postdoc with phd supervisor

Responsibilities of Postdoctoral Fellows and Faculty Supervisors

(revised 04/14/2021)

The Harvard Chan School of Public Health recognizes that postdoctoral research fellows are trainees working in an apprenticeship mode in preparation for a career as scientific professionals.  The mentoring provided to the postdoctoral fellow by the faculty mentor is critical to the fellow’s career development and advancement.

In addition, postdoctoral fellows are generally expected to function responsibly and autonomously within the school’s complex and decentralized environment.  Independent thinking and action are in fact requisite to successful careers in research.

Responsibilities of postdoctoral fellows include the following:

• Assume primary responsibility for the development of his or her research and career.
• Play an active role in seeking career and research advice, both from the faculty supervisor and from other faculty members as appropriate.
• Perform the research required by the faculty supervisor to a high standard and in accordance with all institutional and federal regulations.
• Participate in the postdoc career development and annual review process .
• Work in a collegial and cooperative manner with the faculty supervisor and other co-workers.

Responsibilities of Harvard Chan School faculty supervisors include the following:

• Ensure that mutually understood expectations and goals are in place at the outset of the postdoctoral training period.  This may be best accomplished during the review of the postdoc’s initial career development plan .
• Meet regularly (for example, once a month) to establish and foster a career development plan and to assess important aspects of the postdoctoral fellow’s progress.  In addition, complete the postdoc annual progress review as part of the postdoc career development and annual review process .
• Strike a reasonable balance between the postdoctoral fellow’s responsibility to participate in research directed by the faculty supervisor and opportunities to develop scholarship reflecting the postdoctoral fellow’s own interests.
• Respect the postdoctoral fellow’s individuality, working style, and career goals and be aware that the rate of progress of postdoctoral fellows will vary.
• Maintain an atmosphere in which the postdoctoral fellow feels free to approach him/her for advice or discussion of differences.
• Encourage each postdoctoral fellow to seek advice and collaborative opportunities from other faculty members, or even to identify a second mentor, since the training experience can only benefit from a variety of perspectives.
• Promote ethical standards for conducting research, including compliance with all institutional and federal regulations.
• Accord full recognition of the postdoctoral fellow’s contributions to scholarship, including appropriate authorship of published work.  (The School’s authorship guidelines provide guidance in this area.)
• Establish clear plans for how projects will be divided when fellows complete their training.
• Support the postdoctoral fellow’s use of the full benefits of his/her employment at Harvard Chan School, including vacation time.

Postdoctoral fellows and faculty supervisors may meet with Jennifer Ivers, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, to resolve problems on an informal basis.  Harvard Chan School also provides a formal process for the resolution of issues that may arise between a postdoctoral fellow and his/her supervisor (see grievance policy ).

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Postdoctoral research

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Planning the next step in your career 

Seeking a postdoctoral fellowship should begin a year before you graduate. You may need to arrange a visa. You will need to ensure that you are adhering to the rules set by funding agencies. After securing a grant or position, continue to watch for funding opportunities that could help your CV and allow you to extend your fellowship. Throughout your time as a postdoc, volunteer for tasks that can help you develop new skills.

Around the time you complete your PhD

If you would like to do a postdoctoral fellowship (PDF), start thinking about potential supervisors and projects a year before you expect to complete your PhD. Ask your supervisor for help in setting up contacts. 

If you think you might like to complete a PDF in another country, start looking into visa requirements as soon as possible.

Make sure you are familiar with Canada’s Tri-Council funding agencies’ official rules for PDF awards . These may change from year to year, so check their websites regularly.

Don’t lose touch with your PhD supervisor(s); they can be a valuable source of advice and will most probably provide a reference for you in the future.

The postdoc-supervisor relationship

Supervisor-postdoc relationships have a significant effect on productivity and the overall experience of a postdoctoral fellow (Scaffidi & Berman, 2011). With this in mind, choose a supervisor with whom you feel comfortable and who is supportive of your research and career choices.

Some supervisors might be reluctant to support your attendance at transferable skills training workshops because they feel time away from the lab is wasted time (Phillips, 2010). Take the time to talk to your supervisor about the importance of additional skill training and push for time to attend such workshops. Consider attending SKILLSETS workshops such as Would You Fund It ,  Digital Literacy ,  Learning To Teach events , and  TA Training .

During your postdoctoral fellowship

Keep up to date about what funding opportunities are available in your field , be they from the Canadian Tri-Council or from private funding bodies. Salaried fellowships and travel awards are important for your CV.

Most PDFs are planned to be one year in duration but often extend to two or three years. Be mindful from the beginning about what you want to accomplish in your PDF in the short term and the long term. In Quebec, it is important to remember that you may only be a postdoc for up to 5 years after the award of your PhD degree.

Work with your supervisor to ensure that you have room for professional growth . For example, ask to supervise an undergraduate student project or offer to play a more active role in grant writing .

Work with others to establish collaborations outside of your host university. PDFs are highly mobile and it is extremely useful to have connections, academic or otherwise, around the world. These connections can be invaluable when deciding what comes next.

