svastiharicharan

@svastiharichar1

Asst Professor, Sanford Burnham Prebys Interested in what DNA repair proteins do when they aren't repairing DNA, Advocate for a better academia Opinions my own

San Diego, CA
haricharanlab.com
Joined November 2018
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  1. Pinned Tweet
    23 Mar 2021

    Did some digging into NCI funded R01s for ESI/NI applicants in 2020/21 (based on 50 randomly samples funded awards). Comments . Be warned if you're a non-white female ESI PhD

    9 replies 18 retweets 57 likes
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  2. 5 hours ago

    A lot of us who have received comments of condescension like this in grant reviews know that a comment being placed under a non-score-driving criterion in NO WAY means it wasn't score driving. Check your bias.

    Replying to @Lola_UMich
    Got a comment on a R15 saying, “The PI does not have experience managing a NIH grant” w/ no other info for context. My thought: “Isn’t that the point of this proposal??” I asked about the comment & was told it wasn’t score driving, but I still told them why it was problematic.
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  3. Apr 7

    I cannot highlight this enough. The amount of internalization a scientist in academic research handles is insane, and cannot be productive of a balanced ego.

    alright last thing I will say about this the ultimate evidence of a systemic problem is when someone suggests problems exist beyond an individual level & they're immediately told maybe it's them, maybe they need a different job. systems deny their existence above all else.
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  4. Apr 7

    In part this is the systemic effect of some labs having 15 highly trained, highly motivated postdocs, which allows those PIs to publish faster, more, get funded oftener, and delegate mentoring and teaching. When those PIs set the bar, the rest of us struggle in their wake

    Even under the most ideal circumstances (which we have *not* been living in) with the most focused/productive work habits and most effective teams - there are actual tangible limits to what people can reasonably do well 6/ 🧵
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  5. Apr 7

    Really cool opportunity for anyone interested in cancer research. Informatics is an essential skill if you want to do translational research.

    Learn from literally the BEST in cancer biology informatics👇🏽 As a cancer researcher if you haven’t taken a look - do so NOW. If you don’t understand it, watch their webinars. Incredibly important tool to get familiar with. Also go to talk!!
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  6. Apr 7

    Super excited for this. In-person! Yay!!

    Hey ⁦⁩ ⁦⁩ ⁦⁩ ⁦, come hear⁩ our next speaker ⁦⁩ *in person*!!
    1 reply 13 likes
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  7. Apr 6

    I might have been a little optimistic with that quote, but not that far off 😅

    🎙 "We can fix this problem today," says Svasti Haricharan, PhD regarding the higher mortality rate for Black women Read more from our featured interview here:
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  8. Apr 5

    Even better, we could ignore journal impact factor and neutralize the privileges of status. We could weigh privileges (e.g. money/elitism provided by the home institution) against handicaps (e.g. belonging to an URG). Maybe it's just me, but I could go for a system like this /6

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  9. Apr 5

    This could remove the need for peer review (think of the $$ saved) because progress could be made quantifiable -- # publications, career progress of lab members, service, reagents/data generated for the field. This system could also account for family leave, pandemics etc /5

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  10. Apr 5

    Instead, what if the funding system was reward-based. Every new assistant professor gets a baseline $ amount from NIH when the begin as independent faculty, and their progress is reviewed after 5 years, and the $ amount for the next round of funding is based on this appraisal /4

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  11. Apr 5

    Would it be possible to change scoring criteria to force reviewers to consider new ideas fundable, regardless of the perceived status of the applicant? Maybe, but it will be a hard sell, difficult to enforce, and ultimately depend on peer approval /3

    1 reply 1 like
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  12. Apr 5

    is constrained by the way peer review works. The innovation score intended to promote new ideas, doesn't. Maybe because implicit bias in peer review makes it hard for ideas to be acknowledged as innovative while technical innovation is inarguable /2

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  13. Apr 5

    "...research funders should be open to reasonable new ideas and interpretations, particularly if they differ from the current consensus". Been thinking about this one a lot recently. Specifically on how to make NIH funding more inclusive 🧵 /1

    1 reply 3 likes
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  14. Apr 4

    Whether they provide value or not (which, of course they do, in multiple ways), if grad students purposely avoid labs run by women then that suggests that they think that women-run labs have no value to them. Which makes it a systematic problem.

    Sex bias in training lab PI selection can only be a systematic problem if those grad students are providing some thing of value to the PI.
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  15. Apr 4

    😰 This is all madness. Just give the NIH more money, for crying out loud. We don't need a new funding body, we just need existing funding bodies to have more money so that scientists (overwhelmingly from URGs) don't leave academia in force after a grueling 2 years

    Replying to @Metabo_Dave
    1 reply 2 retweets 19 likes
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  16. Apr 4

    Love this shout out, thank you, David. Now if only I could get this project funded so we can being to understand the genomics and transcriptomics of breast cancer in women of all colors!

    I know I’m late in reading this great work done by on racial disparities in breast cancer survival (a molecular level approach including DNA damage repair). Using publicly available datasets and noting the critical need for diverse and representative datasets 💯
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  17. Apr 4

    We need better biomarkers that are suited to all cancer patients, not just white cancer patients. We can't have precision medicine until we have precision medicine for all

    ER+ cells in Black women have very different patterns of DNA damage repair signaling than White women, leading to increased resistance to endocrine therapies and higher mortality, according to a new :
    5 retweets 15 likes
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  18. Retweeted
    Apr 4

    'Due to longstanding cultural barriers, [...] Black people are significantly underrepresented in tumor datasets and in clinical research in general.' discusses her research on in Black women:

    3 retweets 2 likes
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  19. Mar 29

    This sounds about right. It's not just about the work load (which is a given) but the stress of grant writing in an increasingly competitive funding environment and training/mentoring lab members through a pandemic while trying to maintain a semblance of life outside work

    TT faculty colleague just mentioned they are sleeping 1-2 hours a night to fit it all in. This is not ok. How do we change the culture??
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  20. Mar 29

    The last few months have been that weird academia twilight where on the one hand our published work is getting loads of attention and OTOH my grant applications (on the same research areas!) have not been received well (that's putting it kindly). Being a PI is certainly a trip.

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  21. Mar 24

    Thanks for this shout out to our work on the somatic changes that associate with treatment response in black breast cancer patients

    New SAGE Perspectives Blog on the DNA damage repair landscape in Black women with breast cancer
    2 retweets 4 likes
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