We’ve blogged extensively about the challenges and rewards of career development in academia, most recently about tips for a successful postdoctoral fellowship position search.  In addition to the daunting task of evaluating an endless number of potential labs and advisors, one must consider deadlines for finishing a PhD, the availability of professors for a visit and most critically, the all-important interview.

What PI’s look for in a potential PostDoc

In order to help graduate students hone in on a successful and targeted postdoc search, Labguru asked several professors at elite academic institutions to provide feedback about what they look for in potential postdocs, what qualities impress them during interviews, and their advice for candidates.  So before embarking on your postdoctoral interviews, read our insider tips that will put you ahead of the curve!

How do you see mentorship in the academia?
I like to think of “throwing” (the student) into the water and then rescuing them. For lab work, I teach the students basics of the how and the why of the different procedures and after a short while I let them experiment on their own and make their own mistakes. Students should learn from their mistakes and this is my role: to show them what their mistake was and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I encourage my students to press that red button and see what happens. I believe in giving operational freedom to my students, letting them plan their day/week/month but try to keep track of their activities and also make sure they understand the protocol and encourage them to ask me questions in that regard. I also guide and advise my students in regard to career path, collaborations choice etc.

What was your most memorable moment as a mentee in your career?
Ada Yonath, who was my mentor, has given me a lot of good advice which has directly effected my own mentorship style. The most memorable thing she told me was “focus on the science and let me take care of the rest.”

What lessons have you learned from your mentors? What aspects you’ve decided to keep and what you need to change?
Currently I feel that I can’t reach every student equally and this is my weakness. On the one hand, it is important to make smart use of your manpower but on the other hand I have the responsibility to teach and improve the scientist capabilities of each student which requires giving them the freedom to decide how and when they want to do their tasks. I feel that under the time and tasks I am committed to, I can’t adapt myself to each student and find the way to reach and make him/her a better scientist. I would be glad if I could have more time for my students, and if the students themselves had more initiative to come and show me their current experimentation difficulties or troubleshooting, even those that are regarded as trivial. This is my job, to help my students overcome technical and scientific barriers.

What are your expectations from your mentees?
My students should be independent individuals which are not afraid of making mistakes. While mistakes are part of the trade, those that originate from lack of thinking, plain stupidity or laziness are the ones I dislike. The students should also be highly motivated as the work of a crystallographer and biologist in general is very demanding and I just don’t have the time to push students to do research. If it’s not burning within the student, I prefer not to take him under my research mentorship. And lastly, my students should be smart with developed learning capabilities.

What was the most difficult task you had to cope with in your experience as mentor?
I had many frustrating moments mentoring my students. I was mostly frustrated from students that not make use of their full potential and eventually had a mediocre research outcome. No matter how much I talked, listened or helped, these students just didn’t progress. At a certain point I just gave up. As a mentor I feel that my duty is to inspire and generate motivation in my student’s hearts. Many times, I can only do that only to a limited degree; eventually, if the student is not sufficiently motivated, I can’t expect that my own motivation will be enough to drive the project any faster.

What are five important characteristics for a mentor?
First, don’t do micromanagement. It is not developing self thinking, self-criticism and autonomous research capabilities. Second, a good mentor should let the students cope and learn how to do scientific writing, whether it is an article or a grant proposal. It will take much more time and effort on both sides, but this is an indispensable scientific capability that any graduate student should have to a certain level once he/she graduates. Third, a mentor should let students make mistakes and be forgiving. Fourth, the mentor should give students the freedom that is required for developing autonomous research capabilities while keeping an eye that they are not wandering off course. For example, if a student wants a day at home or at the lab to read material that is work; unfortunately, many PIs sees such reading as “off lab” activity and do not favor it. And lastly, the mentor should be specific with working hours, which should be on average between 8-10 hours daily. Students that work less then that are not maximizing their potential and those that work over time might risk making foolish mistakes and burnout. This is the duty of the mentor to see that his/her students maintain a balanced research work habit.

Dr. Raz Zarivach leads a crystallographic laboratory in the field of magnetosome formation at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

As I prepared for my trip to the Lindau, Germany for the 61st meeting of Nobel Laureates, I decided that for the first time in 4 years, I was going to leave my laptop home. In its place was an iPad 2 supplied by BioData that I have been incorporating into my daily routine over the past few weeks.  I’ve equipped my iPad with Apps that make it ideal for doing science and traveling, Papers, GoodReader, Notes, and BioData. With Papers I have access to all of my papers, Good Reader allows me to mark them up as I would if they were printed, Notes allows me to easily write notes from the talks, and BioData allowed me to keep up to date on experiments that were happening back home in my absence. With this tool kit I set out on my journey to interact with Nobel Laureates and young researchers from around the world.








