Postdoctoral development at HSCI

January 9, 2015

By Maureen Herrmann, HSCI Administrative Director

It has been said that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, and the adage is an apt metaphor for career development at HSCI.  As the research funding landscape severely contracts, and competition for limited faculty positions increases, HSCI has made it an imperative to leverage its extraordinary human capital in service to its post-doctoral fellows as they begin the transition to managing their own independent labs.

Last fall, Jonathan Hoggatt, a post-doc in David Scadden’s lab, approached Willy Lensch, HSCRB’s Executive Director, with some good news and a request.  Jonathan’s K 99 Award submission received a perfect score (the good news) and he wanted to see if HSCI/HSCRB could arrange a seminar so he could share tips with other post-docs going through the K Award process (the request). Navigating the K Award Process at Harvard:  Best Practices and Strategies for Success was held on the Harvard campus on December 15 to a standing-room only crowd.  Jonathan’s presentation was buttressed by remarks from Ya-Chieh Hsu, faculty member at HSCRB, who explained the lessons she learned during her K award efforts – an unsuccessful first submission followed by a successful second submission.  Kiran Musunuru, another HSCRB faculty member, added his perspective from his role as a K Award study section reviewer.  Liz Brady, Angelina Kelly and Laverne Martinez, Sponsored Research Administrators at Harvard, stressed the inherent value to applicants of teaming with their administrators at the outset so that important timelines are met.  Far from a ‘go-it-alone’ endeavor, Harvard has the structures in place to help ensure a strong application.

Rich Lee, the faculty director of HSCI’s Cardiovascular Program, routinely meets with PIs in his area to review their NIH grants in a collegial, confidential, yet constructively critical environment.  He has now taken this a step further.  Canvassing the cardiovascular community, he invites post-docs who are about to embark on their independent careers to bring their job talk presentations to a luncheon with a panel of PIs from across the HSCI community.  At this luncheon, the PIs provide honest (sometimes brutally so)and insightful feedback to these candidates – a ‘tough love’ exercise with the goal of improving a candidate’s chances in this highly competitive arena.

Kicking off the new year, HSCI’s Kidney Program initiated a ‘Transitioning to Independence’ Series where post-docs in the community come with their prepared ‘job talk’ to receive a critical review of their presentation.  In his introductory remarks at the January 8th session, Kidney Program co-director Iain Drummond characterized the series as an opportunity to learn from a “community of coaches”.  Indeed, Caramei Kamei (Drummond Lab) and Rafael Kramann (Humphreys Lab) put forth their best efforts, yet agreed that the critiques, directed at both the rigor of the science and the delivery of the presentations, were both insightful and helpful.

A focus group of post-docs from HSCI’s Nervous System community recently convened to brainstorm ideas for HSCI-organized activities that would be beneficial to their careers.  Starting in March, HSCI will host two or three seminars per year on topics selected by this focus group, which will focus on technologies that the group sees as key to progress in their areas of research.  The topic for the first seminar will be ‘quality control of iPS induced neurons’.  Polished presentations are eschewed in favor of those that share learnings from experiments that failed, describe the challenges that arose, and proposed cautions and considerations for future experiments.  The option of hosting these as on-line webinars was summarily dismissed as all agreed that face-to-face interactions in such a rich community of expertise are critical to enabling the type of collaboration and learning that are the hallmarks of HSCI.