University Recognizes Postdocs with Symposium, Awards
From bacterial spores that can produce electricity to new brain imaging techniques that detect Alzheimer’s disease before any symptoms appear, much of the research at Columbia is conducted by the University’s 1,400 postdoctoral research scientists.
The University celebrated the contributions of its postdocs last month with a two-day Postdoctoral Research and Career Symposium in Lerner Hall on the Morningside campus.
“I want to emphasize how important postdocs are to the intellectual health of the university,” says Michael Purdy, PhD, executive vice president for research at Columbia University. “They play a critical role in the quality of research conducted, of course, but they are also vital to the nurturing of ideas and independence of thought that make Columbia a unique and stimulating environment for research.”
About 1,000 of the University’s postdocs are at the medical center (the number includes clinical fellows and basic science researchers); the rest are in a range of departments and schools, including arts and sciences, engineering, law, business, and the humanities. More than 100 postdocs presented their research at the symposium’s poster session; based on their abstracts, five postdocs won $1,000 grants for travel and conference expenses.
“As researchers, we don’t often see each other’s work,” says Colton Conroy, PhD, a postdoc in the Department of Applied Physics & Applied Mathematics, who presented his work on new coastal ocean models, including one that can predict wind-driven waves from storms far more quickly, and cheaply, than current models. “It’s nice to see what else is happening across the university and find potential collaborators.”
A career fair—a first for Columbia postdocs—was included in the symposium this year after postdocs expressed a desire to learn more about job opportunities outside of academia, says Rory Flinn, PhD, director of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, who helped organize the event with NYC Ascent, a consortium formed by Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, and NYU to encourage collaborative research in emerging computer technology.
“It shouldn’t be news to anyone,” Dr. Flinn says, “that the majority of postdocs trained nationally will not end up in tenured faculty positions. This is especially the case for biomedical PhDs, where the latest national data show that only 10 percent of these PhD holders will attain a tenure track faculty position within five years of earning their PhD.
“We partnered with Columbia’s Center for Career Education to bring in about 70 employers and nonprofits across various industries to talk with our graduate students and postdocs. Some companies came with specific positions to fill.”
More than 70 employers came to the first career fair for Columbia postdocs.
Joanna Dragich, PhD, a postdoc in neurology who studies how the brain is wired during development, attended the symposium to advance her career. “This is a good way to network and meet people inside the University and also find out about job opportunities. I feel that Columbia provides a lot of resources to help you find opportunities; you just have to take the initiative.”
“There is life outside of academia,” Regeneron Pharmaceuticals president and chief scientific officer George Yancopoulous’86 PhD/’87 MD told the postdocs during his keynote talk about starting his own company. “Wherever you go, make sure you are suited to the environment, that it feels healthy when you go to work. That makes work and life pretty enjoyable.”
The five postdocs who were awarded $1,000 travel grants:
MELODY CHENG, Neurology, for her work in establishing a human stem cell model to study the causes and effects of Parkinson’s disease (“Modeling Parkinson’s disease using human induced pluripotent stem cells”)
MICHAEL METZGER, Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, for his work on a newly discovered type of contagious cancer in clams, which may help us better understand the possibility of cancer spreading between individuals in general (“Transmissable bivalve neoplasia”)
XI CHEN, Biological Sciences, for his work in harnessing the energy of natural evaporation with bacterial spores (“Engines driven by evaporation”)
ALP KUCUKELBIR, Computer Science and the Data Science Institute, for his work in developing a new software package that automates the work involved in developing a new statistical model to analyze large datasets (“Statistical modeling of big data: a fully automated scalable inference system”)
DESSISLAVA NIKOLOVA, Electrical Engineering, for her work in developing new optical switches to make data sharing among computers faster, cheaper, and more efficient (“Silicon photonic network elements for high performance optically interconnected Datacom systems”)