Career Development Meeting
Thursday 18th May, 2006

Chair: Izabela Giriat (IG)
Attending: Anne Simon (AS), Sehat Nauli (SN) Markus Kaufmann (MK)

1) Search for a new chair
IG is stepping down as chair of the Career Development Committee meeting. SN will take over her tasks until July. By then, a new chair of the Career Development Committee needs to be found. AS is no longer able to attend the meetings of the committee. Thanks to both of them of for their commitment to the postdoctoral society and their contributions to the success of past event.

2) Brown Bag Lunches
The next Brown Bag lunch will be with Eric Scerri (www.chem.ucla.edu/dept/Faculty/scerri/). He is a philosopher of chemistry and lecturer at the UCLA chemistry department. Date and time will be announced, it will be hopefully end of May or in June otherwise in September. Eric Scerri’s new book will be published this summer: The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. MK is organizing this event.
Future potential guest: Jerry Diamond, will be contacted by Gopal. SN will contact Eric from the business development committee about representatives of biotech or a patent attorney. AS suggested Christine Miller, psychologist from the women in science panel, for a brown bag lunch.

Review of past events:

3) Jean Luc Dumont "The Three Laws of Communication"
IG, AS, SN and MK stated that he gave a clear and inspiring presentation. Noise, as a term to describe all disturbing factors in oral or written communication was found to be an often underestimated problem in communication. One take home message was: never blame the others, do the best with the circumstances you have (room, light, audience, number of words in an abstract or paper).

4) Women in Science Panel
A video of the event will be available at the postdoc web site. IG and AS were involved in organizing the panel with the career center. They mentioned that the audience thought that it was informative. The downside was that one panelist couldn’t make it and one was coming late. It would have been livelier with more panelists. Both panelist faculties were very determined and did not observe major gender differences in research. Psychologist Christine Miller gave a very good overview on gender issues at work place.

Future Events
5) Time Management Event
There is still an event planed on this subject. See minutes from the last meeting. SN mentioned that there is an event on campus this week on time management; he will post it on the web site.
6) Seminar in successful writing

After having a PI panel on academic publishing organized in March, AS, IG, SN and MK propose to have another workshop on effective writing. MK will find out if Michael Alley (http://www.me.vt.edu/people/faculty/alley.html), author of “the craft of scientific writing” is giving workshops at the west coast or if he knows an excellent teacher on writing in the Los Angeles area, preferentially a person that not only published scientific literature and a person who is able to teach writing in a lecture format to scientists.