“We should not consider it a disaster that someone trained to a high level doesn’t remain in academia,” Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, president of the European Research Council, told a panel discussion about science’s “lost generation” last month. Read more
Julie Gould discusses problem solving, research integrity, and the importance of feedback in PhD programmes at the 2018 ORPHEUS conference, held in Iceland in May. Read more
In the June 2018 Naturejobs podcast we focus on women in science. Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj tell Harini Barath about Life of Science, the website they created to celebrate female scientists in India and highlight some of the career barriers they face. Also, stem cell researcher Cristina LoCelso describes the importance of mentoring, hobbies, work-life balance, and strong family networks after becoming the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Foulkes Foundation Medal by the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. And finally, Nana Lee, assistant professor in biochemistry at the University of Toronto, Canada, gives us her three top tips about career transitions between academia and industry, and how best to accommodate family life. Read more
When I was at medical school, curricula were crowded with a large body of knowledge and countless exams. We all longed for that “A grade.” Nothing else mattered. History bored us and was a distraction to professors. Now, at a later stage in my career, I have come to grasp that history is at the heart of science and medicine because it recognises the characters and institutions that advanced science and medicine, their tragedies and triumphs. Read more
Julia Hubbard, a research fellow at the Francis Crick Institute in London, has Type 1 diabetes and lupus. Collin Diedrich (pictured), postdoctoral research fellow in HIV/TB co-infection immunology at the University of Pittsburgh, US, has dyslexia. Listen to their top tips for successfully juggling scientific careers alongside illness and disability. Read more
In graduate school, we lived by two unspoken, yet sacred, rules: you never asked a grad student when they were going to graduate, and you never asked what they were going to do after graduation. Read more
When I was struggling though my double major in chemistry back in the early 1970s I was a rarity. I was one of two women. On the more difficult days, when the environment was feeling particularly male dominated or when I was being particularly patronized, I would try to imagine what it had been like for my grandmother when she was studying to be a doctor at the University of Sydney, straight after World War 1, or for her five sisters, who all trained for professional jobs. Compared to theirs, my situation was a breeze. Read more
A 2017 study paints a gloomy picture of the benefits of postdoctoral training for biomedical researchers, particularly if they choose not to pursue an academic career in the end. Read more