simply blood

Check out these popular articles from Experimental Hematology. Previously posted on December 9, 2015 in the ISEH Facebook Group. I was speaking with senior editor Keith Humphries the other day and we were chatting about an interesting pattern in papers published in Experimental Hematology – the citations of articles published a long time ago are often as high as the bigger journals, but the uptake is quite delayed (e.g., many citations come many years after publication). The cream rises to the top it seems and Experimental Hematology papers often stand the test of time. I thought “what a shame - how can we get these papers into the hands of people earlier?” So I asked Keith if he could identify the top papers to come out of Experimental Hematology over the last couple of years – you’ll see that the big names do publish in the journal and the quality of the papers is very high (Roger Patient, Peggy Goodell, Brian Huntly, Toshio Suda, Kenneth Anderson, Trista North, Patricia Erns...

I have always envied the people who know what they want to do when they “grow up”. It seems so much easier to be aware of what you want for your future. Personally, I always felt more comfortable when I had multiple possibilities lying ahead of my professional future. Even now, as a junior group leader, I always like to think of my future as not fully determined. Thus, I can totally understand graduate students and postdocs that, although they feel academia is the “proper” career choice, they still linger between that and alternative career choices. As I interact with a fair amount of students and postdocs on a daily basis, I see how their agony and frustration on deciding the next career steps hampers their ability to embrace the beauty of what they are actually doing: science… Even though we live in a world of endless information, we often still lack what we need. Everything around us is changing too quickly, making it essential for us to evolve and make accurate decisions quickly....

I am a new Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. At the last ISEH meeting in Kyoto (2015), I was invited to give a “recent applicant view” on how to be successful when applying for Faculty positions. In the paragraphs below I summarize my presentation and provide tips and advice for prospective applicants that are planning to enter the job market. Preparing the application package The application package is your letter of introduction and the one item that will determine whether you are invited for a job interview. To be successful your application package needs to be outstanding. It will require a significant amount of time and effort on your part.  In the US, and in many other places around the world, most academic positions are advertised between August and November. There is usually a fixed deadline to submit the application package. This means that your application package may need to be ready before the position opens! For most positions you ar...