What makes you valuable to your scientific colleagues?

You might have noticed the growing number of scientists who have recently joined Epernicus. But did you know that another rapidly growing area of Epernicus is the assets our members have listed in their profiles? As of this writing, there are more than 850 different topics, methods and materials represented on our network.

Looking for someone who does whole-cell electrophysiology? Works on vibrio cholera? Uses BioBrick vectors? Cultres Sf21 cells? Runs experiments in a Franz diffusion chamber? Codes simulations in Python? They’re all here! And chances are they’re in your lab, department or institution.

A major goal of Epernicus is to make it easier for scientists to find help and give help to colleagues in their scientific networks. And your assets represent all the ways you can help the people you know. It’s expertise you’ve accumulated over several years of hard work, and it’s one of the things that makes you valuable in the world of science.

Of course, we know that it’s impossible to remember all your topics, methods and materials in one sitting, so here are a couple tips on adding assets to your Epernicus profile:

- When you sign on, think of the things you worked with in the last couple days and add them (you can add assets right at the bottom of your dashboard page).

- When you see an asset on someone else’s profile that should also be on yours, just click it, then click “Add” and it’ll be automatically added to your profile

On the flipside, when looking for someone with a certain expertise, just do a search. Any assets or publications that include your search term will show up. Click on them to find out to whom they belong. And look for an announcement in the near future about enhanced search, which will make searching your network even easier.

Why we added Clinical Training

Last week, we added a new section to our profiles for clinical training.  A number of Epernicus members are physician scientists, and we wanted their residency and fellowship training to be included on their profiles.  (Take a look at my profile and you’ll see I have included my residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital). 

Including clinical training also creates a valuable and much-needed network for residency and fellowship alumni.  Though many physicians feel a special kinship with others who trained at their institution, it’s not easy to stay connected to these colleagues.  I can recall a number of times in the last few years when it would have been really helpful to search through the Brigham and Women’s medicine alumni network to find people with specific research or clinical interests.  But there was no way for me to do this.  The new Epernicus clinical training alumni networks will help physician scientists preserve their connections and access to this valuable group of colleagues. 

Public Profiles

For years, we’ve heard from scientists that they don’t have their own web page or a way to be known on their own terms.  Some institutions provide researchers with a web page or with space for a short description on a department or lab page.  This is a start.  But in addition to rarely capturing all the information that’s relevant to a scientist’s persona, institutional pages are often challenging to customize or update with any real frequency.  More often than not, they are out of date.

The truth is, whether you’ve got a fancy web page or not, people will still look you up on Google.  Everyone from colleagues to recruiters to the scientist you just met at a conference will rely on the results of web searches to form their impression of you.  And as you may have already found out the hard way, your name can show up in some pretty surprising places on the web (some of which may make you cringe!).

We decided to do something about this by creating public profiles on Epernicus.  A public profile is a limited version of your Epernicus profile that can be viewed by the outside world if you choose.  Public profiles have their own web address (URL) which means that every member now has a professional website under his or her control.  For example, mine is http://www.epernicus.com/vhm.  You can preview your public profile and turn it on next time you log into Epernicus.  A number of you have already done this and are now posting your web address to personal web sites, blogs, Facebook, and more.  In the near future, we’ll make sure that profiles are indexed so people will find your activated public profile when they enter your name in Google or Yahoo!.

A special shout out goes to our Community Builders who gave us valuable feedback on the public profile before it was launched.  If you’ve got ideas on how to make Epernicus more useful for you or your community, we want to hear from you!

It Began at Carberry’s

It seems only a short time ago that Mikhail and I were hanging out at Carberry’s coffee shop in Cambridge and talking about creating an online home for scientists.  What would it be like, we thought, if you had a tool that helped you stay connected with current and former research colleagues?  A tool that would let you search through your scientific networks – your lab or research group, department, institution, past advisors networks, and more – and find the right people with the right expertise at the right time?   Well, if you’re like us, you can probably remember more than a few times in your research career when a tool like this would have come in handy.  With this in mind, we decided to create Epernicus. 

Epernicus is a professional networking platform that helps scientists stay connected to colleagues in their network and find the right person based on specific expertise and skills.  We’ve had a lot of fun building Epernicus and are excited to see how many of our scientific colleagues are joining the community.  Our goal, simply put, is to enhance your research experience.  We want to help you gain efficiencies while making the experience more enjoyable. 

We’ll keep you posted on new developments and features through our blog.  In the meantime, please send us your ideas or feedback.   We always enjoy hearing from you.