How to win a research grant: Hone your sales pitch

I tend to think of my lab as a small business, with me as the entrepreneur at the helm – although I am probably closer to Del Boy Trotter than to Mark Zuckerberg.

This is just one of the many tortuous analogies I use to make sense of an academic career (because, let’s face it, academia doesn’t make much sense). Grants are the sales pitch that shore up the lab’s cashflow, and while I am not advocating passing off Peckham’s tap water as spring water, even genuine spring water won’t sell unless you market it properly.

As such, your grant applications have to target the customer. What complicates matters is that there are at least two different customers, with different requirements. Your sales pitch needs to be detailed enough to convince peer reviewers that you know what you are doing, but it also needs to be exciting enough to convince the panel to select your application ahead of other, equally scientifically valid, proposals. Here the lay summary is key. Sure, it is mislabelled: no lay person is ever going to read it. But it is your chance to sell the project to the panel.

Within a small business model, you also need to consider the cost of application. Our most precious commodity is our time. The endless hours absorbed by grant writing could be spent teaching, researching, writing papers or even having a life outside work!

The decision regarding whether to bear that opportunity cost should be taken in light of consideration of the chance of success versus the return if funded. Small grants with long application forms and a low hit rate should be ignored, no matter how desperate you get. I keep a tally of grants I have applied for, recording the grant value and the time invested. This has helped me to concentrate my efforts.

The sales pitch mentality stretches to how I review grants. I want to know what I am buying. First and foremost, I want to see a hypothesis. Not buried on page seven after the justification of resources, but on page one, line one, in bold. I then want my pulse quickened with a unique selling point. Why does the work need to be done? If it is a fundamental question, why does it need answering? If it is translational, how will answering it make the world a better place?

If that isn’t clear, no amount of technical competence will save you. So get out there and get selling!

This was first published in the Times Higher Education

#FailTales: Beyond resilience

A career in research is riddled with failure. The fact that there is a blog series about academia entitled #failtales suggests that failure in research is common. If the idea of failure being part of academia comes as a surprise to you, you are either too early on in your career to have been beaten down by it – in which case my condolences - or you are so hyper-successful that it has never impinged upon your exponential upward trajectory – in which case we are now mortal enemies.

First things first; it is OK to fail. Science isn’t easy. Science careers are not easy. We therefore need ways of dealing with failure.

Black Swan

I’ve recently been reading Antifragile, a book by Nicholas Taleb who is a self-styled errant business philosopher. His other book, The Black Swan, is about the surprising frequency of rare, extreme events and the disproportionate impact they have: the book takes its title from the fact that black swans exist, even if you have never seen one, i.e. absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.

Antifragile

Antifragile takes this idea further, exploring how to deal with these random events. The book is not an easy read, but the underpinning message is revolutionary. In between the weird analogies about Fat Tony, a prominent character of the book who embodies the anti-intellectual trader who understands risk without theories, and references to obscure Greek Philosophers, Taleb makes a case for changing our approach to extreme events.

The author splits the world into 3 categories: fragile, resilient and antifragile. Fragile systems respond very poorly to extreme events, and according to Taleb this includes high finance and research that is directed with a particular result in mind. Resilient (or robust) systems, including opportunistic research and privately owned businesses, can cope with such extreme events and recover after they have occurred. Antifragile systems actually benefit from these same extreme events. His examples of antifragile systems include the net economic value of Silicon Valley tech start-ups and the net democratic value of feudal city states, both of which are characterised by agility in the face of changing conditions because of their relatively small size. They also benefit from having a large number of starting options upon which selection can choose the fittest. Interestingly a recent study in Nature suggested that scientific disruption is driven by small rather than large teams (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0941-9)

So how does antifragile link back to scientific careers?

Failure is the linchpin of success.

Without some ideas failing, no ideas are going to succeed. This is very much in line with what Jon Tennant says in his article about the scientific record. Without better knowledge of what went before, we as a community are doomed to repeat ourselves.

A nuance of this is that failure is required to optimise an experiment: nothing works first-time. One of my more useful contributions to science literature was a technical note about in vivo imaging; a technically challenging process that is published in static beautiful images in a way that says, “this is easy, everyone can do this.” In actual fact, it turns out that there are a number of ways to mess it up. We managed to do all of them; fluorescent mouse turds, reflective ink in the pens we used, mice that were scientifically speaking too hairy, not enough anaesthetic, and so on. It would have been really helpful if someone had made this clear earlier. Only through failing were we able to get the studies to work and publish our own beautiful images, though it seems a shame that we failed to mention the pain we had been through to get them.

