Biophysical Society

Despite decades of interventions aiming to transform the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce to be more inclusive and diverse, little progress has been made in creating long-lasting, sustainable change. For a long period of time, the STEM workforce has been described as a leaky pipeline. While there has been some utility to thinking about the STEM workforce in this way, in this article, we discuss how characterizing the STEM workforce as a leaky pipeline can impede the design of innovative interventions that contribute to sustainable change toward a more inclusive scientific enterprise. As an alternative, we join others in proposing the braided river ecosystem model, related social sciences and career development theories as more inclusive ways to think about the STEM workforce and how a target group or an individual navigates their career choices and development as a scientist. New models and paradigms to understand the STEM workforce and individuals’ careers in science may open the door to finding novel strategies to make careers in STEM accessible to all. We present case studies demonstrating the practical applications of these inclusive models.

Scientific conferences play an important role in advancing research, scholarship, and the careers of emerging scientists. The COVID-19 pandemic offered meeting organizers and researchers alike an opportunity to reimagine what scientific conferences could look like. Virtual conferences can increase inclusivity and accessibility while decreasing costs and carbon emissions. However, it is generally perceived that the digital world fails to adequately recapitulate many of the benefits of in-person face-to-face interactions; these include socializing, and collaborative environments that can forge new research directions and provide critical career development opportunities. On November 15 and 16, 2022, researchers, representatives from diverse scientific conference organizations, leaders in virtual platform technologies, and innovators in conference design gathered online for the Open Access Keystone eSymposium "Reimagining Scientific Conferences." The meeting focused on how conference organizers can leverage lessons from the pandemic and emerging virtual platforms to engage new audiences, rethink strategies for scientific exchange, and decrease the carbon footprint of in-person events.

Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is one of the most popular and indispensable tools in molecular biology. Despite numerous advances in ELISA methods that markedly improve the sensitivity and throughput of detection, a hallmark of all ELISA continues to be repeated pipetting of fluids that is not only cumbersome but can easily introduce errors or contaminations. Robotics, despite obvious advantages, remains expensive. Here, we designed and produced cheap "pillar plates" using stereolithography-based 3D printing that can be readily inserted into conventional 96- and 384- well plates and serve as the substrate for ELISA. We demonstrate that ELISA using these "pillar plates" affords comparable specificity and sensitivity of detection of serum antibodies to traditional sandwich ELISA, while markedly reducing the time and efforts associated with fluid transfer. These results underscore "pillar plates" as an attractive platform for rapid yet robotics-free ELISA.

Abstract We apply a dimensional analysis to a neural network model with chaotic dynamics, or a mathematical model of chaotic neural networks. First, Lyapunov spectra are examined to confirm existence of chaotic network behavior and to calculate the Lyapunov dimension. Then, the correlation dimension is estimated in the following three cases: (1) reconstruction from single variable time series, (2) observation in state subspaces and (3) observation of the macroscopic average activity. The results show good correlation dimension obtained by observation in state subspaces and the characteristics of the correlation dimension estimated by macroscopic observation.