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Overcoming (the Inevitable) Failures in Science

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“I am afraid that the opinion remains that the paper is not a strong candidate for publication…” Rejection. Failure. Almost everyone will experience a mixture of these during one’s lifetime. But for a scientist, this has become the norm of our existence: failed scientific experiments, rejected grants, and scathing remarks from manuscript reviewers. The one thing that is certain in academia, is that you will have many failures; what is not as certain is one’s response to such adversity. I hope this piece can give practical advice on how to overcome ‘failure’ and even potentially change our perspective on what failure is, with an emphasis on what steps young scientists, such as graduate students who are just beginning their journey, can take. Turning your ‘negative’ response into a therapeutic one Our typical response to rejection in science (and most other endeavors) is an initial combination of anger and/or disappointment, that can progress to self-pity, blaming the ‘system’, and depre
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Exploring Experimental Hematology: Journal Crossover Series I

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In a bid to connect the research being published in Experimental Hematology with the wider hematological community, we have begun to identify related pairs of recently published articles from other journals and in this entry, we focus on an article published in the European Hematology Association's journal HemaSphere. Novel approaches to understanding ALL treatment and subclone diversity Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) results from malignant transformation of lymphoid progenitor cells, and is a blood cancer found predominantly in the pediatric population. Clinical prognosis for children diagnosed with ALL are amongst the best outcomes for all blood cancers, with about 90% of all patients surviving their disease. However, the remaining children who are refractory to therapy or suffer relapse still represent a significant clinical problem due to the high incidence of this disease in the pediatric population. As such, there remains tremendous importance in identifying the molec
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ISEH 2021 Award Winners

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On behalf of the Awards Committee, ISEH would like to congratulate the recipients of the 2021 ISEH Honorific Awards, which will be presented at the ISEH 50th Annual Scientific Meeting. 2021 Donald Metcalf Award Winner: Tony Green Professor Anthony R. Green is a clinician-scientist and a long-standing member of the hematological community. He contributed multiple landmark papers during his career and shaped the hematological community through leadership roles in international organizations as well as locally in Cambridge, U.K.. Tony started his laboratory in Cambridge, U.K., in 1991 by characterizing the control of key transcription factors, such as SCL. Together with one of his first post-docs, Bertie Goettgens, he identified the first vertebrate hematopoietic stem cell enhancer to be characterized at a molecular level and demonstrated that SCL enhancers are powerful tools for targeting expression to specific cell types during hematopoiesis, vasculogenesis and neurogenesis.  Over the p
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How Twitter Continues to Help Your Science and Your Career

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Love it or loathe it, having a profile on the internet -- and more specifically on a social media platform -- is becoming an important aspect of many scientific careers. Back in 2018, we covered the importance of joining the ever-growing online scientific community ( http://www.simplyblood.org/2018/02/should-scientists-use-twitter-answer-is.html ). Fast forward three years, and this remains true, not only for those who are just beginning to establish their scientific careers, but also for those who remember a time before the internet or social media existed. The platforms available for your social media presence are increasing and diverse, so navigating which might be useful in a professional setting can be overwhelming. The image below attempts to highlight how each of the major platforms can be used, but the remainder of this post will focus squarely on Twitter:  All the early adopters of Twitter will clearly recognize the power of Twitter for connecting and engaging with fellow sc
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Preprints: How To Advance Your Research!

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The pace of science is accelerating. Papers are becoming ever more interdisciplinary and complex, and the revision process is turning more and more arduous. As jobs become more competitive, the pressure to publish in top impact journals keeps getting higher. The result of all this is that high quality submissions are suffering from unacceptably long publishing queues, which negatively impacts the dissemination of important results. To accelerate the speed at which important findings are shared with the global scientific community, researchers in physics, economics, mathematics and computer sciences have long used the preprint model. This involves depositing a finished manuscript in an open access preprint server for the community to interpret, judge and ultimately learn from. The server operators minimally check the manuscript for appropriate content, but do not judge or peer-review the science. Thus, a preprint does not substitute for properly peer-reviewed research in an indexed jou
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Exploring Experimental Hematology: November 2020 (Volume 42)

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In this issue of Simply Blood , we are deconstructing an invited perspective from Experimental Hematology as  Dr. Forsberg and colleagues build on their interesting prior work on differentiation of tissue resident macrophages (trMacs) via an interleukin-7 a   receptor (IL7R a )-positive progenitor (Leung et al. 2019). trMac differentiation follows a ‘nontraditional’ pathway of myeloid cell specification occurring in fetal hematopoiesis. In this study, they now examine the role of IL-7 signaling in the maintenance of other tissue myeloid cells - neutrophils and eosinophils - in the lung, work directed at better understanding the immune system of the lung and its relationship to respiratory diseases. First, the authors examined lung B-cell, neutrophil, and eosinophil content in Flk2 -/- , IL7R a -/- , or combined knock-out mice. Dr. Forsberg had previously shown that all ‘traditional’ adult myeloid and lymphoid cells, but not trMacs, develop via a Flk2-positive progenitor (Beaudin et
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Becoming Your Best Advocate

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What is self-advocacy? Self-advocacy involves speaking up for yourself, your worth, and your needs. The concept of self-advocacy transcends disciplines and its’ mastery is critical for the career development and promotion of scientists at all stages of training. Self-advocacy requires you to bring attention to yourself and your needs, which may be a particularly uncomfortable task for trainees from disadvantaged backgrounds. Under-represented minority scientists are often the only person from a particular background in their group, department, or institution, and thus they may not feel a strong sense of support in their current position. Unfortunately, under-represented minority scholars often feel as though they are responsible for carrying the weight of their communities as they complete their training, and this will not be corrected until dedicated efforts are put forth by the scientific community to support diversity and inclusion. For example, under-represented minority scientist
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