Welcome to a PhD

This recent twitter thread from a first-gen graduate asking about a PhD got me thinking. As a first-gen graduate myself, what advice would I give to someone starting a PhD? The below is tailored towards a biomed PhD in the UK/EU/Australian systems, but some points are more generalisable:

First, getting into a PhD program is tough. You've made it, congratulations! By definition you have the intellectual ability to finish. Never doubt that. That said, you will doubt it. Especially at the 3-6 month period and at ~2 years in. That is normal. Even though the people around you look confident, they all went through a similar period. 

Second, it is your PhD, but the lab's project. You should aim to become the intellectual leader of the project after around a year, but always lead with humility. Others around you will always know more than you on specific techniques or domain knowledge. Being the leader doesn't mean be the boss. It means being the person who makes sure that things are on track, who takes responsibility for keeping up with the literature and following up with people who are part of the team.

Ask for advice, and listen to that advice. Take particular note when it comes from experience. Don't be that student who ignores technicians. When a tech is telling you something, listen. If your supervisor tells you something, listen. Feel free to disagree, but first listen. If someone suggests a protocol for an experiment, do not go back to them for help until you have actually followed their protocol word for word. Don't change protocols that work until you've got a lot more experience. Include every control that is suggested, even the ones you don't think are necessary.

Being a PI is a tough job, very time-demanding. So use their time wisely. Prep before a meeting, take notes during, follow-up. If you can answer a question via a quick google search or conversation with another lab member, do that instead of knocking on their door. A PI can be a valuable asset to you if you use their time wisely. If you start wasting their time they will schedule you out,

The lab environment can be a pressure-cooker of stress. Experiments don't work, trouble-shooting is horrible, publication can be nightmarish. At its best, the shared adversity will create unbreakable bonds between lab members. To make this happen, be considerate, be kind, forgive. Be the team member who helps out. Smile when someone frowns - they may have just had the most horrid day. Soon enough you have a day where you snap or frown - treat them the way you would like to be treated on your worst. Especially keep in mind that science is highly international and multi-cultural, and people may not mean things the way you perceive them (and vice versa). 

At the start, get into the lab and learn how it works. Where the tip-boxes go, who refills them and makes up new solutions, how plastics get ordered. Ask the lab manager or senior tech what you can do to help out. There are no magic fairies - every task is done by the team. If you leave the centrifuge messy, use the last reagent without ordering more, you will annoy people. If you clog up their personal pipettes and don't tell anyone, you will really annoy people. Be a good lab citizen.

The first six months is basically you learning how to be in the lab, reading the basic literature and just learning how to do the techniques. You won't actually make any advances - this is all on-the-job training.

Don't hide mistakes. You are going to make mistakes. You are going to make mistakes that will cost your monthly rent's worth in grant money. I remember the horror of breaking a haemocytometer during my first week in the lab. $500 at a time where that was an unbelievable amount of money to me. You make make mistakes that cost your annual salary's worth. Own them. Admit to them. Don't make them again. Never blame others for your mistake. Someone breaking the centrifuge is bad, but if I know they will never do it again I move on. If they blamed someone else for leaving it unbalanced (while they didn't check) then I worry that they haven't taken responsibility and are more likely to make the same expensive mistake again.

Six months in, and you are ready to go solo. Things that worked when you were shown how stop working. You will feel like a failure. It is tough, you will doubt yourself. You will look at senior students and think you will never be that good. You will, it just takes time. Here first-gen graduates have an advantage. They don't expect things to come easy to them, so they grit your teeth, try again, fail again and try again. A lot of success in science comes from having the personality to be able to deal with failure, over and over again. 

It starts working, you get results! Now you need to switch techniques, and you go through the same process. Much of the next year is this in repeat. You are now a real scientist, but you won't feel like you have made any actual progress on your PhD. Your lab mates try to pick you up, but you doubt. Again, this is normal. These are the "PhD blues". You might think about other careers, do a few training courses, lose motivation to go to work. This period can drag on, but once you get back into the lab and push, things will crack.

