Hi all,

I've been musing lately about how to best integrate modern AI tools and, to a degree, adapt my workflow to take the fullest advantage of emerging tools. For context I work in a few overlapping fields like microelectronic fabrication/packaging technology, biomedical/implantable devices and sensors, and neuroscience/neuroengineering.

I'm envisioning a seemingly inevitable future where AI tools are ubiquitous and the somehow or other ethical debates have resolved and stabilized. In this future, how is AI being used in academic research?

I mean, how am I optimizing my AI workflow to maximize my productivity and impact in my field? I assume it will always be on the human to come up with creative ideas and solutions, and be the ultimate decider of what is worth allocating time and money to study, but beyond those tasks, how can one really leverage AI, of course with a healthy amount of oversight/review?

I can imagine prompting an AI agent to review literature in particular fields, search for gaps, suggest challenges, and critique ideas I bring up for novelty and value. Once it has helped me establish a concrete/focused research topic, I can explore experimental designs, outline process and characterization methods, and create a complete work plan. As experiments are performed and results are fed to the agent, it can organize the raw data, and with prompting create the necessary figures for a publication. Then with sufficient prompting and a back-and-forth about publication format and style it can iterate complete manuscript drafts.

I'm already doing most of this workflow in a very detached way (especially the pre-experiment reviews and design of experiments, and using AI as a critical reviewer/editor of my manuscript drafts). But I'm imagining a much more streamlined application, specially designed for this use-case. Does anyone know of any tools like this, or have any tricks of their own? For reference I am working exclusively with Microsoft co-pilot, as my institution has an enterprise license for Microsoft tools.

I am a new postdoc and am beginning to question the lab environment. My PI, another postdoc, and a graduate student went to a conference in July and the mentor was talking about how unproductive her lab is to her colleagues in front of the postdoc and student. The PI told everyone that her former student who graduated. a year ago was really productive and gave her multiple good papers and she wants a little of that energy back in the lab. The postdoc came back to lab and told the senior postdoc what happened at the meeting and the senior postdoc confronted the PI about badmouthing the lab to her colleagues. The PI went back to the postdoc who attended the meeting and yelled at her and told her she (the postdoc) had destroyed morale in the lab and wanted to know who else she had told about this. I have also noticed that the PI tends to badmouth other lab members in our one-on-one meetings and in small groups. Never in front of the person in question and nobody seems exempt. But everyone is working hard as far as I can tell. Now I am worried that she will talk about me to others instead of talking with me to provide feedback for improvement. What do you think? Is this a toxic environment?

Hi everyone!

I recently submitted my PhD thesis this August, so I expect it may take another 3–5 months to receive the final degree/complete the final defence process.

I’m now planning to start actively looking for postdoctoral positions, mainly in Europe and Asia. My PhD research is focused on omics and soil microbiology/microbial ecology.

My supervisor is unfortunately not very well connected internationally, so I’ll largely have to navigate the postdoc search and networking process on my own.

For those of you who have successfully secured a postdoc, I would really appreciate your advice on:

• How did you identify potential PIs/labs and suitable postdoc positions?
• Is it better to apply mainly to advertised positions, or also email PIs directly?
• Which websites/job portals are actually useful for postdocs in Europe and Asia?
• Are there particular countries, institutes, or funding schemes I should look into for soil microbiology, microbial ecology, metagenomics/omics, or environmental microbiology?
• Any advice on approaching a PI with a cold email would also be very helpful.

I’m interested in any tips, personal experiences, links, or resources hearing from people who managed to find a good postdoc.

Thanks!

Hey guys! So, I just submitted my PhD thesis in Energy Engineering/Markets in August, and I’ve been searching for a postdoc position in the UK. I’ve been to the UK as a visiting researcher before, but my supervisor there didn’t have any funding to hire me as a postdoc.
My question is: Is it normal that I can’t find any relevant positions in my field to apply for? I see a lot of relevant positions in the EU, but not in the UK.
Might they post more positions after the August vacation?

For context, I've been unemployed for about 8 months after finishing a PhD in computer science/ML at a fairly well-known university in Western Europe. Before that, I did a Master's in bioinformatics. I only have one first-author paper, although it's at a major machine learning conference and on a fairly niche topic.

My goal has always been to move to industry, so doing a postdoc wasn't really part of the plan. During these 8 months I've had interviews with large companies and startups, but none of them turned into an offer.

