Being a post-doc means...

...you love science more than an income.

Sex discrimination in academia - Flanders edition

This is a very interesting article about the sex discrimination in academia in Flanders. In Flanders only 11% of professorships are held by women, making Flanders one of the worst regions in the EU for sex equality in academia. The "glass ceiling index" has been calculated for Belgium as a whole at 2.25, meaning that it is 2.25 times harder for a woman to get a professorship than a man - again, almost the worst value in the EU. 

As the largest and oldest university in Belgium, KU Leuven bears a great deal of responsibility for this situation. Despite 600 years of history, KU Leuven has never had a female Rector. Even in Biomedical Sciences, a field dominated by women at the graduate level, only 25% of professors are female, and the situation gets much worse in the traditionally male-dominated areas. Worst of all, despite performing so badly in this area, the university has no systematic policy directives to even start to correct the problem. To try to compete in an international high performance field while ignoring half of the available talent is absurd, to say the least.

Is this a cut-and-dried case of blatant sexism? In consideration, I would suggest probably not. The effect is certainly sexist, women are not getting opportunities given to men. The primary cause, however, is probably not so much sexism as conservatism. Marc Hooghe (KU Leuven) says "What Belgian universities still have is this kind of closed-shop attitude", where old white men pick people who look like themselves for the next generation academia. Alison Woodward (VUB) points out "In Belgium, no one knows about two-thirds of the jobs. How did that guy get it?" and notes that this old boys' club excludes not only women, but also foreigners and ethnic minorities. So rather than just trying to improve parental issues*, perhaps Flemish universities should instead focus on open merit-based hiring. If women are just given a truly equal chance, I have no doubt that soon they will hold at least 50% of positions.

* One of my pet peeves, as the data showing that having a child is detrimental to women but not men is not a cause of discrimination - it is an effect of discrimination. If men actually did half the parenting, then parental issues would have absolutely no effect on sex equality. By all means, try to make child raising easier, just don't think that this alone creates sex equality.

Faculty position opening up in Leuven

See the details on NatureJobs

Autoimmune Genetics Laboratory in the news

De Standaard, 29-11-2012:

(English translation below)

De sfeer is hier collegialer' - Brain Gain

De Australiër Adrian Liston (32) werkt als hoofddocent immunologie voor de KU Leuven en als onderzoeker aan het VIB. ‘Ik had dubbel zoveel kunnen verdienen in de VS of Australië, maar dat is niet doorslaggevend.'

‘Wij zullen hier nog lang blijven, ja. België is een goede plek om aan onderzoek te doen en om onze zoon op te voeden.'

Bent u uiteindelijk tevreden met uw keuze voor België?

‘Het zou duidelijker moeten zijn dat je je werk in het Engels kunt doen. Publicaties, congressen, lessen,... het gebeurt allemaal in technisch Engels in onze branche.'

‘Ook de taal schrikt misschien af. Aan de KU Leuven moet je op papier in het Nederlands lesgeven, dat werkt drempelverhogend. In de praktijk kan je wel in het Engels lesgeven, zeker in de hogere graden. Maar dat weet een buitenlander niet.'

‘Academische vacatures mikken hier nog heel specifiek op de Belgische markt, ze worden vaak zelfs alleen intern uitgeschreven. Universiteiten zijn hier minder internationaal georiënteerd.'

‘Ik heb gestudeerd aan de Australian National University van Canberra en heb daarna een tijd gewerkt aan de University of Washington in Seattle', zegt Adrian Liston. Hij kreeg aanbiedingen uit Canada, Australië, Ierland, het Verenigd Koninkrijk en België.

Waarom is het België geworden?

‘Omdat het Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) zeer actief is in het rekruteren van internationale toponderzoekers. Ik was op zoek naar een plek waar ik onderzoek van het hoogste niveau kon doen. België leek me ook een aangenaam land, met een open houding tegenover mensen die Engels spreken. Ik vind hier ook een goed evenwicht tussen werk en vrije tijd.'

Ziet u verschillen in het academisch klimaat in België en pakweg de VS?

