Biologist and postdoctoral fellow Gary McDowell (@BiophysicalFrog) joined RealScientists in December. Gary began the week from the annual ASCB meeting in San Diego, where he was talking about his work on the left/right patterns of development of frogs.
His hotel room was even fittingly adorned with chiral creatures to really get us into the mood.
Always nervous to talk, but I'm talking about left-right and chirality, am taking my hotel room pic as a good omen! pic.twitter.com/oz3Ztm5KpS
— realscientists (@realscientists) December 15, 2015
Gary also won what is possibly the WORLD’S GREATEST UGLY CHRISTMAS JUMPER/SWEATER while he was curating RealScientists and we are in awe.
And the #UglyChristmasJumper that I won while I was away was waiting for me IT IS SO NERDY pic.twitter.com/x0V5VZDEm7
— realscientists (@realscientists) December 17, 2015
He also shared with us his impressive collection of frogs and frog-related paraphernalia
And as you can see I have quite the collection pic.twitter.com/tHtJu4jvCM
— realscientists (@realscientists) December 17, 2015
And just in case you weren’t 100% convinced of Gary’s enthusiasm for his field of research
ERMAGERD I LURVE THE SCIENCE https://t.co/yOHIxpOkzP
— realscientists (@realscientists) December 17, 2015
So do we Gary. So do we.
Gary agreed to complete our post-curation survey, so here’s how he thought the time went:
In general terms, how did you find your week as a curator?
It was a busy week and I felt I didn’t curate enough but it was enjoyable while I was doing it!
It can be a shock talking to so many. Did you find the sudden rush of interactions (good and bad) daunting?
It made me more cautious in my interactions and I seemed to overall have mainly positive interactions, it was exciting to have so many interactions at once.
What were the highlights? Were there any lowlights?
There weren’t any lowlights, the highlight was definitely going through my current research and making a Storify, neither of which I had done before.
Is there anything you wanted to get out of / do on the RS account that you didn’t manage to fit in?
Yes I wanted to talk a bit more about science policy but was worried about distracting from the frog research side of things. I will be moving into a science policy job in the second half of 2016 – I would be interested in handling the account again at that time to talk about policy only, if that was of interest to the RS account!
Did you have a plan? If so, did you stick to it?
I did, I had planned to talk through being at the conference, and when I got back managed to show the lab and my frogs, and then also go through my research. I planned to talk some more at the end of the week, but didn’t realize I was finishing on the Saturday rather than Sunday.
Do you have any tips or advice for future RS curators?
Make sure you have a plan; it will take more time than you think so be sure to dedicate a couple of hours if doing something like tweet your research.
What other people or accounts should people follow if they enjoyed your tweets this week?
@jessicapolka
Thanks once again Gary from all of us here at RealScientists HQ. If you missed anything from his week, the tweets are all collated at the following link.
