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Pedigree and Productivity

Anonymous — Thu, 02 May 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Pedigree and Productivity Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/02/2019 - 00:00

Colleen Flaherty

A 2015 study found that “social inequality” across a range of disciplines was so bad that just 25 percent of Ph.D. institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenured and tenure-track professors, depending on field.

The effect was more extreme the farther up the chain the researchers looked, based on their own program ranking system: the top 10 programs in each discipline produced 1.6 to three times more faculty than even the next 10 programs. The top 11 to 20 programs produced 2.3 to 5.6 times more professors than the next 10. In theory, this reflects the quality of those programs. But critics say in-group hiring is also about snobbery.

Now computer scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder who led that earlier study say academic pedigree isn’t destiny after all -- at least in terms of future productivity.

“Our results show that the prestige of faculty’s current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity,” says the new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Current and past locations, meanwhile, "drive prominence.”

That is, when it comes to actual research output, where one works is more important than where one trained.

For this new study, researchers looked at productivity and prominence (measured in number of published papers and scholarly citations, respectively) for 2,453 tenure-line faculty members in 205 Ph.D.-granting computer science departments. The analysis was based on a matched-pairs experimental design. As opposed to a completely randomized design, matched pairs involve one binary factor and blocks that sort the experimental units into pairs.

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Staff in Focus: Lindsay Diamond an Immunization Champion, says CDC

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 07:00:00 +0000

Staff in Focus: Lindsay Diamond an Immunization Champion, says CDC Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/04/2018 - 00:00

Cu Boulder Today

CU Boulder's Lindsay Diamond was named by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a 2018 recipient of the Childhood Immunization Champion Award, jointly given by the CDC Foundation and the CDC. The announcement was made in April of 2018 during National Infant Immunization Week and will be celebrated this month in a private reception by Boulder County Health.

Lindsay Diamond (Photo courtesy the Daily Camera/staff photographer Matthew Jones)

According to the CDC website, the honor, which is given across the nation, is for individuals who are doing an exemplary job or going above and beyond to promote childhood immunzations in their communities. Diamond is this year's only recipient in the state of Colorado.

Diamond, who has a doctoral degree in molecular biology and is the director of communication at the BioFrontiers Institute, is cited for raising awareness―in a state that has exemption laws, allowing parents to decline immunizations for children, based on personal or religious beliefs―and making scientific information understandable and accessible through her organization, Community Immunity.

Daily Camera: Boulder County woman receives CDC Immunization Champion honor

Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment: Lindsay Diamond is Colorado’s 2018 Childhood Immunization Champion

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Academic ideas are supposed to thrive on their merits. If only.

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 06:00:00 +0000

Academic ideas are supposed to thrive on their merits. If only. Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/24/2018 - 00:00

Henry Farrell

Allison C. Morgan, Dimitrios J. Economou, Samuel F. Way and Aaron Clauset are all scholars in the department of computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. They have just published an important new article about how ideas spread within the academy. I asked them a series of questions about their work.

People say that science is about the open spread of ideas. However, your research suggests that it really matters whether the scientist who has the idea is working at a highly prestigious university. How does prestige affect the flow of ideas inside the academic community?

Our paper examines a simple hypothesis: Ideas spread in academia by people carrying them from one university to another. This idea is reasonable because academic research is highly specialized, and most researchers spend much of their careers working on topics close to what they trained on during graduate school. So, if a researcher had started studying deep learning in graduate school, and was then hired by a university where no one else was working on it, then that person carried the idea of deep learning from one university to another. In this way, if a small set of universities train the majority of all the academics in a field, ideas that originate at those universities will be overrepresented in the field. And, it turns out that in some of our past research, we showed that prestigious universities dominate the hiring market, meaning ideas that are born at prestigious universities will tend to spread further than those born elsewhere, simply because they have enormous alumni networks. The hiring market dominance of universities like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. means that the other 200+ research universities in the U.S. are likely working on ideas that originated from this tiny group of elite places. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that where an idea is born matters for how far it could spread in academia, showing that prestige can create systematic “epistemic inequality” as a result of the hiring imbalance.

You treat the spread of ideas as a contagious process, which spreads through the population a little like the flu. How exactly do ideas become infectious, spreading from scientist to scientist or university to university?

