The University sponsored a reception for post-doctoral fellows on Monday evening. The researchers were invited from all UConn campuses to an informal meet-and-greet session so they could network with their peers.
Lee Aggison, interim vice provost for graduate education and dean of the graduate school, said that his office sponsored this program because they recognized that it can be difficult for post-doctoral fellows to meet and interact with each other.
“This community is so valuable to the University,” he says. “We want to ensure that our post-docs have a productive experience at UConn, which they can’t do in isolation.”
Post-doctoral researchers, or post-docs for short, are scholars who have completed their Ph.D. training and spend one to several years working in a particular research group to gain further investigative and professional skills before moving on to a faculty position. In many fields, says Aggison, it’s virtually impossible to be hired as a faculty member without having some post-doctoral experience. Post-docs are training grounds for future faculty, giving these scholars the necessary skills to run their own research group or laboratory.
UConn’s campuses are home to more than 230 post-docs, whose research and student mentoring, says Aggison, are crucial to the University’s research program.
“For all research universities, the system of research enterprise is heavily reliant on the activities of post-docs,” he says.
Rashid Ali, a post-doc working in the laboratory of Wolf Dieter-Reiter in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, says that this event was the first time post-docs had formally come together in his six years at UConn.
“An important aspect of being a post-doc is to interact and decide which issues are important to us,” he says. “This is a major step in our career, and we need to have a core relationship with one another.”
Because post-docs are neither students nor faculty, Aggison wants to create greater organization among the scholars to help address issues unique to post-docs. Ali, for example, would like to see more University funds allocated for internal grants to post-docs; and Aggison hopes to bring personnel issues, like maternity leave and vacation time, into discussion.
“Like any other campus network, we want to create a community for post-docs so they can share their problems, experiences, and successes,” says Aggison.
The next meeting of UConn post-docs will take place on Oct. 15 at 5 p.m. in the Whetten Graduate Center, Room 200. Post-docs are encouraged to attend and discuss issues of importance to their community.
