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Working with difficult or bad mentors

4/4/2026

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During a career in science, you may be put in the position to work with difficult people. This can run the gamut from people with tricky personalities to abusive or toxic personalities. This can be difficult enough if they are just coworkers, but sometimes these difficult people will be your boss.

            Obviously, toxic or difficult personalities are not limited to academia or science. I worked for seven years for Radioshack (remember Radioshack?). This was an ideal job for me in high-school and college, and I made great money (for a part-time job) selling cellphones and TVs and computers. I had six managers during that time, and they ranged from the best and most influential mentor I have had in my life, to downright verbally abusive. On the positive side, I had a manager at Radioshack who assigned readings to broaden my horizons (Malcolm X’s autobiography!) and challenged me to do better in my college classes. I also had a manager who showed up drunk and stumbling, and was frequently verbally abusive (he was eventually fired). I had another manager who was a creep, not towards me, but he said many things that made me uncomfortable. I had another manager who was as dumb as a bag of hammers. So when I started graduate school, I was looking forward to having mentors that were experts, and who I could respect.
 
            I also have experience with mentors in science who were bad people. I am going to be vague about career stage for privacy reasons, but I had one mentor who was just a terrible person. Their transgressions included abusing research animals, sexually harassing students, verbally abusing and belittling everyone in the lab, and sleeping around in a department where their spouse also worked. I reported all of the awful behavior to the department chair and other faculty, and absolutely nothing was done about it. I have a decent capacity for suffering, so I just gritted my teeth and tried to leave the lab as quickly as possible.
 
            A substantial minority of the people that I know in the sciences have worked with a bad person, and almost everyone has worked with a difficult person. Sometimes even good people treat people poorly during period of stress (like being a pre-tenure faculty member, or high-stakes field or lab work). I think for decent people who may not be aware that they are having a bad impact on trainees, setting boundaries and explaining the bad impact of their behavior can help reduce any issues. However, for bad people, this may not work.
 
            There are steps that you can take if your mentor is irredeemably bad. First, you can just try to power through, like I did for a while. This may not be a good choice depending on your personality, if you have a long time to completion, or if the abusive behavior is really bad. I am not sure that it was the best choice for me, but it is what I did.
 
            Second, you can try to get help resolving the situation from sympathetic allies that are in a position of power. My experience is that this works best if you can actually remove yourself from the orbit of the toxic mentor (e.g., complete a chapter of a dissertation in another lab), as the toxic person is unlikely to respond to criticism from someone else. They might ease off just enough to let you finish and be done.
 
            Third, you can try to seek help from someone higher up the chain (e.g., if your undergraduate advisor is being abusive, you can reach out to the department chair). I think whether or not this works has a lot to do with the institutional culture around such things. Institutions are usually most interested in protecting themselves, and in my experience prefer to suppress reports of bad behavior, rather than solve them. I also think that the presence of a toxic personality in an academic unit might well be a signal that the unit does not care about reducing abusive behavior. My personal experience was that my reports of illegal and unethical behavior were ignored. But this happened back in the mists of time in the early 2000s, and I do think that awareness of bad behavior by mentors has increased, and tolerance for abuse has decreased. I also think that if something illegal is happening, and you have evidence/documentation, the institution may be forced to act. Whether or not you formally report bad behavior depends a lot on the specifics of your circumstances.
 
            Finally, you can always leave an abusive mentoring situation. This is what I did when I could, and I think it is often the best choice. After all, why choose to continue to work with someone who is being a jerk? I think many people, including myself, fall for the sunk cost fallacy when making these decisions. If you are two years into a five-year dissertation, it may feel like you wasted two years if you leave the lab. But those two years are gone, and suffering through another three years can have profound impacts on your mental health. Also, those two years are not wasted, even if you switch fields, because you have likely completed classes and learned research techniques that you can bring to a new position. Also, in the grand scheme of your life, two or three or even five years is not that long, and my perspective is that life is too short to be miserable for very long.
 
            However, you may well encounter difficulties leaving a toxic situation. Often the personality traits that make someone abusive also makes them want to sabotage your ability to leave. In my case, my toxic advisor tried to make me stick around longer, and I informed them that I was leaving at a certain point, regardless of completion. You might also be threatened with career sabotage. All I can tell you is that reports that a trainee is terrible are met with a lot of suspicion, and at least in my corner of integrative biology, nobody has such centralized power that they can scuttle careers at will. My only advice to you is that you deserve to be treated well, and if you have decided that leaving is the best course of action, then you should feel empowered to do so.
 
            Nobody deserves to be treated poorly or abused. And I think that the preponderance of mentors in our field are humane and decent people, even if all of us stumble sometimes in our mentorship of junior scientists. So if you are in a bad situation, reach out to people that you trust, and consider leaving if it is possible for you. You will be amazed at how life improves without a malevolent force in your life. And choosing to stick around in an abusive situation can have far-reaching negative impacts. All of us should take the lessons learned from all mentors, even the evil ones, and incorporate them into our mentorship to make sure that we treat our mentees in an ethical way.  
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Why is multicausality underappreciated in organismal biology?

