I am Clayton Mansel, and This is How I Work

Today, I am interviewing Clayton Mansel, an undergraduate student in molecular biology, in the "How I Work" series. Next summer, he plans to apply to MD/PhD programs and pursue a career as a pediatric neurologist. He's also a writer at student-scientist.com where he writes about the tools he uses, his experience as a budding scientist, and science in general. In his free time, Clayton enjoys reading, photography, and playing the french horn.

Current Job: Student
Current Location: Kansas City, MO
Current mobile device: iPhone 7
Current computer: MacBook Pro 13 inch

Can you briefly explain your current situation and research to us?
I go to school at a small liberal arts college where I have the opportunity to lead research projects on my own. In the lab, I study the molecular mechanisms of tributyltin-mediated neurodegeneration in mouse enteric neurons.

What tools, apps and software are essential to your workflow?
There are so many! On my Mac, I use DEVONthink as an ‘everything bucket’ where I store all types of files and organize them using folders and tags. My favorite feature is that it automatically makes every PDF (e.g., research articles) fully searchable and uses AI to categorize and contextualize them. For writing papers, MindNode 6 is my must-have app where I take notes, organize my thoughts, and build a mind map for my paper. For collaboration, Notion has proven to be crucial to my lab’s workflow as we organize our tasks and lab calendar.

What is your best advice for productive academic work?
Find long chunks of time for focus without distractions. For me, it usually takes 30 min without distractions before I even begin to be productive and do meaningful work. Cal Newport wrote about this in his book ‘Deep Work’.

How do you keep an overview of projects and tasks?
I use Things 3 to organize my tasks and projects. But often I will also just write a little ‘hit list’ at the end of the day on sticky note and stick it to my computer monitor to remind me of my next steps the next day. For long term goals and my mission/values, I use Notion which gives me a blank slate to think carefully about what I am doing and where I am going.

Besides phone and computer, do you use other technological tools in work and daily life?
I use an iPad Pro that my school gives every student. I really enjoy it for taking digital notes and reading/marking up PDFs. I also use apps like Concepts which provides an infinite canvas—great for brainstorming. I think the iPad is a great companion device for students, but still not as important as a phone and computer.

Which skill makes you stand out as an academic?
My ability to use technology to make myself more efficient and effective. I have learned over the years how to make technology work for me, not against me, and that is something that has differentiated myself as an academic. As one example, I took the time to learn every feature in Apple’s excellent Keynote (like powerpoint) application, and now when I do presentations, people are always impressed and engaged and ask me how I made certain elements. When it comes to technology, I am usually one step ahead of everyone. (Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about math and statistics!)

What are you currently reading? How do you find time for reading?
I am currently reading ‘Economics for the Common Good’ by Nobel Prize winner Jean Tirole. To find the time, I use a Kindle and the Kindle app because I believe it greatly reduces the friction to reading. With the Kindle, I can highlight and take notes and purchase and download new books in seconds. I put the Kindle app on the home screen of my iPhone, and whenever I have a few minutes, I’ll just pull out whichever book I’m reading and my progress is automatically synced across devices. One of my favorite facts is that reading just 30 minutes a day equates to over 1,000 books read in an average person’s lifetime—I want to die having read 1,000 books!

What's the best advice you ever received?
I don’t know about best ever received, but advice that has really helped me this summer was ‘you can’t do anything wrong’. This advice has really given me the confidence to try new things at the bench and take risks in my research. Mistakes are completely fine and pave the way to success.

How do steel fibers improve the shear capacity of reinforced concrete beams without stirrups?

I've recently published a review paper in the journal Composites Part B: Engineering titled "How do steel fibers improve the shear capacity of reinforced concrete beams without stirrups?".

The paper addresses the different shear-carrying mechanisms, and the effect of adding steel fibers to a concrete mix on these shear-carrying mechanisms in specimens with steel tension reinforcement. This review paper is the result of my Poligrant 2017-2018, continued as a Poligrant 2018-2019. While originally I started the research to find a way to extend to Critical Shear Displacement Theory with an extra term that takes the contribution of the fibers into account, reading on the topic and understanding the mechanics further led me to the insight that the simple solution of adding an extra term is insufficient. This paper shows how all shear-carrying mechanisms are influenced by the presence of fibers.

