Scientific Communication Skills I – PHAR 8322 Calendar Tuesday, September 5, 2018 – Thursday, November 29, 2018 Course Instructors: Sean Davies & Claus Schneider No Class Meeting – Due Date Only SEPTEMBER 2018 SU M TU W TH F SA 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 OCTOBER 2018 SU M TU W TH F SA 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 NOVEMBER 2018 SU M TU W TH F SA 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 DECEMBER 2018 SU M TU W TH F SA 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 STUDENTS REGISTERED FOR THIS CLASS Student Name Email Address PI/Lab 1 Russell, Jason [email protected]Carrie Jones 2 Sebastian, Melaine [email protected]Carlos Lopez 3 Teal, Laura [email protected]Carrie Jones 4 Weiner, Rebecca [email protected]Becky Sappington 5 Winalski, Laura [email protected]Rebecca Ihrie
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Scientific Communication Skills I – PHAR 8322 Calendar Tuesday, September 5, 2018 – Thursday, November 29, 2018
No Class Meetings between Monday, October 29-Wednesday, November 28
Tuesday, November 27th – Assignment #5A Due: Updated Specific Aims + Significance (by Noon)
Thursday, November 29 ASSIGNMENT 5B DUE: Discussion of Updated Specific Aims & Significance
Time: 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Subject: 1. Discussion of Updated Specific Aims + Significance
2. Spring Journal Club logistics discussed 3. Course Wrap Up
Location: Bass Conference Room (436 RRB)
Scientific Communication Skills I – PHAR 8322 Calendar Tuesday, September 5, 2018 – Thursday, November 29, 2018
Course Instructors: Sean Davies & Claus Schneider
Hypothesis Testing Lecture I (David Sweatt) 09.06
ASSIGNMENT 1: VIDEOTAPING Due: September 11
Hypothesis Testing Lecture II (David Sweatt) 09.13 Introduction to NRSA (Kim Petrie) 09.18
ASSIGNMENT 2A: SPECIFIC AIMS PAGE Due: September 18
Each student will present a 10-minute summary on the following paper:
Michael L. Anstey, Stephen M. Rogers, Swidbert R. Ott, Malcolm Burrows, Stephen J. Simpson. Serotonin Mediates Behavioral Gregarization Underlying Swarm Formation in Desert Locusts. Science. 2009 Jan 20; 323:627-630. The paper is available for download on Blackboard. For this assignment, the speaking order has been assigned as above. You will be timed during your presentation, but you will not be given any signals as to how much time you have used. For this presentation, you will not be given feedback during class. Instead, during the week after the videotaping session, you will meet one-on-one with the Instructors in 30-minute sessions to watch your video and discuss what you like and what you'd like to change about your speaking style. We also ask you to take notes during the other students’ talk and list 2 or 3 ideas from their presentations (ways of presenting ideas / speaking style) that you would like to incorporate into your presentations. STUDENTS: THE REVIEW SESSIONS ON THURSDAY, 09/20 ARE INDIVIDUAL MEETINGS WITH THE INSTRUCTOR. ONLY COME TO YOUR ASSIGNED REVIEW SESSION IN 556B RRB (Sean Davies’ Office) FOR YOUR SCHEDULED TIME.
This assignment is designed to allow you to identify the aspects of your speaking habits that you would like to improve during the class.
ASSIGNMENT 2B: SPECIFIC AIMS PAGE CRITIQUE DUE SEPTEMBER 24
Scientific Communication Skills I – PHAR 8322 Calendar Tuesday, September 5, 2018 – Thursday, November 29, 2018
Course Instructors: Sean Davies & Claus Schneider
ASSIGNMENT 3: 15-MINUTE EDUCATIONAL SEMINAR DUE OCTOBER 4 Throughout your career you will have to teach and justify your science to non-scientists. Your ability to communicate complex concepts to smart, but non-scientifically trained individuals may be vital to keeping the public research enterprise going and for the public at large to understand the value of science research. This talk will give you practice in expressing yourself clearly and effectively to these audiences. You can choose from any of the three scenarios, but you must have your topic and scenario approved at least one week in advance. Scenario 1: You are an NIH funded scientist working on your current project. Some vocal political candidates have seized upon your project as the poster child for wasteful scientific spending and have ridiculed it widely in the media. In response to this publicity, you have been asked to appear at a hearing before the Senate subcommittee to describe your project and why it merits federal spending. You have been given 15 minutes to present your project and 5 minutes to answer questions. Make the following assumptions about the Senators who will be at the hearing (even if you do not necessarily believe that these attributes apply to all Senators):
They are well-educated and highly intelligent, but have not had any significant scientific training. Therefore, even highly complex scientific notions must be explained in terms of concepts familiar to non-scientists. Some of them will be interested in how your studies provide answers to interesting intellectual questions, but all of them will be particularly interested in how your studies will benefit the public. Your class mates will be asked to play the role of Senators representing various points of view and constituencies.
