Life as an Imperial postdoctoral researcher

by

Dr Claire Morgan

Dr Claire Morgan is a postdoc in the Department of Medicine and part of a network of postdoc reps supported by Imperial's Postdoc Development Centre

Firstly Claire, tell me about your own research work at Imperial

Well I joined the College in March 2013 and I’ve actually had two postdoctoral contracts on different projects. The first was looking at heart regeneration. If you have a heart attack, cardiac cells get injured and die and basically can’t regrow again. However, baby mice within the first week of life can fully repair their cardiac tissue after a heart attack, and my job was to analyse and interpret next generation sequencing data to understand the genetic processes involved. There seems to be a feedback loop at play, where increased blood pressure after seven days tells the cells to stop regenerating. If you can tell that pathway to do something different it might help the cells get going again and regenerate – forming the basis of potential therapy.

Claire works as a computation scientist in the Beta Cell Genome Regulation Lab, headed by Professor Jorge Ferrer (pictured)

Claire works as a computation scientist in the Beta Cell Genome Regulation Lab, headed by Professor Jorge Ferrer (pictured)

The project I’m currently working on is also in molecular genetics, but focussed on Type II Diabetes, using genetic evolutionary methods to understand the disease. Type II Diabetes is in many ways a modern disease that has arisen in an environment in which we have an abundant food supply. In the past, populations went through multiple famines and so it was beneficial have mutations that would allow more insulin be released in the body to maximise storage of surplus energy. So an evolutionary approach can really help unpick the etiology.

What is life like as a postdoc?

It’s exciting, especially at somewhere like Imperial which has all the latest genome sequencing technologies. But its hard work and stressful at times – as in any institution. Contracts are for a fixed period and you have to publish in that time. It’s not a career as such, it’s this intermediate period – similar to medical doctors doing electives. On top of that you have to decide whether you are going to continue in research, given everything you’ve put into your PhD and postdoc. It’s very hard to ask yourself a) ‘do I have the energy to keep going on this path?’ and b) ‘is it ok if I step off this path and do something different?’ It can be tough.

So it benefits to have a network of representatives?

Yes, we provide support in the form of practical workshops for topics like CV writing, but also the community aspect and just talking to each other. The reps are spread across all College departments and encourage the personal and professional development of their peers and act as a conduit for information from and to the Postdoc Development Centre (PDC).

How and why did you get involved?

Claire scooped top prize at the inagural PDC Reps Awards

Claire scooped top prize at the inagural PDC Reps Awards(pictured with Imperial's Provost)

I’ve always been involved with these sorts of things – I chaired the Biological Research Society as a postgraduate in Dublin and I’ve been involved in Medical Research Council (MRC) committees in the past. Dr Karen Hinxman (PDC Consultant) cornered me after a PDC workshop and asked me to be a rep for my Department, at that time the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI). But it became clear to me that it didn’t make sense to work independently as reps for each individual department – say Medicine, NHLI, and Surgery & Cancer – when many of us work here together at the Hammersmith Campus, often on the same floor of the building. So I helped co-ordinate our Hammersmith reps network and worked alongside the other departmental reps to write funding applications for networking events and workshops.

Tell us more about those workshops?

One of our first events, around a year ago now, was a non-academic CV workshop with three or four speakers, who were former postdocs who had gone into non-research jobs. The nice thing was that we had a speaker from Nature and one of the postdocs was inspired by the talk. A year on, she has also now gone to work at Nature, and then came back to Imperial to give the talk herself this year. That’s a nice circular story and I like to think we played a small but important role in influencing her decision.

The most recent workshop was titled ‘Thinking about a baby,’ which was rather different from the usual programme. Postdocs are generally over 28 and under 40 years and 50% are women, and so clearly it’s an important time in life to think about that decision – yet the temporary contracts and relatively low pay (compared with say lawyers or city workers) mean many dismiss it out of hand. We ran a two hour workshop with a number of speakers including women and men who had had children as postdocs and continued successfully with their research careers. There was also a HR professional who talked about legal rights, while Dr Liz Elvidge (Head of the PDC) came in to talk about special grants and schemes that are available and how to tweak fellowship applications to allow for maternity leave.

I think that we took a small step towards a greater level of openness about the topic. The truth is that this is a ‘hushed’ subject in the scientific profession at large. You will still hear people saying: ‘if you want to take your career seriously, you must put children on hold indefinitely’. We have to challenge that thinking.

What next for the Hammersmith reps network … and yourself?

We are going to set up a research day next summer, which we hope will be a big help for technical networking. We work in this campus together but there are actually few opportunities to really understand what other work people are doing and how they are doing it. They’ll be posters and prizes to help promote this, but also discussion and time for technical questions. I’m hoping it will get people talking, you might get someone saying: ‘I see you’re using microRNAs in this cell line and this disease, well I’m doing it for this disease - how are you getting it to work?’

As for myself, I have applied unsuccessfully for a number of fellowships, but for the moment I have a lot of papers to publish from seven different research projects so that is my main focus. Also, I’ve been invited to Peru in January to do a week of teaching at an EMBO course on ‘phylogenetics in the omics era’, which is basically large scale construction of species and gene relationships using big data. I am really looking forward to nerding out on this!

Reporter

Andrew Czyzewski

Andrew Czyzewski
Communications Division

Click to expand or contract

Contact details

Email: press.office@imperial.ac.uk
Show all stories by this author

Comments

Comments are loading...

Leave a comment

Your comment may be published, displaying your name as you provide it, unless you request otherwise. Your contact details will never be published.