Up, down and sideways

It has been almost 1 year since my last post, though it is not for lack of trying. I am now starting my third year as department chair, and as you can tell from my silence, I clearly have realized I cannot do everything. I have learned so many things during this process and I so very much want to lay it all out in this blog so that you have insights into how things work. The problem is that there's so much and I am not really sure where to start, and because I am dealing with so many things, I don't really have the piece of mind to lay out everything coherently. So I'm not going to really try. Instead, I will just let my consciousness flow, complete with all its blemishes.

Watch everyone around you. If they are doing something right, emulate. If they are doing something wrong or unsuccessfully, vow never to emulate.

The job of the chair is to take care of the department and its people, but also to work with the upper administration.  It is also important to work laterally with other departments.  It's not good to compete with other departments or to fight against the upper administration, as some chairs do.  The key is to work up, down and laterally, but the first priority is to work for the department.  I've seen some chairs or deans just answer up, forgetting ultimately that what makes them strong is their faculty.  Watch out for those who only answer up.

Differentiate between excellence and hot air. Often, one will be asked to support this or that financially. If you supported everything, you'd go broke. If you didn't support anything, then you're not doing your job of empowering students and faculty to do great things. But how do you choose?  Learn to recognize what is a good idea. But a good idea is useless unless there is a true champion. That person needs to be passionate and committed to it for the long haul.  Ask whether this initiative is going to be self-sustaining in the long term. Evaluate whether one has true skin in the game.  Why should one invest in a person who isn't willing to put in his/her own time and money into his/her own idea?  No skin. No game. The second thing is whether the person who generated the idea is the right person to pull it off.  I call that credibility.  Do you have the scientific credibility or track record to execute the idea?  If those conditions are not met, don't invest in the idea.  Ideas are easy to come by, but executing ideas is not easy.

Some people are shy or less aggressive.  Don't overlook them.  Recognize that talent and potential is everywhere and sometimes you have to dig it out. 

Follow the rules but have a heart and give people a chance to correct. Inevitably in any academic or business environment, there will be personal conflicts, between faculty, between faculty and student, etc.  Learn to recognize these conflicts early. One approach is to not get involved at all.  However, in this way, these conflicts gradually escalate to the point where you might end up having to refer to HR or something like that. That too seems easy because all you have to do is refer and you're done, but the reality is that you really haven't solved anything and you've not taken responsibility for solving the problem. The best thing to do is to get involved before anything escalates.  Sometimes it's a misunderstanding.  Understand both sides. Sometimes it's one side perhaps not behaving in the best way, but you can pull that person aside and tell them that they've got to correct themselves. The reality is that most people are good, but nobody is perfect.  And because most of us are good, we all want to be given a chance to correct our mistakes and apologize.  The same goes for students. Students are often in a very stressful state especially before orals or before defending their thesis.  They may do funny things under stress or they may not fulfill exactly what you want. You have to be reasonable. They are not your mercenaries.


Learn the art of negotiation.  Negotiation is not about just getting what you want. It is not warfare. True negotiation is about making sure both sides come out good. Don't go in to the dean or the chair asking for something that the dean or chair simply cannot do.  There are finite resources, so keep that mind. Keep in mind also that if you get something that could very well mean something is taken away from others. It can very well be a zero sum game.  From the chair's or dean's perspective, recognize that negotiation again is not about winning, but rather about helping the faculty. If both parties have this perspective, all goes well. If not, things won't go well.

Have ideas, have a vision. Don't just manage.  There is nothing worse than watching someone in a leadership position without his or her own ideas.  Have the courage to have a vision. That vision of course is informed by the faculty, and through iterative discussions with the faculty, that vision is honed, refined, corrected.  But someone has to lead the vision.  Without a coherent and focused vision, one is just treading water.

If one doesn't have their own ideas, adopt someone else's ideas fast. But learn to recognize the difference between a good and executable idea from a dumb idea. 

Believe in the team.  If your colleague looks good, you look good. Help each other.