What comes after your postdoc?

If you are a postdoc, there is no magic "line on the CV" that can conjure up a job immediately. An Individual Development Plan (IDP) can help you identify areas for professional growth and set specific goals for your career. 

What is your goal in pursuing a postdoc? 

Comprehensive postdoctoral training programs can offer measurable benefits in terms of productivity and later career success (Rybarczyk, Lerea, Lund, Whittington, & Dykstra, 2011). Although the 2009 Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS-ACSP) survey suggests that more postdoctoral researchers want career training courses than have access to them, McGill's SKILLSETS program includes a great many workshops designed to offer training in transferable and career-related skills.

Phillips (2010) suggested that postdoctoral fellows tend to be unaware of the financial value of their research and would benefit if universities offered what he calls "enterprise training" to help them capitalize on their work in the private sector, given the lack of academic jobs and the security and salary they entail. For many scholars, commercial opportunities are far from their goals, and much of the discourse about postdoctoral research in the media (e.g.,  The Chronicle of Higher Education ) critiques changes in academia, such as reduced public funding and the shift to "academic wage labour" (Cantwell, 2011).

Individual Development Plans (IDPs) for Postdoctoral Fellows

An IDP provides an opportunity for postdocs to identify their short term research and professional development goals, and long term career goals. Making goals explicit and sharing them has been shown to enhance goal completion. An IDP is a tool for postdocs to self-assess their skill set, reflect on their progress, and highlight their achievements. The IDP helps students to make more informed decisions about their next steps and think beyond the present to envision a trajectory beyond the postdoctoral fellowship. A key aspect of an IDP is the self-assessment of skills, interests, and values.

Visit McGill's myPath website to access planners, workbooks, video guides, peer discussions, and other resources to help you develop your IDP.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License . Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, McGill University .

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What Makes A Good PhD Supervisor?

• By Dr Harry Hothi
• August 12, 2020

A good PhD supervisor has a track record of supervising PhD students through to completion, has a strong publication record, is active in their research field, has sufficient time to provide adequate supervision, is genuinely interested in your project, can provide mentorship and has a supportive personality.

Introduction

The indicators that you’ll have the best chance of succeeding in your PhD project are multi-factorial. You’ll need to secure funding, find a research project that you’re interested in and is within your academic area of expertise, maybe even write your own research proposal, and find a good supervisor that will help guide you through PhD life.

As you research more into life as a doctoral student, you’ll appreciate that choosing a good supervisor is one of the most important factors that can influence the success of your project, and even If you complete your PhD at all. You need to find a good supervisory relationship with someone who has a genuine research interest in your project.

This page outlines the top qualities to look for as indicators of an ideal PhD supervisor. But before we get to that, we should be clear on precisely what the supervisor is there to do, and what they are not.

The Role of a PhD Supervisor

A PhD supervisor is there to guide you as you work through PhD life and help you make informed decisions about how you shape your PhD project. The key elements of their supervisory role include:

• To help ensure that you stay on schedule and maintain constant progress of your research so that you ultimately finish your PhD within your intended time frame, typically three to four years.
• To advise and guide you based on their knowledge and expertise in your subject area.
• To help you in the decision-making process as you design, prepare and execute your study design.
• To work with you as you analyse your raw data and begin to draw conclusions about key findings that are coming out of your research.
• To provide feedback and edits where necessary on your manuscripts and elements of your thesis writing.
• To encourage and motivate you and provide ongoing support as a mentor.
• To provide support at a human level, beyond just the academic challenges.

It’s important that you know from the outset what a supervisor isn’t there to do, so that your expectations of the PhDstudent-supervisor relationship are correct. A supervisor cannot and should not create your study design or tell you how you should run your experiments or help you write your thesis. Broadly speaking, you as a PhD student will create, develop and refine content for your thesis, and your supervisor will help you improve this content by providing you with continuous constructive feedback.

There’s a balance to be found here in what makes a good PhD supervisor, ranging from one extreme of providing very little support during a research project, to becoming too involved in the running of the project to the extent that it takes away from it being an independent body of work by the graduate student themselves. Ultimately, what makes a good supervisor is someone you can build a rapport with, who helps bring out the best in you to produce a well written, significant body of research that contributes novel findings to your subject area.

Read on to learn the key qualities you should consider when looking for a good PhD supervisor.

Qualities to Look For in A Good PhD Supervisor

1. a track record of successful phd student supervision.

A quick first check to gauge how good a prospective supervisor is is to find out how many students they’ve successfully supervised in the past; i.e. how many students have earned their PhD under their supervision. Ideally, you’d want to go one step further and find out:

• How many students they’ve supervised in total previously and of those, what percentage have gone onto gain their PhDs; however, this level of detail may not always be easy to find online. Most often though, a conversation with a potential supervisor and even their current or previous students should help you get an idea of this.
• What were the project titles and specifically the areas of research that they supervised on? Are these similar to your intended project or are they significantly different from the type of work performed in the academic’s lab in the past? Of the current students in the lab, are there any projects that could complement yours
• Did any of the previous PhD students publish the work of their doctoral research in peer-reviewed journals and present at conferences? It’s a great sign if they have, and in particular, if they’re named first authors in some or all of these publications.

