Avenues and Strategies for Attracting Students to a New Lab

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You have gone through years of training, landed a grant to start your own lab at your dream university, and now you are standing in an empty lab space full of equipment thinking, “Wow! Now I actually need to hire people to help me do science.” Given it is conference season (we had an amazing Plant Biology 2026 in Ottawa, Canada this year!), you would have seen the familiar routine play out: new PIs chatting with potential students at the poster sessions, keeping their lab websites polished in case someone follows up, or posting on the old and trusted job portals. These still matter, and they always will. But using them well is harder than it sounds, because as scientists, we are trained to meticulously test our hypotheses, but nobody trains us in the intricacies of running our own lab. A lab is essentially a small-scale startup, and recruiting is one of the places that the gap shows up most.

For a new PI, the recruiting challenge is amplified. You do not yet have a track record, lab alumni to vouch for you, or a two-decade publication trail that speaks for itself. What you do have is direct access to your own thinking and the freedom to be visible in ways established labs often are not. Plantae’s own Setting Up a New Lab: PI Perspectives series gives a good sense of how varied that early experience can be, and the Transition from Postdoc to PI: Building a team blog post is a candid look at recruiting from the PI’s point of view. The good news is a set of newer avenues has opened up to attract students, and plant biologists are already using them well. Across all of them, the labs that consistently attract the right students, whether undergraduates, graduate students, or postdocs, seem to have quietly figured out the same underlying principle, which I will come back to at the end.

 

Use course-based research experiences to hire undergraduates

Take undergraduates first. Most of them never make it into a research lab, not because they lack interest, but because there is no obvious way to get into one. Not everyone has the knowledge or the courage to cold-email PIs to ask them if they could join their labs. That filters out an enormous number of students who would have thrived at the bench if only they had gotten through the door. Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) have quietly become one of the best fixes for this: embed a real open-ended research question into a regular course, and suddenly the lab is reaching students who would have never applied on their own. The evidence backing CUREs is now substantial, with studies showing they broaden participation and improve research-related outcomes for students who might otherwise never enter a lab (Auchincloss et al., 2014; Bangera & Brownell, 2014). And they work especially well for new PIs, because a CURE can be built into the very courses you are likely being asked to teach as a junior faculty member.

I have seen this play out firsthand. At the University of Pittsburgh, Cara Haney teaches a CURE-based undergraduate course that introduces students to the world of plant-microbe interactions, and the result is a steady stream of undergrads asking to join the lab after taking that class. At Tennessee State University, Sonali Roy uses her CURE, Introduction to Genome Editing with CRISPR-Cas9, to draw undergraduates from underrepresented backgrounds into gene editing – an audience that traditional recruiting channels rarely reach. Both examples point to the same thing: a well-designed CURE brings students to your bench who would never have arrived any other way.

 

Meet them in the room, and then meet them online

For graduate students and postdocs, the traditional recruiting circuit of conferences, seminars, and hallway conversations still matters. But by the time a prospective trainee is sitting in your seminar, they’ve almost certainly already formed an impression of your lab from what they have encountered digitally – be it your lab website or maybe the recordings of your past talks. The seminar now confirms an impression rather than creating one.

Beyond your own institution’s seminar series, teaching short intensive courses can pay real recruiting dividends. Programs like the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) summer courses, the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) workshops at Woods Hole, and EMBO practical courses put you in front of a small group of highly motivated graduate students and postdocs for one to two weeks. Unlike a conference talk where you speak for an hour and never see the audience again, in these courses you eat meals with the students, help them troubleshoot at the bench, and get to know their scientific interests in depth. Anecdotally, it is one of the higher-conversion recruiting formats available, and course directors are often looking for new PIs to teach. That is why building a visible, credible digital presence matters more for new PIs than it used to: the students you meet in a workshop, or the ones sitting in your seminar, will almost certainly Google you afterwards.

 

Show the good, the bad, and the ugly, not just the results

Beyond the seminar and the short course, the digital avenues for showing who you are as a scientist span a wide range of effort, from very low to substantial. You do not have to try all of them, but each gives prospective students a different window into your lab. The most reachable form of digital presence is the one you are going to build anyway: your lab website. But do not settle for a website that just gives the gist of your research! Take a look at Min Ya’s lab site at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or Tatsuya Nobori’s lab site at The Sainsbury Laboratory. These read like a person, not a template, mixing scientific content with personality and voice in a way most lab websites do not. That is a digital brand doing recruiting work quietly, on a page most of us end up building regardless.

