Postdoc Appreciation Week - NL
For many disciplines, conducting post-doctoral research is often essential to equip early-career researchers to become independent scientists. As a career position, being a ‘postdoc’ can be stimulating, as it offers generous time and autonomy to researchers to fully explore their potentials. However, it also comes with its own challenges. A recent challenge, for instance, regards the budget cuts in higher education in different countries including the Netherlands. This intensifies uncertainties inherent to this position—postdocs are at the forefront of being ‘cut’.
In practice, there is limited attention and discussion towards this and other challenges a postdoc faces, and postdocs often get different responses when they do voice career concerns: some might be discouraging (“but this [short contract] is the nature of a postdoc”, “it’s hard to do anything as long as universities do not offer permanent contracts to postdocs”, “but they [postdocs] know they have short contracts”), while others are more empowering (“it is the period when you can take time to develop and strengthen your research line”, “you have the freedom to explore”, “it offers you the chance to be focused”).
This discrepancy shows that people may hold different images towards postdocs: What does this position entail? What do we expect to get out of this position? And what are our strategies to keep this position relevant and attractive? Guided by these and related questions and in a series of interview-based short articles, we want to share “portraits of postdocs", painted by colleagues who work in different positions within or beyond universities and UMCs, including researchers, policy-advisers, managers, and scientific support staffs. By providing these diverse portraits, we hope to be a catalyst of potential opportunities and support that postdocs can lean on. We also hope to raise awareness on appreciating postdocs as valuable, important members of universities and UMCs, who deserve to be invested in.
Check out the articles here :
- Dr. Nathalie Hoekstra, Postdoc at the Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University.
- Dr. Julia van Heck, Postdoc at the Internal Medicine Department, Radboudumc.
- Dr. Noortje Janssen, Assistant Professor at the Behavioural Science Institute (BSI): Learning, Education and Development, Radboud University
- Prof. dr. Melanie Schiller, Professor at Department of Modern Languages and Cultures & Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Radboud University, member of Radboud Young Academy
- Dr. Martin Jaeger, postdoc and lab manager at the Department of Internal Medicine, Radboudumc
- Dr. Leonie Helder, Postdoctoral researcher at Internal Medicine Department, Radboudumc
- Arthur Willemsen, Business Manager at the Department of Medical BioSciences and the Department of Medical Neuroscience, Radboudumc
- Prof. dr. Cristian Gilissen, Research group leader, Genome Bioinformatics, Radboudumc
- Dr. Özlem Bulut, Researcher & Business Developer at InsectSense
- Dr. Branka Milivojevic, Data & AI Advisor, Nederlandse Spoorwegen
Activity background and contributors
Being part of the first nationwide Postdoc Appreciation Week NL, this activity is initiated by our member, Honghong Bai. Special thanks go to our colleagues Lisa Teufel, Sylvia Nauta, and Clasien Oomen from Radboud UMC, Chiat Cheong from Erasmus UMC, and the whole PAW_NL organizing team, for their invaluable feedback and support.