Today I would like to reflect on the role of undergraduate students in the Frohlich Lab (and in science in general). To me, mentoring undergraduate students is a truly win-win setup in which every party involves greatly benefits.

• Choice! At most universities, you have a large pool of potential students who would like to work in a lab. This differs from a graduate program where there are only few students to choose from.
• Diversity! One of many ways how we can make sure laboratories are not monocultures of academic disciplines, gender, skin color, national origin etc.
• Chance to shape the future! Undergraduate students are hungry for knowledge, flexible, and very willing to learn and grow. What a privilege to mentor them.
• Scientific output! If smartly organized, the contribution of undergraduates can dramatically boost the scientific throughput and productivity of a research group.
• Leadership opportunity for your graduate students and postdocs! Surprising things can happen and important life lessons are being learned when you mentor your lab members to be mentors for the undergraduate students!

I have learned over the years that some mentoring strategies work better than others for making undergraduate research a joy and success. I am sure there are many different successful philosophies and approaches, but here is how we do it:

• You need a GPA of 3.5 or higher to join the Frohlich Lab. This is safeguard to make sure that student prioritize their GPA, which is perhaps the biggest determinant of which doors will be open to them in the future.
• You need to work 15 hours / week with the exception of the final exam week and university breaks. You need to clock in and out.
• During the first semester, we train you to become an independent and efficient assistant to one of the senior graduate students or postdocs. During the second semester, you keep working on the same project but start to assume larger responsibility. Finally, if you are interested, after two semesters, we design a project and mentor you that you have the chance to perform an entire study for which you carry both the intellectual and the practical responsibility. If you succeed, this is your chance to work like a graduate student and have a first-author paper. Even if you just partially succeed, you will have learned a lot and gained invaluable experience (and of course receive credit proportional to your accomplishments). We had many undergraduate students who were second authors on papers from the Frohlich Lab and had great success in their next professional trajectory (likely/hopefully) aided by the experience and accomplishments in the lab.

Not all thoughts fit 140 characters. We have reached a point as a society where our fundamental values are questioned if not endangered. Let me chime in as so many others have about why science matters.

1. Science reduces suffering through medical discoveries and interventions. I think this should be very easy for all of us to agree on. Numerous discoveries, small and large, have given us unprecedented means to help people who suffer. We must remember that not all science directly and instantaneously leads to a new magic cure. Rather, the self-organized, complex web of scientific endeavors, collaborations, and disagreements provide the foundation for the development of new treatments and cures. I think the main problem here is that we need to be patient and understand that the science today may reduce suffering of our children or grand children. Let's make sure we appreciate that. 
2. Science is (perhaps) the only truly apolitical human activity. The scientific method strives to establish facts about our world and is blind to any type of political inclinations. The last few days have shown us how important it is to have a set of agreed upon facts we can build on and enhance our society. There is no better way to find the truth than a double-blind, randomized controlled scientific study!
3. Science satisfies our ultimate craving, curiosity. We are born curious which motivates us to learn and develop. Sooner or later external factors unfortunately reduce this curiosity as we grow up. Science is the perfect antidote. Science gives us tools to satisfy our curiosity about us as humans, about our environment, and about the university we live in. Gaining answers satisfies our curiosity and enlightens us.

Yours,
Flavio

It is refreshing to see that many (newer) labs have a spelled out their philosophy on how they want to do science. I find reading these very illuminating and a good antidote against some of the darker things that happen in science and anywhere else as soon as real people are involved... For example, here is an inspiring one from the lab of Dr. Brad Voytek.

