HOT OFF THE PRESSES! In this piece we make the case that we are in an abortion infodemic and lay out an urgent research agenda.

This infodemic has unique features that make it challenging to address & this has implications for future infodemics. 🧵

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jmir.org/2023/1/e42582 First, let’s review why the loss of #reprorights puts women's health at risk. Here are the stats on maternal mortality in the US compared to other industrialized nations.

This is inexcusable.

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The usefulness of GRE and GPA for grad school entry is heavily debated for good reason. Poor predictors of success!

I find that the most important characteristic of a candidate is actually none of these. It is COACHABILITY.

Here is why and what coachability is and isn’t. 1/x Why coachability? People who are coachable easily overcome lack of experience simply because they are so highly motivated to learn.

Hands down, I would rather someone who is highly coachable with meh GRE scores than someone who is meh coachable and stellar GRE. 2/x

I teach a grad course on clinical trial methodology for behavioral interventions.

If this is a topic you’d like to learn more about, here are the main take homes from my class (with recommended readings!) in a thread! 🧵

Here goes! 1/x First, you must understand the phases of behavioral intervention development and testing. I can’t tell you how much I see these phases confused in grant applications and papers.

The ORBIT model is a fantastic resource delineating the phases:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

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Teaching online this Fall?

To learn how we can make Fall semester better, we asked students (n=60) what professors did when spring courses went online that showed they CARE about their students.

Here's what they said....

(full report coming soon!)

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#AcademicTwitter A very popular response was professor accessibility via frequent office hours and email made students feel cared for. Quick responses and lots of opportunities to connect were very appreciated. 2/x

College students return to campus in a few weeks. We wanted to know their thoughts about quarantine, symptom tracking, contact tracing, and mask wearing on campus, so my grad student @laurie_groshon and I did focus groups to find out.

Here’s what students told us

1/x First, we asked them about the required 14 day quarantine before the semester starts. Every student we asked said that this is not realistic and will likely fail. 😳

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I’m seeing a lot of talk about the role of “personal responsibility” in behavior (& behavioral interventions).

The idea is that if people just took more “responsibility” they would be doing the things we think they should be doing.

This thinking is a dead end.

A thread

1/x If a person exercises regularly or wears a mask, one might conclude this person has taken “personal responsibility.” But personal responsibility doesn’t actually explain ❓why❓ a behavior has occurred.

It is simply a subjective judgment about one’s character.

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A THREAD (AND AN OFFER!) for front line doc and nurse researchers! 😷🩺🩹

FRONT LINERS: Was your plan to submit an NIH grant interrupted by #covid19?

We want to help YOU for helping us. 🙏1/x We appreciate your 100% clinic commitment 💜and want to help the research stay alive! 💪

THE DEAL: A team of NIH-funded researchers has offered to provide volunteer peer reviews of your R or K proposal drafts you intended (or still intend) to submit on the next NIH deadline. 2/x

I shared the news of @ewarren's exit with my 12 year old daughter tonight. Her response wasn’t of sadness or anger.

It was much worse than that.

A thread. 1/x “She wasn't gonna win either way,” she texted back flatly, as if I was a fool to think otherwise.

DEJECTED. The worst response of all.

Let me take a step back though because she wasn’t always this way. Let’s go back to 2016.

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Are you a student or early career faculty worried about a low publication record? This thread contains my advice for increasing your writing efficiency. I invite anyone to add to it to make it a useful crowd-sourced resource for anyone just starting out! Here goes! 1/x About me: I had to turn around a slow start w writing productivity. My first pub hit 3 years post grad school in 2003. Yikes. I am now a tenured professor w 191 papers and NIH funding, so this slow start didn't mean I was doomed. You are not doomed either! 2/x

Fellow liberals, in this time when abortion rights are under attack, it is paramount that we do not let conservatives bait us into philosophical debates about the moment during pregnancy when “life” begins. Here is why 1/x The abortion debate is not, I repeat NOT, a consequence of differing views about when life begins during a pregnancy. Conservatives want us to fall down this rabbit hole to distract from the true purpose of the anti-abortion agenda. 2/x

How about a thread on #teamscience and collaboration, #academictwitter? I taught a team science class for jr investigators for years and have numerous research collaborations myself. Here are some common issues we discuss (and try to avoid!) when doing team science. 1/x Avoid bringing collaborators into a grant application at the last minute--- “PO says we need an X and that’s you so can I add you? It’s due Monday.” You’ll get nothing substantive from this person since there is no time. It will show. 2/x

I keep encountering misconceptions about what behavioral counseling is, particularly when it comes to health conditions. As psychologists, we don’t just chat w/ patients or tell them what to do. Behavioral counseling is a collaborative learning process. Let me explain… #scicomm Let’s say a patient comes to me wanting to lose weight. My first step is to assess how much they want to lose, why they want to lose weight, medical or psych issues that might be affecting their weight, and what they have tried in the past (and how that went). 2/n

It’s grant season again! Isn’t THIS scenario the WORST:

You submitted a grant, it got a score. You respond to the reviews only for the resubmission score to stay the same or get worse. AGH!! What happened? Here are some common reasons. A thread! 1/14 The No Cigar: The changes you made did not adequately solve the problems that reviewers were concerned about. 2/14

Hearing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford (let’s stop dropping the Dr. from her name, folks) coming forward hit close to home. I don't know her, but I have the same job and I shudder to think of the attempts to destroy her character. Any of us could be destroyed in the very same way 1/12 The job of academic clinical psychologist involves a lot of interacting with the public--we teach students, see patients, and publish research papers. Here are ways you could make any one of us look like a horrible person. 2/12

Sadly, I agree. I edited an academic book, co-authoring two of the chapters. It was a lot of work for very little ROI. #neveragain

https://twitter.com/chrisdc77/status/1035858621354192897

First, it was time consuming to get chapter authors and herd them thru the process, keeping chapters in consistent format and on time. Nearly impossible.

Q2. Content is key in #SoMe! Where do you find it? How do you keep up a daily content feed? #behavioralmedchat A2. I post what I read. I don’t go out looking just for something to post. I also don’t post everything I read---I will post it if it seems like others could be interested or if I want to save it for later or both! #behavioralmedchat

Q1 for #behavioralmedchat. Why social media??? A1. Because that is where advocacy occurs. Find me an org that does advocacy well but is not on social media. If you want to have an impact on an issue, you have to use the channels by which people get information and communicate. #behavioralmedchat

This op ed by @alexandrasking says Lauren Groff should indeed have answered the question on how she balances family and work. I respectfully disagree and here’s why. A thread. 1/14 cnn.com/2018/07/29/opi… IMHO the question is inappropriate for any venue in which a woman is asked to speak about her work. It robs us of air time to talk about our work and ideas. 2/14

This question has been coming up a lot lately, so I thought I would start a thread—plz add to it!

Your grant deadline is fast approaching and you are pretty behind schedule. You wonder: “Should I cram and submit now OR wait until next cycle?” 1/11 Have all of your co-Is and consultants had a chance to read it thoroughly and respond? Make there is enough time remaining to get their read on its readiness. If there isn't, then wait. 2/11

I’ve been reviewing a lot of grants lately and have some advice on things that negatively impact scores on proposals for behavioral intervention studies. A thread! 1/12 The intervention is not based on any conceptual/theoretical model. No discussion or testing of any processes of change. In other words, investigator doesn’t seem to know how or why intervention will impact the proposed outcomes. 2/12