Lateral Transfers in a Government Agency

Lateral Transfers in a Government AgencyLateral Transfers in a Government AgencyA zur seite hin gelegen transfer is the movement of an employee from one job to another within a government organization at the same pay grade.If an employee can request a transfer, the organization must approve the move. Government agencies have detailed policies and procedures surrounding zur seite hin gelegen moves to ensure fairness and to mitigate the chances that an employee will legally challenge the move as unfair or discriminatory. Why an Employee Would Ask for a Lateral Transfer An employee might ask for lateral transfers for any number of reasons, but they often include wanting a different supervisor or moving geographically to accommodate a spouses new job. The employee might be experiencing burnout in his current duties and he wants to broaden his expertise or skills without actually moving to a new job with a different company. Why an Organization Would Prompt a Lateral Transfer Like wise, an organizationmight initiate a lateral transfer for various reasons. It might experience areduction in forcenecessitating that it move workers around to better focus its resources on the most mission-critical functions. The organization may experience changes in the populations it serves and needs to reposition staff to meet changing demands for services. Lateral Transfers Within the Government Lateral transfers can be very helpful to government organizations. At the beginning of its own lateral transfer policy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says, The Institute encourages lateral movement to a different job within the same level or grade when appropriate. Such movement not only helps an organization through cross-training, but it also offers employees development opportunities to broaden their knowledge and enhance their professional growth. Some Examples The spouse of a state correctional officer gets a job in another city. The family really wants this mo ve to happen, but the correctional officer himself needs a job to make it work. Fortunately, the new town has state prisons. The correctional officer requests a transfer to a facility in the new town. The facility happens to have a vacant position at the correctional officers current job classification. The warden happily accepts a trained and experienced officer where he would likely have gotten an untrained and inexperienced new hire otherwise. A government accountant has been working in accounts payable for five years. Lately, she has become bored with purchase requisitions, contracts, and payments. She needs something new, but she still wants to be involved in finance. She notices that the accounts receivable area need mora people, so she volunteers to transfer from accounts payable to accounts receivable. The accounting manager grants the transfer because it will benefit both the employee and the organization.A city has rapid growth on one side of town. New neighborhoods are be ing built as fast as construction crews can erect them. The fire chief reviews the citys firehouse locations and realizes that the city needs to build an additional firehouse among the burgeoning neighborhoods. Since the construction of a firehouse will take more than a year, the fire chief decides to transfer some firefighters from less populated parts of town to the firehouse nearest the new development. As you can see, lateral transfers can work well and be advantageous for both employer and employee. If youre experiencing a dilemma that might be cured by such a move, theres no harm in reaching out to see if a lateral transfer is available to you.

Should I Start My Own Consulting Business

Should I Start My Own Consulting Business Should I Start My Own Consulting Business Should I Start My Own Consulting Business?Wouldnt it be nice to abflug your own consulting geschftsleben?No more unreasonable bosses, meetings you really dont want to be involved in, or working with people you dont necessarily enjoy working with. Most of us have thought about it at one time or another and some of us have actually made it happen.For some people, entrepreneurship and business ownership is the right move and professionally and personally rewarding. For others, it just might not be the right fit.Leaving the conventional workforce to start your own business is truly a difficult decision and one that should be carefully considered. Here are a few key questions you should ask yourself before making the leap.What is your primary motivation for starting your own business?Do you truly have the entrepreneurial spirit or are you displeased with your job, career progress, or work environment? Dont take this question lightly. The truth may be that you are simply unhappy in your current business situation, which means you should be looking for a new position or employer versus going off on your own.Starting up and sustaining your own business is a 24/7 job and your passion for making it work will keep you going through some very long days. It requires a 100 percent commitment.Can you really afford it?A weak financial position is usually the first potential show stopper. How long can you live without a steady paycheck? It can takes months to years to start up and establish a profitable consulting practice and during that timeframe, your paychecks may be few and far between.Realistically, you should be able to go at least a year without a substantial income. Also, carefully consider the benefits you will be losing from your current employer health and life insurance contributions, retirement fund contributions, bonuses, and paid vacations. You most likely will need to invest in personal disability insurance as well. Financial factors will make or break you early on. Make sure you understand the financial picture.Are you socially prepared?In the beginning, most consultants work out of a home sekretariat to keep overhead down and minimize start-up costs. That means no more water cooler chats, conversations in the break room, and lunches with colleagues.How important are these social interactions to you? In comparison, life in the home office can be isolating and most of your human interactions will be by e-mail and the telephone. When you look out your office window and see that the lawn needs mowing, do you have the self-discipline to close the window blinds and make that next sales call instead?How strong is your support network?While you might be a gifted mechanical engineer, you most likely are new to business management. You will need to collaborate with others to succeed in other aspects of your business-legal, finance, marketing, and sales.You are goi ng to need a lot of help. Do you have trusted business contacts? Who is going to help you create your professional corporate identity-your logo, letterhead, a website, your first brochure, and the like? Youll need expert accounting advice. Those contacts should all be in place before you take your first step out the door.Do you have that first client in your back pocket?In an ideal world, you will have your first client lined up and have had serious business conversations with other prospects before you go off on your own. If it is possible to work at night and weekends on your new venture while you are still employed, take the opportunity.Keep in mind that finding a new client is not easy. When you are not doing engineering work for a client, youll be prospecting for new business. Once youve found a prospect, youll develop a proposal, present it, and attempt to land a new contract. And just because youve made it that far, you are not assured of gaining the job. Selling and developi ng new business is a time-consuming process but critical to your long-term success.Starting your own consulting business is not easy. However, if you decide to take the leap and succeed, youll find it to be a truly rewarding experience.Tom Ricci is the owner of Ricci Communications.Leaving the conventional workforce to start your own business is truly a difficult decision and one that should be carefully considered.

