I went to college for nine years to obtain a bachelors, masters and Ph.D. I am very proud of those accomplishments and completely embrace the moniker geek. I love doing cutting edge research and teaching the next generation of ‘geeks.’

The problem is that with my education I did not learn how to market or promote myself or my research. Self promotion is becoming more and more important in science because the federal system of peer review by its nature means that new and outside the box thinking cannot be supported. If you are the first with an idea, your peers will not be familiar with that concept and new things are shunned as being too risky. Innovation now seems to be more of a contest to see who is the first person to try to use a diabetes medicine to treat heart attack. That is not new, but we are rewarding the mundane.

To get federal grant funding you pretty much need to do the whole grant first and ask for the money second.

The discovery culture is rapidly and sadly vanishing.

Picture the whole of human knowledge as a sphere. We refer to pushing back the envelope to expand that sphere of knowledge. Breakthroughs expand the sphere. The research that is being done now is filling gaps, which is analogous to sanding or polishing the envelope.