There is of course a separate conversation about failing fast, when it is right to drop a project if it isn’t working, and how information about the failed project can then be shared. Alternative publishing models and partial paper repositories where things can be put together from a group of studies are appealing, but they aren’t fully viable yet.

Back to the failure.

The aim of antifragility is to go one step further and make setbacks beneficial. It is easier to see how this works at a systems level. My failure and its publication helps other people. Likewise, in the context of grants, there have to be winners and losers – competition is important. If the system is working properly, only the strongest ideas survive and thus the field moves on. While that is great for research as a whole, what about me and my career?

At an individual level, how do you become antifragile? The aim is to make every situation a win-win. Taleb describes a barbell – a bimodal distribution of risk, basically reducing the cost of failure. He says “If I have ‘nothing to lose’ then it is all gain and I am antifragile.” For example, if you are going to invest in a project, reduce the emotional cost and make sure the return is high. Likewise, for antifragility in terms of experimental design, plan your investigations so that the outcomes are always interesting, rather than tightly focused on a hoped-for outcome.

We all fail. Grants are rejected. Papers bounce. Experiments explode. It is clear that we want to avoid the extremely negative impacts of failure. Part of this is moving away from fragility: not having our happiness and mental well-being pinned to a single outcome outside of our control. This means we need to move up the spectrum towards resilience. To achieve this, we can do a number of things: have a growth mindset, don’t take things personally, and build a good network of support for a start. Moving beyond resilience, antifragility can be built into your career. Place yourself so that regardless of external events, you succeed (or at least fail less). This involves not tying yourself to one single idea, too narrow a research field, a single funder: instead, hedge your bets strategically so that if one area goes down, others may be coming up. This is not easy, but at least thinking about it may protect us the next time failure calls.

This first appeared on Digital Science

Nature wants you dead – here’s how vaccines work to help keep us all alive

Nature wants you dead. Not just you, but your children and unborn children and everyone you have ever met.

It wants you to cough and sneeze and poop yourself into an early grave. If it can, it wants you your blood vessels to burst and pustules to explode all over your body. Put simply, Nature is trying to kill you.

And until relatively recently, it was really good at doing this. The average life expectancy of a human in 1900 was 31 years. I should already be dead.

But then science intervened with two critical innovations, clean water and vaccines, and changed everything. Clean water has had the biggest impact, but vaccines are a close second.

Vaccines work by tricking your immune system into thinking it has seen a bug before, so that if you ever see the real thing, it can kill it before it kills you. They are the coolest thing humanity has ever done, that and Magnum ice creams – choc ice on a stick, genius!

Vaccination’s greatest hits

In 1967, there were 10-15 million cases of smallpox a year – this is the equivalent every single person in London. The image above shows two 13-year-old boys in the early 1900s – the one on the right was vaccinated against smallpox, the one on the left wasn’t. The results couldn’t be clearer.

Since 1979, no one has died of smallpox, or even been infected with it. Putting that into context, in the same time 40 year period, more people have been killed by lava lamp explosions, allergic reaction after intercourse with a dog, suffocation after being wedgied, sacrificial goats and whipped cream cans.

Yes, the eradication of smallpox is the biggest success, but the hits just keep coming.

Pretty much everyone wears seatbelts because they save lives. Since 1988, they have saved about 450,000 lives in the USA alone. Vaccines do the same, in the same time period the number of cases of wild poliovirus reduced from an estimated 350,000 cases to 33 reported cases.

But it’s not just polio and smallpox. In 1940, there were more than 60,000 cases and 3,283 deaths from diphtheria in the UK. By 2002, vaccination had almost eliminated it – there were just 2 deaths from diphtheria between 1986 and 2002. Meningitis C has been virtually eradicated, as has invasive pneumococcal disease, Haemophilus influenzae B and rotavirus. And a very recent study showed a 90% reduction in cervical cancer since the introduction of the HPV vaccine – that’s 10 times fewer people getting this type of cancer.

