92nd Penn Biomedical Postdoctoral Council Minutes, January 07, 2008

Ninety-second Meeting January 7, 2008, 5:00 PM (Stellar-Chance 104) 1. Welcome / Attendance: BPC: Stacy Gelhaus, , Laurence Wood, Meda Higa, Matt Seavey, , Lingli Zhang, Jennifer Bachorik, Ginny Cruz, Prema Sundaram BPP: Yvonne Paterson, Kryste Ferguson Absent:: Mikolaj Pawlak, LaShauna Meyers, Dave Chimento, , Arindam Basu, Laurence Jacquot, Dave Hokey, Hedi Schelleman, Koichi Matsumura 2. Update from Biomedical Postdoctoral Programs: Dr. Yvonne Paterson, Associate Dean for Postdoctoral Research Training, Director, BPP a. Penn-Port Program—The Penn-Port program education class will start on Thursday, January 17th. Penn-Port postdocs are currently meeting with their mentors at Rutgers Camden, Lincoln University, and DCCC. b. Postdoc Policy—the new postdoc policy should be out in the January almanac. c. SACNAS/ABRCMS—Yvonne is looking for faculty volunteers to represent Penn at these meetings. 3. Major BPC and BPP projects: Kryste and Subcommittees a. Spring Programming—This spring, BPP will put on the career workshop series, every Tuesday in March. Topics include—1. the basic job search, 2. academic job search, 3. industry job search (including biotech, big pharma, startups, and someone from HR, Matt will give Kryste contacts), 4. alternative careers, 5. Lisa Marshall—public speaking and presentations. Lisa Marshall will come back in April with a new program on networking. Also the K-awards workshop and negotiation seminars are being scheduled for the spring. Also at the end of January (31st) Ameriprise representatives will be here to speak to postdocs about retirement and how to save for retirement when you are not eligible for a 403b or 401K. *Regional NPA Meeting will be June 16 th at the Penn Museum. Twenty people from different careers will be present during lunch and postdocs will have an opportunity to eat with them at small tables. Postdocs will switch halfway through lunch to talk with another speaker of interest. b. Symposium—Robert Sapolsky is coming to speak in 2008. They symposium date is the 24th of October, which happens to be a Friday. Stacy also requested name and biosketch submissions of potential speakers for the next symposium in 2009. So far we have Elizabeth Blackburn, Peter Doherty, Craig Ventner. We will vote at the next meeting in February. c. Seminar Series— The next seminar speaker will be Nature Editor, Chris Guenther (sp?), talk entitled “How not to be Denatured”. This will be on the 22nd of January. Laurence is still making arrangements for food. Kryste will send him a list of allowed caterers, those in Ben Financial system. The dinner/talk should start at 4:30 pm and allow 30 minutes for people to get food and settle in and the speaker will start at 5pm. Alan Wasserstein and Tony Rostain will most likely give the professionalism seminar on May 20th. Case studies from ULAR will be used to portray the postdocs as the abuser and a case study submitted by the council will be used to show the PI as the abuser. Victoria McGovern will be schedule to speak in September.

d. UCKIZ—Matt will tell Hugo we would like two seminars in the fall, which can be schedule from October through December. One will be R&D focused and the topic will be vaccine design. The second seminar will focus on business plan development. Hugo will be giving an overview of UCKIZ to postdocs in February. e. Diversity—Meda has scheduled a diversity meeting, open to all postdocs for Wednesday, January 30th from 4-5pm. An email will go out to all postdocs. Another email will go out regarding MLK day with information provided by LaShauna. Also, Meda brought up the iPRAXIS meeting, which is being held on January 8th at 1pm in BRB 252. 4. Next meeting: January 7, 2008, 5pm Stellar Chance Room 104