1.
How to get tenure*
C. Titus Brown
UC Davis
* While doing open science
Hashtag: #opencon

2.
Caveats and Disclaimers
• Research intensive (R1) in the USA
Details are particular to
• College of Engineering / Computer Science
• College of Natural Sciences / Microbiology
(every dept / college has its own culture)
• My life and research :)
Many ~80% true statements

3.
Y1
Y2
File for reappointment
Receive reappointment
File for tenure
Y3
Y4
Y5
Y6
Y7
Receive tenure (?)
Default Asst Prof timeline

4.
2008
2009
File for reappointment
Receive reappointment
Take position at UC Davis;
apply for tenure.
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Receive tenure
(Extension: Jessie born)
Apply for jobs
My Asst Prof timeline

5.
What did I do for 7 years?
60% “scholarship”
30% teaching
10% service
(I think this is a typical split for R1)
(But virtually nobody cares about the 40%)

6.
I gave talks.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Presentations 0 3 4 7 22 11 23
(Invited) 0 1 3 6 21 11 23

7.
I wrote (some) papers.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Research
papers 1 1 0 1 1 10 2
(Senior
author) 0 0 0 0 1 0 2

8.
I wrote grants.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Grants /
applied for 4 5 9 6 15 3 ?
(Primary
author) 1 1 1.5 1 5 0.3 1
(Received) 1 2 1 1 5 0 1

9.
I worked with students & postdocs.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Postdocs 1 2 2 3 2 1 1
PhD students 2 4 5 6 6 5 5
PhD
committee
memberships ?? ?? ?? 18 15 10 10

10.
I taught classes.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Courses 1 2 2 1 2 2 1
Contact hours 96 153 150 60 93 180 150

11.
Let’s revisit that…

12.
I gave talks.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Presentations 0 3 4 7 22 11 23
(Invited) 0 1 3 6 21 11 23
This is flat out insanity

13.
I wrote (some) papers.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Research
papers 1 1 0 1 1 10 2
(Senior
author) 0 0 0 0 1 0 2
Papers… papers… wait, I’m supposed to write them?

14.
I wrote grants.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Grants /
applied for 4 5 9 6 15 3 ?
(Primary
author) 1 1 1.5 1 5 0.3 1
(Received) 1 2 1 1 5 0 1
This is also flat out insanity
(yet it is what I think must be done today)

15.
Three big grants.
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Big USDA grant
NIH R01
Moore DDD Investigator grant

16.
I worked with students & postdocs.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Postdocs 1 2 2 3 2 1 1
PhD students 2 4 5 6 6 5 5
PhD
committee
memberships ?? ?? ?? 18 15 10 10
Kind of crazy, but kind of OK.
Ends of terms (defense/committee deadlines) were HORRIBLE.

17.
I taught classes.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Courses 1 2 2 1 2 2 1
Contact hours 96 153 150 60 93 180 150
This is actually all pretty reasonable…

18.
Non-standard career actions
1. Training workshops.
2. Blogging.
3. khmer, an openly developed software project.
I made a very early decision to be “open” in
both the physics model (preprints) and OSS
model (source code, development, etc.)

19.
“Analyzing Next-Generation
Sequencing Data” – 2 week summer
workshop
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Workshop
applicants 33 133 170 210 180

20.
Blogging
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Blog posts 52 59 32 15 61 73 69
I wrote a number of long, in-depth blog posts;
Some of them were in depth on my research.
In 2009, Jared Simpson tweeted: “With blog posts like this, who needs
papers?” – very encouraging.

21.
All papers posted as preprints.
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
First preprint (Pell et al., 2012)
Second preprint (Brown et al., 2012)
Third and fourth preprints
(Howe et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2014)

22.
More – reasonably important papers
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Pell et al, 2012 (73 cit)
Brown et al., 2012, unpub (52 cit)
Howe et al, 2014 (22 cit)
Zhang et al., 2014 (3 cit)

23.
=> Very non-linear leveling up!?
In 2014:
• 3 keynote talks, 1 Gordon Conference invitation;
• Job offer;
• Moore Data-Driven Discovery Investigator grant;
• Tenure;
(Yeah, 2014 was a good year, professionally..)
Note: expectations are now scarily high.
(Mmmh, 1%-er problems, I know…)

24.
Moving to a new job: Jan 2015.
• For family reasons, applied for ~6 faculty positions in fall
2013. Some R1, some second-tier/research.
• All 6 places were good places for us to live; fallback plan
was to apply more broadly in 2014 as I was going up for
tenure.
• Also looked at ~3 non-academic “open science”/data
science positions.
• One faculty interview, one job offer, one job acceptance.

