Interview with "The Optimist" magazine

Read the article at The Optimist

Thinking back to your PhD, how would you describe this experience.

I quite enjoyed my PhD. The key success in a PhD is to find a match between supervisor and student. I only spoke to my supervisor every 3-4 months, and it was always about concepts and strategy rather than trouble-shooting. For me, I loved the independence that this gave me, and the amazing post-docs in the lab gave me more than enough technical advice. However, some of the other students around me did not like this approach to mentoring, and would have preferred weekly meetings going into the detail of their experiments. This was pure luck on my behalf - I could easily have ended up in a lab that I found stifling, because I didn't ask the right questions going in. This independence let me mould my PhD to my strengths. I learned just a few basic techniques and then applied them to novel questions. It was an approach that let me generate data and papers quickly, and led to an "easy PhD". 

To ask the famous question, is there anything you would like to change retrospectively regarding your PhD?

The flip side of having an "easy PhD" is that I never really had to leave my comfort zone. Since I didn't spend months (or years) painfully learning and optimising new techniques, I never became as technically skilled as the other PhD students around me. Science is so fast moving, that the best strategy is to learn how to learn, which you only get the hard way. Instead, I had my couple of techniques and I had learned how to plan experiments and writing papers. This made my post-doc really difficult - I didn't have the versatility or skill of other post-docs around me, who were picking up and using the latest techniques with trained ease, earned by blood, sweat and tears earlier on. Now as a PI, this deficit is not so important, since my job is all planning and writing, but even now I regret never learning to become a great experimentalist.   

 Which advice or tips would you give us PhDs on our way?

1. Analyse experiments as you go. I started the habit very early on of always analysing experiments once I finished them. By this I mean a full analysis, including a publication level graph, a figure legend and a few lines of text describing the result. It takes a little time, but it means you get real-time feedback on the quality of your experiments - give you have all the right controls, were the numbers high enough to make conclusions, are my conclusions solid enough to plan the next stage, etc. It also made writing papers and a thesis very simple - I just cut and paste my analysed data in, and I was half-way there. Since editing is much less intimidating than writing, I never developed that writing paralysis that some students get.

2. Don't stress about careers! The infamous "bottleneck" in the academic career is mostly illusional. In Flanders, perhaps 15-20% of PhD students go on to a long-term academic career, but even in countries with lower rates (2-5% would be normal) this this not due to a bottleneck. A PhD in biomedical science is one of the most desirable training programs possible for a modern career. The vast majority of people who leave academia are not pushed out; instead, biomed PhDs are leaving academic because of pull-factors - they find highly desirable jobs that they believe they will enjoy more. When I look around at the PhDs that I trained with or that I have trained, I can honestly say that not one has had a career failure. Yes, very few are now research professors, but that is because almost all of them found something else they liked more. Doctor, CEO, start-up company, scientific writer, senior public servant - all great jobs. Very, very few of the 100+ academic careers that I have followed have ended with someone getting pushed out of academia (i.e., timing out of the post-doc fellowship system), and those that did landed on their feet and found a great career that they now say is better suited to them. So.... don't stress about your future career. Concentrate on doing well in your PhD, and start planning your career a year in advance of any decision, but don't make yourself unhappy about uncertainty in which successful career path you will end up taking.

Advice for international faculty entering the Belgian system

After 10 years in Belgium as a foreign academic, I was reflecting on what lessons I had learned about Belgian academia that I wish I had learned earlier. The key lesson I wish someone had taught me is that Belgian academia works via the patronage system. Having come from the Anglo meritocracy system, it took me a long time to distinguish the features of patronage, as opposed to nepotism or just plain corruption. The system is based on patrons and their protegés, and is so embedded throughout the system that nearly everyone is both a patron and a protegé, in one large network of obligations. One you understand this, many previously inexplicable behaviours and patterns make sense, and it is possible to thrive.