This isn’t to say that a potential supervisor without a track record of PhD supervision is necessarily a bad fit, especially if the supervisor is relatively new to the position and is still establishing their research group. It is, however, reassuring if you know they have supervision experience in supporting students to successful PhD completion.

2. Is an Expert in their Field of Research

As a PhD candidate, you will want your supervisor to have a high level of research expertise within the field that your own research topic sits in. This expertise will be essential if they are to help guide you through your research and keep you on track to what is most novel and impactful to your research area.

Your supervisor doesn’t necessarily need to have all the answers to questions that arise in your specific PhD project, but should know enough to be able to have useful conversations about your research. It will be your responsibility to discover the answers to problems as they arise, and you should even expect to complete your PhD with a higher level of expertise about your project than your supervisor.

The best way to determine if your supervisor has the expertise to supervise you properly is to look at their publication track record. The things you need to look for are:

• How often do they publish papers in peer-reviewed journals, and are they still actively involved in new papers coming out in the research field?
• What type of journals have they published in? For example, are most papers in comparatively low impact factor journals, or do they have at least some in the ‘big’ journals within your field?
• How many citations do they have from their research? This can be a good indicator of the value that other researchgroups place on these publications; having 50 papers published that have been cited only 10 times may (but not always) suggest that this research is not directly relevant to the subject area or focus from other groups.
• How many co-authors has your potential supervisor published with? Many authors from different institutions is a good indicator of a vast collaborative professional network that could be useful to you.

There’re no hard metrics here as to how many papers or citations an individual needs to be considered an expert, and these numbers can vary considerably between different disciplines. Instead, it’s better to get a sense of where your potential supervisor’s track record sits in comparison to other researchers in the same field; remember that it would be unfair to directly compare the output of a new university lecturer with a well-established professor who has naturally led more research projects.

Equally, this exercise is a good way for you to better understand how interested your supervisor will be in your research; if you find that much of their research output is directly related to your PhD study, then it’s logical that your supervisor has a real interest here. While the opposite is not necessarily true, it’s understandable from a human perspective that a supervisor may be less interested in a project that doesn’t help to further their own research work, especially if they’re already very busy.

Two excellent resources to look up publications are Google Scholar and ResearchGate .

3. Has Enough Time to Provide Good PhD Supervision

This seems like an obvious point, but it’s worth emphasising: how smoothly your PhD goes and ultimately how successful it is, will largely be influenced by how much time your research supervisor has to provide guidance, constructive academic advice and mentorship. The fact that your supervisor is the world’s leading expert in your field becomes a moot point if they don’t have time to meet you.

A good PhD supervisor will take the time to meet with you regularly in person (ideally) or remotely and be reachable and responsive to questions as and when they arise (e.g. through email or video calling). As a student, you want to have a research environment where you know you can drop by your supervisors’ office for a quick chat, or that you’ll see them around the university regularly; chance encounters and corridor discussions are sometimes the most impactful when working through problems.

Unsurprisingly, however, most academics who are well-known experts in their field are also usually some of the busiest too. It’s common for established academic supervisors to have several commitments competing for their time. These can include teaching and supervising undergraduate students, masters students and post-docs, travelling to collaborator meetings or invited talks, managing the growth of their academic department or graduate school, sitting on advisory boards and writing grants for funding applications. Beware of the other obligations they may have and how this could impact your work relationship.

You’ll need to find a balance here to find a PhD supervisor who has the academic knowledge to support you, but also the time to do so; talking to their current and past students will help you get a sense of this. It’s also reassuring to know that your supervisor has a permanent position within your university and has no plans for a sabbatical during your time as a PhD researcher.

4. Is a Good Mentor with a Supportive Personality

A PhD project is an exercise in independently producing a substantial body of research work; the primary role of your supervisor should be to provide mentoring to help you achieve this. You want to have a supervisor with the necessary academic knowledge, but it is just as important to have a supportive supervisor who is actively willing and able to provide you constructive criticism on your work in a consistent manner. You’ll likely get a sense of their personality during your first few meetings with them when discussing your research proposal; if you feel there’s a disconnect between you as a PhD student and your potential supervisor at this stage, it’s better to decide on other options with different supervisors.

A good supervisor will help direct you towards the best outcomes in your PhD research when you reach crossroads. They will work with you to develop a structure for your thesis and encourage you to set deadlines to work to and push you to achieve these. A good mentor should be able to recognise when you need more support in a specific area, be it a technical academic hurdle or simply some guidance in developing efficient work patterns and routines, and have the communication skills to help you recognise and overcome them.