25.
Miscellaneous observations
Personal opinions.
Happy to kibbitz about them on Twitter.
(May ignore/block combative schmucks.)

26.
Luck plays a huge part in this.
• Getting position in the first place;
• Hiring productive people;
• Picking tractable research problems;
• Hitting the right grant program(s) at the right
time;
• Choice of subject, timing of big grant
programs;
• No personal illness or financial problems.

27.
Corollary: don’t take an assistant
professor job.
(Or at least, don’t have taken one three years ago…)
• The funding situation is horrible, and we are in a lag time
between a wave of decreased funding and the adjustment
of chair/dean expectations.
• So, if you take a faculty position, there are good reasons
you might “fail” that have nothing to do with you, the
quality of your research, or the quality of your students.
(You will know which it is, because your colleagues will tell
you.)
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/21/the-awesomest-7-
year-postdoc-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-tenure-track-
faculty-life/

28.
Pursue your passion(s).
• You can’t write 5+ grants a year without something
unreasonable driving you!
• That something may not be getting a high profile paper, or
amassing piles of cash (I know, crazy!)
• All of your colleagues understand this.
• Pursue what makes you happy and excited to be there.
• But don’t ignore the bottom line, either: grants and pubs.

29.
Investigate alternatives
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Applied for job outside academia (no offer)
Recruited for faculty position (no offer)
Investigated non-faculty jobs

30.
Build a broad mentoring network.
• Find career mentors who align with your personality
(Jim Tiedje, Weiming Li)
• Find “discipline” mentors who are willing to put up with
Type-A Assistant Prof energy (Hans Cheng, Bill Punch,
Rich Enbody, David Arnosti)
• Chat regularly with super-smart people outside your
immediate discipline (Rich Lenski, Erik Goodman)
• Have friends who will put up with your whining (Charles
Ofria, Chris Adami)

31.
Your online colleagues may be your
best research colleagues.
• I had very few computational science colleagues,
and very few open source/open science
colleagues, at MSU.
• Twitter, blogging, and the Software Carpentry
community were incredibly important avenues of
support!
Note: two of my rec letter writers (Ewan Birney and
Jonathan Eisen) I know almost entirely from
online/e-mail conversations!

32.
Find low cost ways of being open
• Doing a paper review? Blog the top few overview
paragraphs once the papers is out.
• Attending a conference? Take 15 minutes during a
boring talk to write up a few exciting talks.
• Live-tweet talks.
• Work reproducibility, open data, open source into your
daily workflow.

33.
Build a positive reputation outside of
your university.
• You can be the best liked and most respected
person at your university…
• …but come tenure time, that simply will not
matter.
• It also doesn’t matter for grants, papers, or
invitations.
(Note: Internal grants don’t count for anything.)

34.
Corollary: Ignore admin advice.
• Administrators (Chairs, Deans, etc.) are arbiters of
local evaluation. They generally do not pay much
regular attention beyond your stats.
• As we all know, many of these stats are silly
and/or have a high latency (3-5 years for a paper
to accrue citations!)
• …but you’d better have a damned good story
when they ask what you’ve been up to.
Note, you might not want to take this advice; I mismanaged my
relationship with administrators at MSU :)

35.
Don’t “compete” head-on with others.
• You are not going to regularly get high profile
papers (C-N-S, or whatever).
• You are not going to outcompete Dr. Big Shot in
Overcrowded Field, and Dr. Big Shot is not going
to “make space for you.”
• You do have the freedom, and energy, and
perspective, to do/try different things. Do
something that will make you stand out.*
* Yes, easier said than done.

36.
Tackle hard problems & think as
deeply as you can.
(Your research should have a “bus factor” of 1.)
• “Intellectual impact” is absolutely key for tenure letters.
• No one will reward you for publishing a bunch of shallow
papers, even though it will look good on your annual
reports.
• …despite that, this is the advice you will essentially get
from some administrators…
(This is the most important piece of advice I give to postdocs
and assistant professors.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

37.
Serve on hiring committees
• I helped hire two faculty in CSE in 2013/2014!
• Tremendously valuable experience – so this is
what other packets, research statements, CVs,
recommendation letters, etc. look like!
• “Straight talk” in hiring committee is a proxy for
tenure committees – “this person not doing deep
work”, or “why this person leaving their current
position?”