‘De sfeer is hier collegialer, omdat academisch onderzoek veel meer een kwestie van samenwerken is. Wie met buitenlandse onderzoeksgroepen samenwerkt, wordt daar financieel voor beloond. In de Verenigde Staten is het eerder belangrijk wat je als individu verwezenlijkt.'

‘Ik had ongeveer dubbel zoveel kunnen verdienen in de VS of in Australië. Het salaris van een senior researcher ligt best laag in België. Maar ik denk niet dat zoiets doorslaggevend is. De meeste academici willen vooral voldoende geld om aan research te doen. En op dat vlak doet België het tegenwoordig net heel goed.'

‘Er wordt ondanks de crisis niet drastisch gesnoeid in onderzoeksfondsen, in tegenstelling tot in Amerika. Als een academicus echt op zoek is naar een exuberant loon, zoekt hij het in de private sector.'

Wat kan een buitenlandse onderzoeker toch tegenhouden om hier te werken?

'Wij zullen hier nog lang blijven, ja. België is een goede plek om aan onderzoek te doen en om onze zoon op te voeden.'

 A rough English translation:

The atmosphere here is more collegial  - Brain Gain

The Australian Adrian Liston (32) works as a professor of immunology at the KU Leuven and a researcher at VIB. "I could earn twice as much in the U.S. or Australia, but that is not important."

"I studied at the Australian National University in Canberra and then worked at the University of Washington in Seattle," says Adrian Liston. He received offers from Canada, Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Belgium.

Why come to Belgium?

"Because the VIB is very active in recruiting international researchers. I was looking for a place where I could do research at the highest level. Belgium seemed a pleasant country, with an open attitude towards people who speak English. Belgium also has a good work-life balance".

Do you see differences in the academic environment in Belgium and the U.S.?

"The atmosphere here is more collegial, which is important because academic research requires people to work together. Here the grant system rewards those who make international collaborations. In the United States the grants focus on individual researchers."

"I had the option to earn about twice as much in the U.S. or Australia. The salary of a senior researcher is relatively low in Belgium. But that was not a decisive issue. Most academics are more interested in knowing there is enough money to do the research they are interested in. And in this respect Belgium is doing well."

"There is no crisis in Belgium, unlike the drastic cuts in research funds in America. If an academic was focused on their personal salary they would move to the private sector."

What stops foreign researchers from coming here?

"Academic vacancies aim there focus very specifically on the Belgian market, they are often only internally issued. Universities are less internationally oriented."

"Also the language might scare off some people. At KU Leuven on paper you need to teach in Dutch. In practice you can teach in English, especially at the higher levels, but foreigners do not necessarily know this."

"It would attract a broader set of international researchers if they know they can work in English. Publications, conferences, seminars... it all happens in technical English in our profession."

Are you finally happy with your choice for Belgium?

"Yes, we will stay here for a long time. Belgium is a good place to do research and to raise our son."

This is more-or-less what I actually said. The one point that I think was left out is that Belgium shouldn't be concerned about the "brain drain". In science it is very important to have a "brain circulation", good ideas come from mixing people with different training and backgrounds, so it is actually a great thing for Belgian science if a lot of Belgians leave and non-Belgians come in. Rather than be concerned about the outflow, try to work more on the inflow, and then everyone wins.

Here is the article which started the issue (22% of Belgian researchers leave Belgian, only 18% of researchers came in from abroad, making a small net brain drain). And here is the opposing interview, from a Belgian researcher working in China.

Women in Molecular Immunology

It is easy to discuss equality in science through anecodote. Just by spending most of my waking adult life on university campuses across three continents I am fairly confident in saying that sexual equality is better in biology and medicine than in chemistry or physics, is great at undergraduate level and lagging at professorial level, and is better in Australia than in Belgium. Much better than anecodote, though, is quantitative analysis, which is why I love this website. If you don't publish your research it is a hobby, not science, and a good publication record is the A to Z of career success for a scientist. This website collates data on authorship across time and across disciplines, at a global level, and assesses the participation of women. There are a few caveats: papers are only assessed if they are listed in the JSTOR database, and a gender is only assigned by first name analysis (using the US Social Security database as a reference, so it probably fails for first names not commonly used in the US). Still, it is an absolutely beautiful reference point.

