Ranking of the Pittsburgh hospital cafeterias

Hospital cafeterias in Pittsburgh (to the best of my knowledge):

UPMC Presbyterian

UPMC Montefiore

Magee Women's Hospital

Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh

Allegheny General (how many?)

West Penn Hospital (how many?)

I'll rank them using the NIH scoring system (given below, lifted directly from a presentation by Freeman and Friedman on Developing Competitive Grant Applications)




















I'm a vegetarian. So I'm biasing my scores towards how vegetarian-friendly these cafeterias are. You may have different opinions about these places. Go write them on your blog, if you feel strongly enough about it.

Hospital	Score	Reasons
Magee	1	Delicious, healthy food; plenty of options of vegetarians and others with diet restrictions; creative in use of ingredients.
CHP	2	Great food. However, sometimes, only options for vegetarians are pizza and burger. On good days, plenty of choice.
Presby	9	Absolute nightmare. Menu has not changed in 4 years.  Terrible choice of soups and desserts. Exactly 1 vegetarian entrée (“Mediterranean Veggie Wrap”) per week.
Montefiore	?	Have only eaten here once. Greasy, overly salty food. But I’ll give it the benefit of doubt and put it down to a bad day.
Allegheny General	?	Need to assess
West Penn	?	Need to assess

So what brought this on? My new job is at Magee Women's Research Institute, a short walk away from the Magee cafeteria. I can't help comparing the quality of my noon meal at Magee to what I subjected myself last year, when the closest place to eat was the Presby cafeteria.

I lost about 10 pounds last year while subsisting on Presby food, because all I could eat was the salad- the sole dish that was not floating in oil. Compare that to yesterday's vegetarian entree at Magee (quinoa with baked butternut squash. Yummy!) and today's (vegetarian chili with succotash and rutabaga on brown rice. Lovely!)

So, I hope that the Presby chefs take some ideas from the Magee guys. Then again, who cares? I don't have to ever eat there again!

Thank you, IBGP!

There are many things I need to thank my graduate program, the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Graduate Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, for. But definitely, topping that list will be Foundation Conference, a mandatory 4-credit course taken in the first semester of the 5-year program.

Foundation Conference gives a callow, nervous first-year the guts to take a paper like "IRE1a Induces Thioredoxin-Interacting Protein to Activate the NLRP3 Inflammasome and Promote Programmed Cell Death under Irremediable ER Stress",  and tackle every single sentence, data point, every aspect of a figure and figure legend. And the experience is so useful that even today, 7 years later, I remember what that course taught me about reading a paper: read the title, read the abstract and the introduction, then skip the results, read the discussion, come back to the introduction, read the results, go through the materials and methods and re-read the discussion. An incredibly long process that can make you want to tear your hair out, but a very, very useful and a solid way of tearing apart a paper. And if done right, you probably will not forget any aspect of the paper ever again.

Despite its obvious advantages, Foundation Conference is only offered by the Med School. The Graduate School of Public Health, for example, although offering PhD programs in related biomedical fields, does not have anything like it. GSPH offers a first-years-only journal club, but this is a joint session for all first years and by that nature, cannot offer what Conference can: separate groups of 4-5 students per faculty member, individual attention by senior faculty, a forum where every single student has to present his or her understanding of the paper every single week and is forced to read a  paper thoroughly because the faculty randomly pick people to answer questions beyond just the whats and hows of a paper. In our batch, we were 45 first-years. So the school would have had to come up with at least 10 interested and dedicated faculty members who would be willing to plow through each assigned paper, and not to mention, all the written reports by the students, for a whole semester. It's intense.

So thank you, Foundations Conference. I need to read the above-mentioned paper by noon today and although I might grit my teeth and groan out aloud, I think I'll get through it.

A Risky Venture?

Which job to choose? One which is safe and known and has a clear connection to what I want to do in the future, or one is which is unknown but promises to be very exciting, future goals be hanged?

To Tell or Not to Tell

I have been pondering a lot about pregnancy and women in the workplace. When I was first pregnant, nearly three years ago, I had conflicting emotions: happy and excited when I was with my husband or parents, but incredibly nervous at the thought of telling my thesis adviser.

My adviser is an awesome guy- supportive, friendly, excellent mentor. But he was not pleased when I told him I was pregnant. His first look was almost accusing- 'how could she be so irresponsible' were probably the first words in his head. And indeed his first reaction was, "Well, Varsha. I don't know how you'll be able to manage finishing your PhD. Hopefully you have an easy time of the pregnancy" and then he went to expound upon the many girls he knew who became pregnant while at school (not high school, grad school!) and who then had to shelve their dreams of doing research or going ahead in their careers because of their various pregnancy-related ailments. I can remember my emotions during my pregnancy swinging between guilt, shame, embarrassment, giddy happiness and excitement. 

