Career Advice for Young Scientists in Biomedical Research: How to Think Like a Principal Investigator

Pursuing a career in biomedical research can be daunting, considering the stiffer competition and uncertain career prospects in academia. This book summarizes career advice gathered during in-depth interviews with 106 biomedical scientists who lead their own laboratories. The participating principal investigators are from 44 research institutions in 11 countries.

This book is unique in that it provides a glimpse into the mindset of principal investigators. Here, the reader will learn about common thought patterns and values, as well as the range of opinions and ways of thinking to be found among a large group of active principal investigators - without having to read more than a hundred individual autobiographies.

The book will benefit all PhD students who want to learn more about their supervisor's mindset in order to successfully complete their projects. It can help freshly graduated PhDs planning to pursue an academic career, and MDs contemplating a career in research, to decide whether they truly want to embark on this path. Lastly, it can offer young principal investigators a source of inspiration on how to succeed and achieve their goals.

Béla Z Schmidt trained to be an immunologist when he was earning his PhD in Hungary, but he got interested in cell biology and protein quality control during his first postdoctoral position. He studied how cells handle various disease-associated misfolded proteins as he was going through a succession of postdoctoral positions in the USA, first at Washington University and then the University of Pittsburgh.

Béla returned to Europe and got a Marie Curie fellowship to study the aggregation of a tumour suppressor protein at KU Leuven in Belgium. He had to move on due to lack of funding and had a brief but pleasant engagement at a small biotechnology company in Hungary.

He returned to KU Leuven to be an innovation manager but this position turned out to be a poor fit for him, after all. Béla is now a senior staff employee at the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) and working as a science writer in the Switch Laboratory at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research.