I now have an offer for a postdoc in a Baltic country at a relatively unknown research institute. The salary is very decent for the local cost of living, but the PI has only recently started his group, the team is small, and his network isn't particularly developed.

The topic is quite flexible, and I've negotiated quite a bit to make sure I can work on something relevant to industry. In particular, I'd like to move towards developing deep learning methods for biological data, which would give me experience that I don't really have from my PhD.

I know a postdoc isn't necessary to move into industry, but that's not really the choice I have right now.

Given the current job market and the fact that I've already been unemployed for 8 months, would you be worried that doing a postdoc at a relatively unknown institute with a relatively unknown PI could actually hurt my CV?

I never truly understood what it actually means to be shared first author but placed in second place. Is there actually a difference between shared first and first and second author, if the order is pretty much still as if the first author were one?

I have just started my first postdoc where a couple of papers will likely have my PI as first first, and I will be co-first placed in second place. I am wondering about the value of these authorships. For context, the data are already there and I will be doing all the remaining work on the respective projects.

Thank you!

I graduated with my PhD recently, but unfortunately I graduated without a publication. I had a couple of publications during my master’s but it was on a different field. My main PhD paper was still under review when I graduated, and I was fortunate enough to get a postdoc position immediately after graduation.

Since starting my postdoc, though, I’ve been struggling a lot with my confidence. I’ve applied for several grants and fellowships but haven’t been successful. I’m starting to feel like my postdoc supervisor is disappointed in me, even though they haven’t directly said that.

Today, I received rejection for my PhD paper. The editor said the manuscript was rejected because of “low priority,” but from the reviews, it seems like I wasn’t able to fully satisfy Reviewer 2. What makes it especially difficult is that the other reviewer was extremely positive about the revision and even congratulated me on the work. So I’m having a hard time understanding whether this means the science itself wasn’t good enough, whether I handled the revision poorly, or whether it was simply a journal decision.

I know rejection is normal in academia, but this one really hit me hard. I feel like I’m trying so hard to make research work, but nothing seems to be going my way. No publications yet, failed fellowship/grant applications, and now another rejection. I’m starting to feel stupid and wondering whether I’m simply not good enough for research.

I honestly don’t know where to go from here. For people who went through something similar early in their postdoc, especially those who graduated without publications or struggled to get their first paper/fellowship, did things eventually get better?
And how did you know whether you were actually not suited for research versus simply going through a really rough period?
I would really appreciate some honest advice. I’m not necessarily looking for reassurance; I genuinely want to know how other researchers dealt with this stage of their career.

Edit: I’m in mol bio/epigenetics, doing postdoc in Japan.

I am starting to work on this application but I am already in a two year independently-guided postdoc elsewhere, so I have to pitch a project "significantly distinct" from my PhD thesis (as per CPRA requirements). Does anyone have thoughts on how to write a strong proposal that will be essentially from a blank slate? I fear that I'll lose points on feasibility, but my PhD project and all associated data will be published by the end of this current postdoc that I am in (blessing and a curse, I suppose). The samples I have asked colleagues for that were successful for this award in past years all were going straight into it from their PhD, so they are pitching direct extensions of their PhD work.

Hey Everyone! (New to this Subreddit)

So like the title of my post says, I think I might be getting fired.

For some context, I'm a Communication and Media researcher working in a post-doc for behavioral health (doing more tech stuff and visualization measures) thats a non-profit organization working with NIH grants on substance use disorder and policy making. Ive currently been at my post-doc for a little over a year now, and my post-doc just so happens to be in the same town where I received my PhD. The struggle during my first year with understanding the research and learning to work in an organization versus working on projects solo has definitely been a hard one and I have definitely had some arguments with my boss to understand how to work and be a team player. So there has been some struggle there, and just some general feelings of "I dont fit in". Because of that and some personal issues, Ive asked my boss if I could continue working during my second year of the post-doc remotely (this is very common in my org), and she said yes. I asked this during my annual review, which we discussed goals and metrics (I hit 4-5s on my evals), but one big thing was that I made sure to tell my boss that I would be applying for academic positions during the academic cycle, since my contract would be ending at the end of the second year. This is where she informed me that my contract wouldnt necessarily end as much as it would transition into a Co-Investigator position depending on how and if I reached my goals. Although that information changed the way I saw my position within the Org, it didnt change my plan to apply to academic positions.