Looking back, I can say that graduate school is probably the best time to become pregnant. There's a steady source of income, there's support from co-workers, school administrators, and yes, even thesis advisers ultimately, and the work is flexible. As long as your PI has enough grant money to fund you for six months more than he originally expected, life is good. 

A not-so-good time to become pregnant is when you are looking for a new job. And that's when the quandary arises: do you tell your prospective employer during the interview that you're pregnant or do you wait for the job offer and then gently break the news? 

Both my thesis adviser (to whom I asked this question) and my husband thought they would not reveal the news until later. My adviser said, "Well, you have to protect yourself. Ask yourself this: if you were a PI with some finite source of funding, would you hire a highly productive person, or would you hire someone who has uncertainty in her future. And make no mistake: pregnancy and childbirth are uncertain events. Who knows what might happen when and for how long?"
RK said, "Every woman has a right to reproduce. And every person has a right to protect themselves against discrimination. If there is a chance that pregnancy can lead to a person not being hired, then it is only natural that that person not reveal anything that leads to discrimination" 

On the other hand, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg says pregnancy is not a time to be apologetic and freaked out and unsure of yourself; it’s a time to be your most ambitious http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18uDutylDa4.

Well, it so turned out that all these questions arose in my head because this is exactly my situation: I am pregnant and I am job-hunting.

Postdoctoral positions in the biomedical sciences are notoriously underpaid and highly stressful. Principal investigators (PIs) look for productive scientists (and the most productive postdocs are single men or women; married postdocs are also relatively productive, though they do expect holidays once in while; male postdocs with kids are less so, but the least productive postdocs are females with kids. Family systems being what they are, females are the ones most likely to take days off to take care of sick kids, to take a morning off to drive the kids to a doctor's appointment, the ones least likely to stay back late at lab finishing up an experiment). But of course, here I am equating "productive" to "ability to spend large amounts of time in lab". They are not the same at all. And in fact, female postdocs with kids usually end up making the most efficient use of their time in the lab with minimal interruptions and breaks. But it is nonetheless a pretty stressful life: expectations are unclear or unrealistic, job security is low, and egos can be fragile. 

What is the value of this training? This will warrant a whole new blog-post. 

So let me tell you what has happened so far: in my postdoc interviews, I have been clear about expectations regarding time: I will not spend hours beyond 9-5 in the lab, and I am not likely to come to lab on weekends, unless I deem it absolutely necessary. And (more relevant to this post) I tell all my prospective postdoc advisers about my pregnancy. My outlook on pregnancy has undergone a pretty drastic shift from the last time I was pregnant. I do not see it as something to hide or shy away from. I am thirty. If I don't have kids now, when the heck will I? I hope that the persona I project is as strong and honest as I want to be and the message I want to convey is this: I am a great scientist. And I am a mother. If you have a problem with this, then I do not want to work with you. If you hire me, you will get a hardworking and imaginative problem-solver, but you are not going to get a slave. 

So far, it seems to have been successful. Only time will tell to what extent.

Curiosity might join Opportunity tonight!

The NASA spacecraft to Mars, appropriately named Curiosity, will land tonight, if all goes well. This is exciting on many levels.
For one thing, our nearest neighbor has a lot more stories to tell than we originally expected, as the data collected by NASA's previous spacecraft, Opportunity, indicates. Mars used to have water, and therefore might have once contained life (as we know it). Curiosity, in fact, has been targeted to one of the sites that scientists consider likely to have harbored water and life aeons ago.
For another thing, Curiosity is an engineering marvel. When the rover Opportunity landed on Mars 5 years ago, it was dropped by its spacecraft cucooned in a nest of airbags. It hit the ground and bounced to a stop, still packaged in its protective airbag covering, intact, shaken but not stirred, for which NASA no doubt was fervently thankful for. Curiosity packs a lot more punch: it is nuclear powered and carries an impressive number of instruments including an atomic spectrometer, an X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence machine, a large suite of instruments to analyze gases and solid matter, metereological package and ultraviolet sensor and a total of seventeen cameras, not to mention its array of devices for communication with Earth. It is understandable that NASA feels leary of using its trusty old airbags to protect this giant.
Hence, NASA engineers have come up with a pretty darn ingenious system of lowering the rover onto Mars (Mission Impossible-style):
The spacecraft itself will use heat shields and parachutes to slow down its descent. About a mile from the ground, it will lower the rover down by unspooling a set of cables until the rover's wheels touch the surface.

