I am Derek DuBois the founder of DOCjobs, the leading recruiting site specifically focused on careers in industry for people with advanced biomedical degrees. DOC started with a drinks meeting for 6 MDs from Columbia who had left traditional tracks and has since grown to 42,000 MD and PhD members pursuing careers in industry. I have experience in alternate and innovative careers for MDs/PhDs both through my own career as a partner at McKinsey and Accenture and through the 1,000 employers who have used DOC to recruit biomedical talent including investment banks/funds, biopharma, startups, consulting firms and others across the spectrum of healthcare. MDs and PhDs face similar challenges in navigating to careers beyond the established academic/clinical/research tracks, while more and more are seeking such opportunities with the rise in physician burnout and the relative paucity of academic research positions. Hi All – Thanks for the questions – feel free to add additional questions on or add to current threads and I will check back in later tonight and address as best I can. Take care. Best, DDD AMA about applying your skills to careers in pharma/biotech, finance, consulting, and beyond. My linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-d-dubois/ DOC: www.DOCjobs.com

Hi all! My name is Dr. Christopher Carroll. I am a pediatric critical care physician at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Connecticut, and I serve on numerous committees within the American College of Chest Physicians including as trustee of the CHEST Foundation, chair of the Scientific Presentations and Awards Committee, past-chair of the Pediatric NetWork and steering committee of the Critical Care NetWork. Most of research has focused on the treatment of severe respiratory diseases in children (particularly acute asthma and bronchiolitis) and the influence of genetics on respiratory diseases in critically ill children. My name is Dr. Jayshil Patel, and I currently administer to patients, teach and conduct research as an academic intensivist for the Pulmonary and Critical Care Division at the Medical College of Wisconsin. I received training in internal medicine at the Cook County Health and Hospital System in Chicago followed by subspecialty training in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. The majority of my career has centered around a mixture of enhancing patient care, providing education and mentorship to house staff and medical students and advancing science through research, in which I primarily study the impact of enteral nutrition on critical care patient outcomes. Influenza, most commonly known as the flu, is a contagious respiratory illness caused by influenza viruses. The flu can cause mild to severe illness and at times can lead to death. Anyone can get the flu, and serious problems related to the flu can happen at any age but may have a higher risk of occurring in young children and patients 65+. We are in the heart of a particularly severe flu season and it’s important to understand the causes, symptoms and ways to treat and prevent the flu. Since the flu and the common cold are both respiratory illnesses that share very similar symptoms, it can become very tough to differentiate one from the other. We’re here to provide the facts, share the latest in research and help provide more information on how to best tackle this flu season. Just a note, we won’t be able to give specific medical advice or a diagnosis on this Reddit AMA. Conflict of Interest Disclosure: Our thoughts and opinions are our own. We will be back at 1 p.m. CT to answer your questions; ask us anything!

I am Michael Cholbi, Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. I work and publish in a number of area of ethics, including ethical theory, moral psychology, practical ethics, and the history of moral philosophy. Much (though not all) of my work has a Kantian flavor – but do note I’m willing to take Kant and Kantians to task when need be! (For a good overview of my work on Kant’s ethics, check out my book Understanding Kant’s Ethics). Here are some more specifics about my research: I’m perhaps best known for my work on philosophy of death and dying, including my work on suicide and grief. With respect to suicide, my views are complicated: I argue that most acts of suicide violate our Kantian duty to preserve our rational agency, but precisely because this is a self-regarding duty or duty to self, then at a social level, individuals have an autonomy-based right to shorten their lives, consistent with their moral obligations to others; that medically assisted dying is not contrary to the moral norms of medicine and that the medical profession should not monopolize access to desirable ways of shortening our lives; that, all other things being equal, mental health problems provide equally strong justifications for suicide as do ‘physical’ ailments, etc.; and that non-invasive public health measures to prevent suicide are typically defensible. Grief is an understudied phenomenon among philosophers. Much of my work here is concerned with understanding how grief can makes our lives better — why we wouldn’t find it desirable to be unable to grieve, like Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger — despite the fact that it involves pain or mental distress. In the book I’m writing, I propose that grief represents an especially fruitful opportunity to know ourselves and understand our own commitments and values more deeply. In other areas of social ethics, I write on paternalism, defending what I call the ‘rational will’ conception of paternalism, wherein paternalism is wrong because it intercedes in our powers of rational agency in various ways; on race and criminal justice, where I argue (in a forthcoming paper in Ethics) that racial bias in the administration of the death penalty in the U.S. merits its de facto abolition; and on the philosophy of work and labor, a new area of research where I’m exploring universal basic income and notions of meaningful work. As you can tell, my work is very diverse, both topically and methodologically. I try to integrate empirical work from economics, legal studies, and psychiatry into my research where appropriate. I look forward to discussing any and all of my work with the reddit audience! Some of my work: My Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on suicide My review of Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s book on near death experiences A piece on grief in Four By Three A blog post on paternalism from LSE’s The Forum