There’s a long history of thinking of ideas spreading through a population by some kind of transfer process. Memes are classic example of this way of thinking. We use a slightly more narrow definition in our study, in which we define an “idea” as academic scholarship on a well-defined topic, like deep learning or quantum computing. An idea can thus “spread” across universities if a researcher who studies that idea changes jobs from one university to another. In our analysis, we were most interested in the situation where a university “adopted” an idea by hiring a new researcher who had a track record of working on it. Of course, the range of ideas being studied in a university is much more dynamic than this simple model allows, since researchers can pick up ideas from professional meetings, reading the literature, collaborating with other researchers, or developing them from scratch. Our aim was to show that the process of hiring new researchers (typically young professors) is one mechanism by which ideas spread through the system. This way, we don’t need to account for all the different ways ideas circulate in academia. We only need to show that hiring does indeed influence who works on what ideas where.

Your results suggest that really good ideas are likely to spread, no matter who has them, but that mediocre ideas tend to spread further and stick around longer when they come from scientists at highly prestigious institutions. What implications does this have for the ways we should do science?

It’s heartening that we find that good ideas will spread well no matter where they are born. It’s a bit less encouraging that mediocre ideas can spread just as far as good ones if they originate at a prestigious university. If we want academia to act more like a meritocracy, then we should try harder to ensure that our evaluations of ideas are not biased by the prestige of their birthplace, but instead focus on their independent merits. In practice, this is much harder than it sounds, but some things do help. For instance, recent researchshows that peer review based on a double-blind system mitigates prestige biases. Double-blind review works by removing the simple signals that tend to tilt evaluations in favor of prestigious universities. Working out other ways to mitigate prestige biases, for example, in faculty hiring itself, is less clear, but perhaps even more important. That said, our findings show that the advantage of prestige in terms of influencing the circulation of ideas in academia can be very large. This suggests that many good ideas may not be getting the attention they might deserve as a result of not having a prestigious university name associated with them. Another implication is that in a system that incentivizes researchers to produce a large quantity of incremental ideas, ideas produced by researchers at more prestigious universities will tend to be more visible than similarly good, or even slightly better ideas from less prestigious universities.

As you say, it’s easy to study the spread of ideas among scientists, since there is lots of good data. What possible implications does your research have for the spread of ideas in other contexts, such as politics, or among the general public?

We suspect that similar structural advantages may exist in other systems with strong prestige hierarchies. For example, the small number of universities represented among the educational backgrounds of Supreme Court justices and their clerks may be suggestive of less diverse approaches, and less creative judicial solutions. When differences in social prestige exist, then a high-quality idea originating from the bottom of the hierarchy in a business or government will have a harder time catching on than if it came from the top, not due to any conscious or unconscious bias by individuals but rather because of the structure of the system itself. If we want to solve hard problems, of which there are many in science, technology, and society, we need to find better ways to incentivize and recognize good ideas, regardless of where they originate from, rather than relying so heavily on characteristics like reputations or affiliations of the person suggesting it.

Allison C. Morgan, Dimitrios J. Economou, Samuel F. Way, and Aaron Clauset are at the department of computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Aaron Clauset is also affiliated with the BioFrontiers Institute at University of Colorado at Boulder and the Santa Fe Institute.

This article is one in a series supported by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance that seeks to work collaboratively to increase our understanding of how to design more effective and legitimate democratic institutions using new technologies and new methods. Neither the MacArthur Foundation nor the network is responsible for the article’s specific content. Other posts can be found here.

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CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy receives $2 million gift commitment to encourage collaboration between the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and the CU BioFrontiers Institute

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 06:00:00 +0000

CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy receives $2 million gift commitment to encourage collaboration between the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and the CU BioFrontiers Institute Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/19/2018 - 00:00

David Kelly

AURORA, Colo. (September 19, 2018) - The ALSAM Foundation recently invested an additional $2 million to continue the Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program at the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The funding supports a second phase of grants for projects focused on drug discovery and development.

David Ross, PhD, chair of the CU Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and associate dean of research at the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy, is leading the school's efforts to identify new drug therapies and bring them to market quicker than ever before by supporting talented faculty.

"This support from The ALSAM Foundation is critical to our success," Ross said. "By allowing us to award grants to the best ideas at CU, we are able to support innovative approaches to identify the next generation of drugs to transform patient care."

The Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program encourages collaboration between the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and the CU BioFrontiers Institute in Boulder as well as faculty throughout CU Anschutz.

By awarding grants to researchers who build an interdisciplinary team from the CU School of Pharmacy, the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder and from across the CU Anschutz Medical Campus, this fund will jumpstart some of the most transformational ideas at CU today.

"The ALSAM Foundation's generosity is fueling our innovative efforts and supporting high risk, high reward ideas in the laboratory," said CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Dean Ralph Altiere, PhD. "We are so grateful for their longtime partnership."

