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.

We started the blog series in November 2012 and have just completed eight months, having featured 27 postdocs till now. The series has had 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. 

In July 2013, we featured researchers from Florida, Berlin and Tennessee — each unique in the science they do and the tips they offered to postdoctoral aspirants. ‘Away from Home’ also saw its 30th blog post this month, making a series a rich resource for anyone looking at labs abroad for a postdoc stint.

Here’s a round-up of the month’s blogs:

Living with plants:

Biswapriya Biswavas Misra is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Chen Laboratory, Department of Biology in University of Florida, Gainesville, USA. He says his passion for plant biology surpasses everything else in his life and offers a golden tip — that postdoc is just the beginning of a researcher’s life.

Sailing my mast:

Rohit Saluja is a PhD from the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow, India and currently a postdoc fellow at Charité – Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany. He invests his energies in making use of the newly discovered “good” functions of mast cells and to find ways of controlling effects of “bad” mast cells. His postdoc tip: look for a salary if you are headed for Germany, not a fellowship.

Tweaking proteins for medicine:

Anupam Goel, an alumnus of Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. Anupam is researching protein interactions at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, USA as a postdoctoral associate now. In future, he hopes to sell recombinant proteins/enzymes for application in several emergency medical situations in India.

Have you seen our Away from home interactive map yet? Here it is pictured below with 30 flags from around the world. We update it every Wednesday with new postdoc experiences. Please feel free to suggest names of postdocs from unusual countries and disciplines we haven’t covered yet.