For our next interview, we have decided to focus on a former postdoctoral leader who made the return to his alma mater to lead its first-ever Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. Dr. Joseph Lutz received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Bath and went on to obtain a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Kentucky (UK) College of Pharmacy. During this time, he identified several flavonoid compounds that acted as ɑ7 nicotinic receptor agonists for reducing alcohol-induced neurotoxicity.
After completing his postdoctoral fellowship in the Human Addiction Psychopharmacology (HAPPY) Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dr. Lutz went on to establish the inaugural Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at UIC. Most recently, he moved back to Lexington, KY to serve as the director for the brand new UK Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.
Can you highlight your roles and responsibilities as a director of postdoctoral affairs? What makes you excited about your work?
As Director of Postdoctoral Affairs, I am a central resource and the campus point of contact for anything postdoc-related. This means that while I serve and advocate for postdocs on campus, I also help faculty and administrator navigate postdoc support. My office is structured around four main functions: postdoc administration (appointment, onboarding, and separation), measuring postdoc success, career and professional development, and community building. While administration and measurement are very important for the day to day operations of my office, building community via career and professional development opportunities is what makes me excited about my work.
Before you started the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, you were very active as a leader in the UIC Postdoctoral Community. How did your volunteer work as a postdoc leader help you make the transition to your current role?
During my involvement with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Postdoctoral Association (PDA), I was fortunate enough to meet extremely talented and motivated people (postdocs) who got me out of the lab to help organize a Career Development Symposium. I was initially looking for a sense of community but soon realized that this kind of work is extremely important as well as rewarding. With this experience, I had a clearer idea of what I wanted to do and I managed to get my foot in the door, which played no small part in getting me the job.
What kind of student groups or activities were you involved in as a graduate student that helped you gain leadership skills for your role in the UIC Postdoctoral Community? How have those skills shaped your career thus far?
During my PhD program, I was part of the local chapter of my student organization (American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists) which taught me to engage with my peers, show up, and be on time. When I started my postdoc, I immediately joined the Postdoctoral Association in search of peer support. This actually forced me to have a conversation with my postdoc mentor early on in my training about overall job expectations because it was important for me to carve out time to engage with peers. Now that I’m on the postdoc support side, I am part of a group of early-career postdoc office professionals who meet remotely once a month. All this to say that the leadership skill I learned is that it is difficult to accomplish anything of substance without peer support and therefore I have sought it out throughout my career.
What was the most challenging obstacle you faced when building a postdoc office at UIC and/or UK? What was the most rewarding?
I think that the biggest initial challenge I faced when building a postdoc office was aligning what I wanted to do with what the various institutional stakeholders were looking for from an office. I approached it as serving the postdocs only when, in actuality, the office serves not only postdocs but students, faculty, administrators, and institutional leadership. Navigating the institutional landscape remains challenging but gets less so each day. One of the most rewarding parts is building community – a postdoc can be isolating and I’m always excited to see postdocs get together and lean on each other to carve out their own career path.
As an OPA Director, you have a lot of experience putting on programming and professional development events. What was your favorite event that you have planned thus far and why is it your favorite?
Unequivocally: the Annual UIC PDA Career Development Symposium. I initially helped organize the first iteration as a postdoc and subsequently supported the second and third iterations as Director of the office at UIC. The symposium is entirely volunteer-run and has become a strong tradition for the UIC Postdoctoral Association. Not only does it provide an opportunity for graduate students and postdocs to learn about the breadth of PhD careers out there, it really is a great opportunity for the members of the organizing committee to develop mad leadership skills. I’ll sneak in my second favorite: peer mentoring groups – I launched various small groups focused on grant writing, career exploration, and job search where I saw postdocs support each other through difficult and challenging life-changing experiences, nothing gets better than that.
As a graduate student who came to the US to complete doctoral training, you are probably able to empathize with many of the struggles faced by international students and postdocs. From your perspective, what can academic training programs do better to accommodate the needs of international scholars?
For several years now, and in collaboration with the postdoc offices at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, we have been bringing Brendan Delaney to the Chicago area to give a tour of immigration seminars to postdocs. Brendan is an immigration lawyer based in DC who is on the advisory council of the National Postdoctoral Association and therefore an expert immigration for postdocs. His advice to international scholars focuses on planning ahead and making sure that career plans and immigration plans are well aligned. I think that institutions can better accommodate the needs of international postdocs by providing access to experts who can offer them accurate information about immigration options.
In your opinion, what are some of the major issues to address in regards to the postdoctoral training system in the US?
Some of the major issues I see in postdoctoral training in the US are around understanding what a postdoc really is. Faculty, university administrators, and postdoc themselves need to do a better job of understanding that a postdoc is a temporary, mentored, training position for the postdoc to achieve a career path of their choosing. Several issues need to be addressed to achieve this. First, institutions need to shift the mentoring culture towards inclusive career outcomes, i.e. there is value in training postdocs that are interested in careers other than research faculty. To complement this shift, robust career and professional development programs are needed to alleviate the burden on faculty and to promote career diversification among postdocs – most universities nationwide are now doing this via postdoc offices. Finally, to help with this shift, I think that we need to start recognizing and promoting staff scientists in academia in order to alleviate the research labor burden from postdocs and prevent postdocs from remaining in trainee status permanently.
Your wife, Dr. Jessica Weafer, recently started as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the UK Department of Psychology. Do you have any advice for individuals whose spouse/partner is also in academia/scientific research?
First, plan ahead and strategize together! Be prepared to be flexible (and stressed out) through this process. Finally, I think that it’s important for spouses to distinguish and complement each other’s value to the university. This can be done scientifically, i.e. spouses are in different fields (you don’t want to compete with each other for positions and funding), functionally, e.g. one spouse teaches while the other conducts research in the same field, and/or organizationally, e.g. one spouse pursues the faculty job while the other pursues an administrative position (that’s what we did!).
What helpful tips would you give towards early-career scientists who are considering a career in graduate and postdoctoral affairs?
Get involved with your local postdoctoral association – not only will you develop leadership skills, you are essentially doing an internship for the job. Get involved in career and professional development within your professional organization and at their conferences. Attend conferences such as the National Postdoctoral Association or Graduate Career Consortium – one eye-opening experience, for me, was attending the Train-the-Trainers organized by the NIH Office of Intramural Training and Education. Finally, I think that learning the ins and outs of how a university works is key to a career in graduate and postdoctoral affairs.