A good supervisor should share the same mindset as you about finishing your PhD within a reasonable time frame; in the UK this would be within three to four years as a full-time university student. Their encouragement should reflect this and (gently) push you to set and reach mini-milestones throughout your project to ensure you stay on track with progress. This is a great example of when a supportive personality and positive attitude is essential for you both to maintain a good professional relationship throughout a PhD. The ideal supervisor will bring out the best in you without becoming prescriptive in their guidance, allowing you the freedom to develop your own working style.

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To sum up, the qualities you should look for in a good PhD supervisor are that they have a strong understanding of your research field, demonstrated by regular and impactful publications, have a proven track record of PhD supervision, have the time to support you, and will do so by providing mentorship rather than being a ‘boss’.

As a final point, if you’re considering a research career after you finish your PhD journey, get a sense of if there may any research opportunities to continue as a postdoc with the supervisor if you so wanted.

Tenure is a permanent position awarded to professors showing excellence in research and teaching. Find out more about the competitive position!

Reference management software solutions offer a powerful way for you to track and manage your academic references. Read our blog post to learn more about what they are and how to use them.

Choosing a good PhD supervisor will be paramount to your success as a PhD student, but what qualities should you be looking for? Read our post to find out.

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In this post you’ll learn what the significance of the study means, why it’s important, where and how to write one in your paper or thesis with an example.

There are various types of research that are classified by objective, depth of study, analysed data and the time required to study the phenomenon etc.

Dr Singh earned his PhD in Nanotechnology from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT Guwahati), India in 2018. He is now a Senior Research Fellow developing low cost and biocompatible micro/nanomotors for anti-cancer therapy.

Freya’s in the final year of her PhD at the University of Leeds. Her project is about improving the precision of observations between collocated ground-based weather radar and airborne platforms.

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Tress Academic

#68: PhD Support: Pick the perfect co-supervisor

October 27, 2020 by Tress Academic

Are you aware of how much a good co-supervisor can influence your PhD process? Did you know that many PhD students can add co-supervisors throughout their PhD? Not sure who you should pick? Here, we outline the process for finding the perfect co-supervisor, and provide our helpful worksheet ‘Select the perfect PhD co-supervisor’ to move you straight into selecting your prime candidates.

It’s pretty clear to every PhD student what function their main PhD supervisor or advisors plays, and that this person has an important influence on their PhD projects. But in addition to that, PhD candidates have co-supervisors, and what their roles are is often less obvious. In many PhD programmes, PhD candidates can suggest co-supervisors that they find beneficial to their projects. But not everyone is aware that this opportunity exists, and that it is a great chance to get highly relevant experts on board who can really help to elevate a PhD project to another level. Not selecting appropriate co-supervisors for your PhD project is a missed chance that may never come again. 

Many aspects of finding great supervisors do apply to the main supervisor and the co-supervisor alike, see (Killeya 2008, Academic Positions Career Advice 2018, Francis 2019) but co-supervisors can often be appointed while you already work on your PhD research. That’s a big plus, because you do have to have all of them on board when you are starting out!

With this blog-post, we want to clarify the position of co-supervisors, and draw your attention to why having good co-supervisors is important for your PhD success. On top of that, we give you practical advice on how to come up with a list of prime-candidates for yourself. Co-supervisors will support you and be close allies throughout your PhD process. Grab our  free worksheet ‘Select the perfect PhD co-supervisor’  for all the details.

Who are we talking about? 

Besides the main supervisor or advisor, most PhD students have further scientists who give additional supervision. The persons besides your main supervisor can be called co-supervisors, co-advisors, second supervisors/advisors, or mentors. So don’t get confused here – it’s all the same principle no matter what they are called in your graduate programme. We call them ‘co-supervisors’ in this post. 

What do co-supervisors do?

Your main supervisor has the overall responsibility to support and guide you throughout your PhD process from start to finish. If you want an overview regarding their roles & responsibilities, check our blog post no. #10: Good PhD-supervision: What you can expect .  

The role of a co-supervisor has to be seen in respect to the main supervisor. In principle, a co-supervisor can have the following functions: 

• Double-up: As a double-up for the main supervisor. This is often the case if you have one main supervisor and one co-supervisor. The co-supervisor gives you additional supervision, but the main responsibility falls on your main supervisor. No specific roles are defined for the co-supervisor in this case. Think of president and vice-president, or chancellor and vice chancellor. 

• Team-member: While the main-supervisor is the team-leader and has overall responsibility, the co-supervisors add additional expertise. Their function is often specified (e.g. they help you with a particular aspect of your project). Together they have complementary expertise. Think of them as a team of supervisors who provide you with support. 

• Mentor: The co-supervisor as mentor often occurs in combination with point 2 above. Here, one co-supervisor has a special function as mentor and career advisor. The mentoring role emphasises the non-scientific guidance that this person is giving you. 

How many co-supervisors can one have?

The number of co-supervisors you should or may have varies. Having 1-3 co-supervisors is common, but it’s often possible to have more than that if it makes sense in the context of your PhD project. All supervisors together form your supervisory committee (also called PhD advisory committee, thesis advisory committee, or supervisory board). 