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This was on Sunday. I couldn't complete this post or publish it because I was interrupted by my son who woke up crying when a bolt of lightning hit close, Sunday being a day of thunderstorms in Pittsburgh.

Anyway, as all the world knows now, Curiosity did land beautifully and has already sent a bunch of images! Hurray for science! Hurray for NASA!

No matter how bad the budget deficits and bureaucracy, it is reassuring to know that NASA is still at the top of its game.

The Marcus Didius Falco series

Lindsey Davis started this series sometime in the late 1980s. What makes this stand out among zillions of mystery and suspense novels?

For starters, it is based in Rome. And not the pasta-pizza Roma of today, but the Rome closer to the one brought to such comic life in the Asterix novels of Goschinny and Uderzo. Asterix's Rome is, of course, based in the times of Julius Caeser. Davis's Rome is nearly a century after that, in the time of Vespasian, but equally peppered with centurions, corrupt and cowardly, senators, gladiators and arenas with hungry lions and wolves. There's something very lovely in the music of those Roman names, be they as descriptive as Tremensdelirious or Tortuousconvolvulus (these are from Asterix, of course) or as stately as Decimus Camillus Verus or Lucius Petronillus Longus (from the less tongue-in-cheek, but equally entertaining Falco series).

The series is so superlatively good not just because of the story lines, but because of the amount of loving, intricate research that has gone into recreating that world for us. 1st century AD Rome is very familiar, but just foreign enough to keep a reader constantly making notes and comparing. Davis provides a detailed picture of the Roman class system, with the various snobberies associated with each class, by making her hero, Marcus Didius Falco, a lowly plebian, fall in love with Helena Justina, a girl from the patrician class. Falco's character is fully developed, not in the least bit one-dimensional like so many of the private detectives on TV today: he is an investigator, a great buddy, devoted husband and a really good father to his daughters. One of the scenes that captured my heart had him and his two-year old reviving a bumblebee with honey. Take that, Jack Bauer. True heroes make time for their women.

That's my review for the day. It's the Marcus Didius Falco series. Grab any book (there are 20 so far) and let 1st century Rome and its attractions and dangers envelope you.

Embarrassing Illnesses

No, no. Fret not. I have no STDs.

But I do have something which, when I first described it to my husband over the phone, made him sit up and take notice and think of them.

It all started off innocuously enough. Fever, sore throat, chills. I took my ibuprofen, took a surreptitious nap while at work (unlike my graduate-student days, I can no longer slumber away, drooling, at my desk, in front of all and sundry. Postdocs, for some reason, are expected to behave with some more dignity). I stuck it out till the end of the day and then lurched back home where not even the prospect of Alex Trebeck and Jeopardy could keep me from stumbling straight into bed.

The next day began with a incessant, insistent itching on my palms. I examined them blearily and spotted three little bumps on one palm and two little bumps on the base of my fingers on the other. Shingles? I wondered in a panic. Surely not? I took pictures of the various bumps and sent them away to the man. Once he checked out the pictures, he called back and said "It looks like hand-foot and -mouth disease".

So yes. I have managed to get a disease that usually only affects little kids... in fact, not even little kids, more like infants and toddlers. Ani's daycare has had a couple of cases, but I haven't seen Ani with any of the symptoms (yet).

The first appearance of the bumps on my hands were 3 days ago. Since then, every day has brought with it a set of new symptoms, which in obedience to the name, do proceed from the hand to the feet and then, most painfully, to the mouth. And no, it is not because I kept touching these parts with my blister-filled hands. And the blisters are PAINful. And the itchiness! It is enough to drive one crazy. It's a unique torment, because you can't scratch at the blisters for they are tender, and at the same time, you can't think of anything but scratching at those itches. In those two days of torment, I felt like Tantalus in his pond of water. What did help was a concoction of castor oil and turmeric. I would pour some of this on my hands and keep rubbing it in gently into the blisters- the turmeric, in addition to being an antiseptic, acted as a gentle abrasive which served the purpose of scratching those itchy blisters.

Anyway, because I was quite immobilized (and mute. Blisters in the mouth and throat are the worst), I read books constantly. I have recently discovered the ebooks- section of Carnegie Library and spent all day and most of the nights downloading different books, reading them and returning them online. Technology! How perfectly lovely it is! My new finds are Lindsey Davis's Marcus Didius Falco mystery series and the book "Watching my Language" by William Safire. More on these in later posts.