After an intense push through an in-person Annual Conference in Chicago and complementary Virtual Conference this spring, it’s hard to believe that we’ve settled into summer and all of the strategic planning and programming that comes with it. But here we are in August, and I’m thrilled that you’re a part of the NPA, the national voice of the postdoctoral community, and taking the time to read The POSTDOCket, our signature publication.

We continue to push forward in our mission as laid out in the NPA Strategic Plan that was dropped last year after much deliberation and thought. For those of you unfamiliar with the plan, it focuses our work around three pillars – advocating for the interests of our members through policy and communication; promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within the postdoctoral community; and developing the tools you have requested for success, from speakers and webinars to toolkits and events. A fourth inward-facing pillar helps us ensure that we are keeping our own house in order at the NPA to be most effective at assisting our members.

For those unable to join us in April, the Chicago event was a resounding success. For many, it was a strange yet positive experience – it was my first in-person NPA Annual Conference – as some of us saw each other in person for the first time or after a long pandemic hiatus. Masked throughout for precaution, our group of 230 was smaller than usual for the event but carried a spirit of intense positivity that was contagious among attendees. Meanwhile, some of those Chicago programming highlights made up a portion of the Virtual Conference, which was led by original content from presenters across the nation, and allowed us to bring the event to those who could not be in Chicago for a plethora of reasons, from financial to family to institutional.

We are always seeking new volunteers to help in various ways while gaining leadership, management, and program development experience.

I’m thrilled to let you know that our NPA IMPACT Fellowship Program, providing a select group of marginalized early-career research trainees increased access to opportunities to build skills, understand strengths and develop networks, concluded its programming for the first class with a full-day event on the eve of the Chicago conference. The preconference, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, provided an educational and emotional experience for the pilot class of six fellows, meeting one another for the first time in person while learning how to bring the critical element of personal values to their IMPACT learning. You can read a summary of the 2021-2022 IMPACT Fellowship program in this issue of The POSTDOCket. We have kicked off the search for the next class of IMPACT fellows in our quest to live up to that second strategic plan pillar of DEI advancement. If you are interested in applying or know someone who would benefit from the program, here is the application form.

On another front, we saw that our new NPA SmartSkills Program reached unprecedented heights this spring. The free training course, open to all of our members, soared in registration to become the largest program in the history of the NPA. With over 900 registrants, SmartSkills provides training in areas you asked for through our member needs assessment surveys in 2020 and 2021. Taught by expert instructors in their fields from member institutions and government agencies, SmartSkills has already offered guidance to attendees on topics including self-advocacy, negotiation, resume writing, and federal grant application. If you haven’t tuned in yet, don’t worry. All of the classes are recorded and available on the NPA website. Meanwhile, register now for the remainder of the classes for the year. We plan to continue SmartSkills in 2023 and again offer a Certificate of Leadership for those who participate.

2022 National Postdoc Appreciation Week will be upon us soon. During September 19-23, 2022, you have the opportunity to join fellow postdoctoral scholars, postdoc office leaders, and faculty across the country to celebrate the achievements of postdocs. This year is the thirteenth-anniversary celebration of NPAW, as we recognize the significant contributions that postdoctoral scholars make to U.S. research and discovery. There will be both national events coordinated by the NPA as well as local events at institutions across the world. Join us in the celebration. It’s not too late to learn more about what your institution plans to do, and if it hasn’t started planning yet, we can assist. The NPA is your touchstone for NPAW– find the calendar of all events on our newly-refreshed website.

In collaboration with NPAW, we again highlight our critical effort to communicate to others the importance of postdocs in our society and economy through the What’s a Postdoc? campaign. We thank those who stepped up throughout the year in this ongoing effort. NPAW is a particularly opportune time for you to share a quote, a photo, or a story with us about what it means to be a postdoc, what you aim to achieve in your career, and what you do in your free time away from work. As part of What’s a Postdoc?, look for the announcement of a special video component, NPA 3Brief, that will expand the power of this campaign and give you the chance to share your voice.

There is too much happening at the NPA to capture in a single column. Pay attention to the NPA calendar to stay fully informed. In thinking about all we are able to accomplish, I am reminded of the phenomenal work of our volunteers that makes the NPA stronger and broader than its three-person staff. We are always seeking new volunteers to help in various ways while gaining leadership, management, and program development experience.

But the NPA is about so much more than programs, newsletters, or conferences. It’s a movement to improve the postdoctoral experience. This movement is likely to face some significant challenges and changes in the year or two ahead. So while I’m thrilled about what we have accomplished since the launch of our strategic plan, I’m more excited about the creative, innovative, important, and collaborative efforts still to come. Thank you for being a part of us.

Tom Kimbis, J.D., is the NPA executive director & CEO.

