Government Research

Wenny
Lin

Evidence-based life coaching

I remember reading a very interesting article in The New Yorker by Dr. Atul Gawande entitled “Personal Best,” in which he emphasizes that even highly skilled and trained surgeons can improve their techniques with a coach.He asked a coach to watch him in surgery and point out potential improvemen...


Jason
Sherwin

Knowing when to punt

Knowing when to punt is an important part of creativity. Sometimes, some ideas don’t work out how you expect them to and knowing when to let them go can be the difference between going stale and going forward. Recently, we had a project in the lab that looked promising from various angles. We h...


Wenny
Lin

Emergency child/dependent care – benefits for everyone

Recently, I consoled a fellow postdoc during her latest crisis. Her problem was not that her PCR primers didn’t work or that her paper just got rejected for the 5th time. No, her problem was that she was a single mother of two adorable girls, and one of them was sick with a fever. Therefore, baby ...


Nathan
Fisher

Creativity versus Stability

That choice wasn't anything that I thought about when leaving academia for government research.  Perhaps because my first government post, with the US Army, actually involved a whole lot of creativity.  Probably even more than I got to use during my dissertation work.


Wenny
Lin

No swag in the government

In the anxious era of government budget cutbacks, everything is on the table: federal employee salaries have been frozen; postdoctoral fellow contracts have not been renewed; research projects have been scaled back; and my travel funds have been cut by 33%. Yet, at the NIH, we persevere, doing the b...


Wenny
Lin

Aggressive Asian

As an undergraduate, I was once interviewed by a female (Caucasian) professor who exclaimed mid-interview that she’d never before “met such an aggressive Asian woman!” I was flabbergasted by her comment and was not sure how to interpret it.Had I impressed or disappointed her with my goals and ...


Wenny
Lin

Gifts and parties at the government

My roommate recently regaled me with tales from her pharmaceutical company’s holiday party, complete with lots of food and booze and entertainment. I was rather envious at the time because I was busy making baked goods for my office’s potluck holiday party.


Mandy
Kendrick

Done with the Bench?

Done with the bench…or do you just need a change of scenery instead? At the end of graduate school, I remember thinking, “I am tired of doing research; can I really handle a postdoc?”  My graduate work entailed using the model plant Arabidopsis to investigate the molecular cascade of event...


Wenny
Lin

It’s worth it to have it all

Last week in Boston, I attended a professional advancement session at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research conference. Judy Garber, M.D., M.P.H., current president of the AACR, addressed the young research investigators and trainees in attendanc...


Wenny
Lin

Mentoring: Not one size fits all

A few weeks ago, I was invited to sit on a committee of postdoctoral fellows that evaluated nominees for the National Cancer Institute’s Outstanding Mentor Award. We were advised to select award winners who not only performed their expected mentoring duties but went over and beyond the normal expe...