Recent Posts

Gazing into the Crystal Ball: Next-Gen Careers

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Guest Post by Rob Last, Michigan State University, ASPB President. Co-authored by Laura Grapes, Bayer Crop Sciences, and Andrew Hanson, University of Florida. We continue the experiment of expanding participation in ASPB started with the last President’s Letter (http://bit.ly/SecuringFuturePl...).…

Fantastic Collaborations and How to Find Them

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Guest post by George Kantor, Senior Systems Scientist, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University This much is a truism: a successful career in any interdisciplinary field requires collaboration with people from different disciplines. It is more difficult to define what skills are needed to be…

Reflections on my move from academia to a startup

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Guest post by Christy Gault My interest in agricultural biotechnology began in an unlikely place. In an undergraduate Wetland Ecology course, we took a field trip to a small patch of wilderness in rural upstate New York. Canoeing past dense vegetation under a brilliant blue sky, I felt a sense of…

Know thyself: the guide to shaping your career trajectory

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How the power in knowing one's self can positively shape a happy and fruitful career-life trajectory Guest post by Emily Wrenbeck I was fortunate to have an excellent graduate school experience in the Chemical Engineering Department at Michigan State University. Under the mentorship of Tim Whitehead,…

Get the Ball Rolling! Applying and Interviewing for Careers in Industry

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Guest post by Guillaume Beaudoin, Scientist, Conagen Inc. About one year has gone by since I had begun seriously looking for a job to end my postdoctoral experience at the University of Florida. I had read all the doom and gloom: how the ratio of the number of faculty positions to PhDs is forever…

How come approaching questions knowing little helped my career a lot?

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Guest post by Ron Milo, Professor, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel https://www.weizmann.ac.il/pla... When I worked on analyzing biological networks I thought it was a disgrace I don’t know more about the relevant subject. Yet what we…

A new approach to graduate professional development; lessons learned from a leadership retreat

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If you had 48 free hours, what are the odds you’d spend them at a leadership retreat? Prior to my own experience I would have said “not likely”. After all, I’m a second-year graduate student with coursework, experiments, and TA responsibilities clamoring for my time. I’m also a member of the…

Synthetic Biology: Improving Photosynthesis

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Evidence suggests that crop breeding programs have not optimized photosynthesis making it an attractive target for improvement. The last few years have been an exciting time for photosynthesis research with several groundbreaking studies that have afforded huge advances in both our understanding of…

Zombie Donkeys and the Modern Science Ph.D. Degree

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By Andrew Hanson In George Orwell’s masterpiece ‘Animal Farm’ Benjamin the donkey tells the other animals "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey”. The point: history had hit him hard and often, so he could foresee outcomes. As a non-dead (zombie) academic donkey…