In April, the NPA held two conferences, an in-person one in Chicago on April 1-2 and a virtual one on April 28-29. This hybrid approach allowed for maximum engagement for NPA members, with those in-person benefiting from rich networking and engagement opportunities that had been missing over the past two years when the conference was canceled in 2020 and was held online in 2021. The virtual component ensured individuals without the means to attend the in-person conference or with health concerns could still access a variety of amazing content online. In total, 238 individuals attended the in-person conference, with another 379 participating in the virtual component.

NPA Annual Awards

During the conference, the NPA announced its annual awards, with Geoff Davis, Ph.D., receiving the Distinguished Service Award and Kellie Ann Jurado, Ph.D., the Gallagher Mentor Award.

Davis is a staff data scientist in the applied science group at Google Research, having previously worked as a postdoctoral scholar and later an assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College. He was the lead author on the Sigma Xi Doctors Without Orders report that laid the groundwork for increased assessment and reporting on the postdoctoral population.

Jurado, a presidential assistant professor in the microbiology department at the University of Pennsylvania, completed her postdoctoral training at Yale University and earned her doctorate at Harvard University.

Conference Keynote Speakers

The keynote speakers for this year’s conference included:

• Christine S. Grant, Ph.D., a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at N.C. State University who discussed mentorship
• Sarah Hokanson, Ph.D., an assistant provost for professional development and postdoctoral affairs at Boston University AND
• Bennett Goldberg, Ph.D., a professor of physics & astronomy and the former director of the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching at Northwestern University. Both discussed their personal and professional journeys and highlighted the Postdoc Academy, a FREE online program built to empower early and late-stage postdocs with skills to succeed as a postdoc and launch their next career.

In addition to delivering talks as keynote speakers, Drs. Hokanson and Goldberg presented a pre-conference workshop to provide facilitator training for postdoc office leaders. Future online and in-person training is planned. Those interested in joining the Postdoc Academy community can do so here.

Other Conference Highlights

The NPA conference program featured various concurrent sessions covering topics ranging from advocacy for equitable postdoc benefits to international postdoc challenges and opportunities.

This hybrid approach allowed for maximum engagement for NPA members, with those in-person benefiting from rich networking and engagement opportunities that had been missing over the past two years when the conference was canceled in 2020 and was held exclusively online in 2021.

Some resources shared at the sessions included:

• FASEB factsheets to assist in advocating for postdoc benefits
• Association of American Medical Colleges Group on Research, Education, and Training’s Appropriate Treatment of Research Trainees (AToRT) document

There are also always great practical sessions for the postdoctoral scholars in attendance at NPA meetings, and this year was no different.

Topics geared for postdoc attendees included:

• Refining your elevator pitch to land that job
• Business dining etiquette
• Making grant writing do-able
• Empowering career decisions through individual development plans

In addition, the NPA staff unveiled a new tool to allow members to visualize data from the NPA Institutional Policy Surveys (ran in 2013, 2016, & 2019). Members can now choose a variety of data dashboards to plot various aspects of the data and use these to better benchmark their benefits, policies, and procedures with other postdoc-serving institutions.

• Explore Institutional Policy Survey Data

While some of the in-person conference programming was recorded and made available to those attending the online conference component, additional programming was created exclusively for those attending the virtual conference on April 28-29, including:

• An overview of the NIH Loan Repayment Programs
• A presentation from economist Stephanie Cheng investigated NSF data on the economics of choosing a postdoc. Read her paper on this topic: What’s Another Year? The Lengthening Training and Career Paths of Scientists
• Leading and managing in transition
• Building an NIH diversity supplement connections program for recruitment
• Advancing evidence-based practices through the new pd|hub Collections
• Learn more about pd|hub
• Faculty cluster hiring
• Strategies to revitalize a postdoctoral association

In addition, 33 virtual posters were accessible on the Whova app used for agenda management and connection for the conference. The app also allowed those in attendance to download resources associated with many of the sessions, which was especially beneficial when the contents at two concurrent sessions were of interest.

With another annual conference behind us, we look forward to reconvening as a community at the 2023 Annual Conference in Philadelphia, April 21-23, 2023. See you there!

Chris Smith, Ph.D., is the postdoctoral affairs program administrator at Virginia Tech and a member of the NPA Board of Directors.

All postdoctoral scholars do not have equal access to resources that enable their success, especially among marginalized communities and historically underfunded institutions. The NPA’s IMPACT Fellowship Program (IMPACT) was thus created to provide participants with access to personal and career resources with a cohort of peers to strategically build upon existing skills, recognize opportunities, and advance in their careers. March 2022 concluded the first cohort of IMPACT fellows, consisting of six postdoctoral scholars selected from more than 170 applications from various backgrounds and institutions across the country.