You are now the senior PhD student that juniors look at. They see you as calm and capable. You have become a data machine. In about six months you pump out 90% of the data of your PhD. At the same time, you probably see yourself as a bit of a fraud: you know you can handle the day-to-day of the lab, but you doubt you can handle the intellectual side still.  Your supervisor now becomes your key asset, probably for the first time, as you start to write up. 

Don't spend much time on your first draft, it will be rubbish anyway. Everyone's is. Just write it up and get feedback. Just like any technique, writing is a skill that you will learn, you just have to be willing to give it a shot, get feedback, and try again. This means when you your draft back full of revisions, don't just accept the changes. Try to understand them. What change did you PI make, and could you incorporate that strategy yourself next time? In particular, read papers while writing. Compare your paper to published papers, sentence by sentence to see if your work looks like the real thing. What do figure legends have in your field? Does your draft figure legend have all of these attributes? Remember you are the paper lead, but it is a consensus document. Be generous on coauthorship, and remember who helped you out early on. It means a lot to people to be acknowledged, and it doesn't hurt you to have extra authors on your paper.

Publication. Ah, this is a horrible ordeal. You will get rejected multiple times, it will feel rubbish. Flip that paper to the next journal and don't take it personally. Don't dwell too much on the comments, the next reviewers may be completely different. If your paper is given a "major revision" - congratulations! That is actually really good news. Now you need to do all the experiments that the reviewers asked that are at all possible. Yes, you could argue the point, but save this for the cases where the experiment is impossible. It is much better to deal with a major revision than to start fresh with a new journal. At the end, you may feel more exhaustion and relief that the paper is off your plate, rather than actual satisfaction. This is (unfortunatey) normal. So make sure you celebrate every intermediate stage (submission, going out to review, major revisions coming back, etc). 

Remember you don't actually need to publish to graduate (in the UK or Australia, in much of the EU you do, but there is a journal home for every paper). You just need to produce a body of work suitable for publication. Like your paper, just push out the first thesis draft quick and dirty. It is a formality, nothing more. Your contribution is in your papers, while your thesis will be read by the jury only, and then gather dust on the shelves somewhere. 

Congratulations! You have a PhD. The highest degree possible. You are now an expert in your chosen field (although we all have more to learn!). You have many, many good career options available to you. A PhD in biomedical sciences is a gateway to so many interesting careers. Go down a pathway that looks interesting to you, and if it doesn't work out, pick a new path. The world is your oyster!

Position available for a cell biologist in the Liston lab

Due to COVID-19 we have extended the applications for this position for another month.

This is a great opportunity for a scientist to work on an exciting diabetes project in the Leuven lab. Pure cell biology, so we welcome applications from beyond immunology or endocrinology! We have both a research technician and post-doc position available, depending on the experience / background of the applicant. If you are interested, please apply!

Lab tech position

Job opportunity: we need a junior lab technician at the University of Leuven to be trained for PBMC isolation and flow cytometry analysis, to place a key role in clinical trials. We are after someone who is willing to listen and takes their work seriously. If you already know flow cytometry, great, if not, we will train you. Apply here, and take on a job that matters. 

Interview with Louisa Wood

 Where were you and what were you doing before you joined the Institute?

I was a professor at the University of Leuven and VIB, in Belgium. I set up my lab there in 2009, and spent the last 10 years growing a research program and setting up two core facilities. 

What has the relocation experience been like so far? Best bit and worse bit?

I might plead the fifth there! Problems are for solving, not complaining about. 

What’s your research about?

I've always admired scientists who chose one problem and spend a career on solving it at a deeper and deeper level, but that isn't my personality. I love the creative process, hearing about a problem and them coming up with a spark, a creative way to tackle that problem. It has been a fun way for me to work, and we've made major contributions in different fields - basic immunology, clinical immunology, endocrinology, microbiology, neuroscience, genetics, bioinformatics - but I've generally avoiding asking the follow-up questions. I think as my career has matured, I might be ready to settle down with that one special question through: what is the adaptive immune system doing in the tissues? 

Any advice from what you’ve learned from setting up your own lab?

