POSTDOC JOURNAL

The final pushPreparing for a hiatus in your work is hard enough when you can plan it around set dates. When you are trying to plan it around biology, all bets are off.

There is a palpable nervousness in my lab these days, and it isn’t emanating from me. Some of the unspoken fear is that my waters will break in the lab, humiliating everyone. Oddly, this isn’t a fear I share. The other postdoc made some half-hearted joke about maybe getting some emergency medical training in case I needed ‘help’ one day in the lab. Again, not a fear I share as I will not deliver the baby in the lab. All these concerns felt silly to me, and so far removed from what I am really worrying about.

My worries centre around the void I will inevitably leave. Although they’re not that critical, who will be delegated to do my daily lab duties? My biggest concern, however, is my absence from the field nursery. I am planting more than 24,000 plants for a phenotyping experiment I might never see. If the baby arrives early, I might be able to participate, but there is no guarantee that everything will go as planned. So in preparing to miss out on my largest field experiment ever, I am trying to iron out all the organizational issues now. Ironically, no one else in the lab is stressed out about this at all: everyone is ready to lend a hand.Moira Sheehan is a postdoc in plant breeding and genetics at Cornell University.

Most people manage their contacts with the aid of a personal digital assistant (PDA), cell phone or computer. Now a new generation of online tools are helping professionals get even better connected.

Free networking platforms are proliferating on the Internet. Just as young people use websites such as MySpace to find friends and share photos and music, business people use online networks such as LinkedIn and Ryze to make new contacts and discover new opportunities.

Physicians and life-sciences researchers can now do the same through the online biomedical community PrometeoNetwork (www.PrometeoNetwork.com) via a platform provided by the company Within3 (www.Within3.com). Within3 provides the ability to find collaborators, refer patients and find new professional opportunities, in addition to making it easier to manage existing personal contacts.

PrometeoNetwork hosts several subgroups, including, for example, ‘stem-cell researchers’, ‘Italian scientists’ or ‘oncologists’. Members are invited to join such groups by colleagues. PrometeoNetwork and Within3 organize promotions, social gatherings and participation at conferences. PrometeoNetwork

is also working to raise funds for fellowships and to help members find opportunities to work and study abroad.

Members build a profile of their background and interests, and can associate their publications and clinical trials with their profile using a tool that interacts directly with the relevant databases. The community grows as members invite their peers to join (administrators routinely evaluate new requests for membership). Using the search engine, members can find and filter information that exists in the network and in other databases, discover new colleagues, stay current on the work of their peers, communicate with other physicians and scientists, and build their personal networks. Through privacy settings, members can control who has access to their information.

Face-to-face contact at conferences will always be important to scientists. But the new technologies are ways to augment traditional networking. The chances of finding a key collaborator can be dramatically improved — without ever leaving the lab bench. ■

Fabio Fais is a medical biotechnologist and a manager at PrometeoNetwork.

Making contacts onlineNETWORKS & SUPPORTMOVERS

Thomas Mason, Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

2006–07: Associate Laboratory Director for Neutron Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, Tennessee2001–06: Associate Lab Director for the Spallation Neutron Source, ORNL1998–2001: Director of the Experimental Facilities Division of the Spallation Neutron Source, ORNL

With a physicist father and biochemist mother, it never occurred to Thomas Mason to be anything other than a scientist. Nevertheless, a big-picture, wide-ranging view has propelled his career since its early years.

The native Canadian made his first crucial career decision as a physics PhD student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Choosing Malcolm Collins, who worked mostly at large facilities, as his adviser directed Mason towards high-profile physics laboratories. He did his PhD work on neutron scattering at Chalk River, a Canadian national laboratory. “My decision meant I got involved with a much larger range of projects than I otherwise would have,” says Mason. He published 17 papers from his PhD work — more than half of which weren’t part of his thesis.

Mason then did a postdoc at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, at the tail end of the famed lab’s heyday. “It was an environment that made you better because of the peers egging you on,” he says.

Mason thought his career moves were over when he accepted an associate professorship at the University of Toronto, Ontario. But five years later, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) tapped Mason to be the scientific director on the not-yet-built Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), the laboratory’s accelerator-based neutron source.

Mason surprised many by leaving the University of Toronto a week after he received tenure. “I didn’t realize at the time what a crazy idea it was to leave tenure and join a new, risky project,” he says, noting that the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider made it somewhat difficult to recruit scientists for the SNS, another big-budget government project.

Former ORNL director William Madia picked Mason to head the SNS because, he says, all the other international candidates were focused only on their own discipline. “Thom was the only one who saw what it could do in all fields of science,” Madia says. He watched as Mason spent $1 million a day to bring the project in on time and on budget — and he began grooming Mason for bigger responsibilities.

The challenge now, says Madia, is to produce a scientific programme that can maximize the return on high-profile ORNL investments like the SNS and the recently constructed High Flux Isotope Reactor. Mason becomes ORNL’s director on 1 July to do just that. “We’ve built the Maserati, now Thom’s going to drive it,” says Madia.Virginia Gewin

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NATURE|Vol 447|28 June 2007CAREER VIEW

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