I am excited to serve as a guest blogger for Bio Careers. Please allow me to introduce myself - my name is Meghan Mott, and I am a postdoctoral fellow at NIH. I work in the Laboratory of Molecular Physiology at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Our lab uses zebrafish to model synapse development and function. Specifically, I study the role of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction.
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Recently, I consoled a fellow postdoc during her latest crisis. Her problem was not that her PCR primers didn’t work or that her paper just got rejected for the 5th time. No, her problem was that she was a single mother of two adorable girls, and one of them was sick with a fever. Therefore, baby girl couldn’t go to daycare, and my postdoc friend needed to cancel a meeting with some very important people with whom it had taken months to schedule.
In the anxious era of government budget cutbacks, everything is on the table: federal employee salaries have been frozen; postdoctoral fellow contracts have not been renewed; research projects have been scaled back; and my travel funds have been cut by 33%. Yet, at the NIH, we persevere, doing the best research in hopes of bettering the nation’s health.
My roommate recently regaled me with tales from her pharmaceutical company’s holiday party, complete with lots of food and booze and entertainment. I was rather envious at the time because I was busy making baked goods for my office’s potluck holiday party.
There’s a joke in the research world that you don’t submit a research proposal to NIH until you’ve already done the research. When I was a rookie in the biomedical research world, and I was told this cinema vérité version of things, I thought in typical naïveté, ‘but how do you actually fund the research?’ But, as with all jokes that don’t sink in at first, some experience paved the way for understanding upon a future re-telling.
As a Cancer Prevention Fellow at the NCI, I have a generous $3000 “travel and training budget” for attending conferences to present research results, taking training and academic courses, as well as purchasing textbooks that are pertinent to my research. Many labs or research groups at the NIH provide funding to their postdoctoral fellows for similar purposes.
Do you ever complain that NIH is just a bunch of bureaucrats that don’t really understand what it is like in academia? Do you wish that you had the opportunity to speak your mind to some of those bureaucrats to let them know how things should be?
Well, here (from now until October 7) is your opportunity to do just that!
The NIH Career symposium was held this month on the Bethesda NIH campus. The 4th annual career symposium has covered all the possible career areas for fellows including Faculty careers, careers in science education, careers in science policy, research in industry, career options for clinicians, consulting careers, the business of science, science communication careers etc. During the meeting, I found lots of useful websites to share with you to start job searching.
Despite the progressively louder tick of the biological clock, many scientists are unwilling to allow a pregnancy or a newborn slow them down during the high-stakes years of a postdoctoral fellowship. Besides, the meager stipends and sometimes limited health benefits combined with the wrath of lab mentors are hardly motivators for starting a family.
Annually, NIH invests $31.2 billion in biomedical research for the health of the American people. Over 80% of that budget is awarded as competitive grants to the “extramural” world of research, including universities, medical schools, and other research organizations here in the US and abroad.
Approximately 10% of the NIH budget supports “intramural” research projects that are conducted by nearly 6,000 scientists at the NIH.
Who are all these scientists at the NIH?