The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Michael Cholbi, Professor of Philosophy and Director, California Center for Ethics and Policy, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. This AMA is the second in our Spring 2018 AMA Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Professor Cholbi will be joining us on Thursday January 25th at 1PM ET to discuss issues in ethical theory, moral psychology, practical ethics, Kant and the philosophy of death and dying. Hear it from him: Michael Cholbi I’m Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. I work and publish in a number of area of ethics, including ethical theory, moral psychology, practical ethics, and the history of moral philosophy. Much (though not all) of my work has a Kantian flavor – but do note I’m willing to take Kant and Kantians to task when need be! (For a good overview of my work on Kant’s ethics, check out my book Understanding Kant’s Ethics). Here are some more specifics about my research: I’m perhaps best known for my work on philosophy of death and dying, including my work on suicide and grief. With respect to suicide, my views are complicated: I argue that most acts of suicide violate our Kantian duty to preserve our rational agency, but precisely because this is a self-regarding duty or duty to self, then at a social level, individuals have an autonomy-based right to shorten their lives, consistent with their moral obligations to others; that medically assisted dying is not contrary to the moral norms of medicine and that the medical profession should not monopolize access to desirable ways of shortening our lives; that, all other things being equal, mental health problems provide equally strong justifications for suicide as do ‘physical’ ailments, etc.; and that non-invasive public health measures to prevent suicide are typically defensible. Grief is an understudied phenomenon among philosophers. Much of my work here is concerned with understanding how grief can makes our lives better — why we wouldn’t find it desirable to be unable to grieve, like Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger — despite the fact that it involves pain or mental distress. In the book I’m writing, I propose that grief represents an especially fruitful opportunity to know ourselves and understand our own commitments and values more deeply. In other areas of social ethics, I write on paternalism, defending what I call the ‘rational will’ conception of paternalism, wherein paternalism is wrong because it intercedes in our powers of rational agency in various ways; on race and criminal justice, where I argue (in a forthcoming paper in Ethics) that racial bias in the administration of the death penalty in the U.S. merits its de facto abolition; and on the philosophy of work and labor, a new area of research where I’m exploring universal basic income and notions of meaningful work. As you can tell, my work is very diverse, both topically and methodologically. I try to integrate empirical work from economics, legal studies, and psychiatry into my research where appropriate. I look forward to discussing any and all of my work with the reddit audience! Links of Interest: My Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on suicide My review of Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s book on near death experiences A piece on grief in Four By Three A blog post on paternalism from LSE’s The Forum AMA Please feel free to post questions for Professor Cholbi here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Michael Cholbi to our community!