Biological seatbelts

But vaccines only work if you take them. Which is kind of obvious. But the problem is that, as I have just established, vaccines reduce illness, dramatically. This means that the likelihood of people knowing someone who has had a vaccine-preventable illness is very low, which can then reduce the incentive to vaccinate. This is understandable, but wrong and it is particularly wrong because vaccines are a public health measure. By getting yourself or your family vaccinated you are doing a civic duty and protecting others. Because vaccines reduce the transmission of infections – the likelihood that an infected person will infect someone new, they reduce the overall numbers of infections. If you want to see what happens when people stop getting vaccinated, look no further than the reappearance of measles.

Changing the world

So far, so good. But we at Imperial College London want to go further. We want to make new vaccines against diseases that haven’t even emerged yet, preparing for ‘Disease X’ – an unknown pathogen which may cause disease and potentially an epidemic in future. We want to make micro-manufacturing units that can be put in a shipping container and moved to pandemic hotspots. We want to stop HIV and kick Influenza to the curb.

We are working to stabilise vaccines so they don’t go off in the sun and to scale manufacturing processes to make vaccines for all. We want to know when is the best time to vaccinate pregnant mothers to protect their children and the best time to vaccinate children to protect their grandparents. We work across borders with partners around the world to achieve these goals. And I get to work with these brilliant people, doing brilliant things on the coolest thing that mankind has ever done, sometimes whilst eating a Magnum. Happy days.

Natural antivirals

Before the immune system is activated, cells have their own intrinsic defence against viral infection. This comes in the form of proteins that can inhibit various stages of the viral life cycle. Some of these proteins are constitutively expressed and others are inducible – activated by signals from other infected cells as part of the early response to infection. Many of the proteins that provide this cell intrinsic immunity are expressed in response to signalling by a family of cytokines called interferons, in particular interferons alpha, beta and lambda. These antiviral genes are collectively known as interferon stimulated genes (ISGs). There are a large number of these genes (upwards of 300), but knowledge of what viruses they restrict and how they do it is limited, many genes have unknown functions.

In our recently published study we investigated the role of a specific ISG called IFITM1 (short for interferon induced transmembrane protein 1). IFITM1 is one of 3 IFITM proteins expressed by human cells and they appear to have a role in restricting early events in viral ifnection. We followed up previously published work, investigating where in the cell the protein was expressed and showed that unlike the better characterised IFITM3, IFITM1 was found on the plasma membrane, suggesting it prevents direct viral entry. We demonstrated that for a wide range of RNA viruses that infect the respiratory tract, including Respiratory Syncytial Virus, Influenza and Measles, increasing the level of IFITM1 in the cell reduced the level of viral infection. Interestingly we showed that IFITM1 was able to prevent infection with a virus with a DNA genome (Herpes Simplex Virus), suggesting IFITM1 function was associated with its cellular location rather than an effect on specific viral families. The importance of the location of the protein with in the cell was supported by studies that reduced the ability of IFITM1 to localise to the cell surface, leading to increased infection. These studies were supported by increased levels of infection in mice lacking the IFITM1 gene.

Understanding more about the function of interferon stimulated genes can help us to understand how viruses infect cells and may provide insight into strategies to prevent viral infections. In the case of IFITM1, we have shown that human cells make a robust anti-viral response at the cell surface and this can help to reduce viral infections.

Enter the Lab

So, there I was, pipette in hand, doing actual labwork for the first time in a year. How had it come to this? When I started out, I was convinced I was not going to be one of those PIs who is never in the lab: a common sentiment if you speak to late stage postdocs/ early stage PIs. My initial determination to stay lab active was in part caused by the disconnect between the training you receive as a post-doc and the reality of being a PI. Labwork so dominates the life of the postdoc that it is hard to imagine a job without it, skewing your sense of what a PI does and should be doing.

It can be tricky to come to terms with but as you progress in academia your job is no longer at the bench. There is a blunt reinterpretation of Adam Smith’s division of labour: “why have a dog and bark yourself”, which means you can’t do everything. As the leader of the group, your main responsibility is to support your team through ideas, funding and papers. Whilst it may be possible to have ideas and troubleshoot from the lab bench, there are some things that cannot be done, particularly writing. I find it very hard to alternate between bench and desk – and when I do try, fail to do both.

As time progresses, I have gotten to the point where my presence in the lab raises eyebrows and prompts various sarcastic comments along the lines of “labwork eh, try not to break anything”. Which I have to answer with as good grace as possible. However, there was one great occasion, when I had been teased all day by a postdoc about PIs not knowing anything, after several hours of this “banter” the same postdoc made a truly basic mistake in their experiments whilst my experiment went as planned, much to my amusement.

