PhD Blogs

Resources

  • Acagamic

    Primarily a game design and computer science blog, Acagamic is written by an assistant professor of game science at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. It focuses mainly on game theory, but occasionally branches out into other subjects, like statistics or physiological computing. It’s a great blog for those who are very interested in game theory, though it would not be a good math for less technical readers.

  • AMS Graduate Student Blog

    Sponsored by the American Mathematical Society, this is a blog dedicated primarily to the issues faced by math teachers and professors. It covers topics like when to let students leave class, how to organize a reading group and the dangers of social networking to excess. The posts are written by a number of different people, too, so there are always different perspectives to each issue that arises.

  • BenchFly

    Dedicated to helping scientists improve their lab work (and their life outside of it, so nothing gets in the way), BenchFly is mostly a blog, but also features videos and helpful products.

  • Effect Measure

    This blog has been defunct for about a year, but the archives still contain quite a bit of helpful information. It’s part of a larger network of blogs called ScienceBlogs.com, which are all dedicated to science. Effect Measure itself is a health blog, covering a range of topics from the history of medicine to breakthroughs in the medical field.

  • Green Gabbro

    Another ScienceBlogs site, Green Gabbro is written and managed by Maria Brum—a masters in Earth Science. It covers a wide variety of earth-related science, some with a rather snarky tone. One of the most recent tongue-in-cheek articles discussed how gay marriage can cause earthquakes, complete with charts and graphs. But it does cover real issues, too, like the discussion of what a geologist should always carry in her field vehicle, and the differences between geologists and geophysicists.

  • Mathemagenic

    Written by a Ph.D. candidate, with the most recent entries tracing her experience with her dissertation defense, Mathemagenic is a window into the inside world of mathematics at graduate school. Lilia talks about both her life as a Ph.D. student and her outside stresses, being a wife and mother.

  • Miss Atomic Bomb

    Women physicists are difficult to come by, but thankfully this one decided to share her experiences as a woman working in nuclear physics with the blogosphere. The actual subjects of the posts are quite varied and interesting, ranging from ways the government can save money to coverage of the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan after the tsunami disaster.

  • Nobel Intent: The Large Idea Collider

    This blog is a veritable wealth of new information in the scientific fields, especially astrophysics and microbiology. Articles appears on a regular basis, and always feature some fascinating new discovery or development. This is a great source of information for those still working within the scientific academy who don’t have time to go out and do all the research on their own.

  • Ramblings of a Graduate Student

    If meteorology is your thing, definitely don’t miss this blog. Written by a Ph.D. student from the University of Oklahoma, this blog has a lot of beautiful graphical representations of weather patterns and various data mining projects. You can find lots of information about both the weather and ways to chart and graph it, which is a skill that can be applied to any scientific field.

  • Survival Blog for Scientists

    Aimed at aspiring scientists of all stripes, this blog discusses the topics that all of the fields have in common: conferences and when to attend them, how to get your proposals accepted, patenting your discoveries, and what to do when some other lab beats you to the punch. Since there’s no specific focus—only on science in general—this blog is a great read for just about anyone who’s ever set foot in a laboratory.

  • The OpenScience Project

    This blog is a particularly good resource for any scientist operating on a shoestring budget. Its mission is to create free, open-source software for use in scientific areas, so that labs are no longer reliant on the expensive and sometimes poorly designed programs that professional companies sell. There are already several programs available for free, including ones for molecular dynamics and scanning probe microscopy.

  • The Scientific Activist: Reporting from the Crossroads of Science and Politics

    Another ScienceBlogs site, the Scientific Activist puts a political spin on the familiar topics of your typical science blog. Nick Anthis is a biology post-doc with a keen interest in the way politics affects science, and this blog reflects both of his interests. Most recently, he’s written about the Tea Party and animal testing legislation.