The patron is the "godfather". Patrons do not give orders. They make their wishes known, and they expect their protegés to follow them. In the worst cases, this is exploited simply to further the career of the patrons (by making them successful in the eyes of their own patron). It is expected that the rise of the patron trickles down to the protegé, however it is understood that years or even decades can elapse in between. The patron will also have multiple protegés at the same stage, competing for the spoils of the patron. A highly successful patron may pull up multiple protegés through the system with them, but often it is just the one leading protegé who benefits (and may end up becoming patron to the other protegés). This gives the scenario, rather perplexing to an outsider, of good people putting their patron ahead of themselves year after year, without any benefit. In the best cases, the system can work better than an open merit-based system. Merit-based system work based on track-record, and assume that someone with a good record and a winning interview style will be successful in the position. By contrast, the relationship between patron and protegé is far more intimate, and a patron can ideally identify the person who would be best at the job, beyond the confounding luck and personality issues that can sway a CV or interview. In practice, the worst case scenario seems rather more common than the best case scenario.

The protegé is expected to follow the lead of the patron throughout their career, even after they have reached equivalent levels. The level to which this deference is given is quite remarkable to an outsider. The protegé, even as an independent academic, will follow the guidance of their patron is terms of who they should collaborate with, which grants they should submit, authorship order on papers and key financial decisions. Even when they strongly disagree with the advice, the protegé is more likely to get frustrated in private than to argue (or even ignore) their patron. It would take a really gross violation by the patron for the protegé to break off the relationship. Protegés will take on protegés of their own, becoming a patron to others while still remaining a protegé to their own patron. This creates a "family", with the überpatron at the head. The überpatron respects the downwards hierarchy, however, working via their direct protegés only.

There are aspects of patronage to every academic system, however the key to understanding Belgian academia is to realise that patronage permeates every facet. The degree to which the rules of the patron-protegés relationship are embedded in the Belgian character is difficult to overstate, and even Belgians that have become internationalised may struggle to not default into the pattern. The breakdown of the patron-protegés relationship is very rare, and invokes a deep sense of betrayal.

In practical terms, what does this mean for a foreigner entering Belgian academia?

First, as a foreigner you are unlikely to have a strong patron. For myself, after 10 years in Belgian, I never had a patron.  Admittedly, I am very poor protegé material, but the strongest patronage relationships are formed very early, through family or family friends. Even without having your own patron, however, your Belgian students may instinctively fall into the protegé role, and expect the patron-protegé relationship to function. 

Second, to some extent you need to chose between looking crass or being overlooked. Belgians do not put themselves forward, and self-promotion is considered coarse. It is the role of your patron to promote your virtues or ideas. Without a patron, you can either push yourself forward or be ignored. Self-assertion can still work, and is tolerated more in foreigners than in Belgians, but it won't make friends.

Third, breaking into collaborative networks is going to be difficult to you. Many collaborative grants and projects are built around the patron-protegé networks. Trying to join can be looked upon as nearly akin to crashing a family reunion. Some überpatrons are highly xenophobic, and you will never be allowed in. This can lead to frustration, where a good relationship with a colleague never blossoms into a collaboration, not because they don't want to work with you, but because their own patron disapproves. The best path to breaking into the collaborative networks lies in identifying a more liberal überpatron, and getting adopted into the family. Offering up a new technology or the like can be sufficient to get you adopted, for the advantage that it brings in. Adoption does depend on at least tacitly respecting the hierarchy: the network is not a collection of independent equals, and directly approaching protegés can be taken as highly disrespectful by überpatrons.

Fourth, respecting the hierarchy does not just apply to collaborative networks. Belgian academics would never directly approach one of your students or staff with a question, and expect the same "courtesy" from you. Even students from neighbouring labs don't *officially* talk to each other, and even trivial requests for help are expected to go up to their promoters for consultation first. This feels needless and inefficient, but ignoring the protocol is worse: a faux pas can shutdown relationships with your neighbours for good.

Fifth, you need to understand that arguing in a meeting is normally fruitless. Despite being in hundreds of management meetings over the past 10 years, I've never seen a question go to an actual vote, or even anything approximating a vote. The überpatrons in the meeting know who dominates based on who is in the meeting. To force protegés to openly support their patrons would be the height of rudeness - the system is built on implicit support, not explicit support. Decisions are made before the meeting, either between the überpatrons directly, or via jockeying to stack the meeting with their protegés. I never managed to suppress my instinct to give my opinion at meetings, even when it was clearly against the position of the überpatrons, but even if others at the meeting secretly agree with you it just ends up making you look obnoxious. The more successful approach is to identify the dominant network in advance (not difficult, the chair is usually the leading überpatron), and discuss with them before the meeting. Überpatrons can be thoughtful and consultative, as long as you approach them in private: changing their mind after a public disagreement results in too much loss of face.

