Endocrine Abstracts

Why would you want to be a clinical academic? Why is research so enticing for some? Does intellectual stimulation overcome potentially lower salaries and longer hours of harder work? Yes, for some, the possibility of making a difference to medical knowledge is provoking and stimulating. Clinical academia gives researchers the possibility to express their own unique characteristics and traits including creativity and communication skills, professionalism and humanism, excitemen...

In these times of restricted funding, it becomes crucially important that you position yourself to be the only possible candidate for future employment in a postdoctoral position or any other career path that you chose. The time to do this is during your PhD and MD studies and during your first postdoc. There are no hard and fast rules about how you do this, but some pointers may help. First, you must have a passion for research if this is what you want to do. If this is a job...

Many PhD graduates will pursue a postdoctoral training position, most commonly in an academic laboratory. What can you expect from this period in your career? Do you need to go abroad to do a postdoc? What could/should you do to benefit the most of this time? And how can you use your time as a postdoc to help you with your career path once you leave?I recall being very excited about beginning my postdoc and leaving the ‘PhD nest’. I trained and...

Commercialisation and the development of new technologies may be thought of as the natural conclusion of academic research. Typically this has been the preserve of industry, however, more recently translation has become a key aspect of any scientific research programme. The processes involved in the translation of basic and clinical research will be discussed in the context of an in-house drug discovery programme, highlighting the differences between hypothesis and goal-driven...