Also figured I'd introduce myself--my name is Luigi and I'm a postbac fellow at the NIH. I'm a big fan of the Biology.SE community you guys have built here and I'd love to be more involved. I've been trying to answer some older unanswered Qs to help the site get ready for graduation but if there's anything else I can do that'd be helpful definitely let me know.

@Luigi Nice.. the answer ratio is a factor for graduation. Good questions and traffic are also factors. BTW what is postbac (post bachelors ?)

@WYSIWYG Postbac is post-bachelor's, yes. I graduated from Tulane last year and am about to start PhD interviews in January

(last year = May 2014)

Postbac = recovering from Bacterial infection. @WYSIWYG

@fileunderwater Hahaha..

or it can be positive for bacterial infection

luigi - PhD interviews in what sort of subject?

Hopefully I am neither of those types of postbac, haha

I'm interviewing in molecular bio with a focus on microbiology and infectious disease

@Luigi ahh ha.. so you are really interested in bacterial infections

:P

Some of the programs I'm applying to are focused on microbiology but others are general cell/molec bio with researchers working in microbiology

Yup, but I don't plan to contract any as part of my research

Are you not inspired by Barry Marshal ?:P

As a scientist yes, but hopefully I won't have to prove my hypothesis by drinking a culture of my bacteria\

So what are your interests @Luigi

I'm interested in infectious disease pathogenesis and pathogen-host interaction. Right now I'm working on HIV and SIV but my interests aren't necessarily limited to retroviruses

What about yourself?

I had worked on gene regulation in eukaryotes- esp miRNA mediated

my interests are increasing with time.. I have to put a control on this :P

I have that problem sometimes too. Especially when I hear about cool new plant viruses

That's really interesting. Are you getting your PhD in that area?

(or already have it?)

I am in 5th year.. Working on mathematical models since 3 months back

Sweet, so you're almost done! Are you looking to publish or just finish a thesis?

i cannot finish thesis without publishing :P

I would say this depends on the faculties rules for the PhD

university rules

yep.. mine requires 2 papers

first author

Wow, thats hard

Mine was three papers, but only one first author. And it was ok, when one of the three was only submitted.

yeah.. hard life.. Now I don't know whether this is right or not..

Papers indicate progress but setting a minimum limit of two would make people not take any risks

most will not

I would see it the other way: I think two first author papers is quite a limit - which could drive people into conducting scientific misconduct.

Wow that's pretty intense

I agree with Chris, that kind of promotes results-driven research

I feel like it should be your PhD committee's job to determine whether or not you did good work, rather than a kind of arbitrary two-first-author-paper minimum

But I guess it doesn't matter how fair it is because that's your requirement

perhaps..

But I have seen people getting 10-12 papers in their PhD

so irritating.. how everything falls into place just like the movies

10-12?

how do they do this in 3-4 years?

are they included on every paper of the group, no matter if they added to it or not?

Magic.. I dont know.. And correlation says that they are dumb as well

no not that strategy

still

This is fishy, sorry.

Or you use the "thin sliced salami tactics"

I would still prefer to publish one or two bigger articles that matter

i would prefer doing some interesting work :)

this is of course implied :-)

i am reading a book now on mathematical models in neuroscience

There's some neural network modeling research in computer science that's very interesting

The human brain is a pretty hard problem though

@WYSIWYG do you work from a mathematical or a more applied programming perspective?

And 10-12 papers in 4 years sounds like an outlier, I feel like it would be pretty difficult to be invested in that many uniquely publishable units especially when most PhDs seem so focused on their own projects

anybody available?

@MadScientist sorry to annoy you... r u available?