Sixth, be highly sensitive to suggestions to place specific people in a position. If you are trying to get a position opened up to fill an unmet need, the actual person who will end up being recruited is typically of secondary importance to you. Open the position, and then find the best person to fill it. For many Belgian academics, however, the actual person who will be recruited is the key point. Getting their protegés positions is the key function of a successful patron. If a Belgian academic listens to your proposal and then suggests one of their protegés for the position, what they are often proposing is a deal: I would support this proposal if my person gets the position. If you dismiss the proposal as downstream, then the patron will think that either you are trying to open the position for your own protegé, or you have an agreement with another patron. The strategic design of proposals to incorporate a protegé from a key überpatron can often lead to success (assuming the protegé would actually be suitable for the position).

Finally, this should be read not as an attack on the Belgian system, but rather as an explanation of how it functions, as discovered by an initially clueless outsider. For Belgian readers, while they would certainly recognise the behaviours, they would probably be rather appalled to see it written in this way. This is not a codified behavior or quid pro quo; it is just how to be polite and respectful to your colleagues and, especially, your seniors. While it can be infuriating at times, and I've occasionally come home fuming about corruption and xenophobia, that is entirely because I was not raised with these same cultural preconceptions. It is surely no worse than the cultural shock of entering the American system, where entirely different sets of rules are at play, and even though they are invisible to me, Australian academia surely has cultural quirks that offend the sensibilities of outsiders. You don't have to embrace the Belgian system, or become part of it, but at the very least you should understand it and respect it enough to not be *unintentionally* obnoxious.

The employer-mentor tension

I've been reading a lot on the movement to normalise the working conditions of a PhD. A PhD is a lifestyle choice more than a job. The work permeates into your evenings, weekends and holidays. It is difficult to mentally dissociate from the work due to the emotional investment placed in it, which frequently leads to mental health issues. A growing number of students want the PhD to become a more normal "9-5" job, to work just the standard hours they are paid for, in conditions similar to any other profession. This is entirely reasonable.

At the same time, I am seeing a great desire for personal mentoring of students. Professors should be more than a scientific advisor; they should be a coach, a mentor, a career guide and a cheerleader. In this regard, the Professor is much more than a simple employer. This is also entirely reasonable.

Are these two goals, each reasonable in their own right, compatible? To me they pull me in opposite directions. If I support the student's right to be a normal employee, isn't the natural corollary the right to be a normal employer? If I make a point of not intruding on my student's home time, surely I have the right to not let my students intrude on my home time? 

There are two additional asymmetries to consider. First, the asymmetry in power. An email from the Professor to the student on holiday is more invasive then the reverse, due to the nature of the relationship. I am training myself not to send emails on the weekend (my prime thinking time), because even though I intend them to be read on Monday, my students may feel obliged to read them on the weekend. The second asymmetry is less well recognised, the asymmetry in numbers. The student has one professor, while the professor has many staff. I have 20 staff and students, and more than 100 ex-lab members. While weekend-disrupting problems are rare individually, there is at least one every weekend. With HR, each person may only have a work-altering personal problem once every two years, but the net effect is that I deal with such a matter on a monthly basis. 

My personal solution to the tension inherent in the employer-mentor balance is to allow my students and staff to pick their own place on that continuum, but their choice impacts both of our roles. If a student wants to work as a normal employee and not take their job home then they can, but equally they don't get the right to then intrude on my home. It is just not fair for a student to miss deadline after deadline on a piece of writing I assign them, but then to expect me to urgently proof-read their (late) progress report on Sunday afternoon. For a student who has worked above and beyond I will take their thesis draft with me on holiday if need be, but only because we both are invested. A student who doesn't go to the departmental seminars doesn't earn the right to get a paid trip to an international conference. The student who is creative and innovative in pushing technical boundaries will get support in new kit and training. A student who is passionate and talented in research will literally get a hundred hours in career development mentoring from me, but I am reluctant to invest more than 10 minutes doing the same for a student who refuses to be a team member.

In theory, I am comfortable with this choice. In practice it is difficult for me to maintain. Far too often it is the staff who give and give to those around them that are the least likely to ask in return. By contrast, toxic staff (fortunately I have none now!) expect mountains to be moved for them. I know my own nature, and unfortunately I am too much of a workaholic and care too much about my work to act as a completely impartial employer. Management style will always be a work in progress, constantly evolving with my own growth and in response to my staff.

