Directors' Directions

July 06, 2012

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This week at Inside Higher Ed's Confessions of a Community College Dean, a reader asks Dean Dad whether accepting an academic directorship is smart career move. Because this reader would eventually like to move up the career ladder, he or she is unsure whether taking a director position would be considered "a step down."

While every institution is different, and it may depend on field, Dean Dad says that directorships are not necessarily dead ends. "They’re typically one step 'below' an associate dean or a dean … and they usually have narrower scopes of control," he says, but "accepting and working well at a role like 'director of transfer' could give you that credibility, as well as the direct experience that could give you a more informed perspective when you do start moving up the ladder."

Plus, he adds, directorships offer candidates more exposure to the administrative side of academia than most typical teaching/research positions do. "After all, if it turns out to be a mistake, you can always move back," Dean Dad says. "That’s a real plus."

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Sandra Pankow

Research Associate
Scripps Research Institute

The Cystic Fibrosis Interactome

Sandra Pankow is currently a research associate in John Yates' lab at Scripps Research Institute, studying protein-protein interactions involved in cystic fibrosis.

"I'm interested in trying to understand genetic diseases from a systems biology point of view," she says. "I've found that proteomics is the ideal tool for this because it gives the researcher the possibility to investigate thousands of proteins at the same time rather than just having to guess which one or two you should look at."

During her time in the Yates lab, Pankow has worked on developing a new technique for large-scale profiling of protein-protein interactions called co-purifying protein identification technology, or CoPIT. The method uses co-purification of proteins followed by mass spectrometry analysis and bioinformatic processing to identify not just primary protein-protein interactions, but second-degree and third-degree interactors as well.

With it, Pankow says, "we've reached about 30-fold to 100-fold higher sensitivity than previous methods. We're now able to profile an interactome to near completeness."
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Abstract & Registration Deadlines

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On-demand recording available here.

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