.scidart.com

Overpublishing puts enormous stress on students and PIs. And brings tons of money to publishers in STEM. A new study shows that the number of papers is increasing FASTER than the number of #PhD graduates. It’s an amazing work with very useful statistics. Huge kudos to the authors! ▫️ Main outcomes: 1️⃣ In 2022 the number of articles is 47% higher than in 2016. The amount of writing, reviewing and editing workload per scientist is increased enormously. 2️⃣ “Special issues” is a strategy for publishing lots of papers with reduced review time. This is possible due to the “publish or perish” pressure and clearly benefits the publishers. 3️⃣ The publishing time varies widely! MDPI = 37 days. Frontiers = 72 days. Elsevier = 134 days. Springer = 157 days. Nature = 185 days. 4️⃣ The article rejection rates do not seem to correlate with publisher growth. However, rejection rates decline with increased use of special issue publishing. 5️⃣ Certain for-profit gold-open-access publishers create an increasing number of special issues, with uniquely reduced turnaround times, and in specific cases, high impact inflation and reduced rejection rates. 6️⃣ The authors suggest a new metric - Impact Inflation, which is reflected in self-citation within the same journal. For example, MDPI has a high impact inflation due to excessive self-citation compared to other publishers. Conclusions and my opinion: - Scientists have to spend a lot more time on reviewing and writing than before (on average). - The more papers are published, the more the quality is compromised. - Scientific progress has become partially bound to the business models of publishers and their revenue (a sad reality today). - There is a huge lack of transparency. Much of these data had to be ‘web-scraped’ from numerous sources in order to get a full picture. We clearly need regulators to mandate open access to publisher’s statistics. - Reduce the number of special issues! Those typically have low standards. ▫️ Science, publishing and funding make a trio that is very hard to disentangle. However, research quality is controlled by the community. This is why preprint + community review can make a big difference. #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter

Yesterday we started new semester by the KickOff event! We are all motivated to walk through the next student year! ;)

This is why: 1. Funding decisions for PIs must take into account recommendation letters from former PhD graduates and postdocs. Because funding is used to pay for more students and postdocs, it should be allocated only if the PI knows how to manage people correctly. 2. Universities should hire senior professors only after collecting 5-10 recomm. letters from their former graduates, randomly selected. 3. Students should get university-level (or country-level) training in how to select advisors and avoid toxic PIs. 4. Universities should create internal funds and programs for the students who need to switch groups or get financial security while they’re trying to find a new employer. It should be mandatory if the university wants to receive funding from the government (that comes from taxes). 5. Private funders should stop funding “hot research topics” as much as they do these days. Instead, if they start helping students who are already in crisis (by offering fellowships or other support), they will make A LOT bigger impact on the academic community and entire society. 6. In any department, fellow professors should HELP students who got into toxic groups and need support. Not avoid them. 7. At department meetings, the topics of toxicity and mismanagement must be discussed as often as possible. Believe me, your students don’t care about the “strategic plans for the department”, “teaching rotations”, etc that you keep discussing there. All they care about is wellbeing. Everything else comes second. Ensure you are raising awareness and making the right emphasis on what is truly important for the students. 8. Finally, reduce tenure requirements. A lot of issues stem from the load the young PIs have to withstand. Reduce the load on PIs and you will reduce the load on students and postdocs. Don’t ignore mismanagement. Don’t ignore toxicity. Even if it doesn’t happen in your lab. @AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter #phdchat

This first edition of Prokaryotic Pangenomes course has been epic! Our minds were blown by the complexity of bacterial genetics and the diversity of pangenomes. @jomcinerney & Alan were top-notch, and the hands-on exercises were challenging yet rewarding. #Bioinformatics

No evidence for a common blood microbiome based on a population study of 9,770 healthy humans @NatureMicrobiol nature.com/articles/s4156…

TAMPA: interpretable analysis and visualization of metagenomics-based taxon abundance profiles | GigaScience | Oxford Academic academic.oup.com/gigascience/ar…

🥂 to first Doctoral Day presentation at @MedUniGraz! Presented some of the preliminary results from my research with Prof.@chmoei:'Microbiomes of the human respiratory-tract' Research can be hectic and stressful sometimes. But it's good to take breaks & unwind!! #PhD #academia

JUST UPDATED: our massive database of POSTDOC fellowships is available for download. We list 383 different fellowships with description of the award, eligibility criteria, deadline and amount. A fellowship gives you more freedom Download for free here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-op…

This year's christmas present for my awesome team- hoodie with important message 😉. Copyright: PhD students of the @moissleichingerlab. #archaea are just awesome!

Check out our amazing archaea merchandise! Soon to be available for sale! #archaea #sciencecommunication #moissleichingerlab @ShindeTejus

8 tools to make a better flowchart than in PPT 🧵👇

Metagenomics folks: an explainer of how the new release of KrakenUniq can run on your laptop, even with a 400GB database, thanks to very elegant engineering by Christopher Pockrandt. See our @biorxivpreprint for more 1/9 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…