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Wednesday

Apr042018

Interview with eLife on being a scientist parent

Wednesday, April 4, 2018 at 6:43PM

eLife in their Scientist and Parent series

At what career stage did you become a parent?

My partner and I did PhDs in Canberra, Australia, before post-doc’ing in Seattle, USA. After our post-docs my partner decided to move to industry while I wanted to take a shot on being an academic. At this point we relocated to Belgium and started a family. We were 30 years old at the time, in a new country and both starting out on new career pathways. Now our son is six years old, and all three of us have hit our stride, with happy lives at home and successful careers at work (well, for my wife and I, our son is not yet an astronaut).

What support have you received as a parent from your country (including parental leave), institution, and friends and family?

We moved to Belgium just before having a child, which means we were not able to draw upon our network of friends and family. My host institution did not provide any support, but Belgium in general has a lot of governmental support systems, including cheap available all-day care for infants from 3 months of age, in-home care by a nurse if your child is too sick to go to school but you need to work, subsidised cleaning services, and so forth. While parental leave is very limited (4 months for the mother, 10 days for the father, with zero flexibility), the system is set-up to allow parents to go back to work in a full-time basis.

What are the most difficult aspects of balancing parenthood and science?

Major challenges of parenthood:

• The love of my life became my logistics co-manager for the first year. It often felt like every conversation was transmitting critical baby-related information as we did a baby-transfer so the other person could get to work or sleep
• Travel was a major issue. Both my partner and I travel for work once a month, but when a baby is around this turns the other person into a single parent for the week. We both felt guilty about doing this to each other, and I turned down conference and talks that I would normally take – which looked bad on my tenure review
• Illness. Babies are disgusting vectors of disease, and I had non-stop respiratory infections for several years. Normally when you get sick you can just rest and recover, but that is not an option when a baby is around – I had to keep pushing myself beyond the point of collapse. When my son finally started in kindergarten (2.5 years, at which point my partner could take over half the logistics of drop-off and pick-up), I slept for a week to recover.
• Your flexibility becomes very limited – for the first 2.5 years, if I had a faculty dinner or invited speaker event after hours (which happened most weeks), I had to bring my baby along with me. Fancy faculty club dining rooms are rather unused to have a baby around or warming up baby food – and the reception from other faculty was mixed – some were charmed by my son, others strongly disapproved
• The last major challenge was the perception of others, especially the assumption that you cannot be successful at work and raise a child. This was not so much a challenge for me as people tend to (rightly) assume that most fathers don’t actually help that much, but was a major challenge for my partner. Even if it comes from a source of compassion, these assumptions lead to parents not given the opportunity to work on major projects that can lead to promotions

What more could be done to improve the lives of scientist parents? And what single change would have the biggest impact on you? 

Belgium is a good place to start a family, and my partner and I both entered parenthood with a strong agreement on equal parenting. It was much harder than we expected, but in general the support networks were there through government services and our work colleagues. The one thing that really hits hard on scientist parents (although it applies to non-parents) is just the sheer pressure that is placed on us to constantly perform. The career is an immense pressure-cooker, and you are only as good as your last recent success. With so much anxiety and real fear about dropping into a negative spiral (no grant = no paper = no more grants), it is just really difficult to fully disconnect from work to spend the time at home. So I guess if I could change one thing it would be to remove the culture of pressure from science.

What advice would you give to other scientist parents (or scientists who are thinking of having children)?

My advice for new and prospective parents: 

