Sarah L. Keller Prof. of Chemistry Associate Dean for Research Activities for Arts and Sciences (My counterpart in Engineering is Mari Ostendorf.) One of our goals is to enable you to submit large, multi-PI, interdisciplinary grant proposals. Call us if you need help: - Assembling a team - Figuring out to whom to talk about UW matching commitments - Herding cats

Potential pitfalls: Collaborations often result in better science; tenure doesn’t always reward it. -How does your department view collaborations within tenure decisions? Will faculty read your papers, or merely count how many you have? If there are 2 PI’s on a paper, will that paper count half? -You want to establish your own name. If you collaborate with your Ph.D. or postdoctoral mentors, evaluators may assume that resulting publications were from your previous work, not your current independent work. -Similarly, if you collaborate with any established researcher, evaluators may assume that any clever ideas were from your older and wiser collaborator, not from you. When you apply for tenure, you will write a narrative. Use that to make it clear who did what in each collaboration. -What is most important in your field: first vs. last vs. corresponding author -Choose only 1 or 2 collaborations and then also take care of your core research program in order to not over-commit. -If you are in an unproductive collaboration with no publications or funding on the foreseeable horizon, find a professional way to extract yourself.

Prioritizing Collaboration Offers: - What has worked for me: Pick who you enjoy the most. - Goofs I’ve made: Not enquiring whether collaborator has already published and whether plans to publish in the future. Hi Collaborator, I had the idea to verify that there are holes in the membranes by adding beads. It worked great. Now, to be a good mentor to my student, I wanted to get your verification on something that I'm sure won't be a problem... I just think it is more polite to bring it up now rather than later, to make the best relationships possible. When collaborators do work for my lab, I have a low standard of how much time they should have put into a project before I count them as a co-author. For me it is just a couple of days. I'd estimate that my student has put this much time in your project, but I haven't so far. So, if/when these current results get published, I'd like to make sure that my student can be a co-author, no matter how far down on the author list he falls. If that isn't OK by you, please let me know - because I like working with your group! Sorry to be so official (but hopefully not officious!) - Sarah Dear Sarah, I think this is a great collaboration and it is an very nice of you to be so excited! With our first "discovery"-paper of membranes already submitted, to have collaborators on the next papers is a real honor. On the next paper I would welcome to have your student and you, if you like, to be a coauthor. It makes all of us stronger.