The Transition from Practitioner to Professor: The Struggle of New Faculty to Find their Place in the World of Academia

Becoming a college professor brings both the feeling of self-accomplishment and discernment regarding this prestigious achievement. Most doctoral candidates are practitioners in the eld of public education and will hopefully transition from a principalship to the oce of a college professor. While this journey is lled with personal attainment, some of the doctoral graduates experience a variety of struggles along the way to their positions in higher education. This study examined this journey for some of those who have made the move. The questions posed to the participants centered on the benefits, disadvantages, and suggestions on ways to assist fellow completers who have decided to take a position in higher education. Four primary struggles were identied as a result of the study: (1) struggle with the role, (2) struggle with self, (3) cultural struggle, and (4) future struggles. Through a narrative approach, the participants addressed their feelings regarding the move to a professorship, struggles they faced along the way and the impact the professional change had on their lives

Reproducibility of fluorescent expression from engineered biological constructs in E. coli

We present results of the first large-scale interlaboratory study carried out in synthetic biology, as part of the 2014 and 2015 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competitions. Participants at 88 institutions around the world measured fluorescence from three engineered constitutive constructs in E. coli. Few participants were able to measure absolute fluorescence, so data was analyzed in terms of ratios. Precision was strongly related to fluorescent strength, ranging from 1.54-fold standard deviation for the ratio between strong promoters to 5.75-fold for the ratio between the strongest and weakest promoter, and while host strain did not affect expression ratios, choice of instrument did. This result shows that high quantitative precision and reproducibility of results is possible, while at the same time indicating areas needing improved laboratory practices.Peer reviewe