simply blood

As we progress through our scientific career from undergraduate, then PhD to Post-doc, a key inflection point is the transition to an independent faculty position. The journey into this new career chapter is both exhilarating and challenging. On the one hand, you have seemingly limitless possibilities: you can choose your staff and mentor them however you wish, spend your funds to test your new research ideas and push out into new directions, and establish new collaborations and relationships in the field. On the other hand, your science will now need to be balanced with host of new responsibilities as a faculty member. You may find yourself asking how will you attract new staff to your group? How will you manage budgets for each of your projects and people? How will you manage your time as you balance responsibilities of institutional committees alongside publishing and obtaining funding to sustain your group for the long term? Finally, given the scope of your new position, how will y...

As research centres closed their doors, countries closed their borders and entire laboratories shut for many months, many of us tried to plan for one of the most significant transitions in our scientific path: looking for the perfect postdoc lab. This is no doubt one of the most difficult decisions during anyone’s academic career, but how to do that during a global pandemic? In this ISEH blogspot, I explore how new postdoctoral fellows moving across the world to join new laboratories have experienced the pandemic and how this is likely to impact their future scientific careers. Dawn Lin finished her PhD in Melbourne at the end of 2019, and right after, she started planning her future postdoc when COVID was about to take over the world. In November 2021, she had just began her postdoctoral position in the lab of Prof. Andreas Trumpp at the HI-STEM and DKFZ in Heidelberg, Germany. “ The pandemic has definitely changed my plan, and I decided to stay in Australia for a little longer. Init...