There are different routes to success, and you need to find one that works for you. From my perspective, the key to my success (survival? I guess they mean a similar thing in academia) has been rapidly building a diverse portfolio. Key here was my first hire - James Dooley (still with me 10 years later, having relocated over to the Babraham with me). He came on as an experienced research assistant from a small lab (an amazing training ground, since techs in small labs are expected to know how to do everything). Having someone that I could trust in the lab let me write grants. I wrote and wrote and wrote - I brought in 22 grants and 19 fellowships over my 10 years in Belgium, and must have submitted one a month on average. The whole time I saw James develop as a lab manager and then a senior scientist, and saw that he was actually much better in the lab than I ever would be, so the relationship turned into a partnership, with each of us taking the lead in our area of expertise. So I guess the key advice would be to hire James - but he already has a job, so hands off! Seriously though, hire the best, give them your trust and support, and let them take on responsibilities as they grow. It means making a serious commitment to their careers: senior staff grow more valuable every year, and this should be reflected in their salary and job stability.  

Do  you  have  any  words  of  wisdom  for  those  starting  off  in  a  scientific career? What do you know now that you wish you’d known then?

First, attitude matters when you hire someone. Unfortunately, not everyone is in science because they care about it. I've had people with very competent CVs join my lab for the wrong reason, like wanting to get a PhD. Ultimately, if you don't really care about the science, you won't be a good scientist. Skills can be taught, but I've never found a good way to mentor someone who didn't have a positive attitude, so my advice to a younger me would be: when you see those warning signs, give that person their notice. Attitude also matters in the other direction: when we needed to hire a mouse technician we passed over people with experience to take on Jeason Haughton, a Jamaican life guard with no experience in science at all. Why? Because we could tell that he was ready to listen, ready to learn and ready to work. Jeason has now been with me for 6 years, and there was a long line-up from other labs desperate to take him on when I moved over to Cambridge!

Second, peer review is over-rated. There is a degree of "reviewer roulette" at play that you can't take too personally. Great grants get rejected all the time. My first small grant to a Belgian funder was rejected - a few months later I submitted more-or-less the same thing to the ERC and gained a €1.5m grant that led to great papers. Papers will get rejected at one journal, and then accepted at a better journal. Why? Reviewer roulette. Oh, there have certainly been occasions when a reviewer's suggestions improved a paper, but more often it is just extra stuff for the supplementary material. My advice is to accept it is a game, and win through numbers. Why invest all your emotional energy into one grant, when you can write four or five? If a paper is rejected from one journal, resubmit to the next that day. Start juggling with as many balls as you can competently handle (the trick is working out how many that is), and make sure they are always in motion. 

Who has inspired you? Why?

David Attenborough. From the youngest age, watching his documentaries guided me into thinking like a scientist. To try to understand life through the prism of evolution, to understand living systems as complex positive and negative feedback loops. I still find that I bring a very ecological style of thinking to understanding immunology. He also shaped by ethics and my politics - because of him, I am a lifelong vegetarian and ardent environmentalist. For an inspiration from an immunologist, I've also admired the work of Gitta Stockinger (now at the Crick). Someone who is prepared to do a deep-dive into a question, and not just crop off the easy big hits: her work on Th17 cells and the aryl hyrdocarbon receptor are some of the best reads in the field. I'd also add: I think it is important to tell people how much you admire them! Science is a tough business, and even the most senior people deserve positive affirmation. I had the pleasure of successfully nominating Gitta for an EFIS-IL award in 2017, and it was a pleasure to introduce her award plenary and describe her to everyone as one of my scientific heroes. Just recently I sent a letter to Sir David, thanking him for his influence (and received a nice reply too). 

What has been your proudest personal and/or scientific achievement?

