Our ‘Away from home’ blogging series features one Indian postdoc working in a foreign lab every Wednesday. The posts recount the experience of these postdocs — the triumphs and challenges of lab life, the cultural differences, what they miss about India — and, most importantly, offer some useful tips for postdocs headed abroad.
The series has had an excellent response from the scientific and research community worldwide. For our regular readers, and those who are just joining us now, we provide a summary of the month’s entries, including an interactive map pinpointing the labs these postdocs are based. All these interesting entries and summaries can be found under the ‘Away from home’ category of the Indigenus blog.
We will continue to update the map each Wednesday and hope that you will join in the online conversation using the #postdochat hashtag.
Mentors make a researcher
As you get engulfed in the rigours of research and climb the career ladder, many times you forget to express gratitude to those who got you there in the first place. 2013′s first blog of the series saw Harvard Medical School postdoc Amjad Husain say ‘thank you’ to his mentors. Amjad, a PhD from the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), New Delhi also talked about his dreams of spinning off his own venture sometime in the future.
Researching diabetes
What does Australia’s research scene look like right now? Mugdha Joglekar, the first postdoc in this series from Australia, gave us a lowdown of what it is like to do research in Australia. She put it in perspective for our global redearship by comparing the scenario with that of America. Mugdha is a postdoc fellow at the NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre, University of Sydney and worked previously at the National Centre for Cell Science, Pune, India.
From chemistry to biology
Changing disciplines at a postdoctoral level is not usual. Vijay Singh, a postdoc at Stanford University, USA told us about his fascinating switch from chemistry to biology. After a doctoral degree from the Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI) Lucknow, India, he found himself making a seamless transition from nucleic acid chemistry to protein biochemistry and multispectral cellular imaging. Vijay tells us why Stanford is a place where ideas get wings.
Our Away from home interactive map, pictured below and updated every Wednesday, saw its first flags in Australia and the west coast of America this January. Stay tuned as we add more Indian postdocs from around the world. Please feel free to suggest names of postdocs from unusual countries and disciplines we haven’t covered yet.
