Sarah L. Keller Prof. of Chemistry Associate Dean for Research Activities for Arts and Sciences

1. Sarah L. Keller • Prof. of Chemistry • Associate Dean for Research Activities for Arts and Sciences • (My counterpart in Engineering is Mari Ostendorf.) • One of our goals is to enable you to submit large, multi-PI, • interdisciplinary grant proposals. Call us if you need help: • Assembling a team • Figuring out to whom to talk about UW matching commitments • Herding cats

2. Potential pitfalls: • Collaborations often result in better science; tenure doesn’t always reward it. • How does your department view collaborations within tenure decisions? • Will faculty read your papers, or merely count how many you have? • If there are 2 PI’s on a paper, will that paper count half? • You want to establish your own name. If you collaborate with your Ph.D. • or postdoctoral mentors, evaluators may assume that resulting publications • were from your previous work, not your current independent work. • -Similarly, if you collaborate with any established researcher, evaluators may • assume that any clever ideas were from your older and wiser collaborator, • not from you. When you apply for tenure, you will write a narrative. Use • that to make it clear who did what in each collaboration. • -What is most important in your field: first vs. last vs. corresponding author • -Choose only 1 or 2 collaborations and then also take care of your core • research program in order to not over-commit. • -If you are in an unproductive collaboration with no publications or funding on • the foreseeable horizon, find a professional way to extract yourself.

3. Prioritizing Collaboration Offers: • - What has worked for me: Pick who you enjoy the most. • Goofs I’ve made: Not enquiring whether collaborator has already • published and whether plans to publish in the future. Hi Collaborator, I had the idea to verify that there are holes in the membranes by adding beads. It worked great. Now, to be a good mentor to my student, I wanted to get your verification on something that I'm sure won't be a problem... I just think it is more polite to bring it up now rather than later, to make the best relationships possible. When collaborators do work for my lab, I have a low standard of how much time they should have put into a project before I count them as a co-author. For me it is just a couple of days. I'd estimate that my student has put this much time in your project, but I haven't so far. So, if/when these current results get published, I'd like to make sure that my student can be a co-author, no matter how far down on the author list he falls. If that isn't OK by you, please let me know - because I like working with your group! Sorry to be so official (but hopefully not officious!) - Sarah ------------------------------------ Dear Sarah, I think this is a great collaboration and it is an very nice of you to be so excited! With our first "discovery"-paper of membranes already submitted, to have collaborators on the next papers is a real honor. On the next paper I would welcome to have your student and you, if you like, to be a coauthor. It makes all of us stronger.