3/22/2026

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 I kind of enjoy the raging debates that you often see in the literature in the broad fields of ecology and evolution. These debates can be useful, because folks feel strongly about the points that they are making, and so often marshal all of their resources and rhetorical skills to advance their position. Although I definitely see the benefits of these debates, I often feel that many of them boil down to one person saying that Factor A is the only important thing for explaining some pattern, and the other side is saying the same thing about Factor B. But this makes me wonder why organismal biologists would think that most patterns are driven by a single causal factor, when I think the universe is multivariate and multicausal.
             In my own little corner of organismal biology, I have noticed this pattern in studies of the evolution of viviparity in snakes and lizards. We don’t need to get into the weeds on this, but the dominant hypotheses for the evolution of viviparity is that viviparous species can regulate temperature of the eggs, while oviparous species cannot (squamates usually have eggs in burrows that are not attended). Hence, selection would favor egg retention, with an endpoint of viviparity. The evidence for this pattern is biogeographical- at high latitudes and elevations, which are cold, a high proportion of species are viviparous. The fly in the ointment is that myself and other scientists think that it is possible that other biophysical variables are important. In fact, most squamates species are found close to the equator, so species at high elevations in the tropics constitute a big chunk of viviparous squamates. After all, oxygen availability decreases with elevation, as does water vapor pressure, and of course both of these variables are correlated with temperature and with each other. Because these are so intercorrelated, isolating the effect of one variably is difficult statistically. However, most papers have stuck with temperature being the only variable that matters, frequently not even considering other variables. Why wouldn’t other variables matter as well? I think it is because some people must think that only one variable could matter, when it seems more plausible to me that whatever drives the evolution of viviparity must be multicausal.
             There are many other great examples, such as whether scaling exponents are 0.75 or 0.67 for the metabolic relationship with body size, because the scaling exponent indicates whether volumetric scaling or the fractal nature of nutrient delivery networks drives metabolic scaling. Yet it seems obvious to me that both factors can be important.
             ​So why do we have dogmatic arguments about which factor drives X, without a whole lot of nuance or room for other factors? I am not really sure, but there are several possibilities. Making the case that it is a single, simple factor behind some broad pattern may be appealing to our psychology. Writing papers with a single driver may be more appealing to high-impact journals. And I think it is natural, if you put it out there in your papers that Factor A is most important, that you defend that conclusion.
             But I don’t think that is the best way to do science. We should be happy to prove ourselves wrong. A paper is not a static statement of truth. It is a data-based document with our best explanation at the time, which is going to be limited by the tools and information available to us when we wrote the paper. And more generally, I think our literature would be better if we moved beyond simplistic discussions of whether factor A or B matter, and take a more holistic approach that acknowledges the potential of multicausality driving biological patterns.
             I should note that there are many counterexamples that do acknowledge complexity and multicausality, and I think most work in most fields is not dogmatic about a single causal driver of patterns. It is also probably true that those examples are harder to remember because they are not beset with drama and conflict. However, I think that this is a pervasive pattern in our literature, even if it is not in the majority.
             What do I think should happen in my ideal world? Well, I wish journals, particularly higher impact journals, would not be so biased towards “clean” stories. I think The American Naturalist is a good example of a journal that publishes impactful work, but also tends to acknowledge complexity and potential for multicausality. I think it would be better if (for example), it would not be seen as invalidating or a threat to previous work to acknowledge that things may be a bit more complicated than we originally thought. And I hope that scientists grow more comfortable with thinking about how many biological patterns may be caused by multiple drivers. 
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​You can pick your job, or your location, but it is hard to do both

3/15/2026

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It is no secret that the academic job market is highly competitive. I am at a large, research intensive university in south Florida, and even very specific positions attract dozens of applicants. Besides being highly competitive, academic positions are often very specific. While really large and prestigious institutions might put out a general call (that is still quite specific relative to the diversity of fields in biology) for an ecologist or an evolutionary biologist, most jobs are more specific: a microbial ecologist, or a plant ecologist, or evolutionary biologist who studies invertebrates. The combination of a highly competitive job market and the uncertain and specific positions that open in a particular university means that even highly competitive applicants can pick either the type of they want, or the location where they want to live, but only rarely both.
            I should hit the pause button here and explain that I don’t put a value judgement on prioritizing either the type of job you want or where you want to live. All of this depends on the specifics of your situation and how you want to live your life.  I am just trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I am also not defending the way that things are, but I don’t think that anything is likely to change any time soon.
            I think as soon as you acknowledge and understand this tradeoff, then it makes the strategy for applying for jobs much more straightforward. If you can only be happy in the Bay area in northern California, you will need to be open to academic positions beyond the tenure track, and probably non-academic positions as well. On the other hand, if your primary goal is to be a tenure-track faculty member, you should apply broadly, irrespective of the location of the position, which will maximize your chances of getting the kind of job you want.
            By the way, I think this sort of logic applies to any type of specialized job. If you want a job in a zoo, or you want to work for the National Park Service, you also are unlikely to be able to have a great degree of control over the location of your job. Of course, there are many jobs (nurse, doctor, lawyer, accountant) that can be relatively easy to transfer between locations (at least relative to jobs in academia).
            As with many things, there is a sort of middle ground. I think you can perhaps focus on a particular region, or try to avoid a region, and still be successful, particularly if you have a competitive application. For example, while I grew up in the corn belt of the Midwest in Iowa, I don’t particularly like cold weather. So while I applied to jobs across the US, I focused on jobs in the southern third of the country. Some regions (e.g., the West Coast, the Northeast, the Midwest, the Southeast) have a ton of schools, and you would be more likely to be successful in focusing on those areas than on a single city or state.
            Finally, I think it is a good idea to try and be open minded (if possible given your circumstances) about where you would be willing to live. Way back in 2014 when I was first on the job market, I got interviews at many places (rural Kansas, rural Illinois, rural Pennsylvania, Jackson, Mississippi) that would not have been at the top of my list of places that I wanted to live. However, in each case, I met amazing people doing good work in those schools, and I was usually surprised by how much I liked the town and the area. So if there is a chance you might be willing to live somewhere that is not your top choice, go ahead and apply, and you might be surprised at how much you end up liking the institution and the area. 
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What is the most stressful part of an academic career in science?