• If you are relocating and you expect to be a parent in the new location, factor baby needs into the decision of where to move to. Will you need IVF, and is this covered by the health care system? Is infant daycare affordable and available, or will one person essentially have to put their career on hold for five years? Is there good financial support for new parents? How about schools? It doesn’t make sense to take a job that pays more if you then have to hand it all back to pay for private schools and health insurance.
• Reduce future commitments in advance. A baby is not a surprise, you have months of notice. You are going to have a major restriction on your time, so start saying “no” in advance. Don’t teach that course, don’t agree to write that minor review, rotate off that committee and say no to reviewing. It is always easy to say yes when the deadline is 6 months away, but the problem is your time is limited and you need to save it for the stuff that actually matters to your career – mainly, big grants and major papers.
• You have to start equal parenting on day one. A long maternity leave can be a self-fulfilling trap – the mother learns how to look after the baby, and as the baby is constantly changing needs, confidence builds. At the same time, the father often doesn’t learn, and never becomes self-reliant. I would really very strongly recommend that new fathers are given substantial amounts of time alone with their child from day one – they need to figure out the same tricks and develop the same confidence that the mother does. Breast-feeding should not be used as an excuse for fathers not to solo parent an infant – babies are able to switch between breast and bottle on a daily basis. The other proviso of equal parenting is that you need to let the other parent find their own method, and not to try to force them to parent the way that you do.
• If you are coordinating baby information between two parents, use an app like BabyConnect, where you can enter all the details so they are available to the other parent (like, when they last took medication), rather than spending your valuable minutes together synchronising care
• Be prepared to delegate at home and at work. You need to reserve time for the important parts, both at home and at work, so delegate away the rest. Hire a cleaner to come in once a week and tidy up the house, so you can spend valuable hours relaxing. Train your post-docs (in advance) to take over your teaching duties – it will be good for their CV and frees up your time at work. Reduce the intake of new students who will need a lot of training, and make sure that your experienced people know when they can make decisions without you.
• Do things for you. It is easy to become focused around the baby and to forget doing the things that made you happy. But a happy parent makes for a happy child, and you will find that you can do anything with a baby that you used to do without one. At the start it can be difficult, but you will soon find your stride and you end up with a family routine that makes everyone happy.

How do you think the challenges of being a scientist and a parent compare with the challenges faced by other professionals who are also parents? 

My partner always says that academics have the freedom to work whichever 60 hours a week they want to. There is a lot of truth to this. The advantage is in the flexibility – I could change my work around the baby logistics at any time. The disadvantage is that I never truly leave my work behind – I am always on call, and always thinking and working.

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tagged science careers

Monday

Mar122018

A PhD in science is a great career pathway

Monday, March 12, 2018 at 9:35AM

I've said before that a PhD is a great pathway to unexpected career success. People get so stressed about the academic bottleneck that they forget that there are many other doors that open once you have a PhD. This article puts it perfectly - "Science PhDs lead to enjoyable jobs". Four years out of their PhD, >95% of graduates are satisfied with where their career has taken them, a remarkable figure. So stress less, enjoy your time in research, and you will find your own successful pathway!

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Sunday

Dec032017

Experimentation

Sunday, December 3, 2017 at 9:58AM

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tagged science careers

Sunday

Nov262017

Jobs, jobs, jobs!

Sunday, November 26, 2017 at 11:10AM

Two post-doc positions now open in immunology, plus a technician position in the FACS Core, and very soon we will be opening up a new position in endocrinology!

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tagged Liston lab, diabetes, immunology, science careers

Tuesday

Oct032017

Science Minds: Prof Susan Schlenner

Tuesday, October 3, 2017 at 9:44AM

This interview of Prof Susan Schlenner by Science Minds is well worth listening to, for a fascinating discussion of mentorship and the ups and downs of a successful career in science.

You can listen to it on the website here, or subscribe to Science Minds podcast through iTunes.

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tagged Liston lab, science careers

Friday

Sep292017

Prof Susan Schlenner: making a career in science

Friday, September 29, 2017 at 9:55AM

Next week Dr Susan Schlenner starts as a tenure-track professor in our laboratory.

Growing up in East Germany, Susan started her scientific training with Prof Hans-Reimer Rodewald at the University of Ulm. From 2003-2008, Susan worked on her PhD on protection from the toxicity of snake venoms (J Exp Med, 2007). Dr Schlenner stayed in Hans-Reimer’s lab for a mini-post-doc on T cell development, generating IL7Ra-Cre mice to trace the fate of early T cell development (Immunity, 2010). These mice have become one of the key tools of the field, leading to dozens of high-level middle authorships.

In 2009, Dr Schlenner left to Harvard, to post-doc with Prof Harald von Boehmer. At this point, she entered the regulatory T cell field, again creating new mouse strains to redefine the basic biology (J Exp Med, 2012).

We were lucky enough to recruit Susan in 2012. We had just decided that we needed a top-level molecular biologist when Susan turned up. She immediately solved our problems on a transgenic that we had been struggling with for years, and set up a molecular biology platform in the lab. Susan designed her own high-level projects, and secured independent funding for them, which she is now pursuing with her own team. However Susan has always been ready to drop everything to help out the lab, playing a pivotal role in getting our diabetes story in Nature Genetics, and spending her last days before giving birth generating the key preliminary data for an ERC grant for the lab.

