Biophysical Society Bulletin | March 2023

Publications

Meet Biophysical Journal’s New Social Media Contributors

Biophysical Journal is pleased to introduce Jeetender Chugh and Christian Franke , the newest additions to the team of social media contributors. Social media contributors help the editorial office to identify new and exciting research by creating blog and social media posts. Learn more about what drew Chugh and Franke to the position and their views on the relationship between social media and science. Jeetender Chugh What is your field of research? Christian Franke What is your field of research?

I am trying to understand the conformational dynamics of proteins and nucleic acids at the atomic level using solution-state NMR spec troscopy, and how conformational dynamics

My group at the Institute of Applied Optics and Biophysics at the University of Jena, Germa ny, works on the development of both hard ware and software tools for super-resolution

Jeetender Chugh

Christian Franke

helps understand ongoing biological problems, e.g., specificity of protein-RNA interactions, protein folding, phase separa tion, etc. What excited you about being a social media contributor for Biophysical Journal ? Being a social media contributor for the prestigious Biophys ical Journal will not only give me an opportunity to regularly follow the issues and get updated with the current literature, but will also help me improve my writing and communication skills. How do you view the role of social media in science? In current times, social media plays an important role in all facets of life, including reaching out to a larger audience for your scientific publication. In the absence of social media, when I am trying to update myself with current literature, my natural target journals would be in my immediate research interest. The other way to read new literature is to search PubMed using a set of keywords, which are also biased due to my specific research interests. However, social media gives an unbiased (to some extent) view of recent literature due to my large variety of social media connections.

microscopy, like dSTORM and SIM and their application to cell biological and clinical questions. We are also working on the multiscale translation of optical principles, like structured illumination, for SIM and stereophotogrammetry, which is a macroscopic 3D scanning technique. Our main goal is to build methods that people actually use to solve topical problems. What excited you about being a social media contributor for Biophysical Journal ? I generally liked the idea of contributing to the work of the Biophysical Society. Being a social media contributor gives me a chance to promote great science, but also to delve into bio physical topics that I would otherwise miss. I received good inspiration and ideas from some of the articles I’ve tweeted. How do you view the role of social media in science? As with most things, one needs to be sensible about it and balance it carefully. On one hand, social media can be a pow erful promoter of science to the public and it has been shown that manuscripts that do well on social media will generally get cited more over time. It can be very useful to break a complex scientific work down into a couple of key sentences, especially for communication to the general public. Howev er, this abridgement can also lead to oversimplifications of the often very complicated concepts. In the best case, social media functions as an enticing billboard for the actual manu script and leads readers toward it.

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March 2023

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