3/7/2026

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There is no doubt that academia is stressful for many folks. And while not all scientists are in academia, almost all will have academic training at the undergraduate, M.S., or PhD. level. So what is driving the stress in academia? Well, there are many candidate factors- high to unrealistic expectations, a competitive culture, lots of critical external evaluations, and uncertainty. I think anxiety is an important factor for many people in what kind of jobs they want and whether they want to stick with science.
 
            One thing that I wanted to mention is that I don’t know that academia is more stressful than other careers that are highly competitive and involve years of training. I would have to imagine that vet med school, or med school, or law school, are just as stressful or more stressful than grad school in the sciences, at least for most folks. I suspect that competition, and the accompanying uncertainty, is probably always going to be a generator of stress.
 
            My own experience with stress in academia might be a bit atypical, because I rarely feel much in the way of stress, and I struggle to be aware of when I might feel stressed. I don’t think I am consciously suppressing anything, but I just don’t seem to notice that I am stressed out unless something makes it obvious. As an example, I am pretty sure that I was at my most stressed out when I was a postdoc, particularly during the final year or two when I was on the job market. I recall feeling busy, but not particularly stressed. However, during this period, I would sleepwalk regularly, enough so that it was a joke between my wife and I. I had not sleepwalked as an adult before, and have not since. I have to imagine it was stress, driven by busyness and uncertainty at this transitional period in my life.
 
            I was curious about how typical it was to feel high stress at the postdoc stage, so I asked about a dozen of my friends in science. These folks have positions ranging from working for the federal government to professors at liberal arts colleges. This is of course not a random sample, but it is a bit of a sampling of when mid-career folks like me have felt the most stress.
 
            Almost everyone I talked to (10/12) felt the most stressed out at the end of the PhD and during their next position, whether it was as a postdoc, adjunct lecturer, assistant professor, or other professional position. The two folks who were not most stressed during this period felt the most stress either as a pre- or post-tenure faculty.
 
            The most straightforward interpretation of this pattern is probably that uncertainty and contingency are major generators of stress and anxiety. While I was having some success getting interviews and offers during my “big” year for applying for a permanent faculty position, there was also a massive amount of uncertainty. The offers kind of dribbled in, and I had to turn down okay offers before I had a better offer a couple of times, which was a gamble that I was pretty nervous to take. In addition, while my wife is not an academic, there was some uncertainty around whether she would have a job when we moved. And I also think just not knowing where you will be for the next substantial chunk of time can be stressful.
 
            ​Beyond contingency, I think the other major factor is if the job/school/advisor is a bad fit, or if you end up working for toxic person. At least a quarter of the people who I spoke with had a difficult boss during their most stressful period. Clearly, being required to work with someone who you don’t click with, or someone who is a jerk, would spark anxiety, particularly if they control your paycheck and your future.
 
            ​I don’t know that any of the above will necessarily help anybody who is in a stressful period. I think in most careers there will be times of high stress. If you have an anxious personality, I suppose it might be good to be prepared for the stressful times, and it most likely will be during the end of the PhD and beginning of the postdoc. I have a bunch of friends who saw mental health professionals and took anti-anxiety meds to make it through the difficult times, and I think that could be a great way to be prepared for the tough times. If the stress is due to something you can change (e.g., a toxic mentor), then it might be in your best interests to pivot to a different lab or project. But mainly I just wanted to convey that almost everyone experiences these periods of high stress during an academic job, and the experience of myself and my network is that these periods do not last forever, and you can often come out the other side more resilient and hopefully empathetic with others who are having a tough time. 
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Everyone is someone’s first choice