The move out of the lab comes with downsides. The lab is the heart of the group: it’s where all the gossip happens. Long experiments are great opportunities to get to know the team. Ensuring you have shared time together through other activities e.g. tea breaks, lunches and socials can help. As you step away from the bench, there is an inevitable skill fade, both in the techniques you do know and newer techniques that you do not. Losing lab skills is problematic on a number of levels. Psychologically, our success as postdocs was so closely linked to our success in the lab, losing the lab skill set before mastering the PI skill set is tricky. It can also affect our ability to lead in terms of legitimacy as group leaders which is in part based on our technical expertise, when this fades it can increase the ever-present imposter syndrome, but also not knowing how a technique works limits the ability to give feedback when it doesn’t. The best solution to this is to hire brilliant people.

There are still times when you can justify your presence in the lab, particularly in training. When you are getting established and it is just you and one or two other members of staff, the majority of lab know-how resides in your head. At this early career stage, there is a tension between good training and good results. You need to build a solid platform, so that your staff can function independently in the future: but every second you are not generating your first paper feels like wasted time, especially with the probation/ fellowship/ tenure clock ticking down. If you survive this first stage, the training can be self-perpetuating with existing staff training the newbies. This is very satisfactory but comes with the caveat that you need to think about quality assurance. The techniques I taught to my first PhD students 10 years ago have morphed over time. Normally this is for the best – things change after all, but it is worth checking occasionally. The training role never entirely disappears, because people selfishly leave from time to time and unless you have a succession plan in place take all that knowledge with them.

It is really hard to strike the balance. There are times when you are best out of the lab and other times when your presence in the lab might be the key difference between success and failure, or at least helping limit the levels of stress that your team have during bigger experiments. Erring on the side of absence builds independence in your team much more quickly – though this can be tough on them. One approach is to treat yourself to some labwork every now and then. Especially if you pick something that you can still do, that generates quick, easy results for use as preliminary grant data. These short bursts in the lab are refreshing. Unlike a PI’s day which involves some meetings, thinking a bit and maybe some writing, labwork has a set timetable with a clear endpoint to the day. Labwork can be simple and clean and it is reassuring to still be good at something, since a lot of being a PI involves external forces telling you are rubbish. It can also remind you why you got into science in the first place, especially if you generate some novel data. But lab time is best treated as a luxury rather than a key part of the job.

There are also upsides to leaving the lab behind. We tend to paint our lab time in a rosy shade as the best time of our life. But if you go back for longer than a day or so, you remember that it can be frustrating, especially when things don’t work. But more importantly, being the head of a lab enables you to do more of the research you want to do. As an early career researcher, you are working on someone else’s project and there is just one of you. When you get your own lab, you can put as many people as you can get funded onto the tasks you want to do. You also spread your losses, if it is just you, when an experiment fails it is devastating, when there are 5 people working for you, any one failure is offset by other successes.

The fact is that your role changes. As your group grows there is less need for you to be in the lab (and this is ok). You have to come to terms with the fact that most of the time you are best serving yourself and your team outside the lab. So if you are not leading a group yet, enjoy the labwork while you can because, as odd as it may sound right now, one day you will miss it.

This article first appeared on Digital Science

What is up your nose?

We are interested in the contents of your nose, not at the level of hair, bogey and the occasional finger, but at the level of the complex microbial community that lives there and how it is associated with respiratory infection. The makeup of this community has been interrogated through sequencing (the airway microbiome) with indications that some bacterial communities may be associated with health and others with disease.

A bacterial diet

However, what the bacteria in the airways eat to survive is less well understood. One tool that may help us to characterise which biochemicals in the airways bacteria can use as food is called metabolomics. This uses liquid chromatography, to separate the biochemicals, and then mass spectrometry, to interrogate what they are. Comparing the mass spectrometry data against a curated library, we can then determine which individual biochemicals are present and their relative abundance. This tool has been used widely to investigate changes in the blood but has not been used much to interrogate the airway.

