Career Development Week 2025!

Congratulations Christina, Cardev Cup winner 2025!

Back for the 6th annual Career Development Week (CDW) in the R-G lab! This is the week when the lab focuses on career development activities. We invited 6 guest speakers to talk about their career paths: Dr. Ross Marklein (PI, FDA); Dr. Nayab Abidi (postdoc, Genentech); Dr. Eduardo Gigante (postdoc at GA Tech and newly hired faculty at Kennesaw State); Dr. Tingxia Guo (Director, Fate Therapeutics); Dr. Courtney Brown (Community Health Engagement Coordinator, UGA); and Dr. Janhavi Kolhe (Scientific Editor, Cell). They gave great perspectives on their jobs and also the paths that they took from their Ph.D. to this point.

Another thing that we do in CDW is that each student completes career development-related tasks of their choosing. This year, students in the lab completed 202 distinct career development activities, including informational interviews, trying new time-management approaches, writing, preparing post-doc applications, and so on. Christina Endara (pictured above) won the CarDev Cup for this year, having completed 52 activities! We capped off the week with a great discussion of our progress and commitment to continuing these activities through the coming year.

The following is a reflection that Ph.D. student Carmila wrote as one of her activities for CDW this year!

I don’t think someone will disagree that doing a PhD is a huge commitment. It is an exciting, terrifying, challenging, and amazing journey - all at once, sometimes even in a single day! A person embraces this challenge because of their love for science and to take an important step in their career. But where is this step taking you?

To help us reflect on that question, our PI plans a Career Development Week once a year. During this week, we hear from professionals in a variety of roles who share their career paths, experiences transitioning between steps, and answer our questions (a lot of them). This year’s speakers included an industry postdoc, a government scientist, a community health engagement coordinator, a postdoc transitioning to a faculty position, a scientific editor, and a director from industry.

Let me summarize the big points for me from six speakers we had!

1 - People around you matter! Finding a PI that pushes and guides you is the key to finding what best fits you after your PhD. Your lab mates also have an immense influence, especially in determining the environment you will be placed in.

2 - Having a plan is important to put you in a position that suits you, adjusting to the plan as it happens is just as important.

3 – Keep an open mind! You might start thinking you know exactly what you want, but being involved in different opportunities may change your mind.

4 - What fulfills you is important! Just like money, time, freedom, and other aspects of daily routine. Therefore, how much each of them weighs in your career decision is up to you to decide!

5 - There is a bridge between research and community that needs just as much care and attention as the science itself—because building understanding, trust, and impact beyond the lab is also a vital part of the scientific process.

6 – Ask for feedback! Besides showing your interest in somebody else’s opinion, it gives you directions of what needs to be done differently to achieve what you want. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? And yet it is not always what we do.

As if having all those speakers was not enough, during the career development week we have a range of different activities to choose from and complete! The activities are meant to improve our CV, work on skills that need improvement, encourage networking, and different details that get us ready to make the most of future opportunities. We can choose to do the ones that are most suitable for our needs at that moment.

We learn while also getting ready for the next steps in our future at the same time! We can finish the week thrilled about one position or certain to not want some of them. Either way, we are closer to finding what we want to do next and have a full year to tailor that decision – until the next year and next Career Development Week.

PREP@UGA Celebration

We met today to celebrate the latest (and last) cohort of PREP scholars at UGA. The PREP program lost funding as part of the NIH cuts, which is unfathomable since it has been SUCH an amazing and successful program. Our post-bacc Saraí presented her work beautifully and the entire cohort was spectacular. It was an emotional day given that we are all grieving this loss on our campus, but it was heart-warming to go out with such a bang.