12/24/2025

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Part of being a scientist is applying for things- grants, fellowships, jobs, and others. And of course, much of the time you are rejected after applying. However, sometimes you do get a grant, or a job, and at least part of the time, you might know that you were not the first choice. So what does it mean if you are a second choice, and what should you do about it, if anything?
            I have personal experience with being the second choice. I happen to know that I was the second choice for the postdoc position that I eventually got. I was also the second choice for my current position. How I know does not particularly matter, but there is often evidence of being the second choice in the timing of an offer. In both of my cases of being a second choice, I was informed by my prospective employers that I was the second choice, so I could not salve my ego with the balm of ambiguity.
            What does it mean that you are the second choice? I think the only thing it means is that the prospective advisor, or search committee, or department, decided to offer the position to someone else first. You won’t ever really know why this happens, but having seen this from the other side, it is usually contingent and has nothing to do with candidate quality. The other candidate might just fit the job ad or position a little better, even if the department (or postdoc advisor) really liked you. You might actually be the first choice, but the department choice was vetoed by the chair or dean. Even if you were not the first choice of the department or dean, you were some of the faculty’s first choice, guaranteed. And even if it is just one person making a decision (like a potential postdoc advisor), they are making their first and second choices with imperfect information. Speaking again from the other side of the decision-making, I have often reflected on how a department’s second choice turned out to be perfect for what we needed, and probably worked out better than our first choice.
            So what should you do about it if you find out you are the second choice? I think the only thing you need to do is not give that fact any weight at all. You were someone’s favorite (at least if a department or committee is making the decision), and nobody remembers who is first or second after a few months anyhow. My postdoc advisor ended up being a friend and long-time collaborator, despite being his second choice. I have loved my time at FIU, made friends with good colleagues, and earned tenure at FIU despite being second choice. It would be a real tragedy if something ultimately trivial like being a second choice poisoned what was otherwise a good opportunity. 
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The dangers of abstraction in biology

12/7/2025

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​I worry about abstraction in biology. When I refer to abstraction, I am generally referring to anytime we somehow transform, or abstract data in some fashion so that we are interpreting a transformed version of the data, and not the original data. What might be an example of this? I always think of molecular phylogenetics. The actual data used in molecular phylogenetics are individual sequences of DNA. There is then a layer of abstraction in aligning those DNA sequences to infer homology, then yet another layer of abstraction when those alignments are fed into an algorithm to infer a phylogeny.
            Of course, abstraction is inevitable. In the example of molecular phylogenetics, abstraction has occurred before we actually get to the DNA sequences. If we imagine that those sequences are generated by Sanger sequencing, then what is actually read by a sequencer is length of a sequence and reflectance of a labelled nucleotide in a capillary, which is then abstracted by a program into a linear DNA sequence. But I would argue that in this case, we can assume a nearly one to one correspondence between the actual DNA sequence and our abstracted linear sequence in a text file. I think where we need to be concerned is when we have reasons to think that the relationship between the actual data and the abstracted data is diverging from that one to one relationship.
            So why do we need to be concerned about abstraction? I think because it can generate problems that are non-identifiable. Using the same example of molecular phylogenetics, the step of alignment and assuming homology might not be appropriate because of pseudogenes or errors in alignment (particularly for very large datasets). There are many issues that can occur with the next step of reconstructing phylogenies, either problems like long-branch attraction that occur due to data problems, or because the method of reconstruction is inappropriate or incorrectly implemented. Of course, the phylogeny is rarely the last step of the process, as the phylogeny can then be used to map the evolution of traits, or trace the biogeography of a group, or to understand historical demography. For example, if we actually want to know how many times a trait has evolved convergently, we then need to use hierarchically abstracted data to make the actual biological inference that we are actually interested in. If our abstraction has created misleading patterns in the data at any stage, this could lead to making inaccurate inferences.
            I have been using the example of molecular phylogenetics and phylogenetic comparative biology, but that is only because these are fields where I have a lot of practical experience with data and methods. I can come up with similar issues with abstractions with species distribution modelling, visual models, and biophysical modelling, and of course there are many others.
            What should we do about abstraction? Well, I don’t think the solution is to avoid all abstraction altogether. I think that as scientists, we are already pretty comfortable with uncertainty, and in historical fields like phylogenetics and phylogenetic comparative biology, making inferences based upon heavily abstracted data is unavoidable. I do think that one thing that we can and should do is to both acknowledge the uncertainty that results from abstraction, and resist the urge to write papers more forcefully than is merited by our data and methods. I know that in order to get higher impact papers, making a forceful case for a single narrative is often the best bet for acceptance and impact. But we should also be precise in the confidence of inferences. From a pragmatic perspective, if we are making abstractions (e.g., inferring species distributions or physiology based upon remote sensing data) that can be groundtruthed with actual data, we should do so, either in the same studies, or encourage studies that do so. Additionally, even for historical data that cannot be groundtruthed, we should try to conduct robust and severe tests of hypotheses (sensu Platt and Deborah Mayo) with different types of data and analyses (e.g., integrating fossil data into biogeographic studies based on molecular phylogenetics). I think that the best work already employs these practices, but there is great scope for wider adoption of these methods. 
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Prestige of a graduate program does not matter as much as you might think

