Mary Spiro

Are you interested in a career in academia but unfamiliar with the standards and expectations of chalk talks often given…

The transition to any leadership position comes with new challenges and unknowns. This especially holds true for starting one’s own lab where there is no one set of guidelines or ways to go about it. This panel will provide insight and guidance for trainees on how to find and start their own labs at an R1 university. Participants will learn about the different aspects of starting and running a lab, such as interviewing and hiring, budgeting, mentoring, how to recruit students and postdocs, and much more.

Research is becoming ever more complex and increasingly requires access to state-of-the-art technologies and specialized expertise, which are not always available to researchers. Consequently, modern life science research often sees a dissociation between the researcher, who leads a scientific project, and the technology expert, who has the expertise to perform the required experiments. Academic institutions aim to fill this gap by joining forces within international research infrastructures, which allow researchers to integrate innovative technologies, resources, and expertise (e.g., in imaging, compound screening, mouse disease models, and structural biology) in their research projects.

Training environments and careers in academia can be very stressful at all stages. Managing this stress and maintaining good mental health is key to a successful and long-lived scientific career. However, students and faculty are often not trained in self-care and find it difficult to manage these topics for themselves or others. This session focuses on tools and strategies to manage stress and mental health during all career stages in academia.