By contrast to the steady flow of scientists to the United States, American scientists tend to stay put. Nobel laureate and secretary-general of the Human Frontier Sciences Organization (HFSO) Torsten Wiesel lamented this situation in an editorial in Science last year. Weisel has a good grasp of the topic--the organization he heads funds international scientific collaboration. But of the 1551 pos...
Few people like to get up in front of a room full of people and speak. In fact, surveys have shown that people fear public speaking more than death, which leads comedian Jerry Seinfeld to quip that the average person at a funeral would be better off in the casket than giving the eulogy. Scientists often need to present their ideas to an audience, but all of us have been to at least one incomprehe...
Many of us who became scientists may credit documentary series like Cosmos and Hollywood movies such as The Andromeda Strain for sparking our interest in science. But have you ever stopped to think about who makes these movies? Think no more: Next Wave has discovered that filmmaking is a legitimate career track for scientists, albeit one that is more likely than most to be subject to serendipity....
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Our story is evidence that the two-body problem can be solved. We ended up with two tenure-track positions in the Botany Department at the University of Toronto. This feat was the result of several stars coming into alignment--and also a lot of luck. We were both good matches for the department, which happened to be progressive and resourceful; we both had strong CVs; an...
About a year after leaving his postdoc, Rohit (a pseudonym) got an e-mail from his postdoc adviser about a paper he was going to submit for publication on Rohit's work. To Rohit's surprise, his adviser had made him second author instead of first author. The reasoning was that after Rohit left, another postdoc had reproduced some of Rohit's experiments and succeeded in another experiment where Roh...
In Part I, we talked generally about the avenues open to postdocs to deal with workplace problems. In this installment, we'll talk about a widely available resource that can help postdocs, as well as other members of the research community, deal with conflict at an informal stage--the ombudsman. Many people may vaguely remember hearing about the ombudsman during an orientation or were given a pam...