Here I would bring up two post-doctoral fellows who joined my lab back in Belgium - Stephanie Humblet-Baron (joined 2010, as her first post-doc) and Susan Schlenner (joined 2012, as her second post-doc). Both are amazing scientists, Stephanie as a clinical/translational immunologist and Susan as a molecular immunologist, who took on slow-burning projects. For Stephanie, it was six years between her starting in my lab and getting her first paper - but since then a big hit every year! Susan not only started ambitious projects but also set up a CrispR facility at the University of Leuven - a job that has helped many labs, but is not exactly a career builder. In both of them I saw future leaders. They were already at an amazing level scientifically, so my mentorship was to help build their understanding of how a lab works, strategies for writing grants and papers, discussions on how to manage staff, advice on how to build and maintain a portfolio of projects, and guidance through the tenure-track application process. So among my proudest scientific moments were when they were both made tenure-track professors at the University of Leuven - Susan in 2017 and Stephanie in 2019. Two outstanding scientists from my lab who are now independent. I don't think I could have left Belgium without knowing that my lab and Core facilities there would continue to flourish, now under their leadership.

PhD opportunity in the Liston lab!

Are you interested in a PhD in neuroimmunology? Want to find out how to harness the power of the immune system to cure traumatic brain injury? Check out our PhD position here. It is a rare chance to join a fantastic international team, and to learn to do high level science in a supportive and caring environment.

A successful candidate will be:

• passionate about science and the project
• experienced at failure, with a track-record in the resilience needed to pick yourself up and try again
• willing to be wrong, willing to learn, willing to improve
• driven to make a difference, discover new biology or move a promising therapeutic to the next stage
• creative and imaginative
• detail-orientated and reliable

The successful candidate does not need:

• experience at immunology or neuroscience. You are here to learn, not start as an expert!
• technical experience in X, Y or Z - as above
• a perfect CV. I'm interested in seeing that you know how to succeed in the face of adversity

 If you are submitting an application, consider a co-application to a Cambridge College, such as Peterhouse.

Scientific heroes

My first scientific hero was Sir David Attenborough. From the youngest age, his documentaries guided me into thinking like a scientist. To try to understand life through the prism of evolution, to understand living systems as complex positive and negative feedback loops. David Attenborough inspired me to become a biologist, and shaped my politics and my ethics. I recently wrote to him to thank him for the profound effect he has had on me, and was incredibly pleased to receive a letter from him this week. #tellyourheroes

When should I apply for a fellowship?

To develop an academic career in research you need to develop two sides of your CV - one is your publication record and the other is a record of prizes, fellowships and grants. Publications are hard. Years of research and a brutal revision process make accumulating a publication record slow and painful. Prizes, fellowships and grants are, in principle, easier. You write up a proposal and submit. Often you can even submit the same proposal in multiple places. It is very rare that prizes are awarded without you applying for it, so sending out a lot of applications just makes sense.

For poster prizes, departmental awards, travel grants, the equation is quite simple: apply for them. There are a lot of small prizes that are usually under-subscribed, they can earn you a little money and these small prizes build up to greater things. For fellowships, on the other hand, I have started to lean in the other direction. I used to suggest that all post-docs apply for a fellowship - if successful, it is a nice income and a highlight in your CV, and if unsuccessful, well... it is good practice. Now, however, I tend to discourage fellowship applications very early on in the career. Newly graduated PhD students are often very keen to apply for fellowships, and there are so many opportunities that you can easily spend a year applying for one after the other.

The question that you need to ask yourself is whether applying for fellowships is a a good investment of time. A successful fellowship application normally merges a great idea (the science) and a proven record to deliver that idea (most importantly, your publication record). A lot of post-docs make the mistake of applying for fellowships too early, before their publication record is ready to support it. It is easy to think that there is no cost to doing so, but applying for fellowships takes a non-trivial amount of time. As a scientist you always need to weigh up the opportunity cost: time spent on fellowships is time not spent on experiments. There are times when applying for a fellowship is sensible, and other times when you are better off investing all of your energy in experiments (building that publication record for future fellowships). Here are a few factors that you can consider:

Factors that should encourage you to apply for fellowships:

• You are a senior post-doc looking to become independent
• The fellowship allows you to take a key mobility step (eg, Marie Curie to return to Europe)
• You just published a highlight paper
• Your PI says you need a fellowship to stay in the lab (but consider moving labs instead)
• You don't expect your CV to improve in the next year
• You will not be eligible next year

Factors that should discourage you from applying for fellowships:

• Your PI has a grant that covers the full period of your project
• You have a top story cooking (it deserves all your attention!)
• Your publication record is relatively thin, without any highlight papers (but watch out for being excessively self-critical! A neutral faculty member is a useful independent judge)
• You expect your CV to improve in the next year

My suggestion: rather than automatically write a fellowship, because that is what post-docs do, carefully consider the factors above, consult with faculty and then rationally decide where to invest your effort. Make sure that you don't talk yourself out of applying just for reasons of self-confidence, but also don't be afraid to concentrate on the science this year instead of applying, to put yourself in a better position to apply next year.