OR
Scenario 2: You are pitching your project (or related work in your field) to a group of philanthropists (e.g. Gates Foundation) with the hopes that they will fund your research. These philanthropists have a time horizon of 15 years for your research to turn into treatments/interventions that markedly improve in health for the target population. These philanthropist want to know why the disease/condition that you are studying is an important unmet health need, how your research will increase our understanding of the disease/condition, and why investing in your research is likely to provide a significant breakthrough in treatment/interventions. You have been given 15 minutes to present this information and 5 minutes to answer questions. Make the following assumptions about this group of philanthropists:
They are well-educated and highly intelligent, but only a few have had any significant scientific training. Therefore, even highly complex scientific notions must be explained in terms of concepts familiar to non-scientists. They have also sat through hundreds of hours of hype from other would be beneficiaries, so they tend to be critical of hyperbole and like data, as long as they can readily understand what that data means.
OR
Scenario 3: You have been asked by a teacher at a local high school to share with their 15-year old students how research science in your field impacts them or an important emerging concept in science related to your field of research. You have been given 15 minutes to present the project and 5 minutes to answer questions. Make the following assumptions about the children in the class (even if they do not apply to all children of this age):
They have been exposed to only the very basics of biology and math, and have no formal chemistry or physics background. They are eager to learn about the world around them and are particularly interested in things that help them make sense of the world. They are easily bored by monotonous lectures but respond well to exciting presentations that catch their interest. Consider how you might arrange the room or props that you should bring that would enhance your presentation. You want them to come out of the presentation not only excited about your project, but also about scientific discovery in general. Your classmates will be asked to play the role of high school students.
Scientific Communication Skills I – PHAR 8322 Calendar Tuesday, September 5, 2018 – Thursday, November 29, 2018
Course Instructors: Sean Davies & Claus Schneider
ASSIGNMENT 4: RETREAT TALK ABSTRACTS DUE OCTOBER 12 You will need to provide a short abstract of your retreat talk for the booklet. Please prepare this abstract and have it okayed by your PI. The final abstract is due to Karen Gieg at Noon on Friday, October 12th. Additional information on abstract formatting is available below. Each of you will give 2 practice Retreat talks in-class. Then, on Monday, 10/22 students will meet and present back-to-back in a final run through. The location for this final practice is 214 Light Hall.
Practice talks: Oct. 11 and Oct. 18 FINAL PRACTICE TALKS: Mon., Oct. 22 (6:00 pm; 214 Light Hall) – Come early for dinner, so
we can start presentations at 6:00 pm. You may set your own order for speaking on these days. Please use the laptop in Bass rather than your personal computer to mimic the retreat situation and to save time. This assignment will help you prepare your talk for the annual Pharmacology retreat, which is a 'proposal talk' in style. (As a note, you will also have to give a proposal talk when you are on faculty interviews, and will convert this style into writing for grants and/or fellowship applications.) You will give 2 practice talks in-class, and there will be one back-to-back final run through of all talks on Tuesday, Oct. 16 at 6pm in 214 Light Hall (dinner provided). The time slot for this talk is 10 minutes followed by a 5 minute Q and A session. For this, you will put together a talk describing your proposed research for your graduate work. Most students organize this in terms of Specific Aims (usually 2), but this is not required. The talk should contain sufficient background to introduce your topic and explain why additional work in this field is important. It should then include a description of the experiments you plan in order to address this deficiency in knowledge. If you already have preliminary data, this data can be included, but it is not necessary to have any data for this talk. At the retreat, you will notice that the more senior students giving data-centered meeting-style talks, and you can expect to give this type of talk during your third year in Pharmacology. IMPORTANT: It is your responsibility to have your Mentor OK the content of your talk before the retreat. It is to your benefit to get input from your PI on your aims as early as possible and have them watch you give a practice talk as early as possible (hopefully at a group meeting so lots of folks can give input). There is nothing more difficult than changing your talk the night before because your PI hates your aims or your presentation. As a secondary note, if a suggestion for your talk is given in-class and this conflicts with what your PI thinks, follow the advice of your PI (but do mention it to the Course Instructors so that they won't keep making the same point).
