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

5 Key Characteristics of Scientists that Excel

The new R & D head of a major Biopharma company was asked about the key attributes he most admires in the scientists in his organization. The characteristics he mentioned were exactly the ones that I had come to appreciate

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

Be A Rock-Star Undergraduate Research Student

Another fantastic, and seemingly irreplaceable, undergraduate research student has graduated this month and will be leaving my lab to go out into the real world. Although, perhaps “irreplaceable” is not the best term since I have been lucky enough to

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

How justices of the supreme court accidentally just made the biggest argument SUPPORTING affirmative action for university admissions

Pretend one of these justices is instead head of admissions for an elite university. Of course he got there by his single minded hard work and brilliance with help from no one. I am sure his family also rose to

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,