March 1, 2009 - A "New Group at LIAI"
The LIAI Postdoc Association, which was initially founded as a discussion group in February 2007, has now attained an official status at our favorite Institute. The LIAI Postdoc Association comprises 10 members representing 10 different labs at LIAI, and meets once per month to discuss issues that pertain to postdocs, with the goal of improving their and everyone's lives and work at LIAI. Some of the topics we discuss are retirement benefits, career development, Monday in-house and Wednesday external seminars, and UCSD library access. We also address day-to-day issues such as those concerning the LIAI animal facility, and in this regard we meet with Pete and Morag on a regular basis to give them suggestions on what will facilitate the work of the researchers in the animal rooms. With their help a number of positive changes have been made!
A major goal of the LIAI Postdoc Association is to obtain employer contributions to the retirement plans of casual employees. While currently LIAI does not contribute to the plans of casual employees (i.e. postdocs, research scientists, grad students), we are confident this will change soon thanks to the help of Mitch and Melinda and the support of LIAI faculty members. In November the Board will meet and hopefully approve the amendments to the plan; if so, effective January 2009, eligible casual employees with at least 1 year of service will receive contributions from LIAI into their retirement plan. Thank you Mitch and Melinda!
The LIAI Postdoc Association was responsible for bringing you the recent seminar: "Writing Resumes and Interviewing Tips" by Barbara Preston, Ph.D, and our recently increased budget will allow us to organize additional career development seminars in the coming months. We have also been discussing with Hilde ways to increase attendance at the Monday in-house seminars; the punctual 4:00 pm starts and requested presence of the PI's from the represented labs definitely seem to have helped!
The LIAI Postdoc Association members meet once per month, and the first 15 minutes of our meetings are open to anyone; so when you receive an email (sent to postdoc@liai.org) letting you know about our next meeting, please do not hesitate to stop by with any questions, issues or suggestions.
We are excited about our new faculty advocate, Stephen Schoenberger. All we are missing now are members from the Benedict, Ley, Newmeyer, Kawakami, and Zajonc labs. Please come represent your lab in the LIAI Postdoc Association!
Yours truly,
Your LIAI Postdoc Association Members:
Sonia from Schoenberger's lab
Christophe from von Herrath's lab
Florence from Cheroutre's lab
John from Ware's lab
Stephane from Altman's lab
Lauren from Shresta's lab
Wei from Croft's lab
Magda from Sette's lab
Rafii from Crotty's lab
Jose Luis from Kronenberg's lab