Karmella Haynes and Chris Himes enjoyed formal teaching postdocs. Both, however, went on to a second postdoc to get the research experience they’d need to get a good faculty position.

Few postdocs are getting teaching experience now. Greater than 60 percent have 21 or fewer hours of teaching experience, and almost a third have no experience at all, according to an ongoing longitudinal study of science graduate students from Arizona State University, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Postdocs who want some teacher training will find a handful of training opportunities, and the numbers are increasing. They range from formal teaching postdocs to programs that expose postdocs to teaching while they work in a traditional research position.

To land a job when the training is over, however, a student must strike a fine balance between research and teaching, and few positions offer that balance. Teaching experience isn’t always seen as a plus by hiring institutions, especially research universities. Many faculty discourage graduate students or postdocs from going after teaching experiences because they fear that time away from the lab will mean fewer publications—and more difficulty getting a job.

“I was very aware that I was taking an alternative path.”

Karmella Haynes

Haynes’s mentor was Sarah Elgin, an HHMI professor who created the Genomics Education Partnership and is intensely involved in developing better ways to teach genomics. Haynes recalls Elgin strongly encouraging her to take a traditional research postdoc at first. But Haynes was persistent, so Elgin pointed her toward a teaching postdoc position at Davidson College in North Carolina.

Haynes thought it might be a chance to find out about life at a liberal arts college while exploring whether she liked teaching. She chose Davidson’s postdoc over other teaching opportunities because it provided a mix of education and research—just in case she changed her mind.

“I was very aware of the fact that I was taking an alternative path,” Haynes says. “A bad move would have been to jump into the first teaching position I saw. I was really careful to make sure the course of the fellowship left me with my options open.”

Teaching and Research Mix

A focus on research appears to be the hallmark of many of the successful teaching postdocs at liberal arts colleges and research universities. Many also include formal education mentoring by current faculty members or seminars on how to best teach so students learn. The duration of teaching postdocs is traditionally shorter than a typical biology research postdoc (two or three years, rather than five or more).

		Another Kind of Postdoc: Education Research Teaching trainees to design curricula and lead classes while also working in the lab. Read More

At Davidson, Haynes spent the first year of her two-year postdoc doing research in a new field, synthetic biology, with mentor Malcolm Campbell. Working at a college research lab was completely different from her grad school experience. “It was very small, in a wash-your-own-glassware, stuff-your-own-pipette-box way,” she says.

Campbell taught her how to design projects that were easy for undergrads to jump into. “His approach was setting up student-accessible science, rather than bringing the students up to the science,” Haynes explains. The lab focused on bacteria, which are easy for students to work with themselves, instead of using animals or complicated equipment. “They were pretty big impact projects but there wasn’t this big hurdle of technical difficulty.”

The group published a research paper in the Journal of Biological Engineering describing how they engineered the bacterium Escherichia coli to solve a mathematical problem. The publication landed Haynes on National Public Radio’s Science Friday. “It was just really cool how this paper with undergraduates—not coming from a big, powerful research university—got us a lot of attention,” she says. The research also allowed Haynes to attend an international synthetic biology conference—her first professional trip overseas—and meet some prominent scientists in the field.

In her second year at Davidson, Haynes focused on teaching. She redesigned a bioinformatics course to overcome its intimidating reputation among students. They were no longer left on their own to navigate databases and new software; instead, she walked students through the complex material in class—a method she affectionately calls “synchronized swimming exercises”—before making them go solo. She also taught an introductory biology course that had even nonmajors doing polymerase chain reaction and biochemistry.

Photos: Haynes: Jared Leeds, Himes: Jen Judge

	PAGE 1 2 3 4 5	Go Back | Continue