Depending on your PhD programme and regulations, co-supervisors can be added (and rotated off again) to your committee during various phases of your PhD. So you do not necessarily have to have all of them on board right at the start. Nor do you always have the same number of co-supervisors throughout your entire PhD. Herein is a great chance for all of you who think they would benefit from having another supervisor on board – go ahead and see if they can be added to your supervisory committee. 

Advantages of good co-supervisors

The advantages of having good co-supervisors can’t be emphasised enough – here are the most important points:

• More experts, better quality. Having additional experts for particular aspects of your PhD does greatly enhance the quality of your PhD project. You can learn specialty methods or techniques quicker, and trouble-shooting is easier. You’re exposed to various schools of thought. 

• Multiplicity of personalities. Supervision is not just about the science, but involves a great deal of personal contact. You’ll benefit from having multiple personalities available, so there’s a better balance overall. If you’re fed up and tired of one, there’s still others you can rely on.

• Checks and balances. Your project (and you) won’t be dominated by just one influencer, and you reduce the risk of being dependent on a single person. There’s a better chance that formal procedures of graduate schools and universities will be followed to your benefit. In a case of conflict with the main supervisor or one co-supervisor, you have others to talk to.

• Future network. Co-supervisors are great future collaborators and academic contacts. They know you and your work in detail and can help you form an international profile early on. 

• Ease burden on one supervisor . You can have more and better supervision overall, without overburdening one person.

Who appoints co-supervisors?

The main supervisor is often fixed from the start because you applied for a PhD position with this person or you selected them as a supervisor for your project. Co-supervisors, in contrast, are often appointed during the initial phase of your PhD. At most universities or graduate programmes, you’ll discuss potential co-supervisors with your main supervisor, and register the ones you agree upon. And here’s the problem – at the start, PhD candidates are not always aware of the importance of this step, and that they often have the right to suggest candidates. All too often, main supervisors, due to time constraints or lack of better ideas, tend to invite their best academic buddies or the colleagues they alway work with. This might be convenient and trouble-free for them, but is not necessarily the best bet for you. If your guidelines allow for it, make sure to suggest potential co-supervisors.  

You’ve got to realise this: A non-supportive co-supervisor is of little to no help with your PhD research. A good and supportive one will amp up the quality of your research and the overall success of your PhD project. Which option do you want?

Get our free worksheet ‘Select the perfect PhD co-supervisor’ so you know how to arrive at a list of great candidates. Discuss your perfect candidates with your main supervisor, and make explicit who you want and why. Then you can approach your favourite candidates and ask if they would be available (and mention that you discussed the matter with your main supervisor), or your main supervisor may contact them on your behalf. Once you have their agreement, they will be formally registered as co-supervisors with your graduate school or university. 

Who can be a co-supervisor? 

A scientist in your research field with the appropriate expertise is an ideal co-supervisor. Check the regulations of your university or graduate programme. While there are universities where main-supervisors of PhD candidates have to be full-professors, the requirements for co-supervisors are often more flexible. In principle you can appoint any researcher or scientist in your field as co-supervisor, occasionally also a postdoc or industry expert. Co-supervisors can come from outside your own department or faculty, and international expertise from abroad is often welcome (details are specified in your PhD regulations). This can greatly widen the pool of candidates for you and is a fantastic chance to get the very best support for your project.

How to select the perfect co-supervisor?

It is not all too difficult, if you widen the pool of people you can ask and do a brief strategic search online. In our Worksheet: Select the perfect PhD co-supervisor, we have included step-by-step guidelines that give you all the important details to consider. To just give you a teaser: You should get a head-start by identifying the exact areas of specialism you’d need for your PhD project. In the second step, you brainstorm for researchers from nearby (your work-group, department, institute) as well as further away who might be great to have. But you’ll also consider personalities, career-level, their track-record, and much more! Curious? Download our free worksheet “Select the perfect PhD co-supervisor” .

Conclusion:

Having a supportive group of supervisors can be a huge benefit to your PhD. Don’t just settle for what your main supervisor suggests, but do the legwork yourself and make sure you have people at your side that help to elevate your research and are great to work with. 

Keep your eyes and ears open for add-ons to your supervisory team as you proceed with your PhD. If you get to know more academics that would be an asset to your advisory board, don’t hesitate to pave the way and ask if they would be willing to come on board as co-supervisors. 

Worksheet “Select the perfect PhD co-supervisor”

Blog post no. #10: Good PhD-supervision: What you can expect.  

Killeya, Matthew 2008: The PhD journey: How to choose a good supervisor. New Scientist. 

Francis, Chantelle 2019: 6 Things to look for in a PhD supervisor. Find-a-PhD.com.  

Academic Positions Career Advice 2018: How to Choose Your PhD Supervisor. 

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Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Msca opens €417 million call for postdoctoral fellowships.

Postdoctoral Fellowships offer researchers holding a PhD the opportunity to gain new skills and experience while carrying out their own research project abroad. The deadline to apply is 11 September 2024.