So today, I am trying an attempt at spelling out the principles of the Frohlich Lab at UNC:

• We are a Family. this means we treat each other with respect and we care for each other. This also means, just because you graduate, you do not leave the Frohlich Lab. rather, we take pride in seeing you move on to the next step in your life but you remain part of the family.
• We never ever ever ever ever give up. The early years, when the lab was new and we were struggling to find an audience for what used to be unusual ideas (now much more mainstream..), were rough not just for me but for everyone in the lab. But it pays off to be persistent. And, by the way, walking away from something which is doomed should not be confused with giving up. rather, saying no and terminating certain things and projects are incredibly important to succeed overall.
• We own our mistakes, never make excuses, and learn from them. Most importantly, you do not get punished for mistakes you make in the Frohlich Lab. I was shocked to hear that some labs charge lab members for the glassware they accidentally break - very weird! Now of course there are exceptions to this. Certain process, especially around human research, do not allow for any mistake, so the level of care I expect is very, very high. Also, if the same mistake occurs over and over again, the conversation starts to feel differently. The example I provide is the aviation industry, where pilots can report mistakes without fear of repercussions. The resulting findings are then included in the training of the pilots. A very successful model - given how safe air travel is. 
• We want to do world class science. This means no short cuts out of convenience, this means validation of all of our computer code, this means employing double-blind study designs if possible, this means many things. But mostly, this means that we try to do our very best to lead by example in terms of both the quality and the innovation of our research.
• We embrace and foster diversity. Our lab is an example for how the color of your skin or your passport (or any other descriptor people may want to use) does not matter. All that matters is that we do great science together and thereby change the world by helping patients!

Yours,

Flavio

Most of us spend a lot of time in meetings. I believe meetings are important since the quality of the interaction is very different from phone/email/twitter etc. However, I have started to realize that time can go by very quickly in meetings and at the end of the day no time was left for thinking, reading, and writing. Here are some things that I have found help to make meetings productive:

• Spend the first few minutes on setting the agenda (with focus on what the goal of the meeting is). This is obvious but important. then follow the agenda. Extra gold star for the people who bring a print out of the agenda, makes it easier to follow when printed on a piece of paper!
• Taking notes! I have yet to experience a meeting where nobody took notes/minutes and the meeting was worth anybody's time. Designate a scribe! Review the notes at the next meeting. Have people sign the minutes! This all raises the stakes and emphasizes the importance of what is discussed in the meeting.
• Find a good place to meet. I will no longer hold meetings in rooms without windows... Meeting participants need to be comfortable to give their best. Offer water or coffee!
• Start on time and finish on time. This one that I find very challenging - I greatly enjoy working with my team and collaborators and it is hard to cut off conversations despite this is needed.
• Fight the urge to make every meeting an hour long! Most meetings can be done in 30 minutes and, yes, some of them require 2 hours.
• Shake hands! This may be cultural (and relate to my European roots) but I really appreciate to wrap up the meeting with a clear sign of agreement and drive to action - the hand shake!
• Say no to meetings in which your attendance is not absolutely crucial.
• Surprise people - if nothing surprising happens at a meeting it was too much routine and thereby did not really require a meeting.
• Replace in person meetings with asynchronous conversations using tools such as Basecamp.
• Never have a discussion/"meeting" by email - too stressful, too hard to follow.

I hope that some of these ideas make you less "busy all the time" and thus more productive!

Take care,

Flavio

All of us are busy all the time. You are busy. You are likely very/crazy/incredibly busy. I am busy. They are busy.

Sure you heard and said that many times. So have I. Today, I invite you to reflect on this statement. I am worried that this attitude of all of us being busy all the time is not good for our health. In fact, I think this mindset also reduces our potential to innovate, create, and love! Days, weeks, months, and years go by being very busy! Very scary. I enjoy working very hard but I feel that this does not necessarily mean that I need to put myself into the state of being very busy all the time.