There is an wealth of knowledge in this database, but my interest is in molecular immunology, so how are we performing? Well, the question kind of depends on "compared to what?" In 1991-2010, 29.7% of authors on molecular immunology papers were women. This is an improvement from 1971-1990 (23.9%), and a huge improvement from pre-history (being everything from 1970 and before, at 13.7%). It is also outstanding compared to fields such as mathematics, where women still only account for 10% authors (maths clearly has a problem with women; anyone who says the reverse is kidding themselves). But 29.7% is still a long way from 50%. Even among first authors (typically PhD students or post-docs), only 33.2% of molecular immunology authors were women, and among last authors (typically professors) only a dismal 15.4% were women. 

I've said before what I think the problem is (hint, it is men), but this database gives us a resource to see who is fixing the problem, and how fast, and who is content to live in the stone-age and try to do science with a 50% lobotomy. So many questions arise. Why has virology been more equal than immunology throughout the time period? I would love to see a break-down by country to know if this is a discipline-thing, or is a statistical quirk due to regional differences in sexism correlating by chance with regional differences in research focus.

Oh, and for the trivia-minded, within molecular biology the most equal area of research is heat shock proteins, while the most sexist is prostaglandins. In the entire database, the most female-dominated area of research is gender studies (57.8% female authors), while the most male-dominated area of research is a discipline of mathematics called Riemannian manifolds (99.3% male authors). Check it out.

Three years as a junior faculty member

In 2010, after one year as a junior faculty member, I wrote up that year in numbers.

Now, three years in and racing towards my five year evaluation mark, I can calculate the first three years in numbers:

227: the number of grants I have reviewed for various foundations
63: the number of articles I have reviewed for different journals

45: the number of grants submitted (32 project grants and 13 fellowship applications)
        20: grants accepted (17 project grants and 3 fellowships)
        16: grants rejected (13 project grants and 4 fellowships)
        9: grants pending (3 project grants and 6 fellowships)
5,513,005: euros given to the lab in project grants
2,842,774: euros spent in research

35: invited talks
13: conferences
6: lectures

45: article submissions and resubmissions
        26: articles published or in press (9 primary papers, 11 reviews, 6 book chapters)
3: number of edited volumes

16: number of lab members
         5: PhD projects ongoing
       2: Masters projects ongoing
       10: number of full-time researchers in the lab 
(17: number of ex-lab members)

0: still the number of days I've spent doing experiments

So an average month for me is reviewing 8 grants or papers, submitting one grant and getting one paper accepted, giving a talk somewhere, having one new person start in the lab or an old person leave, and spending 80,000 euros on research - and I still work less than my PhD students and post-docs!

Hints for potential students: Writing an introduction letter

I get about 200 emails a year from students requesting a PhD position in my laboratory. I pride myself in answering each one, but actually most deserve to be immediately trashed. This is a typical letter I will receive:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am interest in a PhD position at your institute, the VIB. Please find attached my motivation letter, CV and a scan of every certificate I had ever received. 

Regards.

Before we get to writing a good letter, let's start out by pointing out the worst mistakes of this letter. 

1) "Sir or Madam" is terrible. It shows you didn't research me in the slightest before sending your email. "Professor Liston" or "Dr Liston" is fine, actually "Adrian" is fine for me but I would advise against it in first emails, "Dr Adrian" is weird and makes me feel like a talk-show host.

2) English. Okay, it is not your first language, and you don't need perfect English to be a scientist. But it does demonstrate carelessness that you didn't bother to get your introductory letter right. If you are this sloppy on first impression, how careless would you be in the lab? Get a native English reader to proof read your letter before you send it or use an AI program to clean it up.

3) As if I didn't have enough proof already that this was a bulk email sent out to thousands of scientists, the way "the VIB" is in another font clearly shows cut and paste at work. Anyway, it is a redundant thing to write, I know where I am based, and if you are looking at institutes rather than labs you already have your priorities wrong.

