career development

My Mom did all the great 'Mom' things and was also instrumental in my career choice. After I started grade school, she started feeling out a career in nursing by working as a secretary in the emergency room department of a local hospital. She decided to go to nursing school when I was between 9 and 11 and I remember that her medical books - texts on physiology and pharmacology - began to pique my interest in this field. Her dinnertime recollections of the previous night's ER happenings engrossed me, but simply grossed out my father. As I grew to have a family of my own, I became even more…
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, November 30, 2006 CONTACT: NIH News Media Branch, 301-496-5787 NIH ANNOUNCES MORE THAN 50 AWARDS IN THE PATHWAY TO INDEPENDENCE PROGRAM Five-Year Grants Foster Transition to Research Independence Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, today named 58 recipients of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award. The Pathway to Independence Program, announced in January of this year, offers a new opportunity for promising postdoctoral scientists to receive both mentored and independent research support from the same award. "New…
Medscape Pharmacists has a great article up by Jacqueline Kostwick on modern options for a careers in pharmacy (free reg required). The article is directed toward already-practicing pharmacists who are looking to move within the profession, but it is also a great primer for the prospective student. For those of you who think that pharmacy practice in the US simply involves, "count, lick, and stick," like you see at your local community pharmacy, you would be wrong. Indeed, 61% of graduates still end up in community pharmacy, usually at chain drug stores, but the conversion of the entry-level…
Dr Bruce Alberts, recently departed president of the US National Academy of Sciences and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF, just spoke this morning at a symposium celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Duke University School of Medicine. The overall program is incredible, with four Nobel laureates in three days, plus a number of Lasker Award winners including one of this year's (Linda Grieder). I'm compelled to put up this quick post on Dr Alberts' talk because of his ambitious plan for improving scientific literacy of the US and the scientific prospects for grad students and…
My ScienceBlogs.com colleague, Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript, has just posted on the announcement of a 3rd major San Diego/La Jolla research institute with plans to establish a presence in Florida. Current issues of Roman numeral mixups notwithstanding, Florida has been very quietly rising on the national biomedical research scene, especially in the years since your humble Pharmboy stomped terra in Hogtown. I discussed this issue about two weeks ago here at Terra Sigillata. Therein, you'll find lots of good links to Florida research universities big and small and some editorial…
SciBlings Alex Palazzo (The Daily Transcript) and Mike the Mad Biologist have both held forth recently on Robert Weinberg's editorial in Cell. Weinberg, one of the big daddies of early oncogene research and mentor to some of the best cancer researchers of my generation, expressed his fears that the US investment in training biomedical researchers in the 1990s is going to waste as these trainees move through postdocs and toward faculty positions that simply do not exist. The problem: so-called "Big Biology" initiatives and failure to protect the basic mechanisms of investigator-initiated…
I've gotten a few raised eyebrows this week as to why a modestly-compensated, mid-career cancer researcher would choose to (or could afford) to vacation in Aspen, Colorado. I'll have more to say about this, but just one example of why this is such a worthwhile place to visit comes from my 2 hours yesterday at a free Aspen Institute lecture listening to financier, venture philanthropist, and prostate cancer survivor, Michael Milken, talk about how to revolutionize the pace of scientific discovery and implementation of medical innovations. Many people remember Mr Milken incorrectly, or at…
Well, you know my answer when you see that I am more than a week late with this post on the 15 June question. How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically? Priorities shuffle in relation to time demands, so the last two weeks of grant review have taken priority over substantive blogging, including answering the last two AASB questions. However, this question really gets to the reason that one blogs, given that there are so many interests competing for the time of all…
So, as a Sb newbie, I'm just figuring out the scheduling around here and saw that tomorrow's new 'Ask A ScienceBlogger' question has already been posted. Hence, I figured I should probably answer last week's question: Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why? My SiBlings all took different approaches on this one, with some finding it a poor question because we already probably put a lot of thought into what we're working on now and stay in that area because we love it so much. I took…