Blotting paper 2.0

The aim of our recently published study was to compare methods for sampling the airway metabolome. We looked at two standard techniques – nasal lavage (flushing a millilitre of saline through the nose and recovering whatever you can – quite a lot never comes back!) and induced sputum (getting people to breathe in an expectorant and then spit in a cup). We also used a newer technique, that had never been used for metabolomics sampling, called Synthetic Absorptive Matrix (SAM) strips. These are hi-tech blotting paper and have been used to recover other types of sample from the airways, including antibodies and cytokines. You can watch a video of their inventor having them put up his nose here. We looked at the use of these SAM strips in both the upper airway (via the nose) and the lower airway (via a bronchoscope). In the traditions of Barry Marshall (though I doubt I will get a Nobel prize for this), I volunteered to be one of the subjects for the sampling; the nasal wash, induced sputum and upper airway SAM were all fine, but having a bronchoscopy was fairly unpleasant.

It’s good to share

Having collected the samples, we then outsourced the running of the metabolomics to a company, called Metabolon in the US. This choice had mixed reviews, but I think it is ok to outsource, increasingly labs are outsourcing some of the more specialist analysis approaches – sequencing, transcriptomics, metabolomics. This makes sense in terms of time, expertise and access to equipment. Specifically in the case of metabolomics, outsourcing gave us access to a much larger curated library of samples, giving us more information from our samples, the biochemicals were also grouped into families, enabling us to interrogate the data more easily.

Sooo much data

From the point of performing the study to publishing it has been a lengthy process. In part this was due to the complexity of the dataset. We had approximately 14,000 data points – which may be small compared to some types of project, but when you are used performing focussed studies on individual mediators it was quite a step change. This was combined with a bewildering list of biochemicals, most of which we had never heard of – 1-stearoyl-2-arachidonyl-GPC anyone? In the end, through the power of the R programming platform and a very talented PhD student, we have ended up with a paper that uses a wide range of graph types, all of which aimed to compress the data into a meaningful form.

Food for the Pseuds

So what did we find? In total, 581 biochemicals were recovered from the airways belonging to a range of different families. When we compared the relative abundance of the these biochemicals between the different sampling techniques, we saw that the SAM strips gave us a much greater recovery of biochemicals than the other approaches. Since we were interested in how the airway metabolome enables bacterial colonisation, we screened some of these biochemicals for their ability to support bacterial growth. 35 of these biochemicals were able to support growth of the opportunistic airway bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, including a number of sugars and amino acids.

A microcosm in a nostril

The airways represent a fascinating ecosystem because they are nutritionally more restricted in terms of the range and specific concentrations of any one biochemical compared to say the gut, but at the same time the nutrients are constantly refreshed. The balance of biochemicals in the airways shapes the bacteria that can live there, and we believe that this could be dysregulated in disease. By developing the tools to sample the airway metabolome, we are now one step closer to understanding how changes in airway biochemistry affects infection.

How do you build resilience

This was a co-authored piece with Dr Cecilia Johansson (Imperial College London)

At the recent British Society for Immunology (BSI) Early Career Training session in London, we were tasked with talking about tools to help immunologists improve their resilience. This was identified  by the BSI’s ‘Careers in Immunology’ report as an area that early stage (and middle and late stage) immunologists struggle with throughout their careers. So you probably don’t need us to tell you that a career in science can be difficult. Whatever stage you are at, there are always new hurdles to surmount and rejections to overcome. Part of the phenotype of the successful scientist is resilience: resilience in the face of experiments failing, resilience in the face of papers being rejected, resilience in the face of short term contracts, minimal wages and a terrifying lack of job security. As resilience is "the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties" – how do we build/enhance our resilience?

We have identified three sources of resilience that you can draw upon: within yourself, outside yourself and outside your work.

The Struggle Within

The first source of resilience has to come from within yourself. There are a number of tricks that we think can help:

