The Doc Report - January 2018

The Office of Postdoctoral Affairs will be conducting its inaugural climate survey in February. This survey will assess your experiences as a CU Boulder postdoc in terms of campus community, culture and safety as well as career development, job satisfaction and programming interests. The results of this survey will be used to improve services and inform advocacy efforts for CU Boulder postdocs.

Participation in this survey will enter you in a drawing to win one of two $50 visa gift cards.

This survey will be sent to all individuals classified as Postdoctoral Associates and Postdoctoral Fellows on campus. However, we are aware that some postdocs may not have been converted to the new Postdoctoral Associate job title, and remain classified as Research Associates. We will seek the confidential participation of all CU Boulder postdocs regardless of job title; if you are a postdoc with the Research Associate job title or are unsure of your job title, please use the below link to sign up to participate in the survey.

Sign Up

By Jude P. Mikal and Gina Rumore | The Chronicle of Higher Education

So your grant proposal came back with an unenthusiastic response from reviewers. Was it because they found your science lackluster? Maybe. But there’s a good chance the problem was important nontechnical questions that you left unanswered in the proposal itself.

Questions like: So what? Who cares? Is this project trying to do too much? Or too little? And why is this researcher going it alone?

In our hypercompetitive funding climate, it’s critical for investigators to write clear, cohesive, compelling proposals that foreground the science and its potential significance. With so much at stake, it’s a shame to watch a proposal rejected for something that could have been avoided with a little work upfront. Given that we have a collective 15 years of experience working with scientists to sharpen their grant proposals, we thought it might help researchers to have a list of the 10 most-common nonscientific errors we see in grant writing.

Read More

A new institutional policy report from the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) in collaboration with Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, seeks to improve the postdoc experience. It will be published as a supplement to the January/February 2018 issue of Sigma Xi’s magazine, American Scientist, and has been posted online at the Sigma Xi website and the NPA website.

Supporting the Needs of Postdocs: 2017 National Postdoctoral Association Institutional Policy Report summarizes the results from a 2016 survey of 130 NPA institutional Sustaining Members that hire postdocs. CU Boulder participated in this survey. This report and its accompanying database compare postdoc benefits and support by postdoc funding source, institution type, and institution size, nation-wide.

The report’s key recommendations are that institutions that hire postdocs should increase the staff and budget for their offices that handle postdoc affairs, provide higher compensation and equality in benefits, increase parental leave policies and family-friendly benefits, and implement more tracking of postdocs after they leave an institution.

Read the Report

The Academia Industry Alliance (AIA) is a group of Colorado-based postdocs and grad students that aims to bring together entrepreneurs, scientists, technology workers and businesses.

Over 2017, our networking events, which are free to attend, gathered hundreds of students, scientists, engineers, lab managers, PIs, company representatives including CEOs, recruiters, MSLs and research scientists as well from all over Colorado. We invite you to two attend our upcoming events (see the Events section below for more details): a Brews & Biotech Happy Hour on January 18^th, and the 3^rd Annual Life Science Industry Showcase on February 15^th. Last year saw 400+ attendees (including 20+ local recruiting life science companies) to the 2^nd Life Science Industry Showcase.

If you have any questions, please contact Etienne Danis, co-founder and co-CEO of AIA at: etienne.danis@ucdenver.edu

Do you need some extra help in the lab? Do you want experience being a mentor? Would an $800 grant help you and/or your lab? You might be perfect for the Summer Mentoring program through CU Science Discovery.  Every summer, Science Discovery brings High Students from around the world to participate in a Research Experience and we are currently recruiting labs to host them.

This program runs from July 2nd to July 26th, 2018. Please do not fill this out if you are going to be gone for a significant portion of that time and you would not have anyone else to mentor your students while you are gone. You will be assigned 2 High School students to shadow you in the lab and be of use wherever you see fit. It is my hope that these students will be involved in projects that help the lab move forward. The students are expecting to work 30-35 hrs per week and this could be anything (taking data, analyzing data, taking pictures, doing background research on an area you'd like to get into, setting up a new piece of equipment...). It's meant to be a 'research experience' and give them a taste for real research. Your students will have the opportunity to attend a Research Methods seminar where they will learn good writing techniques, how to make a scientific poster, how to do a literature search, and what the process is to get your work published. During the course of this class the students will also be developing a poster to show at the Research Expo on July 26th.

For your participation in this program, CU Science Discovery offers an $800 grant for your lab. The grant will be directly deposited into a Speedtype of your choosing so that you and your advisor can decide how best to use the funds. Please email Kathryn Penzkover with any questions about the program.

Apply