‘Is the PI a jerk?’ Key questions to ask when you’re moving lab

Laboratory leaders are not doing you a favour when they hire you, says geneticist Joanne Kamens, a senior consultant at The Impact Seat, a scientific workplace consultancy based in Boston, Massachusetts. Because of the long hours and relatively low pay, you are doing them one by offering them your labour, she explains.Kamens lists questions you need to have answered before making a move. “I would say item number one is: Is the PI a jerk?" she says.In the first episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about moving labs, Kamens shares advice alongside Tim Fessenden, a cancer researcher and postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Kim Gerecke, a behavioural neuroscientist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.