Interested in joining the Whiteman Lab?

Note to prospective students: I expect students to take graduate school seriously and to pursue grant proposals, scholarships and fellowships (see bottom of page for links) that will allow them to focus on their research and take ownership over their dissertation projects. I expect Ph.D. students to have deep familiarity with at least one taxon by the time they take their comprehensive exams (e.g., bacteria, birds, insects, plants). All lab members present their research plans and findings at weekly laboratory group meetings and will be expected to present at scientific conferences. Students will leave the lab with a broad skill set in ecological and evolutionary genomics, population genetics and molecular biology, and will be comfortable working with a variety of organisms, including plants, insects, bacteria and/or birds, depending on the research project that they pursue. We try to go as low and as high as we can, across levels of biological organization, in understanding adaptation. I also expect students to get along with each other...It is safe to be your authentic self in my lab--we have students, postdocs and technicians from all over the world, from many walks of life, from first-generation, LGBTQA+, liberal, libertarian, religious and agnostic, under-represented minority, urban, rural, etc. We value human diversity in all its forms and value respect for each other as diverse humans above all else.

My mentoring approach is to deeply engage with students but to take cues from them rather than foist my ideas upon them--so I take a laissez-faire approach overall--but I am as involved as students would like me to be in their projects--I usually see students each day, but we might have an in-depth meeting once a month.

The days of students being completely independent in their Ph.D. research (something common 20+ years ago) are over--biology has become extremely collaborative and this is a good thing. Usually in my lab, the first chapter of a student's dissertation is based on a dataset that picks up where somebody else left off. This allows students to get their feet wet before moving onto more intellectually independent research for the rest of their dissertation chapters. This model has worked well so far. It also allows for students to gain a sense of accomplishment relatively early--usually they publish their first chapter sometime in the 3rd or 4th year. The modern view of the dissertation is that these are papers that should be published as pre-prints and then in the peer-reviewed literature as quickly as possible--few people will read your dissertation--hopefully many will read the pre-print and published papers that are found in it! Most students leave with one or two chapters that are not yet published and they work on getting them published after they leave the lab. This is very difficult because they are ready to move on, they are getting paid to do something exciting and new and they simply don't have the time. But, it is possible. My goal, therefore is to push students to submit at least to bioRxiv.org sooner rather than later and to avoid letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Reviewers always find problems (a good thing) and they are often not the ones you thought they would find! In other words, adding that last experiment or dataset is often not as critical as you would think. I am bad at reading the minds of others and my guess is that you are too! Move it forward, get the reviews, etc. Science writing is always iterative until you see it in print in a peer-reviewed journal, and better to iterate with the reviewers' comments rather than a mythical set of comments in one's head! Having said all of this, the peer review process can be demoralizing because it can take a long time to unfold or because your paper might get rejected, but usually I find that it works well--reviewers' comments are almost always helpful in my experience.

I encourage applications from self-motivated, creative and enthusiastic individuals who have a passion for ecology and evolutionary biology. I take an active role in mentoring students but expect students to develop their own research projects and I look for students with whom I can collaborate; I look for future colleagues. Prospective graduate students should examine the Integrative Biology website.

My perspective on training future biologists is encapsulated by what Professor Doug Futuyma (Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at SUNY-Stony Brook) called a "scientific naturalist" approach in his address to the American Society of Naturalists [Futuyma, D.J. (1998) Wherefore and Whither the Naturalist. Am. Nat. 151, 1-6]: "I think of a scientific naturalist as a person with a deep and broad familiarity with one or more groups of organisms or ecological communities, who can draw on her knowledge of systematics, distribution, life histories, behavior, and perhaps physiology and morphology to inspire ideas, to evaluate hypotheses, to intelligently design research with an awareness of organisms' special peculiarities. Even more, perhaps, he is the person who is inexhaustibly fascinated by biological diversity, and who does not view organisms merely as models, or vehicles for theory but, rather, as the raison d'etre for biological investigation, as the Ding an sich, the thing in itself, that excites our admiration and our desire for knowledge, understanding, and preservation."

If interested in applying, please send me your resume or CV, a statement of research interests, undergraduate and graduate GPA, undergraduate major, and the names of two or three individuals who can evaluate your potential as a research scientist. Note that I am *not* supportive of using GRE scores to determine admission into graduate school or for any other purpose, including for fellowships and scholarships, because they are *not* helpful as predicting success in science and in fact, using these scores may bias admissions decisions: http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7504-303a.

Obtaining an outside fellowship is the most ideal way in which to fund your graduate and postdoctoral research, because these usually provide one with a stipend and research expense allowance.

Here are some potential funding avenues: 

The Whiteman Lab | Integrative Biology | University of California | Berkeley, CA 94720

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