11/16/2025

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My graduate training was not in particularly prestigious programs. I applied for about a dozen Masters programs, got into a handful, and chose to attend the University of Alabama. When I was looking for a PhD program, I talked to few potential advisors, but was only encouraged to apply to a single program. So I only applied for and was accepted (luckily!) into the quantitative biology program at the University of Texas Arlington, so I went to UTA. So both my Master’s and PhD institutions were solid, but not famous or prestigious. After my PhD, I was a postdoc at the University of Virginia, which is a fancier and more prestigious institution (they are called a public ivey by some, probably mostly UVA alums) that is highly ranked. The department also has several important figures in ecology and evolutionary biology that are leaders of major scientific organizations and so on. My experience with all three institutions has given me some insight into how prestige of the institution influences career trajectories.
            I was curious, so I compiled a list of all of the graduate students that I could remember from around when I was at each institution. There has been plenty of time (at least a decade) for these cohorts to settle into permanent positions. I am not going to show the data for confidentiality reasons, so you will just have to trust me. Also, this is at best some back of the envelope calculations (this is a blog, not a journal), so you should consider this to be illustrative, not definitive.
            So what are the career trajectories of PhD students at each type of institution? Well, they are almost identical. About a quarter of the students at each institution ended up in tenure-track jobs, and at roughly the same types of institutions ranging from PUIs to R1s. Most of the others ended up in highly sought after careers like working for federal or state agencies or for biotech companies. Only a few seemed to have jobs that did not require a PhD, or jobs that were not permanent. At least at the three institutions that I trained at, the outcomes are basically the same, despite spanning the prestige spectrum.
            I am not trying to claim that there are no benefits to attending more prestigious programs. Monetary support for research is likely to be greater, and you may get to rub elbows with bigshots that can open doors for you later in your career. There are a few institutions (e.g., Harvard, Yale, Princeton) that come with a special cachet that would definitely benefit you. But you can also get a great job if you get a PhD at a large, not particularly well-known public university. And you can definitely have a miserable experience at an Ivey, or an amazing experience (like mine!) at a big public school. Even if on average grad students at prestigious programs have “better” outcomes (whatever that means), the benefit is likely to be small, variable, and not particularly predictive of individual success.  To me, this suggests that a lot of what drives variation in career outcomes among grad student cohorts is what individual students want out of a career and life. 
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What are the differences between being a professor at a primarily undergraduate institution versus a highly research-intensive institution?

10/26/2025

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There is a paradox for people seeking a job as a faculty in a college or university, which is that everybody, by definition, has completed a PhD at a high-research university. However, many of the faculty positions that are available are at both private and public institutions without a PhD program. I checked the eco evo jobs spreadsheet at the time of this post, and about half of the positions in the US and Canada were at schools without a PhD program. I also think many faculty job-seekers have preconceptions about the differences between the institutions that are worth examining.  I was faculty at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI), and I am now faculty at a public university with very high research activity (classified as an R1 institution by the Carnegie Foundation), and so I have the somewhat unique experiences of having taught and conducted research at both types of institutions.
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            My first faculty position was a Georgia Southern University, which is a regional public institution with many Master’s programs, a very few doctoral programs (none in any of the sciences at the time), and lots of undergraduate students. At the time, Georgia Southern was a primarily undergraduate institution, with substantial teaching loads (I taught three classes a semester). My startup funds were generous for the type of institution, but much more limited than for a big research university- I had plenty of money to buy equipment and conduct research, but I couldn’t support a laboratory manager for long or a postdoctoral researcher. Expectations for tenure were matched to the teaching load and research support- I was supposed to publish every year, publish work from research at GSU, and apply for substantial funding.

            My current position is at Florida International University, which is a giant (nearly 60K students!), very high research, and public institution in Miami Florida. FIU has lots of doctoral programs, a medical school, and our teaching load is correspondingly modest (I teach one to two courses per semester). My startup funds were low for a big research institution, but still enough to pay for a postdoc and some graduate student support. Expectations for tenure were publishing regularly and bringing in at least one large grant from NSF, NIH, or similar.
            What are the similarities or differences between a job at a master’s granting PUI versus an R1 institution? Well, from my perspective, the similarities between the two jobs is most striking. The week is structured by teaching in both jobs, albeit the amount of teaching was greater for me at Georgia Southern. Research was just as important at Georgia Southern as it is at FIU, but the amount of time to do research is less at Georgia Southern. Service was generally similar between the two jobs. I have many friends that are professors across the entire spectrum of institutions of higher educations, and I think the job is largely similar across institutions.  And some of the factors that many folks think would be different between a PUI and an R1 differed, at least for me, in the opposite direction that you might pick.

            I think because the perceived hierarchy of higher ed has been so engrained in our training, there is an expectation that the more research-intensive school is better somehow. I can tell you that when I was faculty at Georgia Southern, I had a gorgeous office with high ceilings and a giant floor to ceiling window that looked out to a forest. My office at FIU is a hot (HVAC is a challenge in Florida) little cell in a building whose architecture must have been inspired by the Soviet Era brutalist aesthetic. Especially at large but cash-strapped public institutions like FIU, space is always difficult. At Georgia Southern, I shared a new and well-equipped lab with another faculty member who did similar research. At FIU, I share a larger but older lab space with another faculty member who does similar research. Grad students at Georgia Southern had allocated office space, while finding office space for grad students at FIU has been a challenge. In other words, a large research university will not necessarily have better facilities or infrastructure that a PUI. 

            One other common misconception about working at a PUI versus an R1 institution is that working at a PUI is less stressful or hectic. In fact, I have talked to lots of faculty job seekers (grad students and postdocs) who want a job at a PUI because of this idea. However, I have found that the busyness and stress is the same at both institutions. Before I was tenured at FIU, there was certainly anxiety about landing a big research grant, as well as keeping up research productivity with publications. However, I felt the same amount of stress at Georgia Southern to keep up research productivity despite a substantial teaching load. After all, I still needed to fund my work and have a productive research program, and so I was still writing grant proposals and manuscripts. As mentioned before, I have colleagues and many different types of institutions, and when I was first on the job market, I interviewed at many different types of institutions. From my perspective, the stress about the job is generally the same, regardless of the type of the institution. Probably the biggest driver of stress in any faculty position is your personal inclination towards anxiety or stress and institution-specific factors, regardless of the category of institution as R1 or PUI.

