The life of a postdoc: Laetitia is a researcher in the Epigenetics Department at the Babraham Institute

A postdoc enables you to pursue a career in academia which you don’t necessarily need if you know that you want to work in industry. During my PhD, I had no doubt that I would do a postdoc afterwards, as it was my personal goal to pursue a career in academia. My PhD supervisor advised me to choose my postdoc by either switching to a different model organism or by switching the research topic. I actually did not switch that much and I am still working on the same model organism and on a related topic. It is true though that I sometimes feel I need to explore something very different and I am considering doing another postdoc afterwards.  

Getting where I am now wasn’t straightforward. After my A levels, I worked for several years as a nature guide, taught recycling in a community council, worked as a child supervisor and then on science outreach with children. Science outreach was great fun, and it made me realise that I wanted to explore science in more depth. I decided to go to university in Paris, nine years after I got my A levels. I did my PhD at Northwestern University studying stress on a microscopic worm called C. elegans. Then I came as a postdoc to the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, as the research project to study inter-individual variability in stress response in C. elegans was really appealing. In the future, I would like to find a lecturer position in academia involving both teaching and research.

Doing a postdoc allows you to acquire new research skills, discover a new field or a new model organism. This can be an opportunity to perform more independent research. Compared to being a graduate student, I feel more efficient: I can learn techniques and get results faster. It might be the most enjoyable time of a researcher’s career, before doing research at the bench is replaced by writing grants if you become a professor.

Lucy is a very inspiring and welcoming community. I really enjoy interacting with Lucy’s members and socialising with postdocs, students and professors. It is definitely one of the best things about being in academia. I always look forward to the seminars where I can learn about very different research topics, it broadens my horizons. My institute is far away from the city center and being at Lucy gives me more a sense of belonging to the University.

About Laetitia

Laetitia is a molecular biologist using the model organism C. elegans, a microscopic nematode to answer fundamental questions. Her work focuses on stress response, which is a highly conserved protective response, induced under stress in order to maintain protein homeostasis by preventing protein misfolding and aggregation. The stress response is key to protect against neurodegenerative diseases, during ageing, and is hijacked by cancer cells. Laetitia’s work focuses on understanding inter-individual variability in stress response gene expression and its consequences on physiology. C. elegans is a great model to address this question, as these worms are genetically identical and their transparency allows the use of fluorescent gene expression reporters in different tissues.