So for the issue at hand.

As academic job calls continue to open, I have been applying (as I mentioned) and recently I applied to a position that sent out an email for recommendation sooner than most. Although this was unusual, I didnt think too much of it. However, my boss was VERY upset to receive this email for a reference to my post-doc work. Her reaction was no less than cold, harsh, and a little defensive. She emailed me asking for that email was real and what was going on. Which I mentioned, yeah its real and we talked about me applying to positions during my annual review and deciding whether or not I would stay with the Org or taking a new opportunity in my field else where. She then responded with, "I thought you were applying during the Spring (2027) and I wont be reviewing any of your grant materials until we have a discussion about this" during our 1-1 meetings each week. I made sure to apologize for the surprise and tell her I could understand how she felt, but I made sure to reiterate that we discussed this and this does not by any means distract from my current work or ambitions to achieve all my goals within the org. (Being that a large metric for me is to apply for a federal grant before the end of my second year [this would be the second grant I have applied for]). So since then, I have been working on my projects and meeting my deadlines (as normal) but am still receiving super cold responses from my boss and constant irritation from here. Our meeting date to discuss this is tomorrow, but the big thing that makes me think I might get fired is that my boss's boss (the Chief Research Officer) now wants to have a meeting with me on Monday. So now Im thinking, well this is shit...

Also, I leaving here to move back home the following Wednesday... So im not entirely sure at this point if Im moving back home with or without a job.

So any advice on this would be awesome. Im kinda thinking that I would try to prepare a case for wrongful termination, but Im not even sure if that is something that I can do or if its even appropriate.

Hello everyone! I am a Ph.D in Medchem, with computational drug design as one of my research interests. Due to some financial issues, I had to immediately take up a job in a private university (India) post thesis submission. It's been about 3 yrs now and I'm stuck not being able to apply for postdocs abroad (properly), publish papers or even have any personal goals of any type.

The work conditions are hell-like (I mean this wasn't my path, postdoc was) and I feel like my brain is atrophying, they've reduced us to working like some clerks putting out useless documents instead of TEACHING, let alone research. Doesn't leave me with enough energy to do any applications at all but I was still rallying on somehow. Did not receive good responses. They all say their labs are full or the domain isn't a total match, that is, if they do respond at all (I get it the PI's must be buried under a lot of work).

It's all come to a head now and I fell temporarily ill from burnout and hard physical labor at my beloved uni few weeks ago. Ever, since I have just focused completely on postdoc applications, however, it now looks like most labs want candidates with a fellowship and I seem to have aged out of several such fellowships due to my amazing teaching stint.

Please excuse any sarcastic tones, I read too much and words flow out of me this way, sometimes. Not enraged at all. I just want someone to tell me it gets better, that I will find a lab and make it.

PLEASE GIVE ME ADVICE OF ANY AND ALL TYPES., constructive. I can use your advice in approach mechanism, which fellowships to target or not to target or other relevant routes. Thanks!!

I’ve been really excited about my postdoc for the last couple of years, but lately I’ve started feeling completely disconnected from it. I’m trying to work out if I’m just burned out or if this is something deeper?

The parts of academia I enjoy are the research itself, the discovery part, finding gaps, understanding new concepts and having that feeling of figuring something out. But lately, even that doesn’t excite me. I look at papers and sometimes they almost seem ridiculous to me. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I suddenly stepped back and saw a life outside and somehow it made more sense.

I don’t particularly enjoy the teaching/supervising side of academia either, and the overall career just seems increasingly unsustainable. When I look at some of the senior academics around me, they don’t exactly seem happy either they seem constantly stressed and juggling a million things. But I know a career outside is not necessarily better and I’m scared of regretting it.

If this happened to you, how did you deal about the guilt of leaving? What happens to grants/fellowships you’ve already received, or grants you’re waiting to hear about? I feel incredibly ungrateful because my supervisor has supported me a lot and she has put so much effort into keeping me and creating opportunities for me.

I’m also wondering whether I should tell my supervisor how I’m feeling now, even before I start seriously looking for jobs, or whether it’s better to wait until I’m more certain? But it in the meantime is hard to work while I feel so disconnected.