Neat Little Packages

Neat Little Packages Neat Little Packages Neat Little PackagesWhen Layla Richards welches only 14 weeks old, she welches diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of cancer that kills three quarters of the infants who contract it. Her doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London immediately started the standard treatment- chemotherbeiapy to kill the cancer and a bone marrow transplant so her body could replace her damaged blood cells- and hoped for the best.Seven weeks later, the cancer returned. The doctors then tried an experimental treatment. That also failed. The doctors told her parents that Layla faced certain death and gently suggested palliative care. In another part of Great Ormond Street Hospital, Waseem Qasim, a professor of cell and gene therapy at University College London, was treating mice by genetically modifying their immune cells. Immune cells are natures first line of defense against disease. They are designed to attack any foreign body. U nless they are a very, very close match, immune cells transplanted from one animal into another will also attack their new host.Working with mice, Qasim had shown he could genetically modify immune cells from donors so they would ignore their new host. He did that through use of an artificial enzyme called TALEN (for transcription activator-like effector nuclease). Like a pair of robotic scissors, TALEN hunts down and cuts DNA at a pre-programmed location. Once the DNA is cut, Qasim can add or subtract genetic material or even an entire gene. That enables him to alter the DNAs code, and therefore the cells behavior.Instead of going after the host, Qasims altered immune cells targeted only leukemia cells. Qasim also found a way to boost the immune cells resistance to a powerful drug used in the treatment. Zhen Gus DNA nanoclew has ligands on its surface that bind to receptors on the surface of cancer cells. It is then absorbed inside the cancer cell, whose acidic environment destroys the polymer sheath containing enzymes that slice through the DNA cocoon, spillingWhen Laylas parents were told about Qasims work, they were adamant about going ahead with what was a treatment that had never been tested on humans.We didnt want to accept palliative care, and so we asked the doctors to try anything for our daughter, even if it hadnt been tried before, her mother, Lisa Foley, said.At that point, however, Qasim had just begun the laborious process of treating enough immune cells to test for safety on humans. He had only enough to fill one vial. Layla was injected with 1 ml of the experimental cells.Within a few weeks, Laylas health improved. After two months she was without cancer and had received a bone marrow transplant so that she could begin making her own immune cells. One month later, in the fall of 2015, Layla returned home. Stories of genetics-based cures like this make it seem as if we live in an age of medical wonders. And to a certain degr ee, we do. But for all the advanced proposals for treating intractable disease, says Matthew Porteus, associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medical Center, there is still one pressing problem. He and his colleagues need better delivery systems.You can have the fanciest ideas and molecules, said Porteus, who himself was the first researcher to modify genes in human cells at rates high enough to cure diseases. But if you cant get them into the cell, they are no use, he said.Better delivery systems will take engineers.Although the cancer treatment that Layla Richards received was a first, the concept of genetically modifying cells in a Petri dish and injecting them into a patient, as Qasim did, is fairly standard. Ideally, though, physicians would like to deliver genetic medicine to cells inside the body. It is the only way to attack cancer and disease where they live. It would also make it easier to treat genetic diseases by changing the DNA in cells that continue to divide and multiply.Doing that, however, increases the difficulty for delivery systems. In addition to convincing the targeted cells to open up and accept a gene-altering payload- no mean feat- in-body systems must first find the right cells and also protect their package from the bodys immune system.Fortunately, researchers have been learning how to do that for more than 20 years while developing nanoscale drug delivery systems. Those solutions have now moved into the mainstream, said Mark Saltzman, a Yale University professor of biomedical and chemical engineering and physiology. Saltzman has published more than 300 papers in the field.custompagebreak The pharmaceutical industry was built on the notion that if you find the right chemical or compound, everything is going to be okay. If it has dangerous side effects or lacks effectiveness, you just tune the drugs chemistry, Saltzman said. Whats different now is that we can achieve greater safety and effectiveness by ch anging the packaging instead. Pharmaceutical companies do that with doxorubicin, a cancer drug that also causes heart disease. Entangling