Beryl Lieff Benderly

Will Micro-Robots Brush Your Teeth?

Hyun “Michel” Koo grew up in what he calls a “poor section” of Sao Paulo, Brazil, witnessing—and sometimes experiencing—what happens when people can’t get oral health care. Children suffering painful cavities and adults ashamed of missing teeth…

Crushing Opioid Abuse with Placebos

A sugar pill could reduce the risk of deadly pain killer addiction. When a 60-year-old runner fell, broke his hip, and injured his knee in a bad spill during a 2019 marathon, he had no idea that his painful injuries would produce a research landmark…

The Promise of Pills that Do Nothing

Open-label placebos may defy logic, but scientists explore promising new treatment possibilities. “You are the active ingredient.” So proclaims the chic, sleek website of Zeebo Effect, a South Burlington, Vermont, company that sells elegant light…

Viral Load

Female science and engineering faculty have borne a disproportionate share of COVID-19’s career side effects. By Beryl Lieff Benderly The pork tomatillo stew dinner was supposed to be a treat amid the pandemic blahs for the family of Pamela Kreeger,…

Search Results for: Beryl Lieff Benderly

Hostile federal policies and a global pandemic have hammered international student enrollment. Biden administration changes could offer relief, but the long-term effects remain unclear. By Beryl Lieff Benderly When University of Pittsburgh postdoc…

ASEE Today

Letter from the President The Mirror Image To create the future of engineering education, we must start with a look at ourselves. This letter is excerpted from the incoming President’s speech at ASEE’s Virtual Conference in June. Let me start by…

Search Results for: china syndrom

A U.S. national security crackdown puts universities and faculty on notice about risks in global research collaborations. By Beryl Lieff Benderly It could have been a scene from an over-the-top spy movie. But in February, when federal agents arrested…

What do we know about Ph.D. scientists’ career paths?

For institutions ostensibly in the business of amassing knowledge, universities know remarkably little about what happens to their Ph.D. alumni once they leave graduate school. In an effort to fill that gap and help universities improve the career…

U.S. academics, make sure you know the rules about foreign funding and affiliations

Openness, intellectual freedom, and international collaboration are traditional hallmarks of university science in the United States. Recently, however, federal funding and law enforcement agencies—as well as universities themselves—have been taking…

A warning from the academic underground of adjuncts and contingent faculty

Over the years countless articles, reports, studies, and white papers have decried the systematic exploitation of adjunct and contingent faculty members. Working on temporary appointments, often with disgracefully low pay and widespread lack of job…

Early-career researchers commonly ghostwrite peer reviews. That’s a problem

Until recently, I thought I knew pretty much all the ways postdocs and graduate students are exploited. That was before I encountered an apparently common form of peonage that I had not even imagined: trainees ghostwriting peer-review reports that…

Mixed messages about women’s representation in science—and a missing piece of the picture

Elaine Weyuker earned her master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, in an academic building that lacked a women’s bathroom. She went on to receive the first Ph.D. in computer science that Rutgers…

A Frayed Welcome Mat

Engineering deans struggle to attract foreign graduate students discouraged by the tone of U.S. policies and rhetoric. By Beryl Lieff Benderly Well before he entered the White House, Donald Trump made clear that he’d head an administration less…

University of California staff researchers opt to form a union, joining postdocs

After 5 years as a postdoc—four of them at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles—molecular biologist Christina Priest hit the university’s time limit for postdoctoral appointments and transitioned to a university staff position as a project…

A decade after a needless lab death, how to strengthen safety

Ten years ago this month, on 16 January 2009, 23-year-old lab technician Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji died of the burns she sustained when an ill-prepared and risky experiment went calamitously wrong. This totally preventable waste of a young life is…

A decade after a fatal lab safety disaster, what have we learned?

This month marks 10 years since Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji undertook her last experiment. On 29 December 2008, the 23-year-old lab technician tried to transfer a small quantity of tert-Butyllithium, which ignites on contact with air. The attempt ended…

To address sexual harassment in science, the past can inform the way forward

In late September, two major scientific bodies announced new policies aimed at curbing sexual harassment in academic research. The National Science Foundation (NSF) now requires institutions holding grants to report promptly whenever an agency-funded…

A suspenseful (fictional) look at women in the lab

This column usually scrutinizes the situation of early-career scientists through the lens of the latest academic or policy research and commentary. This month, however, a new novel offers a view of academic research that we only occasionally get to…

These studies offer a realistic view of postdoc life—and guidance for making career decisions that work for you

If you care about postdocs, the general dearth of reliable information about them is probably a continuing frustration. It’s encouraging, therefore, to report on two recent studies that offer useful insights. Though disparate in their aims and…

Rosalind Franklin and the damage of gender harassment

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Rosalind Franklin, one of the most consequential scientists of the 20th century—indeed, of the entire history of biology—and not just because her 98th birthday would have been last week. She’s been on my mind…