Working as a lab manager
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
Wow. It’s been over a year since my last blog post. A lot has happened since then, though not a lot scientifically which is why I haven’t posted much. Not a lot of updates for me other than lots of (failed) applications, lack of publishing, and that little global pandemic throwing everything into disarray… One reason I’ve been pretty busy over the last while is that I had the opportunity to work full time as the lab manager in our palaeo lab for 7 months from December to July. Our lab manager went on parental leave, and I was hired to replace him for 6 months, but then was extended due to the ..read more
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Now a British-Canadian palaeontologist! Why I chose to get citizenship
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, primarily because I have been extraordinarily busy, and also because I haven’t felt like I’ve had much interesting to say lately. I’ll have some more science-related posts soon (I hope), but for now, I wanted to talk about something that’s been bugging me a lot lately: my reasoning for getting British citizenship. As some of you know, I recently became a British citizen. I applied in November, received my approval letter in early January, and had my ceremony (yes, I had to pledge allegiance to the Queen and all that fun stuff) in February. Each citizenship ..read more
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2018 – Year in Review
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
Seems like yet another year is drawing to a close. How do they keep passing so quickly? Stop that! Since it’s the end of the year again, I guess it’s time for another year in review about what I’ve been up to. 2018 was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Nothing particularly bad, but also nothing amazingly awesome. The good stuff: A couple of good things that happened this year – I published a couple of papers, including one of my  PhD chapters (which I still need to blog about), a correction of a previous paper, and a paper from my first MSc student. I’ve also had another paper submitted f ..read more
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Why I don’t want to move country
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
Recently, Nature published an article titled ‘Why you should move country‘, about the advantages of moving countries as academics. A study has shown that those who are more mobile get more citations, better collaborations, etc. This article sparked a discussion on Twitter about advantages and disadvantages of moving for academia, and there were many opinions and thoughts about it. While I agree that there are advantages to moving labs in order to work with new people and learn new skills and make new collaborations, I disagree that it’s something that should necessarily be done by all, and I h ..read more
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Early tetrapod feeding
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
Well, I’ve managed to fail at my scicomm resolution for the year, which was to write at least one blog post a month. I missed out on September, but I’m back on it in October with an update on what I’ve been up to in the past few months. As some of you know, I’ve been spending a lot of the past year since finishing my PhD working off-and-on in an arthritis research lab, looking at CT scans of zebrafish. I learned a lot working on fish, and have enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something I could do forever. While I’m still finishing off a few things for them, my contract officially ended a few months a ..read more
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Flugsaurier 2018 – Los Angeles
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
I’ve just returned from a 2 week stint in California, where I had a bit of holiday visiting some family, and also attended Flugsaurier 2018, the semi-annual pterosaur conference. Held every 2-3 years, Flugsaurier focuses on the up-and-coming pterosaur research from around the world. It’s a small, specialist conference with 40-70 people typically who work on pterosaurs. I was involved in a minor capacity with the 2015 conference held in Portsmouth, and got sucked in to help organise this meeting in LA. This year’s meeting was held at the University of Southern California, hosted by Mike Habib ..read more
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Quantum Start-up Week
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
Since I’m currently without a full-time academic job, last week I was doing something a little bit different, as part of the company I own with my husband. We were participating in Quantum Start Up Week, part of a programme put on by the University of Bristol and Spin Up Science. The main point of the week was to introduce being an entrepreneur mainly to PhD students. Though it was marketed to people based in quantum science, it was pretty general and much of the information we were given was useful for any startup companies or people interested in it. Mainly, it was to give people an idea of ..read more
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Pterosaur jaw shape – what does it mean?
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
I’ve been a little bit busy and haven’t had a chance to blog about the most recent paper I was involved with, on pterosaur jaw disparity! This paper has been a long time coming, and was my lead by my first ever Master’s student, Charlie Navarro. This project came out of his MSc thesis at the University of Bristol, which I helped supervise a few years ago. I’m so happy, and so proud that we finally managed to get it published, with a lot of help from our co-author and one of Charlie’s other supervisors, Tom Stubbs! The idea for this paper was to look at the disparity and variation of pterosaur ..read more
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My Green OA experience
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
As many of you may know from my random musings, you’ll know that I am a supporter of the idea of Open Access publishing. I strongly believe that research should be open to everyone, and think it’s unfair that universities have to shell out millions to get access to material, especially when it’s government funded. However, you may also know that I did my PhD self-funded (or at least not funded by the UK government), which can make OA difficult. Since most journals charge some kind of Article Processing Charge (APC) in order to cover OA costs, that money needs to come from somewhere. In the UK ..read more
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Don’t do PR before the paper’s out
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist
by lizmartinsilverstone
3y ago
Recently, information about a “new” species of pterosaur has been making the rounds. This is not a new phenomenon – stories like this often make the news. This animal has been touted as the largest pterosaur ever, and was reportedly flightless, both things making this an extremely significant animal in terms of understanding pterosaur diversity and ecology. That is, if it’s true. Extraordinary claims, such as largest pterosaur or first flightless pterosaur, require extraordinary evidence. The problem in this case, is that as it currently stands, there is no evidence. No scientif ..read more
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