Jorge Cham's 'The Power of Procrastination'

A bit late, but I hope that all of you enjoyed the Jorge Cham talk in October. As Jorge said, he was detained as UK customs.........he managed to get some material from it though. Click here for his three part comic strip.

Someone also wrote a great review on their blog about the talk. Click here for the review.

Opportunity to Comment on your Development Framework

Vitae have recently launched a Researcher Development Framework.

Essentially, this is a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education. It describes the knowledge, skills, behaviours and personal qualities of researchers and encourages researchers to aspire to excellence through achieving higher levels of development. I'm sure it is something that I will use in future workshops when discussing CVs and skills.

Many individuals working with researchers will no doubt comment on this document before the final framework is published! However but it would be very useful if researchers themselves could comment. You are the ones doing the research and carving out your futures so contributions from you are essential.

Please click here if you would like to read and comment on the framework.

Be a patent lawyer for an hour. Experiencial workshop.

For those of you that came to the first of our experiencial workshops, here are the slides from the session. Dr. Howard Sands gave a taster of what it is like to work in patent law, using the simple example of the 'anyway up cup.' The workshop involved writing a claim for a patent application using some of the concepts that Howard discussed at the session. I hope that everyone felt that the workshop was useful in gaining some insight into what patent lawyers do!

QM Patent Experience Talk

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Interested in why people become ill?

I was at a garden party (!) a few weeks back and I met someone that was a postdoctoral researcher in my old laboratory. After doing a postdoc in the life sciences, she had retrained to become a Public Health Practitioner. It was a career that I did not know much about so we spent some time talking about it.

Public health requires a passion for improving health and reducing inequalities in health. It requires an interest in why people become ill, how this can be prevented, as well as how they can be treated. It also involves an understanding of how organisations and society can be changed to bring about better health.

The training to be a public health practitioner is relatively long (up to 5 years!) and competition to enter this profession is tough! Recruitment happens on a national basis once a year - this year, recruitment will open in December for posts starting in August 2010. There is considerable competition for all public health training posts in England & Wales but competition is highest in London, Kent, Surrey and Sussex.

If you are still interested and need a few resources, then start your search here.

A useful booklet on careers in public health

Eligibility for training

Training programme

Applying for training

Competition ratios LKSS 2008

Training Opportunities

If anyone is interested in this area, I am happy to invite my contact to Queen Mary to do a Q&A session. Contact me on t.j.bussoli@qmul.ac.uk to express an interest.