The 2024 call for the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions  Postdoctoral Fellowships is open as of today.

The grants, which have a budget of € 417.18 million, aim to improve the creative and innovative potential of researchers holding a PhD.  

They will help researchers acquire new skills,develop their careers, and gain international, interdisciplinary, and inter-sectoral experience by working in another country.

These prestigious fellowships are also a stepping stone in researchers’ careers. They allow them to strengthen research cooperation with leading scientific teams and figures worldwide. 

The call will close on 11 September 2024 and is expected to fund over 1,400 projects.

Research in all fields 

The call is open to applications in any scientific field, including Euratom research. 

Fellowships include

• European Postdoctoral Fellowships , open to researchers of any nationality to carry out a personalised project in the European Union (EU) or countries associated to Horizon Europe for up to 24 months
• Global Postdoctoral Fellowships , open to EU and Horizon Europe associated countries nationals or long-term residents wishing to work with organisations in third countries for a period of 12 to 24 months, before returning to Europe for 12 months

The scheme encourages researchers to gain experience beyond academia by giving them the opportunity to request an additional six months at the end of their fellowship to undertake a placement in a non-academic organisation in Europe.

Conditions for researchers and organisations

MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships are open to postdoctoral researchers from all over the world, of any nationality and at any career stage, with a maximum of 8 years of research experience after their PhD. 

Some exceptions and specific conditions apply, for instance for Global Postdoctoral Fellowships.

Researchers must develop an application with their prospective supervisor and apply together with their future host organisation, which can be

• a university
• a research institution or facility
• a company, small or medium-sized enterprise
• a government, public institution, or body
• a museum, hospital, or NGO
• any other organisation 

based in an EU Member State or  Horizon Europe associated country .

As of January 2024, the United Kingdom is associated to the Horizon Europe programme. United Kingdom organisations will therefore be able to  apply and receive funding under this year’s call under the same conditions as EU Member States and other countries associated to Horizon Europe. 

In addition, researchers applying to Global Fellowships will need to seek the commitment of an organisation based in a  third country , as they will carry out their research there for a period of between 12 and 24 months.

The call is open to researchers wishing to reintegrate in Europe, to those who are displaced by conflict, as well as to researchers with high potential who are seeking to restart their careers.

ERA Fellowships

Researchers applying for a standard European Fellowship with a host organisation in a “widening country” (i.e. a country with lower participation rates in Horizon Europe) can opt in to be considered for the ERA Fellowships call.

Around 50 ERA Fellowships will be awarded to excellent applicants who were not selected under the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships call due to budget constraints. The eligible host countries for ERA Fellowships can be found in the following  list .

Indicative timeline

23 April 2024: launch of the call for proposals

11 September 2024: deadline to submit proposals

February 2025: notification of call results to applicants (TBC)

March-May 2025: grant agreement signature for successful projects (TBC)

April-May 2025: first EU-funded projects start (TBC)

Find out more and apply

Have a look at our tips and tricks to prepare your application

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• 25 April 2024

NIH pay rise for postdocs and PhD students could have US ripple effect

• Amanda Heidt 0

Amanda Heidt is a freelance journalist in southeastern Utah.

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Academic workers on a picket line at the University of California, Los Angeles. Credit: Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty

Amid a reckoning over poor job prospects and stagnating wages for early-career scientists, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said this week that it will raise the salaries of thousands of postdoctoral researchers and graduate students who receive a prestigious NIH research fellowship. The move could boost pay for other scientists as well, because academic institutions often follow guidelines set by the NIH.

Beginning immediately, postdocs who hold one of the agency’s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSAs) will earn at least US$61,008 per year — an 8% increase and the largest year-over-year increase the NIH has implemented since 2017. Postdocs’ salaries, which are adjusted for years of experience, are capped at $74,088 per year. Graduate students’ yearly salaries will rise by $1,000, amounting to an annual salary of $28,224. The agency will also provide an extra $500 in subsidies for childcare and $200 for training-related expenses.

“This is a major step in the right direction and something that the majority will agree is widely needed to retain talent in the biomedical and academic research sectors,” says Francisca Acosta, a biomedical engineer and postdoc at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, who is herself funded through an NRSA.

Postdoc shortage

In 2022, the agency assembled a working group to advise it on how best to retain and cultivate postdoctoral talent , after reports that principal investigators were struggling to fill vacant postdoc positions . In December last year, the panel recommended a minimum salary of $70,000 for postdocs.

The NIH agreed that a salary increase is indeed needed for the more than 17,000 trainees covered by the NRSAs. But in its announcement, the agency acknowledged that the pay rise it has implemented falls short of the council’s recommendation. It cited its tight budget in recent years as a reason.

Canadian science gets biggest boost to PhD and postdoc pay in 20 years

It added that “pending the availability of funds through future appropriations”, the agency would increase salaries to meet the recommended $70,000 target in the next three to five years.

