And in 2018, she became an affiliate lecturer and the leader of her own lab at the University of Cambridge, UK, where she studies autism spectrum disorder and other developmental conditions. In 2017, she won a Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellowship worth more than £980,000 (US$1.3 million) over 5 years. Lawson’s commitment to her own career paid off. “It’s a difficult balance to do your own thing but also learn to trust others and develop their skills.” “They need to be able to be independent thinkers, but also able to work in a team,” he says. Rees says that almost all of his postdocs hope to lead their own groups one day, and that he tries to give them opportunities to prepare for that future. “I wanted to demonstrate that I could do it,” she says. She also secured a small grant from the Experimental Psychology Society in Lancaster, UK, even though she was already working in a fully funded lab. Lawson taught herself new techniques and supervised master’s-degree students to independently advance her career development (see ‘Teaching tips for postdocs’). “He made it explicitly clear that he cared about my career development as much as he cared about the science that I was producing.” Rees encouraged Lawson to speak to other members of the lab, an exercise that confirmed her gut feeling that the lab was a place where she could pursue her own ideas and prepare for her own future. “Our first meeting lasted for hours and hours,” she says. Lawson says she researched Rees’s lab before meeting him, and tried to suss out his attitude towards postdocs and their futures. Once you’ve joined a lab, it’s probably too late.” You’re a researcher, so do your research. “Check where postdocs end up on the authorship list, and where they go when they leave the lab. “You should do some surveillance as well,” he says. But postdocs shouldn’t settle for verbal reassurance alone.
He recommends asking about important issues such as ownership of data and authorship policies. By asking the right questions and checking the fates of past lab members, postdocs can learn whether they’ll end up working solely in the service of a PI or whether they’ll have the chance to pursue their own ideas and advance their own careers.
Through the weight of a recommendation letter, he adds, the PI can also decide whether a postdoc has a chance to get a job afterwards.įor this and other reasons, Kearns says, it’s crucial for postdocs to investigate the PI, the lab and the lab’s culture before taking a position. But it’s a master–serf arrangement,” he says. They hope that advisers will look after them, and most of the time that happens. “The postdoc is usually new and vulnerable.
#BEYOND THE SHADOW YOU SETTLE FOR HOW TO#
To achieve that goal, they have to navigate often-tricky power dynamics, consider the attitudes and intentions of potential supervisors before joining a lab, set boundaries and, in some cases, learn how to say no.Īny postdoc’s quest for independence can be greatly complicated by the well-defined hierarchy in the lab, says Hugh Kearns, a lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who specializes in the development and training of junior researchers. For Lawson and other postdocs, establishing an identity and track record of their own is a key challenge on the path to a science career. Future hiring committees want assurance that a postdoc can thrive beyond the shadow of their principal investigator (PI), and postdocs need to know how to publish papers and win grants on their own to survive. Postdocs have many reasons to seek some degree of independence. “I stuck to my guns on a couple of occasions, but there wasn’t any conflict,” she says. Very rarely, she says, Rees would question her choices. She ended up tackling everything on that list and then some, always following her instincts and judgement to find the next step. “From day one, I turned up with a list of things that I wanted to work on,” Lawson says. You’re working for someone else, but you have to have your eye on the prize.”īefore Lawson joined the lab, she had told Rees that she needed the freedom to pursue her own ideas, run her own projects and generally prepare for a future in which she would be in charge of her own lab. “It’s an interesting time in your career. “I was thinking about independence,” she says. When Rebecca Lawson started her postdoc position in the lab of Geraint Rees, a neuroscientist at University College London, in 2014, she prioritized something very important to her and her future: Rebecca Lawson. Neuroscientist Rebecca Lawson forged an independent path through her postdoc positions.