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If you’re one of our F1000 Specialists, you’ll have noticed the return of the monthly Specialist newsletter, which now include a featured F1000 Specialist every month. We realised that the interviews would be interesting for others to read as well, so you know what our Specialists are up to.

Below are two short interviews with the June and July featured specialists. August’s featured specialist is soon to follow!

Featured F1000 Specialist June 2015 – Kirsten Lee

Kirsten Lee, here shown with a larger version of her model organism (C. elegans)  is a postdoc at the City University of New York. In April, she took over the @F1000 Twitter account for an hour to host a tweetchat about social media in the biomedical sciences. We asked her about her experience below, and you can read a longer interview with Kirsten on our blog.

Why did you choose this topic for a tweetchat?

First of all, I wanted to learn more about how young biomedical scientists started using Twitter and the ways they use it. Second, I was curious what social media means to the biomedical industry and what attracts some professors to social media.

What was the most interesting thing you learned from your tweet chat guests?

People use #ICanHazPDF on twitter to get paywalled papers. And a lot of scientists fear that what they say would affect their career.

How did it feel to take over the official @F1000 account for an hour?

It was great, but I tried to keep in mind that I was not using Twitter for myself but for a company.

 

Featured F1000 Specialist July 2015 – Gary McDowell

Gary McDowell  is a postdoc at Tufts University, where he recently hosted a multi-campus talk by F1000 Outreach Director Kinga Hosszu. Gary is also heavily involved with the Future of Research organisation, which you can read more about in their F1000Research article.

How did you become involved with the Future of Research organisation?

I heard about it through a meeting of postdocs from across various Boston institutions, and I feel very strongly that the way science is being carried out – the structure of the workforce, the way people are trained, and the openness and reproducibility of research – needs to be reformed. I see the Future of Research as an outlet to try to encourage young scientists to achieve improvements to how science is done.

What role do you see F1000 play in supporting early career researchers?

F1000 is able to provide a network and community for researchers to improve the way research is published, distributed and reviewed and I think for young researchers, having a framework to help them achieve some of their goals in science is a great help.

What are you working on when you’re not actively bettering the lives of other postdocs? Any exciting research projects you can share?

I’m working on left-right patterning of organs during embryo development, using frogs as a model system. It’s been very exciting, as I’ve been manipulating cytoskeletal proteins, identified in roles in chirality in species such as mouse, Drosophila and even Arabidopsis, and demonstrating their effect on organs to try to find an evolutionarily conserved role for the cytoskeleton in asymmetry. We’re writing that up now, and I’m starting a collaboration to look at cytoskeletal rearrangements in more detail in neuronal explants!