The meeting was focused on Medicine & Physiology with the theme of Global Health. Nobel Laureates gave 30 min presentations in the mornings of each day and the afternoons sessions gave us opportunities to ask questions about science, life, and why we do what we do. While each laureate has taken a unique path, throughout the week a few major themes stood out that I’d like to highlight with a few quotes.

1. Do what interests you.

“go for the most interesting project, not the least risky” –Elizabeth Blackburn

All of the laureates emphasized the need to find what drives you and pursue it.  For Elizabeth Blackburn it was the curiosity to know what controls telomere length, for Roger Tsien it was his love for colors, and for Peter Agre it was his desire to improve global health.

2. Do Good Science

“lab notebook, write down what you’re going to do and check it off when you’ve done it, take good notes!” -Oliver Smithies

This sounds obvious, but what does it mean in todays competitive scientific environment. Prof. Smithies highlighted the need to keep a good notebook by showing us his own notebook from an experiment he performed earlier this year, meticulously documented, steps checked off when complete, notes and observations in the margins, and an image of a gel pasted in and annotated.  Its attention to detail that enables you to be prepared for the unexpected.  Secondly, doing good science means allowing your data to challenge and refine your hypothesis, not forcing your data to fit your hypothesis.  For me, this is where BioData really shines. I found BioData while I was looking for a better way to document the evolution of a project and all the small changes that I make along the way. In a paper notebook, it can be difficult to quickly look back at an experiment from a year ago or remember why I chose a particular parameter for the experiment. BioData helps me see my understanding of my project grow from the initial experiments to the figure that will end up in a paper. It also helps me easily bring students and collaborators on board to my project, as they can see my progression through the project without having to decipher my notes in my paper lab notebook.

3. Question everything, does it make sense from 1^st principles?

“in the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind“-Louis Pasteur

We must remember that the scientific method never proves a truth, but rather minimizes the probability of alternatives. 99 experiments can support a given hypothesis, but it only takes 1 to prove that it is wrong. As science progresses we are continually rewriting textbooks as our understanding of biology grows. Looking through Nobel Prizes it is easy to see that many of them had to challenge the current paradigm in the field to even start their work. This has challenged me in my own work to ask, what assumptions have I made, what evidence is there to support them, do those explanations make sense, what if they’re wrong?

4. Persistence is key

“Accept your batting average will be low, but hopefully not zero. Accept that your best papers may be rejected from fashionable journals, or may be accepted for the wrong reasons” –Roger Tsien

This goes back to the beginning really. The scientific method takes time and more hypothesis will fail than not, its our passion for the project that propels us through the trials and frustrations.

Now that I’m back in lab, its time to apply these principles. I hope you find these as helpful and challenging as I have.

James Ankrum is a PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology. James is taking part in BioData’s iPad beta program and shares his experience.

* Photos from Lindau by C. Flemming/Lindau Nobel.

Gianpaolo Rando

Scientist and blogger Gianpaolo Rando is BioData Blogs Featured Scientist for the month of April. Read about trends in the development of reporter genes in his blog, reportergene.com

Tell us about your first encounter with science
I was 12: I was a strong reader and a loyal fellow of the civic library. Books being the main source of my knowledge, I thought everything in the world had already been discovered. At the beginning of the school year, my new science teacher introduced a small aquarium to the classroom. He put in a mug full of water from a waterhole and asked the class to observe daily the little water box for two weeks. Life immediately developed and gradually faded when the food resources started to get out. I learnt the basics of ecosystems by direct observation. This was my first encounter with science and the first time I realized that knowledge can be obtained in real-time without need for a book. I asked myself: do you want to only be a reader or do you want to take part in the race toward knowledge? It took 10 years of ‘boring’ book-reading before I really started taking part on my own bench with tubes and pipettes.

What made you choose a scientific career?
My curiosity. I’m curious, pathologically curious. I’ve always wondered how the world runs, and particularly the way living things work. What are the mechanisms and what are the dynamics? Choosing a scientific career was very natural.

What is your current area of research?
I received a M.Sc. in Biotechnology and a Ph.D in Pharmacology at the University of Milan (I’m a former Pharmacologist). I’ve always been fascinated about how small molecules can influence our physiology and our mind. My interest particularly concerns so-called ‘nuclear receptors’, these are proteins that are able to directly sense the presence of small chemicals (i.e., hormones, metabolites, drugs) and to consequently modify gene expression by binding on selected DNA sequences on gene’s promoter regions. Recently, I joined the Center of Integrative Genomics at the University of Lausanne where my current research focuses on the differences in nuclear receptor signaling between males and females.