Hi Reddit! I am Clifford Spiegelman. I grew up on Long Island and was a rather undistinguished High School student (rank about 80 out of 400). I graduated from the same small High School (Berner in Massapequa) that Alec Baldwin attended. I graduated with 3 majors math, stat, and economics in 1970 from SUNYAB. After a stint in the army reserves, I graduated with a PhD in Applied Mathematics/Statistics in 1976 from Northwestern U. I spent 9 years working as a staff statistician at NBS (now NIST) and now 30 years at Texas A&M where I am Distinguished Professor of Statistics. I have a number of appointments including Official Statistician of the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission, and stat advisor to the Texas Forensic Science Commission. I cofounded Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems in 1985 and am editor emeritus. I will use the JFK comparative bullet lead analysis (CBLA) and firearm/toolmark evidence as examples of flawed forensic science. While the flaws in the JFK case are not extraordinary, people seem to care more about these flaws than 100s of other cases with less known victims and defendants. (See http://www.newsweek.com/jfk-assassination-modern-forensic-science-could-finally-solve-shooting-741292 and https://www.innocenceproject.org/flawed-forensic-science-misleads-more-than-juries/. ) I’ll be back at 10 am ET to answer your question, ask me anything!

Thank you everyone who sent in questions! That was a fun hour. Must run, but I’ll come back later and address those that I couldn’t get to in 60 minutes. Means a lot to me to see all of this excitement for science. And if you missed the AMA in real time, feel welcome to pose more questions on twitter @jannalevin. Thanks again. Black holes are not a thing, they’re a place—a place where spacetime rains in like a waterfall dragging everything irreversibly into the shadow of the event horizon, the point of no return. I’m Janna Levin, an astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University. I study black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves. I also serve as the director of sciences at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a non-profit foundation that fosters multidisciplinary creativity in the arts and sciences. I’ve written several books, and the latest is titled, “Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space.” It’s the inside story on the discovery of the century: the sound of spacetime ringing from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago. I’m also the host of NOVA’s new film, “Black Hole Apocalypse,” which you can watch streaming online now here. In it, we explore black holes past, present, and future. Expect space ships, space suits, and spacetime. With our imaginary technology, we travel to black holes as small as cities and as huge as solar systems. I’ll be here at 12 ET to answer your questions about black holes! And if you want to learn about me, check out this article in Wired or this video profile that NOVA produced. —Janna

Hi reddit, I’m Hilary Lawson - post-realist philosopher, director of the Institute of Art and Ideas and founder of the world’s largest philosophy and music festival HowTheLightGetsIn. Born and raised in Bristol, England, I was awarded a scholarship to study PPE at Balliol College Oxford . As a post-graduate I came to see paradoxes of self-reference as the central philosophical issue and began a DPhil on The Reflexivity of Discourse. This later became the basis for my first philosophical book Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament. Alongside my more philosophical writing, I also pursued a media career following my studies. Within a few years I had created my own prime time television series ‘Where There’s Life’ with a weekly UK audience in excess of ten million. In 1982, I went on to co-author a book based on the series and was appointed Editor of Programmes and later Deputy Chief Executive at the television station TV-am. Meanwhile I continued to develop my philosophical thinking and had initial sketches of the theory later to become Closure. In 1985 I wrote Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament as part of a series on modern European thought. In the book, I argued that the paradoxes of self-reference are central to philosophy and drive the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In the late 1980s I founded the production company TVF Media which made documentary and current affairs programming, including Channel 4’s flagship international current affairs programme, The World This Week. I was editor of the programme, which ran weekly between 1987 and 1991. The programme predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Yugoslavia and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, amongst its other laudable achievements. In the 1990s, I focused on writing Closure. It took a decade to complete and was published in 2001. The book has been described as the first non-realist metaphysics. Having begun my philosophical career as a proponent of postmodernism, latterly I became a critic arguing for the necessity of an overall framework and the need to move on from a focus on language. Closure proposes that the human condition is to find ourselves on the cusp of openness and closure. The world is open and we, along with other living organisms, are able to apprehend and make sense of it through the process of closure. I would define closure as the holding of that which is different as one and the same. Human experience is seen to be the result of successive layers of closure, which I consider to be preliminary, sensory and inter-sensory closure. The highest level of closure, inter-sensory closure realises language and thought. The theory shifts the focus of philosophy away from language and towards an exploration of the relationship between openness and closure. An important element of the theory of closure is its own self-referential character. I founded the Institute of Art and Ideas in 2008 with the aim of making ideas and philosophy a central part of cultural life. Our website IAI.tv, which posts to the sub, was launched in 2011. We then moved to publishing articles in 2013 and free philosophy courses on IAI Academy in 2014. Links of Interest: Tickets and lineup for HowTheLightGetsIn 2018 can be found here - discounts available for students and U25s. Routledge has partnered with the IAI to offer a generous 20% off all their philosophy books and a free giveaway each month. Click here for details. After the End of Truth: A debate with Hannah Dawson (KCL) and John Searle (Berkeley) on objective truth and alternative facts What Machines Can’t Do | Hilary Lawson in debate with David Chalmers (NYU) and cognitive scientist and sex robot expert Kate Devlin (Goldsmiths) on the question of machine minds After Relativism: A debate on the pitfalls of relativism and potential solutions with Simon Blackburn and Michela Massimi