            Of course, not all aspects of the job at an R1 or PUI are the same. I get paid a lot better at FIU (probably because we have a faculty union, UFF-FIU), but the cost of living in Miami, Florida is wildly higher than in Statesboro, Georgia. I have found that the capacity for research is certainly greater at FIU, with PhD students, research institutes, and many other resources. Because of time limitations due to the teaching load, either the scope of projects or the amount of time to complete a project were impacted at Georgia Southern. Ironically, I think it is easier to be a good teacher at FIU that Georgia Southern, because you can devote more time to teaching when you are teaching a lot less. To keep up research productivity and not be a workaholic, there was a certain amount of triage that had to take place with teaching at Georgia Southern. It may surprise you to learn that the faculty and leadership at FIU cares about teaching just as much as faculty and leadership at Georgia Southern.

            What does this mean for faculty job seekers at PUIs and R1s? Well, I think the most important point is that it is basically the same job regardless of the type of college or university. The good (e.g., you get to set your schedule, you control your teaching and research programs, etc.) and bad (e.g., lack of structure can lead to overworking, faculty interests are not always aligned with institutional leadership, etc) of being a faculty member are largely the same. If you are interested in a job at a PUI because you think it is easier or less stressful, I hate to tell you that I don’t think that is the case. Conversely, if you have trepidations about landing an R1 job because it seems too busy or stressful, I can tell you that I have not found it more or less stressful than a less research-intensive position. I can say that I was just as happy at Georgia Southern as I am at FIU, and I have a list of things I like and dislike about both places. As is often the case, it will be the specifics of the particular institution (and your match to that institution), rather than broad categorizations based upon research intensity, that will likely determine how happy you are with your job. 
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The joys and difficulties of course-based undergraduate research experiences (CURES) in organismal courses

10/19/2025

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One of the best parts of my job is teaching. I particularly enjoy teaching Herpetology, which I have taught Herpetology at three different institutions- I taught Herpetology at Georgia Southern when I was a faculty at that institution, and I currently teach Herpetology at both Florida International University and at the University of Virginia’s Mountain Lake Biological Station. I have made herpetology particularly meaningful for both myself and the students by incorporating ana authentic class research project into the courses both at MLBS and FIU, which nowadays is called “course-based undergraduate research experience”.

            Of course, most laboratory classes in biology involve research, but most research in these laboratories has a predetermined outcome (at least if the lab goes well!), and involves following a pretty strict protocol. I have taught those type of laboratories and classes, and I think they are the right choice for the priorities in certain course. However, when I speak of integrating “authentic” research into courses, that is not what I am describing. Nor am I thinking of small-scale individual or small-group projects that are unlikely to be able to satisfactorily answer any scientific question. Rather, I mean “authentic” research in that we do not know the answer to the research question, we design the study and experiments together as a class, and we aim for enough replication to end up with a publishable chunk of research, with all of the students coauthors on and contributors to the resulting manuscript.

What are the benefits of incorporating authentic research into your classes? Well, for the instructor, this can help generate data for research productivity (not a factor at an R1, but could be important for positions where the teaching load is substantial) and make instruction more immediate, concrete, and compelling. But generally, incorporating research in this way is a lot more work for the instructor, and the real benefit is to the students. Students that participate in these sorts of classes get improved learning outcomes, realistic research experience, and may even get to be a coauthor on a scientific publication. We know that research experiences can improve social understanding of science, increase representation of under-represented groups, and help students get into graduate school (either in biology or medical school or similar). However, most students attend public institutions and will not be able to work in a laboratory. Course based research expands access to research in a way that I find satisfying, although it by no means solves the access issue.

            I have been integrating authentic research into Field Herpetology classes at Mountain Lake Biological Station since I first taught the class in 2016, and in my Herpetology class at FIU since 2021. So what I will be describing is what works for me. However, I do think that what will work can vary a lot across types of institutions and courses (i.e., I have only integrated research into an upper-level organismal course with limited enrollment). Also, I think my approach works because I like writing papers a lot, and rarely is anyone else interested in being the first author. This is not a humble-brag- just because I like it does not mean I am good at it, and I like writing any sort of paper, regardless of impact. In fact, I regularly procrastinate by writing a modest paper when I should be working on grant proposals or more difficult, higher impact papers. Some scientists are more motivated by other aspects of the research process but don’t love writing, and if you are that sort of scientist, it is unlikely that you will motivate yourself to write up a class project for publication. Regardless, I am just trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive, when I discuss how these courses work for me.

            The first place where I tried to integrate authentic research into a course was my Field Herpetology class at Mountain Lake Biological Station. This is an intensive three-week field course, where students live and learn at the station, which is isolated on a mountain in southwestern Virginia. In other words, this is the perfect context for incorporating research into a biology course. The very first time that I taught this course back in 2016, I split the class of eleven students into three different groups, and each group devised their own research project. As I recall, one group studied aversive behavior in bullfrog and green frog tadpoles, another studied courtship behaviors in red-spotted newts, and the last group studied diet and behavior of garter snakes. I have to recall this because while valuable as a learning tool, none of these projects resulted in enough high-quality data for a scientific manuscript. I found that with multiple projects, neither myself or the TA (yes I had a TA for eleven students) had enough time to really vet and help design the research, and the students did not have enough time to collect enough data for a publication, regardless of the project design. Based on this experience, I completely overhauled how I approach these class projects, which has generally (but not always!) been more successful.