38.
Plan to apply for jobs.
• You have no leverage with respect to tenure without
another job offer. Period, full stop, end of sentence.
• If you cannot compete well for a job at an equal or better
department, then something has gone wrong (bad aim or
failure to execute). (Note, doesn’t mean getting another
job, just “are you competitive?”)
• Applying for jobs is a LARGE investment of energy, but
oddly worth it (and dovetails nicely with tenure package).
– What have I done so far?
– What do I want to do going forward?
See my asst prof vs assoc prof research and teaching statements.

39.
Work-life balance.
(I did not do this well, needless to say.)
• Wife (2004), two daughters (2007 and 2010).
• My wife was tremendously supportive, at
expense of her own academic career (along
with other things)
• Main rule: when I was home and kids were
awake, NO WORK.
YMMV, but this is something to continually reevaluate.

40.
Work-life balance.
Also, exercise and “fun” (trash) reading.
Also, passion for things other than work.
(If there is one thing I could change, I would have
spent more time with my kids; remember, no one
ever said, “man, I wished I’d written one more grant
app” on their deathbed.)

41.
None of your
administrators/committees care about
“open”.
• …but my research active colleagues mostly
appreciated “why”, if not “how”.
• Contra, no significant negative consequences of
being open, because (in the end) I met traditional
metrics (papers, grants, intellectual contrib).
• Had I not met traditional metrics, I would be out
of a job.

42.
Contra: being open can help you with
traditional metrics!
• Training, blogging, preprints, open source all
led to many connections.
• Workshop attendees recommended me as
speaker;
• Blog followers recommended me as speaker;
• Preprints got my research out there earlier;
The secondary impact of openness: you can
leverage network effects!

43.
Caveats
• I’m a Methods guy; being open is a force-
multiplier for methods.
• I’m in bioinformatics and genomics, which is
super-important right now.
• I timed my career well! My faculty position
started when Illumina GAII first came out (=> Big
Data)
• I am a 3rd generation academic white guy, so I
totally played on “easier mode”.
• Tenure extension was very nice but probably not
essential.

44.
Caveats to the caveats.
• Computational methods are generally not
respected in biology.
• Switched fields – I did not work on most of what I
work on now, prior to becoming faculty.
• Absolutely no grad or postdoc advisor support.
Zip, zilch, none – no contact after ~2009.
• Split department/college (65% CSE/Egr, 35%
Micro/CNS). Don’t do this.

45.
The myth of exceptionalism
“Well, sure, that’s fine for you and Ethan, but I couldn’t get
away with that.”
Yeah, well, I didn’t know if I could, either :)
• In some ways, I’ve been a piss poor prof. (See Ethan White
for someone who did this all before me, and better.)
• I’ve also been extremely lucky with timing (rise of
bioinformatics, rise of data science, rise of open.)
• I think we mostly need better mentoring on what paths
work for open science, and we need better incentives.
“Early adopter” benefits will eventually go away.

46.
Conclusions
• Fewer than 20% of the slides in this talk have
anything to do with being open!
• You don’t have to be open to get tenure.
• Grants and papers and intellectual impact are
all necessary for tenure.
• Good science is the only solid foundation for
grants, papers, and impact.
• Open science can be viewed as one way to
market your intellectual impact.

47.
Looking forward => Assoc Prof.
• Switching to yet another new field – VetMed!
• Being interested in openness, training, (anti-
)sexism, and diversity has led to some great
applicants for my lab.
• Passion beyond “get tenure” gives me a long-
term motivation.
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-Associate-Professors/132071/

48.
Looking forward => Assoc Prof.
Interested in using bottom-up approaches,
adapted from open source community, to
enable change in:
1. How scientific impact is measured.
2. How computational science is viewed.
3. How biology training is done.

49.
Questions? Thoughts?
• This is a very polemic take on being a tenure-track
scientist in academia, but I think it’s not too far off
base. Pushback & other experiences welcome!
• Every situation is different and you need to strategize
about your situation and your incentives regularly.
• Strongly consider fleeing academia for greener
pastures (better paid, more respect, less self-
importance, better work-life balance).
ctbrown@ucdavis.edu / @ctitusbrown