Rae Cho / Apr 2024
If you are looking for a postdoctoral position, please email Rae at ucho@email.unc.edu with a PDF describing your research experience/interests (no more than 2 pages), CV, and contact information for 3 references.
Most experiments don’t work (at least not as hoped). Design each experiment so that if it fails (and this is typically a technical rather than a biological failure) you can learn as much as possible. Include controls. Start with pilot experiments. Even differences between experimental and control samples that are real in one experiment may disappear in the next experiment – they were just statistical fluctuation.
Below are Rae’s previous labmates whom you can contact:
The Cho lab opened its doors in Jan 2024. Below is what I think is a fair assessement (advantages vs disadvantages) of joining a new lab. Source: this reddit post.
Advantages:
- If you play your cards right, you'll end up with a lot more responsibility early on. This can be a double-edged sword but you can get experience in things like grant/proposal writing early on, and interesting side-projects may end up being shoved off to you.
- Related to above - opportunity to assist PI with side work once you've got some skills and get some easy middle-author publications. You'll be doing stuff your PI might have been doing a few years ago, it's a chance to expand your skills outside of your direct PhD project/field.
- Depending on the nature of your PhD project, you can hit the ground running quickly if you follow on directly from your PI's postdoc work. Someone I know that was their PI's first student ended up with two first-author publications, plus a couple of middle-author publications, by the end of their second year as a result (and obviously with a lot of hard work from them, but having all systems set up, etc, definitely helped). (Rae: As of Apr 2024, there are two projects in the lab that are 60% and 30% complete. You will be able to publish much faster than your cohort. However, do note that (1) your sense of achievement could be less intense and (2) you may have fewer opportunities to truly challenge yourself. This may or may not matter depending on your goal.) Conversely if your PI is staking out a new research direction, you can spend a lot of your early years on fairly tedious work setting up experimental systems/generating reagents before you actually get any payoff. This was my experience, and the experience of a few other people that I knew. It isn't inherently a bad thing (it's probably better scientific training then having everything ready-to-go) but it does affect how competitive you'll be for awards and recognition during the early/middle phase of your PhD. Much easier to apply for awards and conference talks if you already have something resembling a body of work and first-author publications to show for the work you've done. Much harder when it's 'uh, we purified some protein I guess.'
Disadvantages:
- Difficult to judge them as a supervisor as you have no real baseline to compare them to. How long does it take them to graduate students? Do their students graduate with (good) papers, and if so, how many? You can compare their prior publication record (as a postdoc) to get a guide (i.e. did they get high-impact papers as a postdoc) but doing it yourself as a postdoc is different to doing it with students. You can sometimes get a ballpark about time-to-graduation, etc, from the department. Also, they'll be no students to tell you if they are a psychopath.
- Funding can be an issue, (Rae: At least for 3-4 years, money will not be an issue thanks to start-up fund from UNC and NIH K01 grant.) but supervisor-to-supervisor dependent - my supervisor is pretty well funded for his career stage (if anything, he needs to spend more money!) This obviously isn't always the case, I know labs that get by on small grants from philanthropic groups. Although funding shouldn't be the primary consideration for choosing a lab, it does directly affect your ability to do expensive, complicated experiments (and experience in these can often really help in getting a job or postdoc position later on).
- PI has limited mentorship experience. Some supervisors have trouble transitioning from being a postdoc to a PI, with associated responsibility and associated no-longer-being-in-the-lab. The lab management/people management thing is something that doesn't come naturally, especially for scientists, and it's something that some PIs struggle with.
- Lack of network, especially if your PI hasn't spent a significant period of time overseas.
- Generally a smaller lab, with the associated caveats that come with that - more attention from the PI, but fewer people to go to if you have problems. This can be mitigated somewhat if you're good at networking within your department.