4) The attachments. *sigh*. Don't attach your letter of introduction, put that in your email. Attaching a CV is fine, but that is it, don't annoy me with a lot of extra attachments that mean nothing. One single pdf, nothing more.

So how do you write a good introduction letter? There are a few simple rules:

1) Research the laboratory and the PI beforehand. You need to know who I am and what I do. Yes, this takes a lot more time than having a standard letter that you send to every email address you can find, but it is much more effective.

2) Specify why you are interested in my lab. Not why you are interested in doing a PhD, but specifically why you want to do a PhD in my lab. It is best if this connects your previous experience with the research of the laboratory. For example, when I wrote to my future PhD supervisor (Chris Goodnow) I said I was very interested in working on the issue of genetic variation in T cell tolerance due to my Honours research indicating that the SJL mouse had a defect in tolerance. As he had just published a paper in JEM on defective negative selection in the NOD mouse, could I discuss a PhD project with him? It is only two sentences but it indicates that I know his research, I have relevant experience and I have a specific scientific interest in his laboratory.

3) Don't be aggressive or sycophantic. It is a polite letter of interest, not a last ditch effort to get overseas. Even if it is a last ditch effort to leave your country, don't let that show.

4) Be brief. One or two short paragraphs should be plenty to establish first contact. A good first letter leads to follow-up letters, so there is no need to put everything in there.

5) Have a single attachment, just a pdf of your CV. Like the introduction letter, this should be brief. Keep personal details to a minimum, your age and nationality is useful (for assessing scholarship eligibility) but I really don't need to know your marital status, the names of your children or your blood group. Keep your qualifications and awards to the important stuff - no driver's licence or half-day radiation safety course, just your degrees, marks and the important awards that show real achievement. Don't add copies of these awards. Mostly what I am looking for are your publications, a first-author paper in an international journal tends to be my minimum cut-off for seriously considering a cold call. Language skills are useful, and if you want to have a few sentences on extracurricular activities that is fine (although I only tend to be impressed at volunteer work). 2-3 pages really should be plenty, with no English errors and nice clean formatting. 

Last week I got back a letter from a PhD applicant I had rejected and sent this advice to. He told me that he had sent out hundreds of letters with no reply, but after taking my advice he made carefully written three letters to the labs he was most interested in and within a month he had got back two offers to start a PhD in Germany.  

Advice on applying for an ERC Start Grant (part 3)

I was asked to give some advice on ERC Start Grant applicants, as a current grant holder. As this has come up several times I thought I would write a series of blog posts covering my hints and tips. Partly, this advice is specific to the ERC grant system, although most points are valid across any grant. In a previous posts I gave advice about the written application - Part B1 and Part B2. In this final post I will deal the interview portion of the grant.

The Interview

The interview is not simply an oral version of your written application. There is a panel of around 15 panel members, each of these panel members will be experts on maybe 5 applications and more-or-less bystanders on the other 15 applications.

• Experts. Your chance to impress the experts was your written application, and if you made it to the interview stage than you already succeeded here. The experts are familiar with your work from reading your 30 page dossier; they do not expect to learn anything new from the talk. Instead they will be waiting for the question time to hit you with any issues they have.
• Additional panel members. These are people who are within your general area of research, but outside your specific discipline. They only glossed over your proposal, if they looked at it at all. Design your talk as if they haven’t read your application and focus on importance and strategy. Don’t get bogged down in experimental details and don’t think they really care too much about your discipline – explain to them the advantage in the knowledge that you propose to generate. Focus on the importance and novelty, and why your approach will succeed while others have failed.

