When new graduate students ask me what they should do to “prepare”, I’m confident the right answer is nothing special. Move to your new city, relax, and enjoy your summer (where I am, late August is still “summer break”!). After nagging me about it for a while, I recommend they…

Recently, I was giving feedback on a dissertation draft and paper project. As soon as we sat down (on Zoom), I asked how they were feeling about their progress. Like a cork whizzing off a fizzy bottle of champagne, all these negative emotions poured out. …

Sprint writing sucks. Most people are binge or what I prefer to call sprint writers. People scramble to fill the pages, wringing every word from their brain in a flurry before a deadline. Not only does this impact students, it also affects older writers too. …

[A shortened version of this post appears on the npj digital medicine website] Did you know that Facebook has a “suicide prevention AI”? The popular social media website uses behavioral and linguistic patterns to guess if someone may harm themselves. NPR reports that this AI detects about 10 people every…

tl;dr — I conduct an annual review of the past year to reflect, celebrate, and recenter my intentions with a rose/thorn/bud setup. Rather than set New Year’s Resolutions, this process maintains my awareness of larger life and career horizons. In late December/early January every year, I’ve completed an annual review…

tl:dr; In Ultralearning, Scott Young lays out the fundamentals of helping you quickly learn and retain new skills and concepts. I recommend this book for folks interested in providing practical structure and guidance to independent learning, whether they be for work or leisure. For Ph.D …

Takeaway/tl;dr- We studied 1.5 million Reddit posts with machine learning to see how people self-direct recovery from opioid addiction. In a CHI 2019 paper, we discovered that clinically unverified substances were being discussed and used as treatment for addiction. We also found conflicting support and risks for these treatments —…

When I was a new PhD student, one of the skills I struggled with most was absorbing lots of information from many sources. One of the major differences between grad school from undergrad is the sheer volume of facts, formulas, and theory you need to understand to become an expert…