The postdoc interview

The 2-A postdoc.

D a long discussion of our favorite enzyme mechanisms, Gene Sander advised me that the easiest way to obtain a true picture of the transitory steps of a reaction would be to ‘‘hire a 2-Å postdoc.’’ In the mid-’70s, when this whimsical conversation took place, molecular and structural biology was just beginning to exert an effect on mechanistic enzymology. Whereas the advances of the past 25 yea...

Postdoc Labor Love

I look back fondly on my years as a postdoctoral fellow (1993–1995) as a period of heightened intellectual growth, clarity and optimism. After 5 years as a PhD student, I was finally set free to explore ideas more of my own creation, to start from scratch a new research project but this time with greater wisdom, experience and vision than was possible as a dazed and confused first-year graduate...

Postdoc Annual Report

The Postdoc Variant of the Secretary Problem

The classical secretary problem involves sequentially interviewing a pool of n applicants with the aim of hiring exactly the best one in the pool—nothing less is good enough. The optimal decision strategy is easy to describe and the probability of success is 1/e. In this paper, we consider a minor variant of this classical problem. We wish to pick not the best but the second best (the best is g...

Standards for postdoc training.

Postdoctoral (Postdoc) training has become virtually institutionalized in many parts of the world as a discrete stage in the career progression in most science and engineering fields. However, there is far too much variability in what such training involves, across institutions and among the laboratories within them. Given its importance and pervasiveness—there are over 50,000 postdocs in the U...