Blog 1 - How Asking 'Why?' in the Lab Turned into My Neuroengineering Blog (And Why You Should Ask ‘Why?’ Too)
Takeaway: If you’re questioning the way things are done in your field, you’re not alone. This blog is my way of exploring those questions—and I encourage you to do the same with your work.
Ever wonder why people start blogs?
I did—about 10 times before I actually sat down to write this.
So, let me turn the question on myself:
Why are you starting a blog? And why now? (subtext: don’t you want to wrap up your manuscripts so you can write your thesis, graduate so you can get an industry job, and never think about Academia again?)
The simplest answer is that I’ve always done something like this.
- Grade/high school and undergrad: book reports -> AP-level essays -> technical reports
- Some of tLearning how to write
- Post-BS: I wrote summaries of research articles I found interesting and shared those on Medium
- Some of the most meaningful writing I’ve done to date
- Post-Medium: I got a gig summarizing summaries of “popular science” research articles
- Just doing it for a paycheck – not very meaningful
- Grad school: grant applications, qualifying exam proposal, manuscripts, and actual grant proposals (one that even got funded by NIMH)
- I’m ambivalent about this type of writing because only time will tell how meaningful my contributions to “optical neurophysiology during naturalistic behaviors” really are
Here’s the elevator pitch: one day in the lab, the engineer in me wouldn’t stop bugging the neuroscientist in me: “Why X experiment using Y technique and Z manipulation?”
The neuroscientist usually comes up with good explanations for “X, Y, Z.” The engineer in me has even developed new variations of “X, Y, Z” when I don’t like the neuroscientist’s answer. But these explanations and variations hardly see the light of day – they stay trapped in my brain until I have a conversation with someone that has also asked “why X, Y, Z.”
These blog posts are a way for me to unload these explanations and share my developments with people that are also interested in these questions. Even if you don’t buy my explanations, I hope you at least start thinking: “why X, Y, Z.”
Here’s the broader context: I want to write something meaningful again. I don’t expect to change the world with this blog. But if one person out there finds a tip that improves their research, then it’s worth it.
Maybe someone starting fiber photometry experiments in mice might read my second blog post and learn a new tip that improves the quality of their surgery (I have this post written but want to sleep on it before publishing). Maybe a young research technician or graduate student that feels completely lost in a brand-new field might stumble across a future post I will write about “impostor syndrome,” and realize that it’s a side-effect of the journey -- feeling like an impostor is not a sign that you shouldn’t be embarking on this journey. When I first joined Dr. Conor Liston’s lab, I only knew how to wear a “mechanical engineer hat” and felt like such a faker any time I tried talking about neuroscience. It took years of trial and error, but I think my “neuroengineer hat” finally fits.
Like all blog posts, these are my unique trains of thought stemming from my experiences with things I truly consider myself an “expert” in (or am working hard to become an “expert” in). It’s funny, one of my PIs, Dr. Tim Hanks, has introduced me as the expert on fiber photometry recordings of dLight. And while I haven’t fact-checked him on that, I can safely say that I have recorded dLight from at least 170 recording sites across 100 mice in my three years in https://www.lintianlab.org/(not counting other sensors). That’s at least 300 hours of time at the surgery bench, 600 hours of recording time, and I don’t even want to guesstimate how many thousands of hours figuring out how to make pretty plots in matplotlib to present my data in as meaningful of a way as possible (although Github copilot has made this much easier, and I will talk about how I’m using LLMs in a later post).
I imagine I will eventually post about things I’d say I’m on the “fringes of being an expert at.” Like writing an F31 grant. Grant writing? It’s like buying a lottery ticket—except you get more rejection letters instead of winning numbers. I’m not an expert grant writer – I didn’t get any of the three T32 grants I applied to from Davis. But, I did write an F31 proposal NIMH deemed fundable, and I will talk about my approach in a later post.
One of the most important rules of my posts: they are going to cover the dirty details that are usually kept out of scientific journals. Ever tried to replicate an experiment, only to realize the secret handshake with your lab mate wasn’t included in the methods section? Yeah, same. This blog aims to fill in the gaps with the steps that make the experiment work best. The posts are almost like a commentary on the extended methods of the supplementary sections of a journal.
This first post is just the beginning of this journey. My goal is to continue sharing posts until I graduate, but no one knows what the future holds. Some of my intellectual inspirations** had humble beginnings in blog posts and essays from their graduate school days, and they still maintain them as tenured faculty (or have moved onto books). Maybe this blog series will only exist in this format of “informal thought sharing” for a short time since I anticipate preparing technical reports about the projects I’m working on so there is a smooth transition when I pass them off to the next generation of grad students.
Conclusion: I’m not sure where this blog will take me—or you, for that matter. But if you’ve ever asked, “Why X, Y, Z?” in the lab, I hope you’ll stick around for the ride. Let’s figure it out together.
** Like Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s collection of essays The Trouble With Testosterone, Dr. Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True blog series, or even Tim Urban’s Underneath the Turban which became the Wait But Why series which isn't really about science.