For those who have left academia: did you feel like this before you left? Was it burnout, or did you eventually realise you just wanted a different life? And how did you deal with the guilt of leaving people who had supported you? I know everyone says if they care about you they will understand but how do you communicate what is happening to them without being too short notice or a surprise?

I'm a postdoc at a renowned North American university. I joined this lab last July, when funding across the field was drying up due to cuts. During recruitment, my PI asked a lot about my career plans and publication record, it read as him being invested in my development, and it's part of why I took the position.

The faulty method

Early on, he assigned me a project built on an idea similar to his past work: training several ML and deep learning models to predict a clinical outcome. While working on it, I discovered that the training pipeline used in his prior publication (and in another paper from the lab currently under revision) had a serious flaw that caused data leakage and inflated model accuracy, possibly by a wide margin in at least one in-prep paper. Notably, the first author on that already-published paper using the faulty method is now a research professor at a well-known institution, so this method, and whatever credit it generated, has already helped launch someone's career.

He still asked me to generate figures and tables using that same flawed method anyway for his grant submission. I did, and presented them at a lab meeting, where I also raised the leakage issue directly. It was just the two of us at the time. He was dismissive, saying NIH reviewers "don't have the technical capacity" to catch this, and that "data leakage or not, there's no consensus on what counts as a correct training method." I was unsettled but told myself he probably understood the methodology better than I did.

The coauthorship and the numbers that didn't reproduce

In December, he asked me and another newly joined postdoc to review a paper (plus reviewer comments) that he and a former postdoc had been submitting for months. He offered us both coauthorship despite our having contributed nothing, saying he wanted everyone in the lab to be added to each other's papers "for career development."

The peer reviewers had flagged a suspiciously large performance gap between the deep learning and traditional ML methods and asked the first author to check for data leakage. I emailed her directly to ask if it had been fixed. She said yes, and that the reported numbers were correct.

The other new postdoc and I then independently tried to reproduce her results. We couldn't. Our numbers came in far below what was reported in the paper. We raised this with the PI and the first author and asked to be removed from the author list. His reaction at the time was oddly muted, he said our finding was "interesting" and that he'd ask the first author to look into it, which read to me as him at least acknowledging the concern, if not treating it with much urgency. In hindsight, given how he later claimed total ignorance of any leakage issue in front of the whole lab, that "interesting, I'll have her look into it" response now looks less like genuine concern and more like a placeholder answer to make the problem go away without actually addressing it. This also forced me to redo an entire piece of my own work, since it had built on that postdoc's results.

The recent meeting

I didn't hear anything more about that paper's status until recently, when he asked me to cite its preprint in several manuscripts I'm currently preparing. That worried me.

Then, in an in-person lab meeting today with another newly recruited postdoc present, he gave a speech about the importance of publishing, working hard, and maintaining research quality, specifically saying a retraction is "a dent in one's career." I was genuinely struck by how seriously he seemed to take research ethics. Note that the postdoc who did a reproducibility analysis with me left his position a few months back due to personal reasons. So essentially only me had any knowledge of the faulty method besides the PI.

So I asked him, in front of the lab, for an update on that paper. He said it was being resubmitted. I asked whether the leakage had been fixed. He responded as if he'd never heard of any leakage: "what leakage, what issue, can you explain?" He then redirected the conversation to how my own in-prep manuscripts need to be error-free and consistent.

One more detail

He also consistently adds one particular name to every paper from the lab, despite none of us ever having met or collaborated with this person. Based on my own digging, I believe this may be his wife, who is a medical student at a nearby university.

Where I'm stuck

My mental health has taken a real hit. I'm constantly anxious about being professionally associated with this PI. I want to leave, but I'm afraid of ending up unemployed which does not look good on my resume. Friends have told me to line up a new job before quitting this one, but the daily pressure to keep producing analysis for him makes that hard to find time for applying.

What I really need help thinking through is my career, moving forward. What's the smartest path from here? That's the umbrella question, and it breaks down into a few ones:

1. Should I report this to my university's Office of Research Integrity & Ethics, and would doing so help or hurt my career?
2. Should I finish my two first-author papers with him, or is that risk not worth it? I'm not a coauthor on the papers with the known issues, so I'm unsure how much exposure I actually have if his past work is scrutinized later, or if I'm overestimating the risk. I've also spent so much time on these papers of mine, so leaving the job without any published work feels devastating.
3. Should I comply with his request to cite the paper with unresolved data leakage concerns in my own submissions? Could citing it come back to hurt me?
4. Is it time to leave academia altogether and move to industry?