Question Time

The questions you get asked will vary based on your project and your application. Have you been wildly ambitious? Expect to get a lot of questions on feasibility. Have you stuck very close by your existing research? Expect to get questions about competitiveness. The experts should ask most of the questions, any technological or methodological concerns they have will be raised here. Generally these will be along the lines of “X is risky, what will you do if it doesn’t work?” or “this is a highly competitive field, how will you compete?” If there is enough time you may get some standard questions from chair or other panel members, such as questions about your long-term career plan and so forth. A few general points apply across the different questions you will get:

• Listen politely to the full question, never assume where it is going or interrupt to answer
• Your tone and attitude matter as much as your words – a grant application is a sales pitch!
• Being right is less important than having a clear articulate message and sounding competent. Even if the expert is wrong there is little benefit in arguing – it certainly comes off badly to the rest of the panel. That said, you can still disagree – “based on my experience the approach is feasible, but in case we do hit a roadblock there is an alternative strategy that we can take...” is completely reasonable response.
• Don’t waffle. It wastes time and it makes it look like you have not thought about the question before. A clear and concise answer reassures the entire panel that you are aware of the issue and have already got a strategy in place. You don’t need an answer for everything, but you need to look like you are capable with dealing with anything.
• Sometimes this involves thinking quickly on your feet and bluffing

On the Day

• Talk clearly and smoothly
• Do not waste time
• Know what you are going to say
• Make every sentence count
• Look at the panel
• Be calm and confident
• Exude gravitas
• Be polite rather than adversarial

On the day of the interview you will arrive at the ERC building, show your passport and be given a visitors badge to enter. You then need to go and upload your talk and deliver ~15 copies of a printed version of your talk before being shown to the waiting room. The room will be full of the other candidates that are being interviewed that day and the wait can be several hours. When your interview is approaching you will be shown up to second waiting room where you will be alone, at this point there is only 10 minutes or so. You will then be led into the interview room. There will be no introductions of the panel members, your talk will already be on the screen and you will be expected to essentially go straight into your presentation.  

Behind the scenes of a panel discussion

In a typical panel, such as the ERC, only a fraction of the applications are read by each panel member. All the panel members are active scientists and all want to support good science. Typically, when going into a panel meeting, each member has a handful of application that they are really keen to push forward – and invariably there is not enough money available to cover all of these applications. In the discussion the experts will take up 90% of the time talking about each grant, but the decision making is split evenly between the panel members. It is not unusual to see an expert trying to convince the rest of the panel that their favourite project is more deserving than your favourite project. In the ERC you have a unique chance to help out the experts on your side, by pitching your talk to the non-experts. If it is dry and technical they will basically ignore it. As an immunologist who regularly sits on an immunology-biochemistry panel I almost fall asleep when there is an application by a structural biologist to find the structure of protein X. So if you are a structural biologist don’t waste your time describing purification strategies to the experts who already read your application – instead use this opportunity to tell the non-structural biologists why this gene is important and what you will be able to do with the structural information (eg, the role of the gene in disease, solid examples of how structural knowledge can be used for rational drug design – perhaps you have a collaboration with chemists?).

Click here for a download of my full set of ERC Start Grant hints and tips.

Advice on applying for an ERC Start Grant (part 2)

I was asked to give some advice on ERC Start Grant applicants, as a current grant holder. As this has come up several times I thought I would write a series of blog posts covering my hints and tips. Partly, this advice is specific to the ERC grant system, although most points are valid across any grant. In a previous post I gave advice for Part B1, in this second post I will deal the written application Part B2.

ERC Start Grant - Part B2

• As a rough length guide, think of ~4 pages for state-of-the-art and objectives, ~2 pages for progress beyond state-of-the-art, ~8 pages for methodology, ~1 page for budget. Adapt to your particular project.
•  You need to be ambitious. Prove that you are thinking as future PI, not as a post-doc. This is not a conservative FWO or IWT grant application, where they pick solid projects. The ERC sees itself more like a MacArthur or Howard Hughes “genius award”, to fund the best and brightest. You can definitely go too far (for example, see the reviewers’ comments that I got from my application), but the panel is generally much more forgiving on over-ambition than under-ambition. The criticism I had on feasibility and over-ambition would have been fatal in an FWO application, but at the ERC the project was approved.

“This is a ground breaking project that interconnects genetic studies, cohort studies and biological studies… It is an extremely ambitious proposal with important and broad objectives and diverse perspectives.”