the drug in liposomes, sac-like structures made from fatty acids, keeps it from interacting with heart cells or other tissues. And because the liposomes are smaller than 100 nanometers in diameter, the bodys immune system ignores them. They are small enough to pass through the leaky blood vessels that surround tumors, and cancer cells have no mechanism to remove them. The fact that fatty acids are common molecules helped allay Food and Drug Administration concerns about the packaging, Saltzman said. Doxorubicin became the first FDA-approved nanomedicine in 1995.Since then, packaging has grown a great deal more sophisticated. Saltzmans work is a case in point. He prefers to work with synthetic polymers, for example, because they offer a great deal of flexibility. The polymers enable him to package two or more medicines at a time and cont rol precisely how htte nicht viel gefehlt the packages will release their payloads. Also, since artificial materials do not trigger immune responses, he can deliver very high doses of medication without a reaction. Saltzman draws on decades of research to target specific types of tissues or cells. Gang Bao, ASME Fellow, Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines, Rice UniversityPeople have been studying cancer for a long time, Saltzman said, and some characteristics of cancer cells are well known. For example, they reproduce rapidly, and need to accumulate folate molecules to make DNA. We put folate on the surface of our molecules, and cancer cells think they are folate and ingest them. We also put cell-penetrating peptides on the surface to speed uptake once the cell recognizes the package.Saltzman developed a range of approaches to deliver cancer drugs. Yet many of these techniques would adapt easily for genetic medicine. In fact, many researchers are already puttin g them to work.Arcturus Therapeutics in San Diego bills itself as an RNA medicines company. Cells use RNA to carry instructions encoded in the DNA to ribosomes, structures inside the cells that build proteins to spec by interfering with that process, RNA medicines can disrupt the formation of proteins that cause disease and tumor growth. In June, Arcturus signed an agreement to commercialize RNA medicines with Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a Johnson Johnson company.Arcturus wants to package these RNA medicines using a fatty acid-based nanoparticle system, a delivery technology that it calls lipid-enabled and unlocked nucleic acid modified RNA (so that its acronym can be LUNAR). The company says this is an advance over previous lipid-based delivery systems. In those systems, lipids were made from permanently charged molecules called quaternary amines their positive charge held negatively charged medicines and RNA molecules in place. Unfortunately, the charged particles accumu lated in body tissues the way balloons with a static charge stick to a wall.Thats not a problem if you deliver one or two doses, said Arcturus CEO Joe Payne. But if you are dosing every day, every week, or even every month, it is a problem.Arcturuss solution is a biodegradable lipid with a temporary charge, just enough to wrap medicines and RNA in a loose, yarn-like bundle. When the bundle reaches the targeted cell, the cell engulfs it, trapping it in a small sac that travels into the cell. By the time that sac breaks down, the lipid has fallen apart, releasing its medicines or RNA to go to work in the cell.To target specific cells, Arcturus follows Saltzmans playbook. It decorates the LUNAR surface with different molecules, and also changes its size, shape, and charge. This yields some surprisingly sophisticated systems. For example, Arcturus attaches small umbrellalike structures to LUNAR. They hook onto liver tissue, allowing the package to break free and enter the ce lls.A lot of this sounds like science fiction, but its real, Payne said.It must seem that way to Andre Watson, chief technology officer of Ligandal, a fledgling Silicon Valley startup building delivery systems for genetic medicines. Three years ago, Watson was an undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute looking for a project he could work on in graduate school. A professor pointed him towards delivery systems.Watson quickly hit upon the strategy of building a multilayer package. The outside layer would target specific types of cells. Once inside, it would disintegrate, leaving behind a second package containing scissor enzymes and genetic material. custompagebreak Watson makes both shells from peptides. Peptides are the way biology presents information. They dictate where things go inside the cell, he said.Watson leverages this by programming the peptide shell to carry its genetic payload into the cell nucleus, where DNA creates RNA. By targeting the nucleus and tuning his peptide package to disintegrate slowly, Watson can flood the DNA with active genetic material for weeks at a time. As a result, he claims he can achieve gene replacement rates that are much higher than standard processes.Watson came to Silicon Valley with $1,500, but Ligandal