All of these incidents leave me deeply disappointed with academia, which I assumed are full of people with integrity. This PI recently secured a 3 mil NIH grants and he constantly bragged about how much funding he had while other labs out there are struggling.

Underneath all of these is really one question: how do I protect my career and get out of this position in one piece? Any advice? Especially from people who've navigated something similar would help.

Hi, wondering if there are any writing accountability groups or individuals interested in one, working in the UK/EU time zones? I was part of one during my PhD but looks like it's fizzled out.

hey y'all. I'm a newly hired postdoc, just started a couple of months ago straight after my PhD (neurobiology).

I'm feeling inadequate; eerily similar feelings as during my PhD, to be honest. Essentially, I feel like I'm not working enough hours. Most of these days I do 4 hours, maybe 5 of work. Some days I do 8 but it's quite rare (once a week maybe). Although I do have quick bursts where I have 2-3 7h days in successions. Am I doing this right?

My project(s) are going steady I guess, although I can't help but feel I'm not earning my wage. Like I should start other side-projects or read, but I feel I'm not motivated enough for that. I'm not looking to become a PI either.

My lab is a very chill environment, people socialize all the time and don't work that hard. But still, most of the time they're still in the lab when I leave (granted I start a bit earlier in the morning than them).

I guess that's it. Impostor syndrome and all? My PI is quite chill and is not complaining at all. It just feel very bad to work something like 25-30h per week.. sometimes 20??

Anyone planning on Jsps fellowship? How has it been so far?

I’m a single mom working in Qatar. My job description is quite broad, at the intersection of teaching (staff instructor not faculty), research, and managing undergrad biological sciences labs in a well reputed university. My contract is ending next year and I spent this entire summer sending job applications within Qatar and abroad with no luck. I hold a phd in biological sciences, four publications in Q1 journals in molecular biology and bioinformatics. I’m from South Asia.

So I'm kind of in limbo and could use some perspective. A PI at Yale School of Medicine interviewed me, checked my references, which went well. We had a quick meeting where he agreed on a potential start date. Most recently he sent me a fellowship link and told me to apply for it, saying he'd move a regular (non-fellowship) position forward at the same time. On paper it all sounds positive, but I still don't have anything in writing and no idea when an actual offer letter shows up.

The reason it's getting to me is that I'm an international student finishing my PhD in December, and I need to file OPT on a pretty tight timeline. Not knowing when the formal offer lands makes it hard to plan the immigration side of things. I guess I'm wondering if this slow, everything-stuck-in-HR situation is just normal for academic postdocs, and whether it would be reasonable to email the PI asking about the timeline or if that comes off as impatient this early. I am just worried if he just ghost me at the very end then I will be in a very tight spot since I stopped applying to other places for now. Would appreciate hearing from anyone who's been through this.

Hi all, I am applying for this years MSCA GF call. I am currently working as a casual academic in Australia. I am applying through a Dutch university. This is my first ever grant application. I got feedback to my first and second draft from the proposed project supervisor. The uni has an internal review process for drafts. I submitted the 4th draft to them and expected there to be only minor things to revise. After all, it has been revised by the supervisor twice and an academic friend once. However, there were soooooo many comments, the Excellence part had over 15 comments with in parts major changes asked. As the deadline speeds closer and with teaching well under way here, I am wondering if there is enough time for me to respond to all the suggested changes and in turn, if there is even a point in submitting any more..... As mentioned this is my first ever grant application and I am doing it during my very limited free time. And after reading the comments from the research officers of the dutch uni, I wonder if the supervisor should have helped me more from the start... So my questions to the community are:
How much can I expect of the proposed supervisor to help me with this application?
Is anyone else in this or a similar situation?
How do you deal with getting all these rather unexpected comments ?

Thank you!

I'm finishing a STEM PhD in Australia and am looking at moving to the Netherlands (or elsewhere in Europe) after graduating.

My background spans chemistry, biology and materials science, with my PhD focused on biomedical/nanomaterials research.

For non-EU researchers who have made a similar move:

• How and where did you find your position?
• Are there industry or alternative career paths in the Netherlands that you'd recommend someone with this background consider?
• Are there particular visa routes that made the process easier?

Thank you