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2006 Career Opportunities in Physiology Committee Report

Career Presentations at APS Conferences

The Committee continues to work with organizers of APS conferences to include career development sessions and/or activities at those meetings. In 2006, Committee members will attend both APS Conferences (“Comparative Physiology 2006: Integrating Diversity and Physiological Genomics” and “Proteomics of Lung Disease”). They will contact the organizers to set up a career session or activity and will work with the Education and Meetings Offices to coordinate a display of materials.

The successful APS Professional Skills Training (PST) Short Courses also will provide materials to use for career development sessions at APS meetings and chapter meetings. For example, many of the short course sessions (e.g., authorship, dealing with reviews, being a reviewer, common writing mistakes, and knowing when you are ready to write) have PowerPoint sets, speakers notes, interactive activities, and take home resources ready to use in a session. The Careers Committee will offer these sessions to conference planners, as well.

Careers Symposium, Experimental Biology

2006 Session: In 2006 the Career Opportunities in Physiology, Trainee Advisory, and Women in Physiology Committees coordinated the topics of their sessions to provide a complimentary set of career advancement sessions for early career physiologists. The 2006 APS Careers Symposium was entitled, “Navigating the Interview: How to Make it Work for You.” The session was designed to provide potential interviewees with information about what to expect in the interview, the etiquette of interviewing, and possible pitfalls to be aware of in the interview process. The program focused on how to prepare for an interview, the similarities and differences between industrial and academic hiring processes, and the skill sets desired by industrial and academic employers.

The symposium was well attended; approximately 140-160 attended, with the vast majority staying for the entire symposium, and some attendees staying well after the symposium ended to ask additional questions. Based on information from the exit surveys, 50% of those attending were graduate students, 28% were postdocs, and 14% were new investigators.

2007 Session: The proposed 2007 symposium will focus on creating successful scientific collaborations.  Again, the Careers in Physiology Committee is coordinating with the Trainee Advisory and the Women in Physiology Committees to create sessions that complement each other.

Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship Program

The APS Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship Program supports 12 full-time undergraduate students annually to work in the laboratories of established investigators. These Fellowships provide a $3,000 summer stipend to the student (10 weeks support), a $300 grant to the faculty sponsor/advisor, and a travel award/reimbursement for the students to attend and present their data at Experimental Biology or an APS Conference. The goal of the program is to excite and encourage undergraduate students worldwide to pursue a career as a basic research scientist.

The UGSRF students have also been competing in the David S. Bruce Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award program. In 2004, five of 11 UGSRFs with first-author abstracts submitted to the EB meeting applied for the award. The past two years, all the students with first-author abstracts have applied for the award (eight of eight in 2005 and nine of nine in 2006).

2006 Program: For the seventh year of the program, 45 applications were received, an increase of seven percent from last year and an increase of 61% since the Council raised the student stipend in 2005.  Over the seven-year history of the program, we have received 310 applications for the 84 awards granted, with the typical funding rate ranging between 20% and 30%.

Explorations in Biomedicine Undergraduate Physiology Retreat

The APS Explorations in Biomedicine project has worked with elementary, middle, and high school and Tribal College educators who work with Native American students since 1997 to promote interest in biomedical research careers and excellence in science education. The project is supported by the NIGMS Minority Opportunities in Research Program, with funding to end in summer 2006. The project has developed many outreach models and resources, including summer research fellowships for teachers, faculty, and undergraduate students, travel fellowships, professional development retreats and workshops, and curricular materials development (print, online, and multimedia).

Careers Poster

The current APS Careers poster was designed in 2002. Each fall it is distributed to all US and Canadian undergraduate colleges and life sciences departments.  The poster prominently displays the URL for the APS Web site, which is how most undergraduates seek information. These posters are usually re-distributed every year, because most undergraduate departments clean off their bulletin boards each autumn.  This is the fourth year of the current poster distribution. The Committee began a redesign process for a new poster for 2007. The Committee will finalize the redesign at their fall 2006 meeting for printing for fall 2007.

Career Outreach PowerPoint Presentation Package

The APS Careers PowerPoint Presentations, when completed, will provide downloadable PowerPoint files for use at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, as well as lower and upper undergraduate levels. Two PowerPoint presentations for use with undergraduate students (lower and upper level versions) have posted at the APS main website, the APS Career Web, and in the APS Archive of Teaching Resources.

APS Careers Web Site

The APS Careers Web Site was developed by the Careers Committee in 2002 and launched in March 2003. It provides extensive resources for two major purposes: 1) to assist students and new and experienced physiologists in the development of their careers; and 2) to help the general public gain a better understanding of the work that physiologists do. The site includes separate sections and resources for elementary, middle/high school, undergraduate, graduate/professional, postdoctoral fellows, new investigators, established investigators, and the general public. Within each section, the user finds resource categories customized to their needs. The specific resources (such as biographies, hands-on experiments, career resources, etc.) are written at the appropriate educational level.

Updates and Improvements: In the past year, more than 50 new resources (or links to new resources) have been added to the Careers web site. These include new information at all the levels, but primarily undergraduate, graduate/professional, postdoctoral, and new investigator levels. In addition, the Careers Committee audio-recorded the Careers Symposium at EB 2006 and will, for the first time, be preparing the slide/audio presentations for inclusion on the Career Web Site. In the past, only the slide presentations from this session were available.

The Career Opportunities in Physiology Committee, along with the Trainee Advisory and Women in Physiology Committees, recognizes the need to provide career development resources and training at all career stages. The needs of graduate students differ from those of postdocs. New investigators and educators have different needs as well. The Committee hopes to address both career development and advancement issues in its future activities.