Postdocs undervalued as PhD mentors

Postdoctoral scientists are proving to be valuable mentors for graduate students, and universities should do more to formalise the relationship, a Canadian and US research team has concluded.

The analysis, led by Timothée Poisot, an associate professor of biological sciences at the Université de Montréal, pulled together data to detail the ways in which postdocs, graduate students and their institutions would benefit if their often de facto relationships were officially acknowledged and encouraged.

“Neglecting to recognise and credit mentoring and advising as part of a postdoc’s job is a disservice to science, research, and education,” especially with the growing recognition in academia of the value of quality mentoring, the team said in a perspective article in Plos Biology.

Along with Professor Poisot, the authors represent the University of British Columbia, the Université de Sherbrooke, Carleton University and the University of Arizona.

Their work derives from the fundamental realisation that postdocs lack a clear role in higher education, which means that they are often paid too little and relied upon too much, Professor Poisot said.

“The reality is, there’s no such thing as a postdoc – it’s just a position that we created just to make sure that people with a PhD and without a full-time position have a place to exist in academia,” he said.

In general, the postdoc concept covers a broad swathe, typically concentrated in research, providing a transitional if precarious position on the pathway towards careers in academic, industrial or non-profit settings. Postdocs are often subject to “a lot of ad hoc agreements” with faculty that leave them receiving insufficient credit for their work, Professor Poisot said. Even among the four universities in Montreal, he said, postdocs face significant variability in their roles and treatment.

Yet a common trend everywhere, Professor Poisot said, is that graduate students have become ever more drawn towards postdocs for their mentoring needs, because they are often close in age and highly knowledgeable about specialised areas of their disciplines.

That is reflected in some of the limited research on the topic of postdocs, he said. A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, covering 336 biological sciences doctoral students from 53 US institutions, found that those students were four times more likely to show positive skill development when postdocs actively participated in their lab discussions.

“Graduate students can benefit tremendously from being formally paired with postdocs as part of their supervisory team,” the Poisot team says.

The challenge, therefore, is to get universities to formally honour that kind of relationship, Professor Poisot said. “We’re not calling for a single format for postdocs – that would be counterproductive,” he said. “But we need to recognise that different postdocs will want to do different things, and that’s not an excuse to not give them credit for the things they do.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com