            My general approach to devising a research project is to first come up with the skeleton of an idea prior to the class period. I do this by chatting the concept over with collaborators (my former postdoc Ian Clifton, now an assistant prof at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, or my collaborators Mike Logan at UNR and Alison Davis Rabosky at the University of Michigan, all of which have coauthored class projects with me) or with the TA. One of the great pleasures in my life has been teaching Field Herpetology at Mountain Lake Biological Station with Albert Chung, who was an M.S. student of mine at Georgia Southern and has TAed (and now co-instructed) the MLBS course since 2017. By coming up with the general idea we can do the groundwork to make sure that the basic idea is a sound one. Of course, we then do all of the necessary parts of research in the class to give the students ownership of the concept, but I have found that students prefer to be given a starting idea that we can then elaborate on as a class. We also only attempt a single project for each class, which helps us to meet sample size goals and ensure publishable results.

            Beyond the project idea, the other aspect that I have found to be crucial is selection of the research system. When I first started teaching at MLBS, I thought perhaps the class projects would be on salamanders, which are by far the most abundant vertebrates on the station. However, salamanders have been the focus of research at MLBS for decades, and so a lot of the low hanging fruit has already been plucked by previous researchers. Additionally, while I almost studied salamanders for my dissertation, and have been involved with some research on salamanders (my only species description is a salamander from northern Mexico), they are not the focus of my research, which means that it was more difficult to come up with a good research idea that could be done as part of a project for which we only really had a couple of weeks. There are plenty of other herps at MLBS of course, such as garter snakes and water snakes, but many of those have also been fairly well-studied or had logistical issues associated with them. I was lamenting the lack of a place where we could get some more interesting animals, maybe even snakes, at MLBS to the director Butch Brodie (who is a herpetologist as well as a coleopterologist, among many other things), and he told me of a rocky hillside near the station that looked good for snakes. I checked it out, and sure enough, there were plenty of ring-necked snakes, which are not well studied, particularly in this location. Almost every project at MLBS since then has studied some aspect of the biology of ring-necked snakes.

            Another important consideration for authentic course-based research is what kind of data you want to collect. For me, the key considerations are that 1) data must be simple to collect, preferably without specialized equipment that requires training and might breakdown and 2) all data collection and processing must happen during class times. When I have attempted research that relied upon post-processing of images or other data types, the research has inevitably stalled because there is no-one to process the data, and real-time checks of data quality cannot happen. What this means is that I have done lots of thermal biology projects and behavioral research, because the data can be easy to collect, and interpretation is straightforward. This of course reflects my own background and interests.

            How and if you can incorporate research into your course also depends on the institutional context. It is worth pointing out that I also taught herpetology at Georgia Southern University for several years and never incorporated research into the course. Why is that? Well, while there are plenty of critters on the Georgia Southern campus that we could study, none of them were really abundant enough where I could see developing a successful research project. Beyond my course at MLBS, I have also incorporated authentic research into my semester-long Herpetology course at FIU. The class project is the centerpiece of the required laboratory, and while we have less time per class, we have a whole semester to complete the project. There are at least nine species of lizards on campus that we could use for our research project, and our work thus far has focused on two of the most abundant species on campus (brown anoles and bark anoles).
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            I hope that the lessons that I have learned about incorporating authentic scientific research into Herpetology might prove useful to anybody who is interested in this approach. I have found that there have been several hidden benefits for me. One of them is that I keep better contact with students after the course, and I can write better and more-informed letters of recommendation. Another is that most of my current research focuses on anole lizards, but my roots are in studies of snake biology. Working on ringnecked snakes as part of class research at MLBS has allowed me to have a research program focused on snakes, at least for three weeks per year, which has been fulfilling. 
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How can an animal lover hunt and fish?

10/11/2025

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I am, and always have been, a biophile. I can’t remember a time when I was not completely fascinated by animals. I had a menagerie with a rotating cast of characters when I was a child, from hamsters and gerbils and hedgehogs to snakes and monitor lizards and tarantulas. I remember at one point realizing that I could keep spiders as pets, so I had two dozen wolf spiders in used margarine containers from Aldis. My best friend and I would walk creeks, or wet prairies, looking for snakes and such, and when we could drive, we made field trips across the state (I grew up in Iowa) or into neighboring states like Missouri to find critters. As an adult, I have also lived with many animals. My wife (who is not a biologist but loves animals) has had dogs, cats, rabbits, turkeys, chickens, ducks, veiled chameleons, day geckos, a collared lizard, and a blue-tongued skink. I currently live with two dogs, three cats, five day geckos, and at least three parthenogenetic mourning geckos. So it is safe to say that I love animals, and I have chosen a career where all I do is think about, study, and teach about animals. So how does that square with the fact that my favorite recreational activities involve pursuing and killing animals?

