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Speaker: Gary McDowell, PhD, Founder Lightoller LLC
Workshop Description: There have been a number of recent conversations about the nature of the postdoc, combined with concerns about declining interest in and applications for positions. Dr. Gary McDowell will talk about his experience and research about postdocs over the last decade, and make the case for why it might be time to abandon the "postdoc experiment" and look for new ways forward to support research and scientists for a sustainable scientific enterprise.
Cannon Room Map: https://postdoc.hms.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/postdoc.hms/files/quadmap-cannon.pdf
Speaker Bio: Gary McDowell is the founder of Lightoller LLC, a consultancy providing expertise on early career researchers, with the goal of ensuring that future generations of researchers can reach their potential to solve problems for society. Originally from Northern Ireland, Gary has a Masters in Chemistry and PhD in Oncology from the University of Cambridge, U.K. He carried out postdoctoral research at Boston Children’s Hospital and Tufts University, and helped organize a symposium in Boston in 2014 to give a voice to early career researchers (resulting in the White Paper, “Shaping the Future of Research: a perspective from junior scientists”). In 2016 he co-founded and became Executive Director of the nonprofit “Future of Research'', and in 2017 he was appointed to the Next Generation Researchers Initiative, a committee mandated by the U.S. Congress under the 21st Century Cures Act and convened by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, examining the policy and programmatic steps that the nation can undertake to ensure the success of the next generation of researchers in the biomedical and behavioral sciences in the U.S. The report, “Breaking Through” was published in April 2018. In 2019 he founded Lightoller LLC, a consultancy providing expertise on STEM education and training, with the goal of helping future generations of researchers reach their potential. He is also an independent scholar with the Ronin Institute, an affiliated researcher and board member for the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE) and a Lecturer in Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, teaching Chemistry.