Scientific Communication Skills I – PHAR 8322 Calendar Tuesday, September 5, 2018 – Thursday, November 29, 2018
Course Instructors: Sean Davies & Claus Schneider
Retreat Abstract Formatting and Content Information:
The purpose of the Project Summary/Abstract is to describe succinctly every major aspect of the proposed project. It should contain a statement of objectives and methods to be employed. The abstract must be no longer than 1 page of text, and follow the required font and margin specifications. The abstract should not contain proprietary confidential information. The abstract should include YOUR NAME (plus any collaborators, including your mentor) and PROJECT TITLE (you’d be
surprised at the number of people who forget to include this information) Text must follow these minimum requirements:
Font size: must be a minimum 11 points (smaller text in figures, graphs, diagrams and charts is acceptable as long as it is legible when the page is viewed at 100%). We recommended the following fonts, although other fonts (both serif and non-serif) are acceptable: Arial, Garamond, Georgia, Helvetica, Palatino Linotype, Times New Roman, Verdana
Type density: must be no more than 15 characters per linear inch (including characters and spaces)
Line spacing: must be either single or double spaced
Text color: must be black (color text in figures, graphs, diagrams, charts, tables, footnotes and headings is acceptable)
Use paper size no larger than standard letter paper size (8 ½" x 11”).
Margins: Provide at least one-half inch margins (top, bottom, left, and right). Additional suggestions:
Avoid jargon.
Spell out acronyms the first time it is used and note the appropriate abbreviation in parentheses. The abbreviation may be used thereafter.
Scientific Communication Skills I – PHAR 8322 Calendar Tuesday, September 5, 2018 – Thursday, November 29, 2018
Course Instructors: Sean Davies & Claus Schneider
SAMPLE ABSTRACT: Characterization of “Mycobacterium Gyrase Inhibitors” (MGIs): A Novel Class of Gyrase Poisons
Elizabeth G. Gibson§, Tim R. Blower✜, James M. Berger✜, and Neil Osheroff¶⌘
Departments of §Pharmacology, ⌘Biochemistry and ¶Medicine (Hematology/Oncology)
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN 37232 ✜Department of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore,
MD 21205 Tuberculosis is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. In 2013, an estimated 9.0 million people developed TB and 1.5 million died from the disease and an estimated 480,000 people developed multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). The current standard of treatment is the RIPE regimen: rifampin, isoniazid, pyrazinamide, and ethambutol. Resistance is prevalent against these drugs and the second-line treatment, fluoroquinolones. There is an urgent need for drug discovery and development of a novel class of anti-tubercular drugs to combat wide-spread resistance. My proposal is designed to characterize a new class of compounds classified as “Mycobacterium Gyrase Inhibitors” (MGIs) for use in the treatment of drug resistant tuberculosis. For preliminary studies, I have utilized purified wild-type M. tuberculosis gyrase and mutant enzymes to characterize the activity and feasibility of the three MGIs: GSK000, GSK325, and GSK126. All three compounds displayed activity against gyrase, with GSK000 being the most efficacious. In marked contrast to fluoroquinolone antibacterials, MGIs induced primarily single-stranded DNA breaks. The compounds did not cleave DNA in the absence of gyrase and the DNA breaks were reversible, further demonstrating the role of gyrase in generating the MGI-induced strand breaks. GSK000 displayed a strong preference for M. tuberculosis gyrase over Bacillus anthracis or Escherichia coli topoisomerase IV, suggesting specificity for gyrase. Finally, the MGIs retained activity against a common fluoroquinolone resistant mutant gyrase and displayed no significant activity against
human topoisomerase II. Taken together, these results suggest that MGIs are a novel class of gyrase poisons that have potential as anti-tubercular drugs for MDR-TB.
ASSIGNMENT 5A: UPDATED SPECIFIC AIMS + SIGNIFICANCE
DUE NOVEMBER 27
ASSIGNMENT 5B: DISCUSSION OF UPDATED SPECIFIC AIMS + SIGNIFICANCE
