I signed the contract this week to start a
research group at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, an
outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). After blogging
my way through a PhD and postdoc it is a pleasure to be able to write
this blog post. In January, I will be joining an amazing group of people
working in bioinformatics services and basic research where I plan to continue studying
the evolution of cellular interaction networks. I am currently interested in
the broad problem of understanding how genetic variability gets propagated
through molecules and interaction networks to have phenotypic consequences. The
two main research lines of the group will continue previous work on the
evolution of protein interactions and post-translational modifications (see post) and the evolution of chemical genetics/personal genomics (see post 1 and post 2). I will continue to use this blog to
discuss research ideas and on-going work and as always the content here reflects
my own personal views and not of my current/future employers.
I take also the opportunity to mention that
I am looking for a postdoc to join the group in January to work on one of the
two lines described above. If you know
anyone that might be crazy adventurous interested please send
them a link to this post. Past experience (i.e. published work) in computational
analysis of cellular interaction networks is required (ex. post-translational
modifications, mass-spectrometry, linear motif based interactions, structural
analysis of interaction networks, genetic-interactions, chemical-genetics,
drug-drug interactions, comparative genomics, etc). The work will be done in collaboration
with experimental groups in the EMBL-Heidelberg and the Sanger. Pending approval
from EMBL, a formal application announcement will appear in the EMBL jobs page.
I wanted to also share a bit of my
experience of trying to get a job after the postdoc “training” period. I have
ranted in the past sufficiently about how many problems the academic track
system has but the current statistics are informative enough. About 15% of biology related PhDs get an academic position within 5 years. The competition
is intense and in the past year and a half I have applied to 15 to 20 positions
before taking the EBI job. On a positive note, I had the impression that better
established places actually cared less about impact factors. Nevertheless, it
has been a super stressful period and even so I know I have been very lucky. I don’t mean this in any superstitious way
but really in how statistically unlikely it is to have supportive supervisors
and enough positive research outcomes (i.e. impactful publications) to land a
job. I think we are training too many PhDs (or not taking advantage of the
talent pool) and the incentives are not really changing. From my part I will
try my best to contribute to changing the incentives behind this trend. We could
have less funding for PhD in bio related areas, smaller groups and more careers
within the lab besides the group leader. At least, PhDs should be aware and train for
alternative science related paths.