On the bright side, a proposal for a PhD student together with 3 other (more senior) PIs was awarded, so I will be at least co-supervising somebody in the not-too-distant future. The proposal requires quite a bit of protein engineering and perhaps even some structural biology, so the fit is not so bad.

Speaking of structural biology, I started hands-on training on an important electron microscope at a nearby university. I had to skip the first session due to other obligations, but the second one was quite interesting and useful. The new facility operator was an old acquaintance of mine, so it was nice to be surprised by a familiar face, as well as running into several other while there. We are allowed to bring our own sample for screening during the last training, so that would be a nice opportunity to obtain some preliminary data for the ERC!

Also, I was asked to help make a (protein structure) figure for a commentary by a senior PI in my department. The initial tone of the commentary was a bit hostile towards the original work being discussed, but me and a postdoc that made the other figure helped to make it somewhat more diplomatic (although weird aspects remain in the original work which we point out).

Finally, the month ended with a nice two-day symposium that was right up my alley, so again a lot of familiar faces. A good friend and previous close collaborator of mine won a prestigious early-career award, which was certainly very well deserved. Our collaborative work was prominently discussed in his presentation, so I couldn’t help but taking some pride in having contributed a little bit. My own poster was very well attended, a former colleague later told me he couldn’t even find a moment to say hi as it was so busy. I also met several other good friends and even a former judo mate, who recently became a PI as well. To top it off, I won a quiz price, which was a lego set of a high-end electron microscope by an illustrious manufacturer that was co-sponsoring the symposium. I had good fun this morning assembling it together with my 5yo daughter, who seemed quite fascinated by my attempted explanation at what the real machine is and does.

Catch y’all on the flipside!

PS I am still working on the website, I didn’t give up on that, so stay tuned for that one!

I have actually done some wet-lab work myself the past month, molecular cloning to be precise. I always find that compared with other techniques and assays, cloning makes me rather Zen, so I didn’t mind. Doing experimental work in a new and unfamiliar lab always reminds me of when I was a Master student blundering along.

The experiments are actually to complement the computational work of one of the two interns, who had her interim assessment meeting with her internal university examiner, who happens to be my own former PhD supervisor. It was nice to see him again and also discuss some science and collaboration. Overall he seemed content with the progress of the internship.

After the two previous rejections of my grant pre-proposals, I now received a series of five(!) thorough reviews of my first full proposal, and what’s more, the tone was actually quite positive! The one thing all five agreed on was that I was an expert at the proposed techniques, which was quite nice to read. However, the reviews were quite long and I had exactly 6 days to write a 4500-character rebuttal to each of them. That made a complete pig’s ear of my schedule as everything that could be postponed until after this deadline, was. Let’s hope it was enough to convince them to allow me through to the interview round since this would be one of the bigger grants that I applied to!

This rebuttal left me a grand total of 1 day to prepare a presentation for an internal ‘mini-symposium’ for the whole institute. I decided to throw together a bunch of slides from different former presentations (as group leaders tend to do, or so I’ve heard… now I’m one of them haha) and winged it, which is not my habit.

I also used this month to write another pre-proposal for a charity grant, although I still have a few days to submit, which I will use to polish it. However, the grant explicitly mentions they are open for clinical proposals, which mine definitely is not. I looked for possible clinical partners interested in my topic but couldn’t find a good match on the short notice, so I will probably just submit it solo. The nice thing about this one is that it should just be open again next year (and hopefully not explicitly for clinical proposals).

Unfortunately, I received bad news about the acquisition of the workstation I mentioned in previous blogs, as my preferred provider was rejected, resulting in more delays. My impression is that it will take months for this thing to finally arrive, which would be very late for my interns and also not ideal in terms of my project planning.

To end on a positive note, just before the holiday I saw a very interesting presentation by some postdocs from another lab in my division. They aren’t structural biologists but they have essentially done most of the preparatory work that would be necessary before you could think of structure determination. Moreover, their target looks to be a pretty interesting one based on the predicted structure, so this might be a very nice collaboration opportunity! The head of that lab agreed so let’s see where this leads…

Catch y’all on the flipside!