Why did you decide to start a scientific blog? What reactions did you receive?
It was an experiment. Four years ago I wondered which part of the world was most intellectually active in one particular field of molecular biology (the development of reporter genes). Of course pubmed can give some answers, but I wanted to know not only which labs were publishing most, but also about the public: Where the readers were? Where the discussion was? What was more popular: luciferase or GFP? So I registered reportergene.com and I started commenting on papers dealing with new technologies involving reporter genes. The idea was to resolve the IP address of the visitors and obtain a map of niches interested in the development of genetically-encoded approaches. The blogging platform was chosen because of its simplicity, but at that time I was not thinking of it as my blog.  One year later I gradually realized that a scientific blog was an opportunity of immediate communication for a scientist. Young researchers can work three years or more before getting into a publication, and probably never being contacted about their work (if they aren’t the corresponding author). Despite the vastness of the scientific community, PhD students and postdocs are still confined to their benches with limited social connectedness: you can speak every-day with your 10-20 lab-mates about your research or, once a year, try to catch some of the 100 conference attendees toward your poster. This is poor communication. In this sense, a blog is a short-circuit: you can debate your arguments every week with thousands of readers: writing a post takes the time of a coffee, but gives you immediate feedback on the topics you are interested in. You are still ‘at the bench’ working full-time on your project but once a week, your coffee break takes a world-wide dimension, and you immediately feel the world wide web of the scientific community.

Your last paper introduces a new method to classify drugs, what are the current problems in drug classification?
There are several ways to classify a drug (i.e., chemical composition, etc), one criteria concerns drug action and it is based on a theoretical framework which dates at the middle of last century. In very simple words, if a drug activates a biological effect is an AGONIST. A second drug that competes with an agonist, preventing the effect, is an ANTAGONIST. Today, because of our better understanding of the complexity of intracellular signalling, this definition becomes of difficult application. Most of the drugs act by binding to a cellular receptor: upon binding, drugs ‘activate’ the receptor, initiating the signaling cascade responsible for the biological outcome; we know that a single drug can induce different signaling cascades, and this ability may change significantly with respect to the tissue where the drug is acting and the time after drug administration. In short, a candidate drug can be agonist in the first week of therapy and suddenly may became antagonist (with obviously deleterious side effects!). Likely, such a candidate drug would be discarded in the drug development pipeline: in fact, it is common for unforeseen toxic profiles to be discovered late in the pipeline, already at the level of clinical studies in humans. This is unwanted: a failure of a clinical study is a great loss for a pharma-company. In conclusion, pure semantical problems about classifying drug action may contribute to stagnation in the biomedical economy other than being a potential hazard for human volunteers.

What is the current model of understanding drug effects over time?
Current models belong to a discipline called Pharmacokinetic (PK) which studies the drug distribution in the body over time. With PK we can predict the presence of the drug in a particular organ, however, we don’t get any information about the pharmacological effect. Drug action is studied by a second discipline called Pharmacodynamic (PD). My PhD dissertation deals with the possibility to introduce new dimensions (space and time) in PD studies by monitoring drug action on living ‘luciferase reporter-mice’ developed by my PhD mentor: Adriana Maggi. These animals start glowing when and where a drug is active: for the first time in the history we can study drug effects in a safe living mammals without  the need to kill them. We are developing the technology to follow drug activity in different anatomical areas several times in a day for long period of times (months) without actually killing any animals. This new knowledge would have the power to disclose potential side-effects before getting into clinical studies, with clear social, ethical and economical benefits for men (and mice also!).

Why a SERM was chosen as a model?
Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs), were conceived for post-menopausal hormonal replacement therapy to avoid estrogen unwanted effects on breasts while retaining their beneficial effects in other organs. As their name says, SERMs activity on the cognate receptor is ‘selective’ – this means that a SERM that blocks estrogen’s action in breast cells may activate estrogen’s action in other cells, such as bone. To date however, none of the SERMs developed appears to be provided of the ideal balance of ER agonist and antagonist activity. Because SERMs do not fall into distinct categories of agonists and antagonists, they represent a great ‘proof of concept’ to further elaborate on drug classification. Furthermore, menopause is one of those permanent conditions in which a drug is supposed to be administered chronically: the time dimension can not be further neglected.

References: Rando, G., Horner, D., Biserni, A., Ramachandran, B., Caruso, D., Ciana, P., Komm, B., & Maggi, A. (2010). An Innovative Method to Classify SERMs Based on the Dynamics of Estrogen Receptor Transcriptional Activity in Living Animals Molecular Endocrinology, 24 (4), 735-744 DOI: 10.1210/me.2009-0514

Lab Instructor and science enthusiast Joanne Manaster is this month’s BioData Blogs Featured Scientist. Follow Joanne at @sciencegoddess on twitter or on her website, Joanne Loves Science.