The abstract is:
Even though the structural behavior steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) has been extensively researched, structural applications are still limited. One barrier to its implementation is the lack of mechanical models that describe the behaviour of SFRC members failing in shear. This paper reviews the effect of steel fibers on the different mechanisms of shear transfer and combines the observations from the literature regarding the parameters that affect the shear capacity of SFRC. Additionally, a selection of currently available expressions for the shear capacity of SFRC is presented. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art on the shear capacity of SFRC elements without shear reinforcement, shows the lacks in our current understanding on the shear behaviour of SFRC elements without shear reinforcement, and outlines the steps necessary to address these lacks. The presented work aims to be a framework for (experimental) efforts addressing the shear capacity of SFRC members without shear reinforcement.

You can access the article here.

Inbox zero in academia

I recently ran a poll about inbox zero, as I've been trying to maintain my Inbox Zero again, after not being able to do so for nearly 11 months.

My poll focused on how many of us have or try to have an inbox zero. The outcome, however, may be biased by the fact that I used the #inboxzero hashtag - this may have driven fans of Inbox Zero to the poll and may have skewed the results. In fact, I am quite surprised by the relatively high number of people that have inbox zero!

Here's the wake of the poll:

Fatigue Assessment of Prestressed Concrete Slab-Between-Girder Bridges

My colleagues and I recently published a paper in Applied Sciences, Special Issue Fatigue and Fracture of Non-metallic Materials and Structures titled "Fatigue Assessment of Prestressed Concrete Slab-Between-Girder Bridges".

You can download the open access paper here. If you're interested in it, the preprint is also publicly available.

This paper is the last journal paper in the suite of papers that deal with fatigue in slab-between-girder bridges. In this paper, we went one step further than in the previous ones, which dealt with the experiments only. Here, we developed a method to assess existing slab-between-girder bridges based on the experimental results. It's a rather practical and practice-oriented paper.

The abstract is:
In the Netherlands, the assessment of existing prestressed concrete slab-between-girder bridges has revealed that the thin, transversely prestressed slabs may be critical for static and fatigue punching when evaluated using the recently introduced Eurocodes. On the other hand, compressive membrane action increases the capacity of these slabs, and it changes the failure mode from bending to punching shear. To improve the assessment of the existing prestressed slab-between-girder bridges in the Netherlands, two 1:2 scale models of an existing bridge, i.e., the Van Brienenoord Bridge, were built in the laboratory and tested monotonically, as well as under cycles of loading. The result of these experiments revealed: (1) the static strength of the decks, which showed that compressive membrane action significantly enhanced the punching capacity, and (2) the Wöhler curve of the decks, showed that the compressive membrane action remains under fatigue loading. The experimental results could then be used in the assessment of the most critical existing slab-between-girder bridges. The outcome was that the bridge had sufficient punching capacity for static and fatigue loads and, therefore, the existing slab-between-girder bridges in the Netherlands fulfilled the code requirements for static and fatigue punching.

When reviewers want you to cite their work

It has happened to me a number of times: (anonymous) reviewers who not-so-gently ask me to cite their work as part of a revision of my manuscript. I'm not talking about reviewers who suggest publications I may have missed, from various source (I too will add references to my review report where I think these are necessary to improve the manuscript). 'm talking here the reviewer who said I have missed Something Really Important and gives me 5 references by the same first author that necessarily should be included to represent the state of the art.

To see how common this malpractice is, I ran a poll on Twitter. Results and the followig discussion are below

Two papers from the ACI Structural Journal

My collaborators and I recently published two papers related to the topic of fatigue in slab-between-girder bridges. These paper are published in the ACI Structural Journal, Vol 116 nr 4. The two papers deal with two series of experiments: the first series had transversely prestressed decks between prestressed T-girders, and the second series had transversely prestressed decks between inverted T-girders / bulb T-girders. I worked on part of the analysis of the test results, and reporting the results in journal papers during the summer of 2018.