Social media, when done thoughtfully, extends this in a much smaller-format way. Chenxin Li, an Assistant Professor at Michigan State, posts regularly on Bluesky about the everyday humdrums of running a lab: the wins, his endless pursuits with cloning, the odd observation that turns into a real question, the failed experiment that finally worked on the fourth try. It is not polished lab-marketing content; it is someone letting you watch science actually happen. For a prospective student trying to figure out what a lab is really like day to day, that kind of running commentary is genuinely useful in a way that a lab website, however good, simply cannot be. And it takes only a few minutes a week to build.

Longer-form writing does something similar with more depth. Sophien Kamoun at The Sainsbury Laboratory has built an enormous reach simply by writing prolifically outside his papers, blogging and posting regularly about open science, publishing practices, career advice, and the everyday reality of running a group. The effect is that a much wider set of people encounter his thinking than would ever read his primary literature, many of them exactly the kind of students weighing where to apply. A new PI does not need Kamoun’s audience to make this work; a single honest blog post about the process of setting up a lab can do more recruiting than a polished website ever will.

At the more ambitious end of this spectrum are podcasts. To be clear, I am not suggesting every new PI should go and start one. Not everyone can, and not everyone should. But for the new PI drawn to the format, the payoff is real! The Taproot, run by Elizabeth Haswell and Ivan Baxter as a Plantae podcast, has been doing this for years: they explicitly dig into the struggles behind the science, the false starts, the career pivots, the mentoring headaches, the kind of things scientists never put in a manuscript. Newer entries like Arif Ashraf’s No Time To Read take a slightly different angle, focusing each episode on a conversation with the lead or corresponding author of a recent paper about the story behind it, the kind of context you would never get from reading the paper itself. What both formats do, without ever calling it recruiting, is let prospective students hear how a scientist actually thinks and talks, unscripted, before an application exists. That is more informative about lab culture than any “About the PI” page can be. And you do not even need to host your own; being a guest on someone else’s podcast puts you in front of the same audience with much less setup.

 

Show the human behind the scientist, not just the science

If you look across CUREs, Min Ya and Tatsuya’s lab websites, Chenxin Li’s Bluesky feed, Sophien Kamoun’s writing, and podcasts like The Taproot and No Time To Read, none of it looks like a recruitment strategy in the conventional sense. Nobody sets out to fill a rotation slot with a podcast episode or a Bluesky post about a failed western blot. But they are all doing the same thing, and that thing is the piece I promised to come back to: they’re showing the real human being behind the scientist, not just the science. Prospective students are ultimately trying to answer a question no highlight reel can address: what does it actually feel like to work in this lab, and is it safe to struggle here? In their essay on becoming a principal investigator, Barr and colleagues put it plainly: one of the best recruitment strategies a new PI has is simply being a good mentor with a real interest in trainee success (Barr et al., 2019). Students and postdocs talk to each other, and that word gets around – and real data is showing that engaged mentorship at the postdoc level directly shapes graduate student outcomes (Feldon et al., 2019). The scientists who let people see the whole picture, the failures alongside the wins, the person alongside the CV, tend to attract applicants who already trust them before ever walking through the door.

None of these strategies replace the website, the job ad, or the listserv posting. Those still bring people to your door. What the newer avenues do is decide which people knock and come in.

 

References:

  • Auchincloss, L. C., et al. (2014). Assessment of course-based undergraduate research experiences: A meeting report. CBE–Life Sciences Education, 13(1), 29-40.
  • Bangera, G., & Brownell, S. E. (2014). Course-based undergraduate research experiences can make scientific research more inclusive. CBE–Life Sciences Education, 13(4), 602–606.
  • Barr, D. A., et al. (2019). Becoming a principal investigator: Designing and navigating your academic adventure. Molecular Cell, 76(6), 875–880.
  • Feldon, D. F., Litson, K., Jeong, S., Blaney, J. M., Kang, J., Miller, C., Griffin, K., & Roksa, J. (2019). Postdocs’ lab engagement predicts trajectories of PhD students’ skill development. PNAS, 116(42), 20910–20916.
  • Plantae (2018). The Transition from Postdoc to PI: Part 4 – Building a team
  • Plantae (2023). Setting Up a New Lab: PI Perspectives

 

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About the Author

Aditi Bhat

Aditi is a postdoctoral researcher in Cara Haney’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh with a deep fascination for how plants sense and respond to the world around them. Her current work explores how receptor-like kinases orchestrate rhizosphere microbiome composition in Arabidopsis. Trained as a root biologist at Penn State, where she studied mechanical stress perception, she has steadily followed the question of how plants integrate complex environmental signals. When she’s not in the lab, she’s out exploring – new cities, new trails, new meals, and plenty of photos to prove it.  Find her on X: @jumpy_botanist | Bluesky: @jumpy-botanist.bsky.social.