Blog 1 - How Asking 'Why?' in the Lab Turned into My Neuroengineering Blog (And Why You Should Ask ‘Why?’ Too)
Takeaway: If you’re questioning the way things are done in your field, you’re not alone. This blog is my way of exploring those questions—and I encourage you to do the same with your work.
Ever wonder why people start blogs?
I did—about 10 times before I actually sat down to write this.
So, let me turn the question on myself:
Why are you starting a blog? And why now? (subtext: don’t you want to wrap up your manuscripts so you can write your thesis, graduate so you can get an industry job, and never think about Academia again?)
The simplest answer is that I’ve always done something like this.
- Grade/high school and undergrad: book reports -> AP-level essays -> technical reports
- Some of tLearning how to write
- Post-BS: I wrote summaries of research articles I found interesting and shared those on Medium
- Some of the most meaningful writing I’ve done to date
- Post-Medium: I got a gig summarizing summaries of “popular science” research articles
- Just doing it for a paycheck – not very meaningful
- Grad school: grant applications, qualifying exam proposal, manuscripts, and actual grant proposals (one that even got funded by NIMH)
- I’m ambivalent about this type of writing because only time will tell how meaningful my contributions to “optical neurophysiology during naturalistic behaviors” really are
Here’s the elevator pitch: one day in the lab, the engineer in me wouldn’t stop bugging the neuroscientist in me: “Why X experiment using Y technique and Z manipulation?”
The neuroscientist usually comes up with good explanations for “X, Y, Z.” The engineer in me has even developed new variations of “X, Y, Z” when I don’t like the neuroscientist’s answer. But these explanations and variations hardly see the light of day – they stay trapped in my brain until I have a conversation with someone that has also asked “why X, Y, Z.”
These blog posts are a way for me to unload these explanations and share my developments with people that are also interested in these questions. Even if you don’t buy my explanations, I hope you at least start thinking: “why X, Y, Z.”
Here’s the broader context: I want to write something meaningful again. I don’t expect to change the world with this blog. But if one person out there finds a tip that improves their research, then it’s worth it.
Maybe someone starting fiber photometry experiments in mice might read my second blog post and learn a new tip that improves the quality of their surgery (I have this post written but want to sleep on it before publishing). Maybe a young research technician or graduate student that feels completely lost in a brand-new field might stumble across a future post I will write about “impostor syndrome,” and realize that it’s a side-effect of the journey -- feeling like an impostor is not a sign that you shouldn’t be embarking on this journey. When I first joined Dr. Conor Liston’s lab, I only knew how to wear a “mechanical engineer hat” and felt like such a faker any time I tried talking about neuroscience. It took years of trial and error, but I think my “neuroengineer hat” finally fits.
Like all blog posts, these are my unique trains of thought stemming from my experiences with things I truly consider myself an “expert” in (or am working hard to become an “expert” in). It’s funny, one of my PIs, Dr. Tim Hanks, has introduced me as the expert on fiber photometry recordings of dLight. And while I haven’t fact-checked him on that, I can safely say that I have recorded dLight from at least 170 recording sites across 100 mice in my three years in https://www.lintianlab.org/(not counting other sensors). That’s at least 300 hours of time at the surgery bench, 600 hours of recording time, and I don’t even want to guesstimate how many thousands of hours figuring out how to make pretty plots in matplotlib to present my data in as meaningful of a way as possible (although Github copilot has made this much easier, and I will talk about how I’m using LLMs in a later post).
I imagine I will eventually post about things I’d say I’m on the “fringes of being an expert at.” Like writing an F31 grant. Grant writing? It’s like buying a lottery ticket—except you get more rejection letters instead of winning numbers. I’m not an expert grant writer – I didn’t get any of the three T32 grants I applied to from Davis. But, I did write an F31 proposal NIMH deemed fundable, and I will talk about my approach in a later post.
One of the most important rules of my posts: they are going to cover the dirty details that are usually kept out of scientific journals. Ever tried to replicate an experiment, only to realize the secret handshake with your lab mate wasn’t included in the methods section? Yeah, same. This blog aims to fill in the gaps with the steps that make the experiment work best. The posts are almost like a commentary on the extended methods of the supplementary sections of a journal.
This first post is just the beginning of this journey. My goal is to continue sharing posts until I graduate, but no one knows what the future holds. Some of my intellectual inspirations** had humble beginnings in blog posts and essays from their graduate school days, and they still maintain them as tenured faculty (or have moved onto books). Maybe this blog series will only exist in this format of “informal thought sharing” for a short time since I anticipate preparing technical reports about the projects I’m working on so there is a smooth transition when I pass them off to the next generation of grad students.
Conclusion: I’m not sure where this blog will take me—or you, for that matter. But if you’ve ever asked, “Why X, Y, Z?” in the lab, I hope you’ll stick around for the ride. Let’s figure it out together.
** Like Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s collection of essays The Trouble With Testosterone, Dr. Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True blog series, or even Tim Urban’s Underneath the Turban which became the Wait But Why series which isn't really about science.
