December 7, 2006
Postdocs raising professional profile at UW
With their own recognized association and a dedicated office on campus, postdoctoral scholars — “postdocs” for short — are raising their professional profile at the UW.
After a planning period that began in 2004, several postdocs got together to form the UW Postdoctoral Association last year. In its first year, the new association held two research symposia and a number of social events to get postdocs together.
Also opened about a year back was the UW Office of Postdoctoral Affair, postdocs’ official home and advocate at the UW. The office offers, among other services, professional development workshops dedicated to the postdoc experience — and has another, on the topic of mentoring, coming on Dec. 12.
And speaking of mentoring, the UW Postdoc Association also has honored Theodore Beauchaine, UW professor of psychology, with its 2006 Postdoctoral Mentorship Award, for his contributions to the development and encouragement of UW postdocs.
Asked what advice he might have for other faculty membors, Beauchaine said, “I don’t really like the word ‘mentor,’ as it implies, at least to me, too directive of a role in a person’s training. I prefer to treat postdocs as much as peers as possible. The best thing is to encourage the postdoc to find his/her own way in his/her discipline, and provide support for that, including time to write.”
Neither faculty nor students exactly, postdocs are individuals who have earned a terminal degree — usually a doctorate or a medical degree — and who are pursuing further training. They serve time-limited appointments of generally no more than five years, often working with faculty on innovative research projects, and their work is usually funded by training or research grants. Postdocs have proliferated nationwide especially over recent years, due in part to increasing federal funding of biomedical research.
It’s estimated that there are about 1,000 postdocs at the UW each year. The UW Postdoc Association has about 200 members on its mailing list, says member Lindus Conlan, but is always interested in finding more members. The temporary nature and high turnover of postdoc positions makes maintaining membership challenging, however. As Joseph Marx, current association president and a postdoc in biochemistry noted, “As soon as (pstdocs) get through the door, they’re already looking for their next job.”
Conlan said the association’s mission is to raise awareness and promote the work of postdocs campuswide, as well as to provide needed professional development.
“There’s certainly a lot of attention for graduate students, but for postdocs part of the difficulty is that there are so many different job titles,” she said. “It’s actually difficult to characterize who the postdoc population is at the UW.”
As for the association’s social side, Marx said, postdocs gather to network in small meetings they call “Five at Five” (also known as Happy Hour). In these meetings, Marx said, “each has one slide to talk about their work for five minutes. And there are five talks.” The next such meeting is set for 5 p.m. Friday, Dec. 15, in room J-412 of the Health Sciences Building.
The association’s second research symposium, held in Turner Auditorium in the Health Sciences Building in October, featured eight speakers, all postdocs, talking about their research and in doing so underscoring the varied nature of postdoc positions — speakers represented physics, bioengineering, biochemistry, biostatistics and biology as well as anthropology and forestry resources. In addition to choosing a faculty member for the mentorship award, the association’s postdocs also chose a first-place and runner-up from among these presentations.
Chosen the best among these was Zareen Khan of the College of Forest Resources, who, Conlan said, “presented her work on how plants can be used for environmental remediation of soils contaminated with hazardous waste.” Chosen as runner-up was Siddhartha Sikdar of bioengineering, who presented research that used ultrasound to detect sounds produced from blocked heart to diagnose a possible heart attack.
Thomas Gething, director of the new UW Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, which was created in January by Provost Phyllis Wise, said the office “contributes to improving the situation of postdocs on our campus largely by providing a set of workshops dealing with professional enhancement activities.” He said the office has touched on grant writing and project and personnel management — skills that postdocs ultimately need for their later careers but have little time to learn on their research jobs.
Gething said the office also can mediate between postdocs and faculty, when necessary. “Sometimes expectations are unclear between the postdoc and the principal investigator,” he said. Happily though, he said, such services are required only rarely.
The office will hold a workshop titled “Mentoring Undergraduate Researchers: Where to Begin?” from 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 12, in room 303 of the South Campus Center.
Gething said raising the profile and improving the professional skills of postdocs is good not only for the postdocs themselves, but for the University, too, in the long run.
“It puts us more on par with institutions we like to consider as our peers,” he said.
For more information about the UW Postdoctoral Association, visit online at http://depts.washington.edu/uwpa/. To learn more about the UW Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, visit online at http://depts.washington.edu/pdafrs/index.html.
