Dr Becky Carlyle - How not to lose the plot when you lose a postdoc

Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Every good lab trains people who then leave it, and in this blog Becky writes about what that costs the person left behind.

The first half is practical: why no one is truly irreplaceable, how record keeping and an electronic lab notebook keep critical knowledge out of a single person's head, and why an offboarding protocol has to start months before the last afternoon.

The second half is about the part of the job nobody puts in the induction pack. By the time you are a PI you are the one who stays while everyone else rotates past, and in a funding climate where good people leave because the money ran out rather than because they wanted to, the loss arrives mixed up with guilt. Becky writes openly about her own recent departure, the meeting where she could not hold it together, and what pulled her out of it: a network of peers who are not going anywhere, treating mobility as something that genuinely serves the researcher, and measuring your own success by what your people go on to do once they are gone.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-when-a-postdoc-leaves-your-lab/

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Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer's Research UK Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford, and has previously worked in the USA. Becky writes about her experiences of starting up a research lab and progressing into a more senior research role. Becky's research uses mass-spectrometry to quantify thousands of proteins in the brains and biofluids of people with dementia. Her lab is working on various projects, including work to compare brain tissue from people with dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease, to tissue from people who have similar levels of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology but no memory problems. Becky is also a mum, she runs, drinks herbal teas and reads lots of books.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers, drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, who we thank for their ongoing support.

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