Thomas A. Steitz

I began my thesis research at Harvard by working with a team in the laboratory of William N. Lipscomb, a Nobel chemistry Laureate, in 1976, on the structure of carboxypeptidase A. I did postdoctoral studies with David Blow at the MRC lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge studying chymotrypsin.

American Scientist

Eric Kandel

I had many moments of disappointment, despondency, and exhaustion, but I always found that by reading the literature and showing up at my lab looking at the data as they emerged day by day and discussing them with my students and postdoctoral fellows, I would gain a notion of what to do next.

Richard J. Roberts

I was first exposed to the idea of macro-molecular sequences while I was a postdoctoral fellow with Jack Strominger at Harvard. During that time, I briefly visited Fred Sanger's laboratory in Cambridge, England, to learn the methodology of RNA fingerprinting and sequencing.

English Scientist

John B. Goodenough

I go to the lab and in order to interact with my postdoctoral students and try to see if I can shape them to not copy but to ask questions and to think. We have to have a little dialogue because you don't pretend to be the fountain of all wisdom.

Katie Hafner

In 1981, while doing postdoctoral field work in cultural anthropology, Bonnie A. Nardi lived with villagers in Western Samoa, trying to understand the cultural reasons that people there have an average of eight children.

American Journalist

James D. Watson

I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules.

Ivan Illich

I didn't want to go into the papal bureaucracy, so I thought of doing a postdoctoral thesis, which they call a 'Habilitation' in German universities, on alchemy in the work of Albert the Great.

American Sociologist

Carol W. Greider

Students and postdoctoral fellows largely depend on the support of the public sector to finance the training and research that will make them world-renowned scientists.

Bonnie Bassler

I am lucky because I get to work with the smartest, most creative, and most devoted group of students and postdoctoral fellows imaginable.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.

The term specifies a career stage in academia after the Ph.D. It’s a time for further research and study.

Career Stage

'Postdoctoral' often implies a temporary position or job, not a permanent academic role.

Temporary Nature

Emphasizes conducting research, sometimes independent, to deepen expertise in a specific field.

Research Focus

 over my postdoctoral supervision and I said no you're a lab guy I'm not a lab guy I can't teach you this stuff but I've just found this site and if you're willing to learn to be a field guy I'll take you out there and let's see what

Part Ape, Part Human:...

 So, I threw myself into this project. However, I couldn't do it by myself. I needed help. I definitely needed help. So we recruited undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and professors

How cancer cells...

 Hawking and helped us launch the next Einstein initiative right now killest is a postdoctoral fellow in North Carolina working on computational science and you see her on the left at singularity