The abstract of the first paper is:
In the Netherlands, slab-between-girder bridges with prestressed girders and transversely prestressed decks in between the girders require assessment. Static testing showed that compressive membrane action increases the capacity of these structures and that the decks fail in punching shear. The next question is if compressive membrane action also increases the capacity of these decks under repeated loads. Therefore, the same half-scale bridge structure as used for the static tests was subjected to repeated loads at different fractions of the maximum static load, different loading sequences, and for single and double concentrated loads. A relationship between the load level and number of cycles at failure (S-N curve) for the assessment of these bridges is proposed, but the influence of the loading sequence was not successfully quantified yet. The conclusion of the experiments is that compressive membrane action enhances the punching capacity of transversely prestressed thin decks subjected to repeated loads. 



The abstract of the second paper is:
Previous research showed that the capacity of existing slab-between-girder bridges is larger than expected based on the punching shear capacity prescribed by the governing codes, as a result of compressive membrane action. A first series of fatigue tests confirmed that compressive membrane action also acts under cycles of loading. However, a single experiment in which first a number of cycles with a higher load level and then with a lower load level were applied, seemed to indicate that this loading sequence shortens the fatigue life. This topic was further investigated in a second series of fatigue tests with three static tests and ten fatigue tests. The parameters that were varied are the sequence of loading and the effect of a single or a double wheel print. The results show that the sequence of load levels does not influence the fatigue life.

PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: Creative thinking for the 21st century

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands.

These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands.

If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better - and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic!

One look at any news website will teach you this: we are facing major challenges over the next decades of the 21st century. Global warming research shows a bleak and unstable future ahead. Nonrenewable resources will be depleted. Increasing human population on this planet will place even a larger demand on the resources of the planet...

While some countries are taking the lead to move towards a circular economy in the low-carbon and most likely degrowth era, the global community and political leaders are hesitant to flip the switch and change the status quo.

Now, you may wonder if Auntie Eva is on a political rant today. Don't worry - I am here to raise awareness on how you as a researcher can use your creative skills to make a small contribution to what the 21st century will look like. Regardless of your field of study, you can contribute. If you are a full professor, not shackled by tenure restraints, I would like to invite you to set aside part of your time to work on tackling these big challenges. Climate scientist, political scientist, engineer, psychologist - your point of view is necessary, and I firmly believe that we will need interdisciplinary solutions to solve the challenges ahead.

It's unlikely that you will wake up tomorrow with The Idea that will solve one of the major issues. But with deliberate practice, and setting aside time frequently to think about how you can contribute, we may all inch forward to solutions. Here is what you can do on a regular basis to use your creative thinking for the greater good:

1. Look at the bigger picture
Place your research in the bigger picture. Besides your field, where else could your methods be applied? Can your research results be turned into policy recommendations? Which greater good does your research serve, and how can you make sure the outcome of your research will actually be set to work?

2. Serve locally
Be active in your community. Don't try to be Professor-Messiah, but see how you can gain the trust of a larger group of people around you. Can you help them understand popular science claims in the news, or debunk a fake science article that is going viral on social media? See how you can put your knowledge to work at the local level, and inspire those around you.

3. Serve in committees and working groups
At a professional level, see if you can join interdisciplinary working groups or committees, where you brainstorm together on how to tackle bigger problems. You can work together with colleagues at your institution to see how to reduce the footprint of your institution as a whole. You can work in local groups, to see how you as a team can come up with solutions for pressing issues at a local and/or national level.

4. Read broadly
Be informed about the state of the world. Read broadly about topics related only tangentially to your research. Remember that reading sparks creativity - you may get a good idea to combine your work with something from another discipline. Use smaller side projects to explore different possibilities for interdisciplinary solutions.

5. Educate
Serve those around you and your students by educating them and, if necessary, help them trust science and scientists again. See if you can educate at different levels - by visiting schools, writing blog posts about topics related to science, or by giving a well-funded perspective at a speaking opportunity.

6. Link your research to the sustainable development goals
If you want to better frame your research in the recommended pathways for the future, check how your work can contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN. Read about the goals, and think about how you can frame your work within these goals, and how you can contribute to sustainable development through your research.

7. Question the status quo
Things don't have to remain the same forever. Question the choices we make because "everybody else does this" or because "I've always done things like this". You don't need to work on the same research topic your entire life. You can explore more interdisciplinary collaborations to see if you find that this work gives you more satisfaction and leads to more actionable items. You can question the way your institution uses natural resources. You can prod politicians about the decisions they have made in the past and continue to support. Keep a fresh mind and stay creative - at all levels.