Hi everyone, happy to be here! Hyperhidrosis is a common condition, approx 3% of people deal with excessive sweating from their armpits, palms or soles of feet. It can be debilitating, the sweating is often heavy and uncontrollable, causing people to really struggle in social and work situations. The good news is that hyperhidrosis is highly treatable. At the Columbia Hyperhidrosis Center, our team of thoracic surgeons and dermatologists developed a multidisciplinary approach to the management of hyperhidrosis. While surgery is extremely effective at eliminating hyperhidrosis, there may be some unavoidable side effects, so we believe non-surgical options should be tried first. Here’s a little bit more about me and an interview about hyperhidrosis. Here’s my proof Edit: Thank you Reddit, I’ve enjoyed answering your questions. I’m signing off for now, and will try to check back in later today. Happy holidays!

Hello Reddit! My name is Tom Pering and I am currently a Teaching Associate at the University of Sheffield. My research focuses on the gases which volcanoes release. In particular, I am interested in volcanoes which have basaltic magmas. This type of magma allows the constant release of gases at the surface, which can then be measured using remote sensing techniques. As part of this, I am also interested in the modelling of how gas behaves within magmas, which then leads to a range of volcanic activities; such as strombolian eruptions. The research group in volcano remote sensing at the University of Sheffield has a strong history of developing such techniques. Recently we have developed a low-cost ultraviolet camera approach to remotely sense the volcanic gas sulphur dioxide (SO2), which incorporates the popular Raspberry Pi platform. Happy to answer questions about my research and more broadly about volcanology! Here are a few example papers from our recent research: Ultraviolet Imaging with Low Cost Smartphone Sensors: Development and Application of a Raspberry Pi-Based UV Camera - http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/16/10/1649 A Low-Cost Smartphone Sensor-Based UV Camera for Volcanic SO2 Emission measurements - http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/9/1/27 The dynamics of slug trains in volcanic conduits: evidence for expansion driven slug coalescence – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377027316304267 Hello everyone! I am taking a break for a couple of hours but will keep an eye on this and return to answer questions at about 8 pm GMT (3 pm Eastern Time).

Hello Reddit! We are PhD student Noam Brown and Professor Tuomas Sandholm at the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University. We do research on developing AIs that can reason about hidden information (which is widespread in real-world strategic interactions). Earlier this year we built Libratus, the first and only AI to defeat top humans in no-limit poker. We played four of the world’s best pros in a 120,000 hand, 20-day Brains vs. AI match of heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em, with a prize pool of $200,000. The AI won the match decisively, winning a combined $1.8 million (at $50/$100 blinds). The victory was statistically significant with a p-value of 0.0002. The details of the bot were just published in Science Magazine! We’re here to talk about Libratus, the competition, what this means for the future of AI, and any other questions you might have. We’ll be back at 9 am to answer your questions, Ask us anything! EDIT: We’re closing the AMA. Thanks for the questions everyone!