A slightly bigger investment (a GPU workstation for the computational work in the lab) took quite a bit more effort in spite of me having negotiated to have this included in my startup package. The computational interns seem to be quite eager for this since the central high performance computing facility is rather busy with other users (and to be honest the performance is not as high as the name suggests in this case). I got quotes from four different suppliers and settled on a favourite one. The investment has now been approved from higher up so hopefully we can formalize the order for this soon(ish).

In the meantime, I another rejection from a grant pre-proposal I submitted previously (no explanation why), while I am still waiting for the third (this one was actually a full proposal so a bit more effort went in, fingers X-ed). This motivated me to push a bit harder for the HFSP collaborative proposal with my US-based partner, which was in the end also neatly submitted a day before the deadline.

Likely, this contributed to what I have to admit is a bit more stress than I expected. Having done about 7 years of postdoc as well as a PhD, I am no stranger to work-related stress, but somehow this still caught me a bit by surprise. Perhaps it is also the combination with a commute that depends on the whiffs of our national railway system. I am trying some breathing exercises and to rush a bit less during the commute (even if that means having to catch the next train), let’s hope this will help.

An incident that was more comical than stressful happened after a Friday drinks that was organized to celebrate the finalization of an internship in a neighbouring lab in the institute. The drinks themselves were nice but not eventful. However, as I was waiting for the train afterwards, I got a phone call from one of my interns if I might have accidentally taken the wrong backpack. I was rather discombobulated since it looked exactly like mine from outside, but still I quickly checked inside, while the whistle blew signalling the train doors were about to close. Shit. Not mine. Next my intern told me whose backpack it was… no less than the head of my department (who was also at the drinks, as this intern was from her lab). Double shit. No choice but to run back to my bike, cycle back to the bar where the drinks were hosted and swap back the correct backpack, panting from the bike ride. Turns out we both got the same backpack from the Christmas market at a shared former employer. Thankfully she didn’t appear like she was about to leave and we all had a good laugh about it.

I was also added to an online meeting of group leaders about our national research infrastructure for one of the techniques my lab uses. While I always had some vague understanding that such meetings took place, it is still quite different to actually be invited and take part in it. While I didn’t contribute anything this time beyond introducing myself briefly, it was still useful to hear about the current state of this infrastructure and also nice to see some familiar faces including former colleagues as well as my PhD supervisor.

At the end of this month, I joined a 1.5-day symposium by a society of a field I am new to, but I plan to take my research in this direction so it seemed like a good way to get to know this field and learn about the latest science. It indeed turned out to be an excellent networking opportunity and I met several people that I previously only had had email contact with face to face. The ‘highlight’ of this meeting was the dinner and subsequent drinks at a beach restaurant/bar. I made some PhD students from my institute wait as I thought I had lost my coat (which turned out to be right where I put it up in the luggage room), resulting in us having to walk through a hail storm to get there (it only started just after we left). The other head of my department turned out to be the king of the dance floor, which I definitely did not have on my bingo card for him. Also, I watched from across the room how the hair of one of the PhD students from my institute caught fire from a candle, to which her conversation partners thankfully reacted very rapidly and thoroughly. Cue the lame ‘on fire’ joke.

Finally, I have been spending my evening hours building a lab website in stealth mode. While it is not quite ready for launch, I feel like we are getting close, so hopefully I can share it with you in the next update! I promised this one would be shorter than the previous blog, so catch y’all on the flip side!!

Greetings reader! This is my first shot at writing a blog, so forgive me if the style or content appears somehow inexperienced. Last month, I finally reached my main career goal of becoming an independent (junior) research group leader. As is common in my field, this is as a ‘tenure track’, meaning I will be on a 4-year temporary contract before a decision on tenure is made. I am having a lot of new experiences and I was thinking if a blog would be a nice way to share them. If you think that it is, bear with me and join me on this new adventure!

