We are always building our team…

 

  • Paid full-time research opportunities are a great way to get laboratory experience if you’re interested in graduate or medical school or to develop your skills in project management, communication, and teamwork. Research technicians in our group are vital team members who help develop projects, build preliminary data for grants, and even lead their own research projects if they have sufficient time and motivation.

    Research Technician positions are usually posted in the spring for a summer start date. E-mail Blair or fill out the lab contact form with your CV to express interest.

  • Graduate school is when you learn how to be a be a professional scientist (identify a gap in knowledge, design a research approach to address it, manage the acquisition and analysis of data, and navigate the publication pipeline). The best advice I got when choosing a graduate mentor is to ‘Choose a mentor who is the type of scientist you want to be.’ A decade later, I still pass on this advice, so here’s how I would describe myself as a scientist:

    I am a passionate, strategic, and ambitious scientist and mentor. I care deeply about fostering creativity and innovation while maintaining clear expectations, robust processes, and scientific rigor. I’m fascinated by how multicellular systems break and establish morphological and functional equilibriums, especially when those collective properties are fundamental to wound healing and disease progression. I chose planarian flatworms as a model because they are masters of tissue re-patterning and regeneration, but don’t develop age-associated diseases common in mammals.

    If that sounds interesting to you, you should rotate in the lab and we’ll see if it’s a good fit. We accept students from all of the programs in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, but I am most involved in the Genetics and Genomics (G&G) and Development, Disease Models, and Therapeutics (DDMT) Programs.

    Apply to the Baylor College of Medicine Graduate School for Biomedical Sciences: https://www.bcm.edu/education/graduate-school-of-biomedical-sciences/admissions

    Once admitted, contact me to discuss rotations, current projects, and research interests.

    Please note that we cannot directly admit students into a PhD program, so if you’re interested in pursuing a PhD with us, please apply the above graduate programs.

  • While it may be a minority opinion, I wouldn’t recommend a postdoc position unless you need postdoctoral experience for the job you want. If you want to run an independent research group or core facility at a management level, getting additional experience in grant writing, scientific communication, and project or program management as a postdoc may be valuable. For those interested in faculty positions, postdoctoral experience gives you the space and resources to develop your own expertise or research area that you will build on as an independent investigator. As my graduate advisor told me, ‘Choose your scientific Mount Everest, and then choose a postdoctoral advisor who will get you to base camp.’

    We have several funded research projects that could benefit from the experienced hands and independent leadership that a postdoctoral associate could provide. If you join the lab as a postdoctoral associate, I will work closely with you to ensure that your research and training activities fit with your professional goals and timeline. I will also work hard to ensure that if you are interested in faculty positions, you develop your own point of view and independent research trajectory, as well as skills in grantsmanship, lab management, and scientific communication. If you’re interested in this type of postdoctoral training environment, reach out to me via e-mail with your CV, a sample of your research, contact information for three references, and a cover letter that discusses your prior experience and why you are interested in our research group.

    Ideally, your application package should demonstrate:

    - An interest in developing/pursuing an independent research project that complements the lab’s interest in stem cells, developmental biology, cancer prevention, and aging in organisms (Cover Letter)

    - PhD or MD/PhD in a related or adjacent field (CV)

    - At least 1 First-Author Research Product (Pre-print or peer-reviewed publication, Please Provide a PDF)

    - 3 References (Ideally, one should be your primary PhD Advisor)