has lined up $500,000 in angel investments. The company is working with several leading researchers and pharmaceutical firms, and plans to begin publishing results soon, he said.If Watson is still trying to build his reputation, Zhen Gu has begun to establish one. He was named one of MIT Technology Reviews 2015 list 35 Innovators Under 35, in part for an injectable nanoparticle package that breaks down and releases insulin when it encounters high levels of sugar in the bloodstream. Gu, an assistant professor in University of North Carolina-North Carolina State Universitys Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, is now seeking to do something similar by packaging genetic materials in DNA.He calls his system a nanoclew, after a clew of yarn, because it looks like a tightly wound ball of DNA. The DNA is shaped to hold gene-cutting material as well as polyester groups that give it an electrical charge that promotes uptake in cells. At the cellular level, Gus DNA creations look good enough to eat, and cells do ingest them. The DNA, although biocompatible, is artificial and does not trigger an immune response. To test the system, Gus team gave mice tumors that had been modified to produce green fluorescent proteins. The researchers then programmed their nanoclews to cut out the DNA that made those proteins. According to Gu, about one third of the cancer cells stopped fluorescing after treatment.The human body is made up of a couple of hundred different types of cells- blood, brain, muscle, skin, and so on, not even counting the microbial hitchhikers- and it is improbable that any one type of packaging will reach them all. As engineers test the design of d elivery systems, they will find themselves working with scientists to understand how all the pieces fit together. The gaps in sciences understanding come across clearly when talking with Gang Bao, an ASME Fellow who heads the Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines at Rice University in Houston. Bao has been working on genetic cures for sickle cell anemia. It is a promising application for genetic therapy, since a single mutation in a single gene in just one type of stem cell causes the disease. This gives Bao a very specific target to attack.His game plan sounds simple remove the stem cells that make blood cells from the bone marrow splice in a gene segment to fix the mutation and then inject the modified cells back into the bone marrow so they can produce healthy red blood cells. Executing the plan has proven difficult, which is one reason why Bao has been working on the problem since 2008. For instance, Bao uses CRISPR- a powerful, low-cost genome-editing techn ology- to break DNA strands. Cells repair 95 percent of those breaks by rejoining the broken ends the way we might tie a broken shoelace. Often, this introduces small mutations into the gene, destroying its ability to produce RNA. This technique helps eliminate unwanted or dangerous proteins.The other 5 percent of the time, however, cells use a molecular template to build and then insert a new gene into the missing gap. Bao hopes to take advantage of this mechanism to alter genes and reprogram anemic stem cells to make healthy red blood cells. This is the fruchtwein important question for genome editing, how to raise the percentage of template-based repairs, Bao said. We must learn to control which type of repair the cell selects, or how to separate the properly corrected cells from those with end-to-end repairs so they do not compete with each other when we replace them in the patient.Bao is also tackling another template repair problem, when scissor enzymes sometimes m ake the wrong cut. CRISPR targets DNA by looking for a specific sequence of 20 pairs of molecular building blocks that form DNA. Human DNA contains 3 billion pairs, so that sequence is likely to appear in several different places. Scissor enzymes also may sometimes settle for getting 19 out of 20 pairs right.Bao calls this off-target cleaving, and it could lead to unwanted mutations and unexpected side effects. He is developing a web-based tool that will rank DNA segments by their vulnerability to off-target cleaving. We can show researchers the problem, but we do not have a way to fix it yet, he said.Baos realism is bracing when set against the rise of venture capital-backed genetic medicine companies. The technology is risky. This is why Ligandals Andre Watson describes the ideal test subject as someone in the late stages of a rare, lethal disease. fruchtwein other researchers would agree.Yet the future is coming fast. Watson, for example, imagines that clinics 30 yea rs from now will sequence patients genomes and biopsy their conditions, and prescribe treatments that target the precise cause of disease.That may seem like more fiction than science. But this time last year, so were the genetically modified immune cells that cured Layla Richardss cancer.Alan S. Brown is associate editor at Mechanical Engineering magazine.You can have the fanciest ideas and molecules. But if you cant get them into the cell, they are no use.