When CrispR editing of mammalian cells first burst onto the scene in 2014, Dr Schlenner spend several years learning the new technique, importing all the tools to Leuven and optimising the process for high throughput genome-editing. The creation of the MutaMouse Core facility was the outcome of this patient work, and will revolutionise biomedical science in Leuven.

With Dr Schlenner achieving the hard-won honour of a professorship, I see lessons in her success that other post-docs could learn from:

1) Train with the best people. In the Rodewald and von Boehmer labs, Susan was surrounded by top scientists doing exciting work. An excellent environment is essential to blossom as a scientist

2) Learn how to do proper experiments. “Controls, controls, controls”, is Susan’s motto, every experiment needs the right controls to understand the result, otherwise it is just expensive play

3) Be prepared to work hard and work long. Experiments often don’t work; it takes grit and determination to tear the hidden secrets out from nature. To create her IL7Ra-Cre strain, Susan generated more than 3000 ES cell clones to screen, before finding the one single clone that set her career on a roll. Others would have given up early, and switched to an easier project, but Susan stayed the course. Persistence is a virtue.

4) Always keep on learning. So often we are scared to enter a field we don't know, or pick up a new technique. It is comforting to stay doing the experiments we already know how to do. Susan has always been prepared to start from scratch as a beginner, learning new techniques such as CrispR.

5) Publish top papers. Immunity and J Exp Med papers as first author, a Nature Genetics as co-last. It sounds obvious, but the top papers are the bed-rock upon which your career is built. If you ever get the opportunity to push a story into the very top level, you seize it and put in whatever effort it takes.

6) Make yourself valuable. Susan has always been a team-player, spending her time teaching others and rescuing difficult experiments. Susan always made sure that the people around her could succeed, rather than only looking out for herself. This was not just rewarded in her dozen middle-authorships, it also meant that she was always someone that her promoters were willing to support in return. Susan’s professorship is in no-small-part a direct consequence of the MutaMouse facility that she was building for the university – she made herself so valuable to the university that they needed to give her a position to make sure she stayed.

7) Stay in the game. It can be depressing looking at the odds of success in academia, but if you are not willing to put in the years, then you have no chance. Susan post-doc’d for nearly 10 years before achieving her professorship: don’t give up on your ambitions.

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tagged Liston lab, science careers, women in science

Interview with eLife on being a scientist parent

eLife in their Scientist and Parent series

At what career stage did you become a parent?

My partner and I did PhDs in Canberra, Australia, before post-doc’ing in Seattle, USA. After our post-docs my partner decided to move to industry while I wanted to take a shot on being an academic. At this point we relocated to Belgium and started a family. We were 30 years old at the time, in a new country and both starting out on new career pathways. Now our son is six years old, and all three of us have hit our stride, with happy lives at home and successful careers at work (well, for my wife and I, our son is not yet an astronaut).

What support have you received as a parent from your country (including parental leave), institution, and friends and family?

We moved to Belgium just before having a child, which means we were not able to draw upon our network of friends and family. My host institution did not provide any support, but Belgium in general has a lot of governmental support systems, including cheap available all-day care for infants from 3 months of age, in-home care by a nurse if your child is too sick to go to school but you need to work, subsidised cleaning services, and so forth. While parental leave is very limited (4 months for the mother, 10 days for the father, with zero flexibility), the system is set-up to allow parents to go back to work in a full-time basis.

What are the most difficult aspects of balancing parenthood and science?