How did you first become interested in the science field?

I’ve just always known I would be doing science all my life. There was never a doubt and I can’t imagine anything else. Early on I thought it would be astronomy but after I broke my foot in 5th grade, I turned my attention to wanting to become a doctor. I knew scientists (researchers) existed somewhere but never had any introduction to it or considered it an option until about my junior year of college when I sat next a professor on a train. I must have impressed him because within about half an hour of meeting, he offered me a position in his lab as general help. Also, my junior year, I took a course that was a combination of cell biology and histology. I remember exactly where I was sitting and even what I was wearing when I had the sudden realization that I truly loved this material and knew that I had to use this information and learn more and more about it. After meeting the professor of that course, he soon offered me the option to help do some organizing and prep work and then ultimately help him instruct some of the lab courses. That is when I learned that I was very comfortable teaching science to semi-technical audiences, and especially good at explaining HOW to do techniques.

What is your favorite part of research and lab work? What is the worst part?

I love sharing my enthusiasm with students. I especially enjoy helping them learn lab techniques because they can see and feel concretely that they have done something, versus what they experience in theory work courses. I know I can teach anyone to do any technique I can do. Because of this, I get plenty of “knocks on my door” from engineers wanting to learn biological techniques. The worst part about lab work is when you are feeling frazzled or are not prepared to work and then everything seems to go wrong. We all have days like that!

Can you tell me a little bit about your work?

Even though I find research fascinating, I decided not to pursue that as a career goal. I was much more excited by teaching, so chose to run laboratory courses and to occasionally lecture for non-lab courses. I’ve designed multiple lab courses over the years, mostly revolving around cell biological, histological and cell culture techniques. I love to take any opportunity to visit research labs and see new techniques and ask questions so I can pass new ideas to the students. After deciding what topics need to be covered, I test protocols and make them almost foolproof. That includes finding the most useful reagents at great prices, as well as refining and writing clear instructions. Day to day, I ensure supplies are ordered, reagents are prepared and aliquoted for students. I do simple maintenance of lab equipment and find the people who can help when the problems are beyond my expertise. I handle student and administrative issues and supervise several student employees. For the cell culture and tissue engineering course, I hire a freshman to do the cleaning, stocking and sterilizing. If they are new, I have a lot of training to do. I also employ a junior or senior who has taken my course to prepare the media and other reagents as well as tend to the cells before handing them over to the students. And then I have graduate students who come in as teaching assistants and other undergraduates who help the TA with the course (activities are run in an outer lab area as well as the culture facility). For each set of employees, I provide a weekly list of responsibilities that I discuss with them. This helps keep them organized and all parties clear on respective duties. This course has a lecture component, which I love because I can share my enthusiasm over the latest findings in the area of stem cells and tissue engineering. Naturally there is a grading component and a website to maintain. In a way, it is much like running a research lab combined with the duties of teaching a lecture course. I have another course that is run much like a medical school histology class, which requires very little wet reagent prep work, but a lot of question answering and explaining of what students hope they are seeing through the microscope.

In your opinion, what is the most important quality for a scientist to be successful?

To be curious! Accept and nurture that part of yourself. Having good fine motor skills is a plus!

Can you share any tips for lab management and organization?

I had to, over the years, make compilations of recipes, protocols and instructions for EVERY aspect of the lab, from cleaning to equipment handling and troubleshooting, to reagent prep, to data keeping, to phone numbers. I find if I have prewritten calculations of commonly used volumes of reagents, I save quite a bit of time over the course of a semester. These instructions are kept online and also in binders with the pages in sheet protectors and tab dividers. If a TA or other employee is ever lost about what to do, they have the “giant notebook” to consult! The cleaning person should never feel perplexed as to what needs to be done because they can consult another binder created especially for them.

What is your next step? Where do you plan to be in ten years?

I do a tremendous amount of outreach to the local community in the form of a girls engineering camp (GAMES) as well as now being an adviser for U of I’s iGEM team. I’ve participated in the state science fair and the state and national level Science Olympiad. My international outreach includes my advisory position with the Young Scientist’s Journal International, as well as my social networking involvement on twitter, through my website and my youtube videos where I have taken to trying to discuss science in unexpected, whimsical and meaningful ways! I hope to find ways to bring my enthusiasm for science to a larger audience, and hopefully have appeal to a wide audience, ranging from children through adults, especially to those who thought they didn’t like science and surprise them that they actually can enjoy it and even understand it. I expect to have a larger presence within the new media in order to do this and possibly creating an online “channel” that contains great programming with real and accessible science, presented in interesting and entertaining ways, and especially emphasizing women’s role, but would accept a more traditional TV opportunity if it were part of a smart science show.