The agency also suggested that NIH-funded institutions could supplement salaries in other ways. That presents a challenge, according to Sharona Gordon, a biophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, given that the NIH’s modular R01 grants — one of the main NIH research awards with which principal investigators fund their labs — have remained at $250,000 per year since they were introduced in 1998. Such grants cannot be used to supplement salaries, meaning that lab heads have to pull money from other sources to increase trainees’ pay.

Even scientists who approve of the NIH’s move say it could have unintended consequences. “For institutions such as ours, which mandate that the postdoc minimum salary be set to the NIH minimum, there are some concerns that this increase in personnel costs could be a barrier for labs based on funding levels,” Acosta says.

For some, the five-year timeline for the increase feels insufficient. Haroon Popal, a cognitive-science postdoc at the University of Maryland in College Park whose work is funded by the NIH, says that although he understands the pressures on the agency, the new salary will not be enough to support him as he assumes multiple caring responsibilities. Even with the boost, postdoc salaries in academia fall far short of what researchers could make in government, industry or non-profit positions.

“This is an issue of diversity and equity for me,” he says. “The new postdoc salary is not allowing people like me to be in academia, which is counter to the NIH’s, institutions’ and our scientific community’s goals of increased diversity.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01242-x

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Democrats win a New York special election, further narrowing the House GOP's majority

Democrats won a special election for a House seat in western New York on Tuesday, The Associated Press projected, further shrinking the GOP's narrow majority in the House .

Democratic state Sen. Tim Kennedy defeated Republican town supervisor Gary Dickson in the 26th District, a reliably blue area that includes Buffalo and some of its surrounding suburbs. Democrats will now control 213 seats in the House, compared with 217 for the Republicans. Five seats remain vacant.

Kennedy will serve the rest of Democratic Rep. Brian Higgins' term. Higgins, who was in his 10th term, resigned in February to run a local performing arts center, and he had some choice words for partisan gridlock in the House. Higgins told The Buffalo News late last year that Congress is “in a very, very bad place” and that “we’re at the beginning phases of a deterioration of the prestige of the institution.”

That did not deter Kennedy from running in the special election or for a full term in November.

“The dysfunction has become an embarrassment across this country and across the global community,” Kennedy said in a phone interview Monday. “And we have to restore honor and civility and functionality back into the halls of the House of Representatives.”

Kennedy’s victory Monday was no surprise — President Joe Biden won the district by 23 percentage points in 2020, according to calculations from Daily Kos Elections , and the district has twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans.

That means Democrats are favored to hold on to the seat in November. Kennedy will first have to win the June primary to run for a full term, but he could have that race to himself.

Former Grand Island Town Supervisor Nate McMurray, who ran unsuccessfully in a neighboring congressional district, is also looking to run. But Kathleen McGrath, a spokesperson for the state Board of Elections, wrote in an email that there are multiple objections to McMurray’s petition signatures and that ballot access will be determined at a meeting Wednesday. Kennedy had also filed a lawsuit challenging McMurray’s signatures.

“I’m looking forward to working with my colleagues to deliver for the people of this country and making sure that the House of Representatives is more reflective of the people,” Kennedy said of his campaign for a full term. “And I believe going into November, we have the moral high ground here to take back the House as Democrats. I believe the people of this country are sick and tired of seeing the dysfunction in the chaos that’s reigning under MAGA Republican control in the House.”

Kennedy, who is likely to be a reliable Democratic vote in the House, focused his campaign on core party issues, including protecting Social Security and Medicare, defending democracy and codifying the right to an abortion into federal law.

Kennedy, a practicing Catholic, said in 2014 that his views on abortion had “evolved,” and now he is calling for federal law to reflect the abortion protections in New York state law.

Kennedy was among the state legislators who voted in 2019 to protect the right to an abortion in New York up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for nonviable fetuses and when a patient’s health is at risk.

"I believe that a woman’s right to make health care decisions about her own body ought to be made between a woman, her family and her doctor,” Kennedy said. “And if we do not allow for that scenario to play out, and if we restrict and ban abortion across this country, women will die.”

Kennedy had the endorsement of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s political arm. He reiterated his support for Israel while also calling for civilians to be protected in its war against Hamas.

Bridget Bowman is a deputy editor for NBC's Political Unit.

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April 30, 2024

Ayla Cordell | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

The 2024 Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT) at Brandeis Graduate School of Arts & Sciences was not Will Dahl’s first rodeo. “It took me two tries,” the Molecular and Cell Biology PhD student said. “On my first attempt last year, I missed a line and stood silent for what felt like ages. To be honest, I was terrified!” This year, Will took home the first place prize for the Sciences of $1,000 and the overall win. He credits his success to careful planning, refinement, and lots of practice. He focused on formatting his talk as a story that would resonate with a wide audience: “Every sentence must be calibrated to communicate, and there is no room for asides. The talk converges from broader impacts to the actual thesis.”