Over the six-month fellowship, participating postdocs engaged in a range of programming, which included five components:

• Power of Peer (POP) Circles
• External mentoring
• CliftonStrengths assessments and individualized interpretations
• Lunchtime speaker series
• Fellows networking event at the NPA Annual Conference in spring 2022

These components aimed to increase access to opportunities for marginalized early-career research trainees to build skills, understand their strengths better, and develop new networks.

The program components proved vital in IMPACT's success, beginning with an orientation kick-off in September of 2021 that led to the POP Circles introduction. These POP Circles provide a safe space for the IMPACT fellows to connect with one another and discuss their personal and professional development. They are self-sustaining sessions, initially facilitated by Claire Horner-Devine, Ph.D., founder of Counterspace Consulting, LLC, and progressed to self-facilitation by those in the POP Circles and, in this case, the IMPACT fellows. For external mentoring, the fellows were paired with mentors outside of their institutions.

Postdoctoral scholars should devote a block of time in their schedules for the sole purpose of reaching out to new contacts or maintaining relationships with current contacts.

The IMPACT fellows also participated in a unique speaker series that involved both professional development discussions and networking panels from December 2021 to March 2022. This series provided information on project and time management, conflict management and negotiation, transferable skills, and leadership development. These were done in the form of workshops with each topic presented by experts in the fields who volunteered their time to discuss these items with the IMPACT fellows. The IMPACT fellows were also given the opportunity to have informal discussions with others in leadership roles in academia and industry on their career paths and what advice they would give to early career trainees.

The IMPACT fellows completed their program at the NPA Annual Conference by participating in a professional development and networking event prior to the first day of the annual conference in Chicago. The day involved presentations by Helen H. Hsu, Psy.D., outreach services director at Stanford University’s Counseling and Psychological Services, on wellness that comes with knowing one’s values and implementing them, and Diana Mendez, M.A., associate director at NYU Breakthrough Leadership Scholars at NYU Stern School of Business who discussed values in the career search and ensuring a future workplace is a good fit. In addition to these presentations, the program included feedback and appreciation.

One final aspect of the program was the opportunity for the IMPACT fellows to create a project that could impact their postdoctoral community and be provided with seed funding to accomplish this task. The project was reviewed early on in the program and was given peer feedback in an effort to create an impact in their community. IMPACT proved to be a great success as the fellows created an everlasting bond and shared challenges and successes with one another. They bonded more than the NPA could have imagined through the POP Circles, as was evident from their feedback. The fellows expressed not feeling alone because of the program and wished it could have been longer.

IMPACT programming was focused on transferable skills and competencies that are valuable for a wide range of professional opportunities. Based on the pre- and post-program survey, all fellows felt the program helped prepare them for their career progression. For example, post-program, 100 percent of fellows felt confident in their ability to transition into a post-training career and have made connections in their potential careers of interest compared to 33 percent pre-program. Also, 100 percent of fellows have started discussions around professional goals with their mentors, feel confident in managing conflicts, asking for the support they need, and managing their professional network. Other skills that have improved post-IMPACT are creating SMART goals, applying personal strengths, and negotiating. Hence, irrespective of their next career goal, IMPACT is designed to prepare postdocs for a broad range of employment opportunities and bridge the gap between research and practice. The NPA IMPACT team plans to continue this program on an annual basis and, with the feedback obtained from the pilot cohort, will only aim to improve it for future cohorts.

We must acknowledge those who made this program possible by volunteering their time or providing funds. These groups and individuals are listed in alphabetical order below.

• Title Donor
• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
• Individual Seat Name Donors
• Columbia | Zuckerman Institute (Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute)
• LS-PAC MODELS Center
• The University of Chicago (Division of Biological Sciences - Office of Postdoctoral Affairs)
• University of Illinois Chicago
• Individual Donors
• Harini Aiyer
• Sreekanth Chalasani
• Stephanie Eberle
• Tom Kimbis
• Caleb McKinney
• Session Speakers
• Arne Bakker
• Chiara Bertipaglia
• Sampurna Chatterjee
• Sarah Hokanson
• Valerie Fako Miller
• Nancy Schwartz
• Shoba Subramanian
• Nyki Walker

Sponsorship opportunities for the 2022-2023 IMPACT Fellowship Program are currently available for individuals and organizations. Learn more about supporting this important program.

The application process for the 2022-2023 IMPACT Fellowship Program is open now through August 1st. Learn more and apply today!

Matthew Aguirre, Ph.D., is the director of graduate student services and GSA senior advisor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and is a diversity officer for the National Postdoctoral Association.

Vipul Sharma, Ph.D., is the assistant director for postdoctoral affairs at the University of Chicago and is a diversity officer for the National Postdoctoral Association.

Ariangela Kozik, Ph.D., a research investigator at the University of Michigan (UM), seems uniquely attuned to the connections and networks that underlie both biological and societal systems. “I like to think about how things are structured and how different domains work together to produce an outcome,” she says. This worldview permeates every aspect of Kozik’s work, informing and interweaving what others might regard as distinct spheres of research and advocacy.

