News

Maria Leptin, director of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and visiting professor at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, led a series of workshops on grant writing on November 1st, 2018.

Over the course of the day, around 60 Dunn School students and postdocs attended different workshops centred around applying for grants and fellowships for the two major career transitions in an academic career: research fellowships for graduate students moving onto postdoctoral positions, and grants for postdocs looking to become independent group leaders.

In each section, Maria gave a brief introduction drawing from her own experience before moving on to answer questions that had been submitted beforehand, or directly from the audience. As the director of EMBO, a major source of funding for life scientists in Europe, Maria was able to share some of her insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the application processes for fellowships and grants. In addition, she gave some advice to early-career scientists in the room, on topics ranging from how to choose a research area or location for a first postdoc, to how a group leader can attract talented PhD students and postdocs.

“I really liked the rather informal workshop,” said Dr. Marcin Suskiewicz, a new postdoc in Ivan Ahel’s lab. “She spoke about her experience of simultaneously being a young parent and an early-career scientist, which is directly relevant for me now, and she definitely knows a lot about all the steps of the scientific career not only by having gone this path herself, but also by accompanying many people on the way.”

After the workshops, Maria had lunch with a small group of participants, and a selected group of postdocs were able to have short one-on-one sessions with Maria to discuss on going grant applications. The day included a coffee and tea break open to everyone in the department and ended on a relaxed note with drinks at a local pub in the evening.

The day was organised by a group of volunteers made up of students and postdocs, which included: Rebecca Moore (Sattentau lab), Sonia Muliyil (Freeman lab), Anna Caballe (Raff lab), Heather Jeffery (Nieduszynski lab), Philipp Kruger (Dushek lab) and Derek Xu (Baena-Lopez lab). The event was supported by the Dunn School Postdoc and Graduate Student Associations (PDA and GSA) and was sponsored by Bio-techne, Geneflow, Lonza, and Biolegend.

Written by Derek Xu (@derekcxu)