Major challenges of parenthood:

• The love of my life became my logistics co-manager for the first year. It often felt like every conversation was transmitting critical baby-related information as we did a baby-transfer so the other person could get to work or sleep
• Travel was a major issue. Both my partner and I travel for work once a month, but when a baby is around this turns the other person into a single parent for the week. We both felt guilty about doing this to each other, and I turned down conference and talks that I would normally take – which looked bad on my tenure review
• Illness. Babies are disgusting vectors of disease, and I had non-stop respiratory infections for several years. Normally when you get sick you can just rest and recover, but that is not an option when a baby is around – I had to keep pushing myself beyond the point of collapse. When my son finally started in kindergarten (2.5 years, at which point my partner could take over half the logistics of drop-off and pick-up), I slept for a week to recover.
• Your flexibility becomes very limited – for the first 2.5 years, if I had a faculty dinner or invited speaker event after hours (which happened most weeks), I had to bring my baby along with me. Fancy faculty club dining rooms are rather unused to have a baby around or warming up baby food – and the reception from other faculty was mixed – some were charmed by my son, others strongly disapproved
• The last major challenge was the perception of others, especially the assumption that you cannot be successful at work and raise a child. This was not so much a challenge for me as people tend to (rightly) assume that most fathers don’t actually help that much, but was a major challenge for my partner. Even if it comes from a source of compassion, these assumptions lead to parents not given the opportunity to work on major projects that can lead to promotions

What more could be done to improve the lives of scientist parents? And what single change would have the biggest impact on you? 

Belgium is a good place to start a family, and my partner and I both entered parenthood with a strong agreement on equal parenting. It was much harder than we expected, but in general the support networks were there through government services and our work colleagues. The one thing that really hits hard on scientist parents (although it applies to non-parents) is just the sheer pressure that is placed on us to constantly perform. The career is an immense pressure-cooker, and you are only as good as your last recent success. With so much anxiety and real fear about dropping into a negative spiral (no grant = no paper = no more grants), it is just really difficult to fully disconnect from work to spend the time at home. So I guess if I could change one thing it would be to remove the culture of pressure from science.

What advice would you give to other scientist parents (or scientists who are thinking of having children)?

My advice for new and prospective parents: 

• If you are relocating and you expect to be a parent in the new location, factor baby needs into the decision of where to move to. Will you need IVF, and is this covered by the health care system? Is infant daycare affordable and available, or will one person essentially have to put their career on hold for five years? Is there good financial support for new parents? How about schools? It doesn’t make sense to take a job that pays more if you then have to hand it all back to pay for private schools and health insurance.
• Reduce future commitments in advance. A baby is not a surprise, you have months of notice. You are going to have a major restriction on your time, so start saying “no” in advance. Don’t teach that course, don’t agree to write that minor review, rotate off that committee and say no to reviewing. It is always easy to say yes when the deadline is 6 months away, but the problem is your time is limited and you need to save it for the stuff that actually matters to your career – mainly, big grants and major papers.
• You have to start equal parenting on day one. A long maternity leave can be a self-fulfilling trap – the mother learns how to look after the baby, and as the baby is constantly changing needs, confidence builds. At the same time, the father often doesn’t learn, and never becomes self-reliant. I would really very strongly recommend that new fathers are given substantial amounts of time alone with their child from day one – they need to figure out the same tricks and develop the same confidence that the mother does. Breast-feeding should not be used as an excuse for fathers not to solo parent an infant – babies are able to switch between breast and bottle on a daily basis. The other proviso of equal parenting is that you need to let the other parent find their own method, and not to try to force them to parent the way that you do.
• If you are coordinating baby information between two parents, use an app like BabyConnect, where you can enter all the details so they are available to the other parent (like, when they last took medication), rather than spending your valuable minutes together synchronising care
• Be prepared to delegate at home and at work. You need to reserve time for the important parts, both at home and at work, so delegate away the rest. Hire a cleaner to come in once a week and tidy up the house, so you can spend valuable hours relaxing. Train your post-docs (in advance) to take over your teaching duties – it will be good for their CV and frees up your time at work. Reduce the intake of new students who will need a lot of training, and make sure that your experienced people know when they can make decisions without you.
• Do things for you. It is easy to become focused around the baby and to forget doing the things that made you happy. But a happy parent makes for a happy child, and you will find that you can do anything with a baby that you used to do without one. At the start it can be difficult, but you will soon find your stride and you end up with a family routine that makes everyone happy.

How do you think the challenges of being a scientist and a parent compare with the challenges faced by other professionals who are also parents? 

My partner always says that academics have the freedom to work whichever 60 hours a week they want to. There is a lot of truth to this. The advantage is in the flexibility – I could change my work around the baby logistics at any time. The disadvantage is that I never truly leave my work behind – I am always on call, and always thinking and working.