“Some of the research directions could be difficult to accomplish during the project time, in particular some of the objectives of RT3. Perhaps, the PI should have planned them more realistically.”

“The proposal goes beyond the current state of the art, but its major problem is the over-ambition.”

“The proposed research involves an innovative and ambitious study design, but the risk is justified by the potential impact in the field.”

•  Refer to your unique edge on this project. Is this a direct continuation of your post-doc work? If so, describe how this builds off some technique or tool that you pioneered, giving you an edge over the competition (and either here or in Part B1 make it very clear that you will not be competing with your former PI). Is this a meld of the skills you picked up in your different training periods? Then work in references to strategies you have used in the past. Is this possible due to a unique combination of institute resources or collaborations? Then work in the network you created. Be relatively subtle, the place for direct marketing of your work is Part B1, but references like “using the strategy that I previously designed for gene Y (Jones, Science 2010)” show that you are highly capable of getting this to work.
• The application needs to have an accurate assessment of risk – do you have a back-up plan in case that approach doesn’t work? Why is it that you have a shot of getting this to work while no one else does? (if it is due to your training or past successes, this should be the focus on Part B1). It is not enough to have a grand idea; you need to show that you will have a decent change at success.
• You need to show a future career path. The ERC is not just funding a project, it is funding the start of a new elite laboratory. You need to have tangible outcomes during the 5 year period, but there should also be a sense of how you will build on this after the grant has finished.
• Ethical issues need to show that you have a realistic idea of what is involved, but you do not need to have approval at the time of application (you will need to before you get money from the ERC, however). If it just involves mice a simple referral to an animal ethics committee should be sufficient, if it involves humans or primates you need to demonstrate that you have sufficient knowledge of the ethical and legal framework to make your project practical. 
  

More hints and tips - the interview.

Advice on applying for an ERC Start Grant (part 1)

I was asked to give some advice on ERC Start Grant applicants, as a current grant holder. As this has come up several times I thought I would write a series of blog posts covering my hints and tips. Partly, this advice is specific to the ERC grant system, although most points are valid across any grant. In this first post I will deal the written application Part B1.

ERC Start Grant - Part B1

• Write every part of B1 in the context of the project that you are going to propose - fully utilise every section to sell your application
  
• In your CV you are selling yourself, not describing yourself. Identify your relative strengths and make them stand out. Perhaps you have lots of middle authorships in great journals – then put the journal impact factors in bold, so a quick scan of the page will highlight the great journals rather than your position on them. Perhaps you haven’t published in the top journals, but your work has gathered a disproportionate number of citations – then don’t put the journal impact factor in bold, instead put your individual number of citations in bold.
• Most importantly, when you are presenting your “scientific or scholarly contributions to the field” this is not a generic description. Use this to show how you are uniquely suited to run the project that you have proposed. For example, if you are proposing a project that melds skills you learned from your PhD and your post-doc, place special emphasis on these skills. Your career descriptions should be interwoven with the perspective of where you are going.
• Do not use the extended synopsis in Part B1 to simply summarise the project of Part B2. Use it to discuss the novelty of the approach or the concept. You do not know which part a reviewer will read first, so each document needs to be able to stand alone. Part B2 has a key function in showing that the outcome of your work will be important

Key tip: write about your career projection in the same way you write a scientific paper. You wouldn’t write “we investigated gene X, because of the twelve candidate genes the lab next door had a knockout of this one available”. Instead you would write up results that placed intent and direction in your activity, justifying gene X as your primary focus for a reason. Likewise, don’t describe your career trajectory as it actually occurred, “I did a PhD in metabolism, then my partner moved to Leuven so I looked for a post-doc and got offered one in dendritic cell biology”, rewrite it with intent and direction – “I have had a long-term interest on the impact of metabolism on the innate immune response, so in order to gain skills in both disciplines I first pursued a PhD in biochemistry and afterwards moved to a dendritic cell laboratory. Now I am able to utilise my training in both disciplines, with my independent laboratory focused on the effect of metabolic processes on monocyte activity.”

More hints and tips - Part B2 and the interview.