Fascinated by the human microbiome since college, Kozik now uses multi-omic approaches to understand how host-microbe interactions influence disease heterogeneity in asthma, revealing the unseen connections within and between systems. Although she is a microbiologist by training, Kozik approaches this work with a keen awareness that her fundamental goal of improving health outcomes cannot be accomplished without addressing the biopsychosocial forces that affect health. She incorporates these factors, such as measures of exposure to systemic racism, into her analyses, explaining, “It’s really important to me that we as the biomedical science community understand that the environment and world and society in which we live- everything- is so interconnected and has an impact on health.”

Through these conversations, Kozik wants the public to realize that scientists exist in their communities and experience the same uncertainty and stress as everyone else.

Building Community to Break Down Barriers

Kozik’s journey began in a supportive family environment that fostered her innate interest in science. As she advanced through academia, however, she encountered obstacles she felt compelled to address. “The things I have worked really hard to advocate for are things I have been personally slowed down by,” Kozik shares. “I’m trying to make it better for the people coming after me, as well as clear the path for myself.” After having her first child while working as a graduate student at Purdue University, Kozik was struck by the lack of support and community for those navigating academia while parenting. She founded Purdue’s Graduate Parent Support Network to combat the isolation she was experiencing as a new mom and bring visibility to a community facing the same challenges. The group coordinated resource-sharing events and made important strides at the administrative level, including instituting a grant to offset childcare costs.

As a postdoctoral scholar at UM, Kozik again noticed a need for both structural and social support for postdocs with children. She revamped an existing but dormant organization, the UM Postdoctoral Family Association (UMPDFA), and began advocating for equitable benefits for postdocs with children. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, Kozik and the UMPDFA served as a voice for trainees facing dire challenges such as lack of childcare, ensuring that recovery initiatives included the support and flexibility they needed to accomplish their academic work.

During this time, Kozik also took her community-building skills to Twitter. In 2020, she and another postdoc, Kishana Taylor, Ph.D., launched #BlackInMicrobiology, an effort to connect Black microbiologists across the world. Kozik explains that isolation perpetuates the barriers that Black scientists face, and bringing together this virtual community was crucial in igniting coordinated advocacy efforts toward inclusion for Black people in scientific spaces. Their annual virtual event, #BlackInMicroWeek, enabled online connections that became genuine relationships, spurring collaborations, publications, grant proposals, and outreach efforts targeting Black communities. “My network grew from knowing zero other Black microbiologists to knowing now more than 300,” Kozik says. Observing that #BlackInMicrobiology filled an urgent need, Kozik and Taylor transitioned the group to a nonprofit organization, the Black Microbiologists Association, which Kozik hopes “will have a bigger, more sustained impact on the community of scientists we’ve brought together.”

Building Public Trust Through Existing Connections

While her network of scientists expanded on Twitter, Kozik was also using Facebook groups to connect with fellow parents in her Michigan community. As panic and misinformation swirled in the early days of the pandemic, her identity as a scientist came to the forefront in these interactions. “I cared about the people there, and I didn’t want them making decisions based on false information,” she says. So Kozik began writing weekly updates on the pandemic and hosting Q & A sessions where she served as a bridge between the agencies handing down public health guidance and her existing social network. “The average person can’t pick up the phone and talk to someone they know and trust at [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” Kozik explains. “As scientists, we can stand in the gap and be this conduit of information.”

Kozik emphasizes that it’s important not to undervalue postdocs as science communicators. “Even though we are considered by the academic system as ‘trainees,’ we are scientists practicing science every day,” she notes. “We can have a real serious impact right now because the skills we have as far as scientific literacy are what is sorely needed by the public.” Through these conversations, Kozik wants the public to realize that scientists exist in their communities and experience the same uncertainty and stress as everyone else. “Just connecting on that human level can help open the door,” she says.

A System for Better Science

Kozik’s appreciation for the community- be it microbial or human- remains central to her work towards inclusivity and equity as she advances her academic career. She advises trainees “not to perpetuate this idea that we have to bifurcate or compartmentalize our identities,” encouraging them to embrace all aspects of their identities as they get involved in their academic, local, and virtual communities. In doing so, Kozik says, “we can continue to shape the way we do science into something that works better for everybody.”

Jacqueline Mann, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and an associate editor with the POSTDOCket.

What's A Postdoc? The world needs to know more about postdocs. The NPA believes that the contributions of this highly skilled and educated population should be known. We are committed to amplifying the postdoc stories of the 70,000 postdocs innovating across the United States to the academic community, policymakers, and the nation at large. We need your story. Submit information about you and your postdoc career in whatever way you wish: with a quote, a picture, or a short video. Together we can paint a compelling picture of What's A Postdoc?.