Hi Reddit! This is Johna Leddy, president of The Electrochemical Society (ECS). I’m joined by Jeff Fergus, editor of the Society’s official meeting proceedings, ECS Transactions (ECST). Today we’d like to talk with you all about open science, our Free the Science initiative, and our new preprint server, ECSarXiv, built and hosted by the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework. We’ll be back at 12 noon ET to answer your questions, ask us anything! ECS Chief Content Officer & Publisher Mary E. Yess (username: ecspublisher) will also help to field questions. More about us: Dr. Johna Leddy: I’m an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Iowa, an alumna of Rice University and the University of Texas, and the current president of ECS. I’ve been an ECS member for over 25 years and have served on various committees within the organization. I’m also a former chair of ECS’s Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry Division. My research interests range from fundamental electrochemistry through voltammetric methodologies and modeling to the technology of power sources. A major focus for me has been examining magnetic effects on electron transfer processes. Dr. Jeff Fergus: I’m a professor of materials engineering and the associate dean for program assessment and graduate studies in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering at Auburn University. I’ve served as the editor of ECST, ECS’s official meeting proceedings, since 2013. I’ve also held positions on multiple committees within the organization and served as the chair of the ECS High Temperature Materials Division. My research interests are in materials for high temperature and electrochemical applications—particularly in understanding and mitigating performance degradation, such as chromium poisoning in SOFCs and capacity fading in Li-ion batteries. The Electrochemical Society (ECS): ECS is a nonprofit scientific society that has been publishing continuously since 1902. We’re an international membership organization that has over 8,000 members worldwide across more than 80 countries. Our mission is to disseminate and advance the science we steward through meetings and publications, and we believe the best way to do that is through transition to an open science paradigm. This mission is the driving force behind our Free the Science initiative: www.electrochem.org/free-the-science. We believe that by opening and democratizing research, we can enhance and accelerate the science that will ensure our survival and sustainability on this planet. We already give authors the opportunity to publish open access in our 2 peer-reviewed, hybrid open access journals—the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology. Currently, over a third of our journal articles are being published open access. The upcoming launch of ECSarXiv will mark a major step forward for Free the Science toward the complete open access model we plan to one day implement, allowing all authors to publish for free and removing the paywall for readers. We invite anyone who wants to know more about open science, Free the Science, preprint servers, or scholarly communications to ask questions here. For more info about us, check out our website at www.electrochem.org. Edit: Thanks, everyone, for the insightful questions and discussion. That’s all the time we have today. We had a great experience talking with you all—you raised a number of excellent points about the open science movement that we’ll want to keep in mind as we move forward. Until next time, please feel free to reach out to us with questions at [email protected].

Under the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the world has agreed to do what is needed to keep global temperatures from not rising above 2°C as compared to pre-industrial levels. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, in every economically viable scenario to that goal requires reaching zero emissions and requires the deployment of carbon-capture technologies on large scale. These technologies allow us to keep burning fossil fuels almost without emissions, while putting us on the trajectory to hit our climate goals. They are considered a bridge to a future where we can create, store, and supply all the world’s energy from renewable sources. But carbon-capture technologies have a tortured history. Though first developed nearly 50 years ago, their use in climate-change mitigation only began in earnest in the 1990s and scaling them up hasn’t gone as planned. My initial perception, based on what I had read in the press, was that carbon capture seemed outrageously expensive, especially when renewable energy is starting to get cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. At the same time, my training in chemical engineering and chemistry told me the technologies were scientifically sound. And some of world’s most important bodies on climate change keep insisting that we need carbon capture. Who should I believe? The question took me down a rabbit hole. After a year of reporting, I’ve come to a conclusion: Carbon capture is both vital and viable. I’ve ended up writing nearly 30,000 words in The Race to Zero Emissions series for Quartz. You can read the 8,000-word story where I lay the case for the technology here: https://qz.com/1144298; other stories from the series here: https://qz.com/re/the-race-to-zero-emissions/; and follow the newsletter here: https://bit.ly/RacetoZeroEmissions. I’ll be back at 11 ET (16 UTC) to answer questions. You can ask me anything! Bio: Akshat Rathi is a reporter for Quartz in London. He has previously worked at The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in organic chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. 1 ET (18 UTC): I’ve answered all the questions. Thanks for having me!