Career adventures require a leap of faith and can be hard to navigate. Our first podcast of 2018 examines the impact of fresh starts and how having transferable skills can deliver career fulfilment for both science PhDs and retiring lab heads.
Melanie Sinche, director of education at the The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut, shares the results from her recent research on transferable skills and job satisfaction, published in PloS One in September 2017. The majority of those who leave academia after a PhD in science are very happy with what they are doing, she finds.
Retirement doesn’t necessarily mean the end of a career. After 35 very successful years running the Kolter Lab at Harvard Medical School, Roberto Kolter will close his lab for good in summer 2018. Roberto describes his future plans for life as an Emeritus professor, and how he planned his retirement (it took five years!)
Ask an expert
This month’s “ask an expert” question comes from India-based masters student Rahul Hazari. Rahul wants information about funding opportunities for research in the West. Susan Marriott, professor at Baylor college of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and president of Bioscience Writers, answers Rahul’s question.
If you’ve got a science careers question, send it in to naturejobseditor at nature dot com and we will try find the appropriate expert to answer it for you on the podcast.
Julie Gould is a freelance writer and podcast producer.
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