I recently participated in a fantastic iBiology course called “Let’s Experiment : A Guide for Scientists Working at the Bench.” My involvement partly included a discussion about an experimental decision tree I made to help my students filter all the ideas we had flying around. The talented team at iBiology then made a stunning adaptation.
In addition to the content, the course included a forum discussion between contributors and students. There was quite a backlog of questions so, to cover more ground, we instead decided to do a live Q&A. In this segment, I talked through the decision tree a bit and also answered some really fantastic questions posed by students. I tried to emphasize the frameworks I use to think about these things rather than a rigid set of rules to apply when prioritizing experiments. I hope you find the Q&A to be a great supplement to the course!
Originally I had planned to just put up this post to link to the newly available Q&A and aggregate all the relevant links for the course, but thought this would be a great time to just highlight my general love for iBiology. One of my scientific heroes, Ron Vale, founded the site in 2006 to share with the world (for free) the excitement of scientific discovery. And I can’t say enough about the stellar team at iBiology who are so good at their jobs that it’s no surprise the content is as useful and outstanding as it is.
In case you haven’t had a chance to explore this invaluable resource, let me highlight a few things you can get from iBiology. You can hear about major discoveries by scientists that made them, get inspired by the beauty of biology, learn important skills, and get general guidance on the practice of science. When new students join our microscopy-heavy cell biology lab, I send them first to the microscopy series on iBiology. It’s fantastic for students and experienced scientists alike. I highly recommend taking a look!