This year, I am trying to be more mindful and focused on my key priorities. I try to prioritize and not to think about all the other things that seemingly require my attention. I would like to make significant progress by investing focus and energy into my teaching, mentoring, and research. Hopefully, this will help me shift my focus from being busy to being happy about the impact of my work. Here are some roadblocks that I have identified, which I will try to reduce/eliminate:

• Checking my phone every few minutes for some kind of update. There are always new emails, tweets, and basecamp messages. When on Sunday the email storm gets a bit calmer, there are always news updates, checking frequent flier miles, and worst come to worst checking on bank accounts and credit cards. I enjoy all these modern tools of convenience and communication but I have decided to partially wean myself off my smart phone. If somebody needs my urgent attention, they can still make use of the perhaps least used function of phone, namely to call me...
• Not planning ahead for how I spend my day. If you do not run your day, the day will run you! By changing this, you will no longer feel busy but will feel productive and happy!
• Procrastination. Now and then I catch myself doing things which are really not that important just to avoid having to start writing the next grant etc. I am now working first on the big and important things (yes that next grant!) such that by lunch time I am filled with a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment.
• Lack of a clean separation between work and home. I am now dedicating specific hours to my family and I make sure I only get interrupted by work in case of an emergency. This helps me recharge my batteries and be more productive when I turn my attention back to work. Increasing the distance between all my computers, tablets, and phones on one hand side and myself on the other hand side really helps with this!

​

It is now almost six years since I started as an assistant professor at UNC. Many things have changed. I have learned so much over the years. I will however never forget the magnitude of the challenge to get a research group off the ground. I decided to write up here few of the lessons (not in any particular order) I have learned that hopefully will be of help to the next generation after me.

• Use electronic lab notebooks and insist on "at least one entry for every day you work for the lab". We started with paper lab notebooks which were not very useful since they are neither searchable not shareable. Since we switched to Evernote, it takes me less than 30 minutes a day to know what everyone is working on. We have now more than 10,000 notes.
• Insist on writing your first large grant (R01 etc) as a single PI grant centered on your research interests. This will establish your full independence!
• Provide a lot of structure to undergraduate research volunteers. Provide even more structure (required number of hours, have them check in and out, clear deliverables). And then monitor closely if they follow those rules. With such a firm structure, they can be incredibly successful. The first author of our most cited paper from the Frohlich Lab is an undergraduate!
• Offer to teach individual guest lectures in different undergraduate and graduate courses. This is a great opportunity to increase your visibility and recruit talented students.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate.
• Use social media to make your research/thoughts/perspective visible on a global scale.
• Create a system in which you will never use any data (e.g. dropbox). Forbid external hard drives and local only files.
• Organize symposia/workshops at conferences you go to (typically you need to submit a formal proposal). This is a great opportunity to reach out to the leaders in your field and build a strong network. This can be quite some work but well worth the effort!
• Finally, and perhaps the most difficult/controversial one: Learn to say no!!!

For those of you who know, the following should not come as a surprise! It is time to look at the questions we are interested in (mechanisms, functions, and perturbations of network oscillations in health and disease) from new perspectives. Here are some of the new angles that we are currently working on integrating into our research:

• Microbiome: I know we are kind of late with this as this has become a major hype over the last few years. Yet, some of the more recent findings look truly intriguing and we have several model systems such as the maternal immune activation model of psychiatric disorders for which the microbiome results look very exciting.
• Entrainment by rhythm and musics: I think that the way the brain responds to periodic stimulation via tACS or TMS may translate / resemble how to the brain responds to periodic sensory input. And if I may take this a step farther, perhaps the rhythm based therapeutic interventions for disorders such as autism may have a mechanistic basis that strongly resembles what we have been studying for tACS?
• Chronic pain: As it turns out, chronic pain is not only a massive public health crisis, but also very poorly understood at the level of network dynamics. The little we know points towards disorganization of thalamo-cortical rhythms - a topic the Frohlich Lab should be well equipped to study!
• and some more...

As you can see, these topics do conceptually relate to what we are focusing on but also bring a whole set of new methods we need to master. As I have learned almost five years ago when we started to build the lab and we were novices at the majority of methods, good collaborations with experts in the field and hiring trainees who have the according background are the two most important things to avoid stupid beginner's mistakes. Hopefully we can avoid those! If you have interest/background on any of the topics above and you are reading this, please reach out to me - I would love to chat with you!