Is the Scandinavian model the solution for STEM parents?

The Scandinavian model for parental leave is often touted as the world’s best. 12 months parental leave, split between both parents. This is a great model for a lot of careers, but is it actually a part of the solution to the issues that women face in the STEM fields?  In some cases, perhaps, but as a blanket solution I find it lacking:

1)     First, it must be stated that extended parental leave is only part of the Scandinavian model. When it was first legislated, the leave was typically taken almost exclusively by the mother, with the father just taking the mandated “Daddy’s two weeks”. Essentially, it reinforced the traditional model that put parenting on to the woman, often truncating women’s careers. This has changed substantially over the years, but those changes are due to the evolution of Scandinavian culture and the increasing normality of equality in the Scandinavian countries. Implementing just extended parental leave will not recreate the full advances seen in women’s careers across Scandinavia in the past decade

2)     Extended parental leave is ideal for workplaces where workers can be readily replaced during this period. Large employers are capable of hiring extra staff which can shift between different positions, and employees that only need days or weeks of training to get up to speed are easier to replace. Academic science generally fulfils neither of these categories. First, while universities are large, labs are essentially independent small businesses. Few if any labs are large enough to have standing rotating staff that substitute in for parental leave. Second, for scientific staff, their skills require months or years of training. As an employer, I generally write off the first 3 months of a post-doc’s time as just getting up to scratch of new techniques and the project. For a Masters student starting a PhD, often the entire first year is spent mastering the field without actual productive experiments being performed. That level of expertise is just not readily replaceable, which means the science suffers. This will then leave a negative mark on the applicants' CV beyond the one-year gap.

3)     Scientific funding and scientific projects rarely have the flexibility to make this work. Consider a PI who hires a post-doc to work on a 3 year project. One year into the project, the post-doc goes on maternity leave for a year. The PI cannot put the project on hold for a year – since the funding clock is still running. Instead they need to transfer the project to a new person. Is it fair or reasonable for that project to be transferred again when the parental leave post-doc comes back? Potentially, but it is something that needs to be solved on a case-by-case basis. Even if the funding could be put on hold for parental leave (as in some fellowships), scientific careers are built on advancing science. If the work is scooped in the meantime, original work becomes confirmatory work – which would be a negative for the lab, the PI and the post-doc.

Consider two hypothetical cases, and whether extended parental leave helps or hinders a woman’s career in science.

Scenario 1. A young female PI goes on extended parental leave. What happens to her lab? You can’t shut the lab down for a year. PIs have responsibilities to their students and post-docs, they have responsibilities to their grant funders. So either those students get shuffled to another PI, or they have to work independently (and sub-optimally), or the PI on leave actually spends a chunk of unrecognised time managing the lab remotely. After the return, authorship on papers can often become murky and grants have been spent inefficiently.

Scenario 2. A young post-doc employed on a grant goes on extended parental leave. The PI hires a replacement post-doc to continue the project (the grant and science must go on). A year later the post-doc returns and (best case scenario) the PI manages to find enough funding to keep both staff on for a year to finish up. The paper may end up with a joint-first authorship, or maybe the new post-doc was able to push things fast enough that the original post-doc becomes second author. Afterall, the year back after parental leave is hardly your most productive. There is no easy fix – the PI needs to consider the contribution of both staff members in making a decision.