1. Mindset. Carol Dweck is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University; in her book MindSet,1 she identifies the strength of a growth mindset, which means looking for the opportunities to improve yourself in any situation. So instead of saying ‘reviewer 2 is an idiot’, reframe the situation to say ‘how could I have made my writing more clear so that even reviewer 2 could understand it’.
2. Other people. Other people’s success can be a source of strength, or not: we have two different approaches to deal with it.
   1. Never compare up (John’s approach). With the internet to hand you don’t have to look very far to find a more successful immunologist than yourself. It is then very easy to slowly sink into despair as you read their endless CV of success. Don’t do this! Alice Prince at Columbia very clearly describes how people’s CVs are not an honest reflection of the route they took.2
   2. Inspiration (Cecilia’s approach). Use amazing people around you as role models. Have a lot of them and use their skills/behaviour/mindset as motivation.  
3. Behaviour. It is not what happened, it is how you react to the situation that decides the amount of resilience needed. Your values, mindset, beliefs, and current state of mind all influence how much resilience you have: when you are super stressed and over-worked it is much harder to cope. Reflect on how and why you react to a particular situation and think of how you can improve your coping strategies.
4. Celebrate. Make a point of celebrating successes big and small: papers, grants, experiments for both yourself and everyone around you. Apply the perspective of time to your progress: taking a longer view smooths out the lows and demonstrates an upward trajectory. Pause and take stock of the past three months, one year, five years and identify what went right.
5. Make plans. It is difficult to assess your progress without a plan. What do you want to achieve in the next three months, one year, five years. The granularity of the detail can fade as you look further into the future.
6. Pause and take care of yourself. In a stressful life/period, it is very easy to forget yourself. Find ways of manage your time (as time is precious and we never have enough) and your stress levels. Mindfulness (essentially meditation) can be a very helpful tool. It doesn’t need much more than closing your eyes and focusing on your breath or the background noises for a few minutes to re-wind and re-set.

All of these approaches link to good reflective practice – studying your own experiences to improve the way you work. There are times when everything can get on top of you and you have to take time to step back. However, occasionally, it is not possible to do this alone and this is where you need to the second source of resilience, other people.

Everybody needs somebody

We all need support from other people. The Ancient Greek language has multiple different words for love/ support, and while the type of support we need most will vary from person to person and with time of life, these different types provide a useful framework for thinking about our interactions with others. This support can come from both within science and from your broader circle of friends and family.

Agape refers to love from a parent to a child, but more broadly reflects support from a senior figure to someone more junior. Don’t restrict yourself to one role model or mentor, you don’t even need to have met them (e.g. CJ looks to Cheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook3; JT has learnt a huge amount from Stephen King’s book On Writing4). Take every opportunity to meet new and inspiring people. But also look inwards, most organisations (including the BSI) run mentoring programs. And remember different people will be useful for different types of advice/perspectives.

Eros describes the love of a partner. Now this is far from being a lonely hearts column, but we both draw great strength from our partners. The family network (partner, children, parents, cousins etc) is also a huge source of support.

Finally, but not least, Phillia love of a friend. Assembling a group of like-minded individuals is really important. Start in your PhD. Long hours spent moving colourless liquid around in labs are the perfect time to bond. Immunology is not a big field: as you progress with your career, it is amazing the times your paths will cross and re-cross. If nothing else, your PhD cohort are good for free beds in foreign cities. But the hope is that you can rise together on a common mutually supportive wave.5

Hit the road Jack

The final source of support is the realisation that this is just a job. If can feel all consuming, but it is still just a job. It helps to take a broader perspective. Again this comes back to good reflective practice. In parallel it is vital to have a life outside work (more work to live than live to work). This is not always easy, especially if you are juggling work and family commitments. But find outlets that you enjoy, without feeling the pressure to excel at them: bake but don’t aim to win Bake Off, run but don’t aim to win marathons. These other activities serve the same purpose as mindfulness – they break the loop when work is getting on top of you. Try to remember why you are doing/chose to do this job and the many positive aspects it brings.

A career in immunology has peaks and troughs. It’s ok to find it tricky and to admit to other people that you find it tricky. Recognising and celebrating the highs and learning tools to negotiate the lows can really help.

John Tregoning, Senior Lecturer in Immunology, Imperial College London. Twitter: @DrTregoning

Cecilia Johansson, Senior Lecturer in Respiratory Infection, Imperial College London. Twitter: @cjohansson_lab 

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Further reading

You can read more articles from John on his blog: drtregoning.blogspot.co.uk. References for the article are below.

1. Dweck, C. S. Mindset  the new psychology of success. Updated edition. edn,  (Random House, 2016).
2. Prince, A. Omissions from a National Institute of Health (NIH) biosketch. PLoS Pathog 14, e1006896, doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1006896 (2018).
3. Sandberg, S. Lean in: women, work, and the will to lead. First edition. edn,  (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).
4. King, S. On writing: a memoir of the craft. Scribner trade paperback edition. edn,  (Scribner, 2010).
5. Tregoning, J. No researcher is too junior to fix science. Nature 545, 7, doi:10.1038/545007a (2017).