Supporting future faculty and scientific research: The importance of postdoc experience

Olivia Justynski's passion for science was evident from childhood. The native of Barrington, Rhode Island, spent her middle and high school years on the highly successful Barrington Science Olympiad team, winning the state competition and experiencing the thrill of the national event. As a graduate student at Yale University, she realized she wanted to be a professor.

Now a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA, Justynski is studying developmental biology in the lab of Dr. Alvaro Sagasti, specifically looking at how the skin develops in zebrafish. This research helps shed light on how human epithelial tissues of the body might develop - tissues that line or cover organs like the stomach, intestines and mucosal tissues which contribute to health and/or disease.

Postdoc experience is critical to building training and research experience in a lab setting, which is key to becoming an independent investigator, and to applying for faculty positions. But the federal government's termination of several pre- and postdoc training programs and suspension of millions of dollars in research grants to UCLA has potentially altered Justynski's path.

"I have lost the funding that I was supposed to have, as well as this training opportunity, which has been really disappointing for a lot of us," she said of her Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award (IRACDA) fellowship, an NIH-supported program - terminated in April - that combined traditional postdoc research with rigorous training and practice in teaching. "This was a great program that had trained postdocs for over 20 years in many different schools across the country, and it's really sad to think that there won't be any IRACDA postdocs after this year."

Justynski was in the second year of her four-year IRACDA fellowship. Sagasti had multiple grants suspended, which means that already allocated funds can't be used to book time on equipment or for supplies and services. Despite the uncertainty, Justynski hopes to continue with her plan to look into future faculty positions.

"I think everyone is kind of in a state of worry and anxiety. Nobody really knows what's going to happen, and we're sort of waiting for the next shoe to drop," she said. "It's a really discouraging time to be in science. It feels like we're not valued for the work that we do, and that maybe this industry isn't going to exist in a couple of years. And it's been very sad to see these attacks on science in America."