In short, I think that the Scandinavian model is excellent, and an incredible advance for some careers. However the particular aspect of extended parental leave is not suitable for all people (not everyone wants it), and it can have a negative effect on STEM careers. I would suggest a more flexible approach to STEM researchers who have children. This approach would allow researchers to make the choice to take extended leave, or make the choice to stay active in their field:

• Extended parental leave should be an option available to all
• Implement broad structural changes that promote equality in STEM, most importantly hiring women at senior levels and normalising a healthy life balance
• Infant daycare and before/after-hours childcare should be cheap and readily available for parents who chose that pathway.
• A “parental sabbatical” should be available to PIs who have children, where the PI becomes excused from all teaching and committee duties for a year, but is still able to work on research
• Grants should be automatically extended by a year if the PI has a child or if the staff paid on those grants go on leave
• Ethics protocols, biosafety protocols, etc should be automatically extended by a year if the PI has a child or the staff working under those protocols go on leave
• Review board decisions should be delayed by two years if a PI has a child
• Please comment if you have additional suggestions

If you are interested in how my family handled having a child and a career in STEM, you can read an interview I had with eLife on being a scientist parent. 

Interview with "The Optimist" magazine

Read the article at The Optimist

Thinking back to your PhD, how would you describe this experience.

I quite enjoyed my PhD. The key success in a PhD is to find a match between supervisor and student. I only spoke to my supervisor every 3-4 months, and it was always about concepts and strategy rather than trouble-shooting. For me, I loved the independence that this gave me, and the amazing post-docs in the lab gave me more than enough technical advice. However, some of the other students around me did not like this approach to mentoring, and would have preferred weekly meetings going into the detail of their experiments. This was pure luck on my behalf - I could easily have ended up in a lab that I found stifling, because I didn't ask the right questions going in. This independence let me mould my PhD to my strengths. I learned just a few basic techniques and then applied them to novel questions. It was an approach that let me generate data and papers quickly, and led to an "easy PhD". 

To ask the famous question, is there anything you would like to change retrospectively regarding your PhD?

The flip side of having an "easy PhD" is that I never really had to leave my comfort zone. Since I didn't spend months (or years) painfully learning and optimising new techniques, I never became as technically skilled as the other PhD students around me. Science is so fast moving, that the best strategy is to learn how to learn, which you only get the hard way. Instead, I had my couple of techniques and I had learned how to plan experiments and writing papers. This made my post-doc really difficult - I didn't have the versatility or skill of other post-docs around me, who were picking up and using the latest techniques with trained ease, earned by blood, sweat and tears earlier on. Now as a PI, this deficit is not so important, since my job is all planning and writing, but even now I regret never learning to become a great experimentalist.   

 Which advice or tips would you give us PhDs on our way?

1. Analyse experiments as you go. I started the habit very early on of always analysing experiments once I finished them. By this I mean a full analysis, including a publication level graph, a figure legend and a few lines of text describing the result. It takes a little time, but it means you get real-time feedback on the quality of your experiments - give you have all the right controls, were the numbers high enough to make conclusions, are my conclusions solid enough to plan the next stage, etc. It also made writing papers and a thesis very simple - I just cut and paste my analysed data in, and I was half-way there. Since editing is much less intimidating than writing, I never developed that writing paralysis that some students get.

2. Don't stress about careers! The infamous "bottleneck" in the academic career is mostly illusional. In Flanders, perhaps 15-20% of PhD students go on to a long-term academic career, but even in countries with lower rates (2-5% would be normal) this this not due to a bottleneck. A PhD in biomedical science is one of the most desirable training programs possible for a modern career. The vast majority of people who leave academia are not pushed out; instead, biomed PhDs are leaving academic because of pull-factors - they find highly desirable jobs that they believe they will enjoy more. When I look around at the PhDs that I trained with or that I have trained, I can honestly say that not one has had a career failure. Yes, very few are now research professors, but that is because almost all of them found something else they liked more. Doctor, CEO, start-up company, scientific writer, senior public servant - all great jobs. Very, very few of the 100+ academic careers that I have followed have ended with someone getting pushed out of academia (i.e., timing out of the post-doc fellowship system), and those that did landed on their feet and found a great career that they now say is better suited to them. So.... don't stress about your future career. Concentrate on doing well in your PhD, and start planning your career a year in advance of any decision, but don't make yourself unhappy about uncertainty in which successful career path you will end up taking.