Before my official starting day, I had one month ‘in between jobs’, which I spent mostly on preparing two grant proposals (a full one and a pre-proposal), for which the deadlines were the first and second day of my new job. I already submitted a third one (also pre-proposal) before my official starting day, which required some speedy paperwork and autographs on my organization’s side, and they did not let down. Day 1 and Day 2 were therefore rather packed with wrapping up these other two proposals, on top of the usual introductions, tours and paperwork that come with a new job. Day 1 also included a lunch with several of the department heads and bigshot professors, where I tried not to come across too asinine, but thankfully the atmosphere was pretty relaxed. I guess it helped that I met all of them already as part of the interview process (needless to say the atmosphere was a bit less relaxed back then, perhaps they were making up for this haha).

A big new factor was my significantly longer commute, which I am still trying to get used to a month later. While the distance isn’t that far, it is one of the busiest routes in the country and therefore both roads and trains are completely packed during the rush hours. I tried both car and a bike-train-bike combination (I acquired a shitty bike to permanently park at the train station for this purpose). It turns out I prefer the latter over endless driving in traffic jams, in spite of the many train delays and sometimes dangerous situations for cyclists (e.g. cars jumping the red light, other cyclists looking at their phone screen while approaching the intersection at full speed etc.). If everything goes well, I can do this in under an hour, but it turns out this occurs only very rarely.

My startup package only included a (senior) technician from a pool of technicians already employed at my institute, but thankfully I had two (computational) research interns lined up to start two weeks after myself, to have a bit more of a real ‘team’ from the get-go. Since they are doing their research internships outside of their own university, they need to have an internal examiner from that university as well as a local supervisor (me). One of them picked an internal examiner I am not very familiar with, which immediately triggered some sort of domino Murphy’s law situation. She wasn’t happy with the research proposal for the project and decided to discuss this with the board of examiners and not with me. Thankfully I knew several people on this board personally and I got wind of this through the intern, so I managed to rebut against her objections. After a direct call on her request, we agreed that with some minor alterations, the proposal should be good to go. Then she asked if the intern already submitted his contract with my organisation to the online student portal of their university, which I said I would double-check. It turns out that he didn’t, and neither did the other student (she said it wasn’t necessary, although I cannot access this portal so I could not check this myself). After the intern submitted his contract with my organization to the portal, it was rejected by the university for vague reasons and they suggested to use their own contract instead. It turned out I could not sign this contract myself and it had to go through the legal and HR departments of my organization, where several people happened to be on holiday. Through a Kafkaesque circus involving a lot of pleading, apologizing, getting sent back and forth and trying to figure out who is supposed to do what, we managed to get the signed contracts just in time (or actually a day too late, meaning one of the interns started one day later than scheduled). Let’s put this in the basket of useful career experience.

I got a nice new office shared with a fellow junior group leader. Our institute apparently has a substantial art collection and our office also features a massive (my guess would be 5-6 m2) painting featuring a fully nude woman. While it is a beautiful painting, it reminded me of a documentary on the child sex trafficker and rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who apparently had many paintings featuring nudity in his house in palm beach Florida. In this documentary, one of the survivors said that these paintings made her feel uncomfortable the first time she entered that house. Now that I am in a leadership position and my subordinates might have to come to my office to ask me questions, I was afraid that this huge painting might also make them feel uncomfortable. I therefore inquired if the painting could be swapped with something else in the collection. This was set in motion surprisingly quickly, perhaps too quickly, because as it was already approved, my new office mate replied in a rather irritated tone that she had not been informed about this and that she was attached to the painting. Ofcourse she is correct in that she should have been consulted and I made clear it was not of high priority for me, so alas, the painting remains in my office and I will just have to apologize to future visitors (already happened once by now).

As a new PI, it is important to put yourself on the map a little bit. I saw a linkedin post by my former employer announcing that a friend of mine was just starting his own lab in Belgium. I decided to directly message the linkedin account of that organisation, asking if it would be too forward by me to ask for a similar plug as I was in the same boat. Thankfully somebody in charge of that organizational linkedin account was very friendly and happily helped me out with this. You can decide whether this was vanity on my behalf or important self-marketing for a new PI (probably both). At least it led to a lot of ‘engagement’ on linkedin, for whatever that’s worth.