Recognize that to make a department, there are many different roles that must be filled. The role of the junior faculty are 99% to maintain research excellence. But as one rises up in the ranks, research, education, mentorship, service and outreach all become important.  Some will gravitate towards mentorship or service, others will stick to research.  All roles are needed. But to re-emphasize, research excellence is the oxygen mask that one needs when they are starting.  That's how one builds credibility. Once one has credibility, then they can diversify. And if you have credibility, you have far more influence and a greater ability to help others in the future.

I guess that's it for my stream of consciousness.  The figure above is a goauche painting of a Swinhoe's Pheasant, an endemic of the island of Taiwan.

Our instrument was down for a while, in part because of some neglect due to my being chair. However, it is now up and running. We had our Element 2 completely refurbished, but we still had some issues with the cooling system.  Took me more than a month to resolve that. I had to change the pump head of the chiller, which solved 50% of the problem. We then realized that the cooling system was probably clogged after 16 years (yes, I have been here for 16 years and the instrument is still operating). Two days ago, I spent several hours flushing 40 gallons of water through - I had never seen so much junk come out of a tube ever!  Thinking we had finally fixed our problem, I turned it right over to the students. But the instrument looked like it would still get too hot...so then today, I figured out that our flow controller and the chiller were not calibrated properly after all these changes!  We fixed that in the morning, but then we found out that the instrument mass calibration was drifting, a sign that we were still having cooling problems... or... as it turns out, during refurbishing, the automatic drift correction on the instrument had been disabled.  Alas, we are now up and running. Finally. Knock on wood.  I wish I had a technician. Then again, all this instrument work on my part was a good escape from being chair.

What are we doing in terms of research. Some of the things that have come about include our paper on sulfur isotopes of deep arc lithosphere. I'm pretty sure most of the community will be upset about that paper.  The paper tackles the debate on redox of arc mantle, which, if I want to be honest, is just about the most boring thing in the world, but unfortunately, I keep getting drawn back to it. The real problem is that the debate is very narrowly focused on whether arc magmas are oxidized at the source or during ascent. It's really not a very interesting or even useful debate because the big picture is missing.  So that sulfur paper we published only because, well, it's the routine thing to do. But read it anyway if you want a different perspective on the world. No guarantees that my interpretation is correct!

Far more interesting to me is a recent paper from our group, led by post doc Ming Tang, with former student Monica Erdman and Graham Eldridge as coauthors. In Science Advances.  The redox filter.  In this paper, we show that plagioclase-free garnet arc pyroxenites (ARCLOGITES) initially have negative Eu anomalies, which then increase with progressive differentiation. The key is plagioclase-free and Eu anomaly.  Without plagioclase, how do you make a Eu anomaly?  Turns out, the only way to do it is through variable Eu valence state, which means that we can track redox.  We are able to say something about the redox state of the arc mantle, but the most important part is that oxygen fugacity increases during differentiation. This is very peculiar, but we find that this increase in oxygen fugacity does so while Fe is decreasing.  This is commonly thought to be driven by magnetite fractionation, but note that magnetite fractionation should cause reduction rather than oxidation.  The only way to achieve these systematics is via garnet fraction. Garnet has high Fe content but no ferric iron. So you deplete in total Fe but enrich the residual melt in ferric iron, oxidizing it.  We show that the extent of Fe depletion correlates with the extent of garnet fractionation. This seems to be how calc-alkaline magmas form... and it explains why calc-alkaline magmas are found primarily in thick crust.  In two previous papers, we came very close to solving this problem, but we just didn't make the leap.  Eu was the key observation that allowed us to make the leap.

Not to be outdone, we kept going on these same arclogites. Ming looked at Nb, Ta systematics as well as TiO2 systematics. What's clear is that arclogites have high Nb/Ta ratio, and thus provide a simple resolution to the old Nb/Ta paradox.  Hopefully, this work will come out soon.

Other things we're working on are the interplay between erosion and magmatism and climate - this is the work of recently graduated PhD student Hehe Jiang.  With my more junior students, we are now working on crystal growth and volcanic ashes.

I'm also working with laurence yeung on the isotopic compositions of bird feathers, to study molt.

That's about all for now.  Just signing in here to let you know that I haven't dropped off the face of this world.