Category Archives: Professional Development
My Great Escape From Academia
Inspiration, in the form of a special session at a virtual scientific conference, finally struck for a new blog post about why I recently left academia. Hopefully, those interested in pursuing an academic research career will find helpful #key tips
Top-ten Things I Learned my 5th Year as a Lab PI: AKA Taking Time to Smell the Roses the Year You Go up For Tenure
David Letterman may have retired, but Top-Ten lists live on! Top-ten Things I Learned my 5th Year as a Lab PI: AKA Taking Time to Smell the Roses the Year You Go up For Tenure. I absolutely adore
Avoiding the 5 dysfunctions of a team in a biomedical research lab
One of the biggest problems with becoming a lab principal investigator (PI) is that we don’t get any of the training that business leaders get about managing the people and resources of our new labs. I am always going on
PhD= Presenting Happy Data
After spending weeks helping students prepare for lab meeting presentations and then seeing some crash and burn, and others really excel, I decided to put fingers to the keyboard in an attempt to point out the 15 most important things
Spotlight: ASBMB Q & A with Charlie Benson, Ph.D.
I enjoyed sharing my career path successes and failures with the member magazine of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Hope it encourages those in training and beyond to keep going! Click here to read the spotlight from
How I Became a Cancer Immunotherapy Researcher
I am a member of the Early Career Scientists committee for the Society for the Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC). The committee members were recently asked to “spend a few moments thinking about how we arrived at where we are in
“It’s a balancing act alright”
The problem: “Family formation (marriage and childbirth) is a key factor for the departure from the STEM workforce between Ph.D. receipt and achieving tenure for women in the sciences. Needed progress can take place only through changes in the attitudes,
How my tenure-track academic position isn’t as scary as I once thought.
I presented my research and career path at my departments Graduate Research Seminar a few weeks ago. I am always happy to share the story of how I got to where I am now so that students will see that
PhD Skills: What it takes to make it as a PhD student.
Many undergraduate students that I talk to say that they never considered pursuing a career in research because they didn’t think they had what it takes to get a PhD. Then, when I ask them what they think it
The “Less Obvious” Benefits of Attending Scientific Meetings
I am Junior Faculty Member in an institution where there isn’t a large group of other scientists working in my field so I typically go to 2 to 3 research-specific conferences per year. Students often think that the only reason