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Under the bright white stage lights and looking out upon an audience of friends, family, members of the Brandeis community, and a panel of five judges, finalists took to the Spingold Theatre stage. While it was certainly nerve-wracking, contestants noted the benefits of presenting in this format.

Manning Zhang, who won first place in the Humanities/Creative Arts/Social Sciences category, said the best moment of the competition was standing on the stage for the final round with rushing adrenaline. Acknowledging that few friends and family know about what she researches in Sociology and Health Policy, she began sharing more with them to understand how different people would react to her research. While this helped her prepare for the competition, it ended up holding deeper meaning for Zhang: “It took me a really long time to pursue my research and say, ‘This is meaningful.’ Getting feedback from people and hearing that they understand what I’m doing is really important to me.”

Victoria Khaghani, a Master’s student in Anthropology who was Runner Up in the Humanities/Creative Arts/Social Sciences category, echoed this sentiment. “You have to push yourself pretty hard to be able to condense your research down. But being able to then present my research to my family and have them say, ‘We finally understand what you’re doing,’ where they can understand the importance of it…that was huge.”

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The final round may have showcased three minutes of individual presentation, but 3MT thrives as a collective and collaborative effort. “This is one of the only opportunities GSAS students at Brandeis have to share their research with the overall Brandeis community, outside of their departments,” McCann noted. Zhang (Sociology and Health Policy) even reached out to 2022 winner Emiliano Gutierrez-Popoca (PhD English ‘23), whose talk on Master-Servant Relations in Early Modern Drama led him to the National 3MT competition. Though they come from different disciplines, 3MT provided a platform for shared experience, and Popoca helped Zhang revise her draft for the final round. “I’ve gained a lot of rapport with people I didn’t think I could have rapport with…networking is very precious,” Zhang said. The 3MT community at Brandeis continues to strengthen and grow, and we cannot wait for next year!

Special thanks to 3MT sponsors: Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, Mandel Center for the Humanities, Office of the Vice Provost for Research, and the Division of Sciences

This year’s winners include:

First Place - William Dahl (overall winner), Molecular and Cell Biology, Stressed Cells' Secret Weapon for Survival

Runner Up - Pranav Ojha, Molecular and Cell Biology, What Makes our Clock Tick: A Look at Where It All Starts

Humanities/Social Sciences/Creative Arts

First Place - Manning Zhang, Sociology and Health Policy, Move It or Lose It

Runner Up - Victoria Khaghani, Anthropology, The Devil’s in the Details: Neglected Patterns of Honduras

People’s Choice

Pranav Ojha

New York 26th District special election results 2024

New York is hosting a special election to fill the House seat previously held by Rep. Brian Higgins (D), who resigned from Congress in early February. Nominees were selected by the state parties – the Republicans chose West Seneca town supervisor Gary Dickson, and Democrats chose state Sen. Timothy M. Kennedy. Polls close at 9 p.m. Eastern.

Special election results

Kennedy (D) is projected to win. An estimated 93.8 percent of votes have been counted.

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Democrat tim kennedy wins new york special election to replace ex-rep. brian higgins .

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Democratic Buffalo state Sen. Tim Kennedy defeated Republican West Seneca Supervisor Gary Dickson in Tuesday’s New York special election to replace longtime former Rep. Brian Higgins (D-NY). 

Kennedy jumped out to a massive 78.4%-21.6% lead over Dickson when the Associated Press projected it to go in his favor, at 9:17 p.m.

“We did it. We did it as a COMMUNITY,” Kennedy wrote on X. “Because that’s what this was all about since Day One. And that’s what it will always be about.”

“I’m honored. I’m humbled. I’m ready to get to Washington and get to work,” he added.

The 47-year-old state senator will serve out the remainder of Higgins’ term in the House of Representatives, which expires at the end of the year. 

Higgins, 64, resigned from his 26th District congressional seat in early February, in order to become president of Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo. 

The former 10-term congressman also expressed dissatisfaction with Congress when he announced his decision to resign. 

“Congress is not the institution that I went to 19 years ago. It’s a very different place today,” he said in November .

“We’re spending more time doing less. And the American people aren’t being served.”

Kennedy’s victory narrows the Republican conference’s already slim majority in the House to 217-213, meaning the GOP can only afford to lose one vote on any bill if Democrats vote along party lines. 

Kennedy outraised Dickson, a former FBI agent, by more than $1 million dollars, Federal Election Commission records show . 

Dickson described his politics “more towards the center” of former President Donald Trump, whom he said he supports as the GOP nominee for president, according to the Associated Press. 

Kennedy is also running to serve a full term in New York’s 26th District, which encompasses Erie and Niagara counties, including the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. 

The district is considered a safe seat for Democrats. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the 26th District by a greater than 2-1 ratio. 

Kennedy will square off against attorney and former Grand Island Town Supervisor Nate McMurray in the June 25 Democratic primary. 

McMurray is currently facing a lawsuit from Kennedy seeking to remove him from the primary ballot over more than 1,000 allegedly invalid signatures collected in McMurray’s electoral petition. 

McMurray has denied the claims in the suit. 

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