A PhD in science is a great career pathway

I've said before that a PhD is a great pathway to unexpected career success. People get so stressed about the academic bottleneck that they forget that there are many other doors that open once you have a PhD. This article puts it perfectly - "Science PhDs lead to enjoyable jobs". Four years out of their PhD, >95% of graduates are satisfied with where their career has taken them, a remarkable figure. So stress less, enjoy your time in research, and you will find your own successful pathway!

Experimentation

Jobs, jobs, jobs!

Two post-doc positions now open in immunology, plus a technician position in the FACS Core, and very soon we will be opening up a new position in endocrinology!

Science Minds: Prof Susan Schlenner

This interview of Prof Susan Schlenner by Science Minds is well worth listening to, for a fascinating discussion of mentorship and the ups and downs of a successful career in science.

You can listen to it on the website here, or subscribe to Science Minds podcast through iTunes.

Prof Susan Schlenner: making a career in science

Next week Dr Susan Schlenner starts as a tenure-track professor in our laboratory.

Growing up in East Germany, Susan started her scientific training with Prof Hans-Reimer Rodewald at the University of Ulm. From 2003-2008, Susan worked on her PhD on protection from the toxicity of snake venoms (J Exp Med, 2007). Dr Schlenner stayed in Hans-Reimer’s lab for a mini-post-doc on T cell development, generating IL7Ra-Cre mice to trace the fate of early T cell development (Immunity, 2010). These mice have become one of the key tools of the field, leading to dozens of high-level middle authorships.

In 2009, Dr Schlenner left to Harvard, to post-doc with Prof Harald von Boehmer. At this point, she entered the regulatory T cell field, again creating new mouse strains to redefine the basic biology (J Exp Med, 2012).

We were lucky enough to recruit Susan in 2012. We had just decided that we needed a top-level molecular biologist when Susan turned up. She immediately solved our problems on a transgenic that we had been struggling with for years, and set up a molecular biology platform in the lab. Susan designed her own high-level projects, and secured independent funding for them, which she is now pursuing with her own team. However Susan has always been ready to drop everything to help out the lab, playing a pivotal role in getting our diabetes story in Nature Genetics, and spending her last days before giving birth generating the key preliminary data for an ERC grant for the lab.

When CrispR editing of mammalian cells first burst onto the scene in 2014, Dr Schlenner spend several years learning the new technique, importing all the tools to Leuven and optimising the process for high throughput genome-editing. The creation of the MutaMouse Core facility was the outcome of this patient work, and will revolutionise biomedical science in Leuven.

With Dr Schlenner achieving the hard-won honour of a professorship, I see lessons in her success that other post-docs could learn from:

1) Train with the best people. In the Rodewald and von Boehmer labs, Susan was surrounded by top scientists doing exciting work. An excellent environment is essential to blossom as a scientist

2) Learn how to do proper experiments. “Controls, controls, controls”, is Susan’s motto, every experiment needs the right controls to understand the result, otherwise it is just expensive play

3) Be prepared to work hard and work long. Experiments often don’t work; it takes grit and determination to tear the hidden secrets out from nature. To create her IL7Ra-Cre strain, Susan generated more than 3000 ES cell clones to screen, before finding the one single clone that set her career on a roll. Others would have given up early, and switched to an easier project, but Susan stayed the course. Persistence is a virtue.

4) Always keep on learning. So often we are scared to enter a field we don't know, or pick up a new technique. It is comforting to stay doing the experiments we already know how to do. Susan has always been prepared to start from scratch as a beginner, learning new techniques such as CrispR.

5) Publish top papers. Immunity and J Exp Med papers as first author, a Nature Genetics as co-last. It sounds obvious, but the top papers are the bed-rock upon which your career is built. If you ever get the opportunity to push a story into the very top level, you seize it and put in whatever effort it takes.

6) Make yourself valuable. Susan has always been a team-player, spending her time teaching others and rescuing difficult experiments. Susan always made sure that the people around her could succeed, rather than only looking out for herself. This was not just rewarded in her dozen middle-authorships, it also meant that she was always someone that her promoters were willing to support in return. Susan’s professorship is in no-small-part a direct consequence of the MutaMouse facility that she was building for the university – she made herself so valuable to the university that they needed to give her a position to make sure she stayed.

7) Stay in the game. It can be depressing looking at the odds of success in academia, but if you are not willing to put in the years, then you have no chance. Susan post-doc’d for nearly 10 years before achieving her professorship: don’t give up on your ambitions.