Today, I had the great pleasure to visit the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. I was invited to present Grand Rounds (in essence give a talk on our work in the Frohlich Lab). I had a phenomenal time and everybody was incredibly nice and we had truly inspiring conversations about a broad range of subjects related to psychiatry. I was particularly impressed by the incredible level of care and compassion for the patients, by the innovative research, and by the positive spirit of a shared and meaningful mission. Here are some thoughts (no particular order) loosely inspired by my visit.

• As much as we need to aggressively push forward with understanding the neuronal basis of psychiatric illnesses and use these insights to develop new safe and effective treatments, we should never forget the importance of the human interaction between patient and caretakers (doctors, nurses, therapists, etc.). This is not only important in psychiatry but actually in all medical fields. Medical outcomes will be better! The brain is tightly interconnected with our entire body and what we feel and experience has broad and poorly understood effects on how we recover from illness and accidents.
• Science and medicine are fields that tremendously benefit from the global nature of today’s society. I had lunch with three talented and wonderful residents (psychiatrists in training) and all four of us have a passport of a different color! The future success of research for the advancement of humanity rests on free and open exchange of people and ideas on a global scale.
• Teaching neuroscience to psychiatry residents is often a challenge for multiple reasons. First, at least the first two years of the residency are so full with patient care that there is quite literally no time left. Second, lectures and textbooks that are great for graduate students (provided by research faculty) are too complex and not digestible for residents who often have little neuroscience background. Third, the applicability of (even really cool) basic science to the daily challenges of caring for patients with psychiatric illnesses is often not clear and reduce emotional buy in. We need to overcome this because even if most residents will not pursue science down the road, the thinking strategies employed in science are incredibly helpful even for routine clinical care. Add on top to that the ability to understand research papers and to thus stay informed about new emerging treatments. I had those kinds of considerations in my mind when I wrote Network Neuroscience. If you are a medical resident and had a chance to look at the book, I would appreciate your feedback (below as comment, by twitter, or email) as I am slowly but surely planning the second edition. I also want to highlight an amazing resource: The National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative – check out their website – they have amazing resources for neuroscience training in psychiatry residence programs.

This post is the result of thoughts fermenting in my mind for the last few months. As you may know, one area the Frohlich Lab focuses on is the use of non-invasive brain stimulation to engage and modulate brain rhythms (transcranial alternating current stimulation, tACS). Six years ago when we started the Frohlich Lab, this was a quite unusual idea and only few others were pursuing this approach. Today, a lot of research effort is going in that direction. Yet, more critical voices have started to emerge and I feel it is time to begin mapping out my own thought process on the future of tACS. I am focusing on tACS and not tDCS since I know much less about tDCS. In no particular order:

• We are reaching data lock for our first two tACS treatment clinical trials (schizophrenia and depression) in the next few months. To my knowledge, we are the first ones to do such studies in psychiatric populations (if not, please let me know, my impression is derived from searching clinicaltrials.gov). Will the results define the future of tACS as a treatment? Clearly no - they are small pilot studies with (almost) all limitations of small studies (few tens of participants). Also, we started these studies when we knew much less about target engagement by tACS. Will the media try to overhype the results (especially if positive). Clearly yes. So buckle up, this will get crazy. As a preview: we have some patients who got dramatically better. All placebo? Maybe!
• Overall, the number of attempts to reproduce tACS results (including ours) is as close to zero as it can be. Please let me know if you can point me to a clean and clearly reproduced tACS result (two different research groups!).
• We all know/suspect that at least half of the tACS studies undertaken are negative - where are the published reports??? If this field is supposed to survive (which I hope it will for the benefit of patients) everybody needs to publish their negative findings. If no journal takes the paper (shame on the journal!) then put it on a preprint server or something. Please!
• The number of tACS studies with proper EEG (even just before and after stimulation) is still frustratingly low. Can the basic findings of modulating alpha oscillations be reproduced? We need to know. The Frohlich Lab is working on this but ideally at least ten other labs are willing to try. All it takes is 20 healthy controls, a basic EEG, and a brain stimulator!
• Successful blinding. Blinding tACS interventions is very difficult due to the phosphene issue (light perception triggered by stimulation of optical nerve). We as a community should do much better in addressing this and in trying to establish reasonable solutions. As a first step, please publish your blinding stats such that we know if you have successfully blinded your participants and device operators.
• We still need much more work on target engagement - we have converged on the Arnold tongue as potential mechanism but even that has yet to be demonstrated in vivo! There is a tremendous need for more preclinical work and computational neuroscience studies to better elucidate if and how tACS engages network oscillations. We are very grateful to NIMH and the BRAIN initiative to support our efforts in the realm of tACS for targeting thalamo-cortical rhythms, in particular the alpha oscillation. Much more of this is needed!

Please give these points some thought and let me know if you agree/disagree/have other points to add. This is crucial. I am convinced that tACS can morph into a successful neuroscience tool and also therapeutic intervention. But we need to be smart and collaborate. Let me know if you have any questions - I am always happy to discuss/help. My only conflict is that I may recommend XCSITE 100 from Pulvinar Neuro - not because I make significant/any money with it (far too small of a business - we exist to enable high quality research)- but because I think effective blinding and quality control are essential for successful research!

One of my true passions is electrophysiology! I enjoy the engineering and I enjoy the troubleshooting, which often feels like solving a major mystery. Here are some random thoughts and experiences. 

• 60 Hz noise. Wherever we go, we pick up ambient 60 Hz electromagnetic fields (in Europe this would be 50Hz). this is a concern since 60 Hz is frequency employed by the brain when it synchronizes neuronal activity across cells and networks. The main strategies to fight 60 Hz noise are shielding and grounding. Shielding can take different forms but it most often involves a material that conducts (such as aluminum foil, or fabric embedded with metal wires) between the experimental setup and the likely source of the 60Hz field (e.g. power cords etc). Yes - you tin foil hat! Grounding refers to electrically connecting the major pieces of metal (such as cases of devices) to ensure they are on the same potential and thus no current can be introduced by the external 60Hz field. Most devices have a ground port. It is important to connect all ground ports together at one electrical point close to the set-up, essentially giving rise to a star of ground wires. An even better approach is to eliminate the 60Hz at its source such as moving away transformers from the setup or using battery powered equipment. Which takes me to my next point...
  
• Charge and check your batteries! I know of so many devices that do not properly indicate when the battery is getting discharged. You can use a simple volt meter to get an idea if a battery is still good. Just realize that the nominal voltage of a battery such as 9.0V is not necessarily what the charged battery delivers, for example if we are looking at a lithium ion battery, the charged voltage would be less. Google the datasheet of your batteries!
• Write down all your settings of your amplifier etc for every single experiment. Most of the devices we use for electrophysiology have some kind of front panel where you can select certain settings such as the gain of the amplifier and the filtering of the signals. Your notes are the only record of these settings. Just because a given knob was "always" in the same position, it just takes one clueless PI wander into the lab and turning the knob to get reminded of how life at the bench felt like. I certianly hope I have never been guilty of this - but who knows!
• Lastly - listen to your signals (i.e. feed them into an audio amp). Our ears are the much better real-time signal analyzers than our eyes. By learning what a good recording sounds like, you can very quickly assess the quality of a recording without any analysis. This can then guide your troubleshooting - if you need posthoc data processing to see how noisy your data are, then it is too late to fix the set-up!

OK - enough of all that. Do you enjoy the technical challenges of electrophysiology? I certainly do.