            I should mention that I am not talking about killing animals for my research. Integrative research can often require killing animals to collect tissues or for other valid reasons. Collecting animals for natural history collections also involves killing animals. I think the reasons and justifications for killing animals for research is a bit different than hunting and fishing, and most of my colleagues who have collected animals for collections or killed animals for research do not hunt or fish.

            So how can an animal lover like myself also like pursuing and killing animals? Well, I think it ultimately comes down to the fact that I love animals in the aggregate, but I am okay with the idea that individual representatives of a species can die. After all, death is a part of life, and all individual organisms will eventually die. Hence, I am okay with hunting an animal species given that there is a valid reason for doing so. That reason for me is usually consumption of the animal. I am a meat-eater (as well as a plant and fungus eater), and meat that I procure from myself from the wild is almost always more ethical than what I can purchase.

            The fact that I hunt and fish should not be misconstrued as a generally lax attitude towards animal death. As an example, I don’t generally kill animals without a purpose. I rescue spiders, centipedes, and other bugs from my house and garage, and try to avoid killing animals on the road (where my background as a herpetologist gives me an edge in seeing animals on the road). And when I do kill a fish or a squirrel or a duck or a deer, I also do not take it lightly. I take great care to use as much of the animal as I can, including most organ meat, and saving bones for stock, and so on. In other words, the same ethos that has me tolerating spiders in my house also guides my hunting and fishing.

            The previous passages have described why I am okay with hunting and fishing, but maybe not why I actively hunt and fish. Both of these activities involve substantial effort and can be pretty expensive. So why do I do it? For me, it is about a connection to nature and to my food. Outside of conducting scientific research, probably the best way to understand an animal is to pursue it. And the best way to be connected to your food is to harvest it yourself. So hunting and fishing falls in the same category of gardening, or farming animals, or mushroom hunting. It is a powerful way to connect with nature and with your food. When I eat something that I have harvested, I know that it is far more special than anything that I could ever purchase.

            Although it is not really the point of this post, I also want to dispel a few popular ideas about hunting. Probably the most bizarre idea is that I dislike the animals I hunt or fish, and nothing could be farther from the truth. Whenever I mention that I hunt or fish to someone who does not, they often will ask about feral hogs (everywhere that I have hunted has feral hogs). When I tell these folks that I have hunted feral hogs, they seem to be much more comfortable with the idea, probably with the idea that feral hogs are the enemy, or that I am rectifying some great wrong. But this idea is based in a flawed understanding of how hunting can impact wildlife populations and how I relate to animals that I hunt. In fact, hunting of feral hogs has probably incentivized their spread, as hunting them is quite popular, and they are great table fare. States like Missouri that do not have entrenched hog populations sometimes ban hog hunting, with the idea that allowing hunting will incentivize the illegal spread of hogs. Instead they employ government sharp-shooters to eradicate hogs. Regardless of the efficacy of hunting for managing hog populations, my attitude when harvesting a pig is the same as it would be for a squirrel or a duck. My attitude towards anything that I am harvesting is probably best summarized as intense interest and fascination.

            Another common misconception about hunting is that it is always violent and maybe even depraved (which is probably linked to the idea of disliking prey). You see this a lot in popular representations of hunting, where hunters are portrayed as bloodthirsty and lacking respect for the animal.  I have both hunted ducks and raised ducks for meat, and killing and butchering animals raised for meat is much harder than hunting. In hunting or fishing, there is the brief violence at the moment of death, but you do not have a relationship with the animal, and the first time you see that animal closely is when you approach the carcass in the field. Contrast that with killing an animal you have raised since it was young and are invested in its wellbeing, and it is a much more difficult process.

            A final misconception that I want to address is that it is better, or easier, to kill some kinds of animals compared to others. While I can’t say that this is not true for some people, it is not true for me. Many people who have no objections to fishing seem to be taken aback by hunting, even though both pursuits often end up with the death of an animal. Perhaps my attitude towards this is shaped by the fact that I happen to fascinated with and have devoted my life to studying snakes, which many people fear and despise. I also fundamentally do not think that organisms are arranged into a hierarchy, with things most similar to humans at the top of the hierarchy, and more distant organisms further down the ladder. My fundamental belief is that individual organisms have the same value, and might even have similar capacities for suffering. For example, almost all motile organisms have evasive behavior, and even sessile organisms like plants experience and respond to damage. To me, saying that only organisms with nervous systems similar to us can suffer (and hence should not be killed and eaten) is not supported by any evidence. So hunting and fishing is a way for me to be conscientious in general about my impacts on the world, including potential suffering of the organisms that I must consume to live.
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            My goal with this post is not to convince anyone to hunt and fish, or change their diet, or anything like that. I think we are all living in a world where no ethical choice is uncomplicated, and I think however people choose to live in the world, either as vegans or pescatarians or meat-eaters, is great. In fact, I lived for about four years as a (mostly) vegan- my wife was vegan and I cook for us, so I was vegan most of the time. But I did want to explain the seeming paradox of enjoying hunting and fishing as an animal lover. I will just end on the fact that both pursuits have allowed me to be more connected to nature and food, and the same motivation that made me pursue this career also makes me passionate about pursuing animals in nature, whether for photos or science or food. 
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    Christian L. Cox is faculty at Florida International University. 

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