Some of the current active research areas include novel drug discovery efforts including high throughput and computational approaches, informatics and systems genetics, RNA-based therapeutics, immunotherapy and precision medicine.

��ˮ��Ƶ the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is the only comprehensive academic health sciences center in Colorado, the largest academic health center in the Rocky Mountain region and one of the newest education, research and patient care facilities in the world. Home to 21,000 employees, more than 4,300 degree-seeking students and two nationally recognized hospitals, CU Anschutz trains the health sciences workforce of the future and fuels the economy. CU Anschutz features schools of medicine, pharmacy, dental medicine and public health, a college of nursing and a graduate school. Learn more at ucdenver.edu/anschutz.

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BioFrontiers research cited in article related to updated UVa paid parental leave policy

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 17:57:18 +0000

BioFrontiers research cited in article related to updated UVa paid parental leave policy Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/12/2018 - 11:57

Ruth Serven Smith of The Daily Progress

Adapted from The Daily Progress article.

The University of Virginia on Tuesday announced expanded paid leave benefits for new parents — a move that goes beyond a state executive order and one that could help the school remain competitive with its peers.

In June, Gov. Ralph Northam issued an executive order providing eight weeks of paid parental leave to state employees. The order, which included full-time UVa employees, was effective immediately.

In January, UVa will expand leave for part-time salaried staff, as well. The expansion bumps UVa up to the nation’s median for paid parental leave, according to University of Colorado researchers.

Now, each parent who is a UVa employee can take time off after the birth of a child or placement of a child under 18 with them as an adoptive or foster parent or guardian. Part-time salaried staff will receive time off prorated to the amount of hours they work — for example, someone who works 30 hours per week will be eligible for six weeks of paid time off.

Previously, UVa employees who were tenured faculty, tenure-track or had a one-year appointment were only eligible for three weeks of leave at full pay after the arrival of a child under the age of 7. Faculty could ask for additional unpaid time off or use short-term disability leave. Staff and other employees appeared to previously be eligible for only the 12 weeks unpaid leave guaranteed by federal law.

“Spending time with a child who just joined your family is incredibly important,” UVa President Jim Ryan said in a statement Tuesday. “Besides giving parents and children a chance to bond, studies have shown that paid parental leave makes children healthier, raises productivity at work and prevents parents from having to choose between taking care of a child and keeping their jobs.”

Virginia Tech expanded its policy to one identical to UVa’s in August.

Nationally, only 5 percent of U.S. workers had access to paid family leave in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the public sector, access to paid family and medical leave is spotty. California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Washington, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia also cover some public employees or cities and counties that opt in.

When Northam signed the order, he said he hoped it would help state employees with young families who previously relied on a federal law that would protect their job while on leave but doesn’t require the time off to be paid.

Some universities have expanded leave on their own, but there is little consistency between which universities offer leave, the amount offered and if it is given to people who are not birth mothers, according to analysis from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

��ˮ��Ƶ 60 percent of universities provide paid leave for new mothers or fathers, with an average duration of 14.2 weeks for women and 11.6 weeks for men, said Dan Larremore, an assistant professor of computer science who worked on the project.

“There was a huge amount of variability,” Larremore said. “I would have thought that the more prestigious places would have more of an incentive to treat new parents well, but it was all over the map.”

UVa’s eight weeks is at the median of leave offered at the 205 U.S. and Canadian universities surveyed, and below the amount offered by Princeton University, Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The group compared its findings about policies in academia with those of tech companies, some of which, such as Etsy Inc. and Spotify Technology, offer as much as six months of paid leave to men and women who become parents. Netflix Inc. offers a full year off.

But of higher importance than the amount of time off, said Allison Morgan, a graduate student who worked on the project, was making sure employees knew their school’s policy and keeping track of how the amount of leave offered might affect hiring, retention and tenure decisions.

The researchers are adding their parental leave findings to a project that looks at how factors such as gender, family makeup and an institution’s prestige interact in academia.

“We’re generally interested in institutional and perceived barriers to participation in the sciences, and one of the barriers we saw was the use of parental leave in the sciences,” Morgan said. “We want to uncover persistent inequities in science, and the data shows there are more disparities than we’d like.”

Ruth Serven Smith is a reporter for The Daily Progress. Contact her at (434) 978-7254, rserven@dailyprogress.com or @RuthServen on Twitter.

The paid parental leave project by Allison Morgan, Sam Way, Mirta Galesic, Aaron Clauset, and Dan Larremore at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Santa Fe Institute.

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