One very positive aspect of my new work place turns out to be the canteen. I did not have very high expectations, having experienced canteens in this country for most of my life, but this one is of significantly higher standard than the average. I heard it is because it is not an external caterer but an in-house team. The first two weeks, eating there felt a bit awkward being all by myself, but now that my interns have started it is a pleasant daily lab ritual to have lunch in the canteen together.

Another new experience for me is the ‘research strategy meetings’, where upcoming grant proposals are discussed. I already presented here two times now, the first time before my official starting date as the deadlines were on Day 1 and Day 2. I was looking for new grant proposal options and my eye fell on the Human Frontier Science Program ‘early career’ research proposal. I previously (unsuccessfully) applied to their postdoc fellowship. This fellowship requires a team of 2-4 junior group leaders with different expertise/background, from different countries (but has to be HFSP member country), independent status (so no postdoc or similar) and with a PhD obtained less than 10 years ago. This rather specific set of requirements basically eliminated my entire network, so I decided to ask around at my new institute, which led to some names being suggested. After making contact with a guy from the US via Linkedin, he agreed with a call to discuss this proposal opportunity. This all took a bit longer than expected, meaning I was too late to submit myself via the regular way for the aforementioned research strategy meeting. However, in the email announcing it, there was a link to a shared word document with the program of the meeting. Since it was already the next day, I boldly put my name after the last speaker in the list, meaning I would present from 5 p.m. (big mistake in my country as it turns out!). While the presentation in the meeting went fine and was actually moved to 16.45, I was told very clearly the next day by my boss to not use this approach the next time. I hope I got away on my newbie status with this one…

In the meantime, there was already a preliminary decision on the first grant proposal I submitted (before I started the job), which sadly was negative. However, it was allowed to submit a rebuttal if you thought there were factual inaccuracies in the assessment report. I decided to do so since there were some very questionable statements in this report that I felt I could protest (as did my superiors). It was made very clear by the grant provider that this rebuttal was not meant to provide additional, new information concerning the pre-proposal, or the rebuttal would be automatically rejected. Ofcourse, I made sure to not do so. I therefore was rather surprised that when I saw the reply to my rebuttal (in the final decision letters), one of the referees was quoted as:

“In the rebuttal, the candidate does not bring up new evidence but mainly restates the evidence that was already there.”

This is the boomer logic we are up against.

I also made contact with the neighbouring institute, a prestigious national institute with very strong science and several people I knew in my field from before. Somebody I overlapped with for a year or so during my PhD just started there as a junior group leader a few weeks before I did, which helped to make a connection. It was nice to visit the scientists in this group there and they were happy if I joined their biweekly group meeting. Moreover, during my visit they told me I could use some of their instruments that we lack (for now) at my own institute, albeit for a fee.

I still had to arrange my promised technician, for which I already submitted a vacancy text before my first official day. I found out it had never been circulated and I therefore submitted a slightly updated version (based on my impression of the labs during the tour I got). While initially slow, a match was made relatively quick with somebody with A) >25 years of experience at the institute B) almost the complete skillset I was looking for C) a very strong recommendation by his current boss, who was running out of funding to keep him in his own lab. He seems like a nice guy as well, which is ofcourse important too. The transfer was formalised on the last day of my first month, so we will have the team ‘complete’ for the next month.

To wrap up the first month, the final afternoon had an ‘oratio’ by one of the group leaders from my institute who recently became professor. Since I am already in a collaborative project with him, I figured it would be nice to go there. I could have expected (but didn’t) that one of my recent colleagues from my previous jobs might be there, so seeing her was a nice surprise and we could catch up on what happened there in the meantime and ofcourse my new role.

As this is my first blog it is a bit long, I will try to make the next one less verbose. Catch y’all on the flip side!

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