Please enter your votes for the NextGen Association for Postdocs and Graduate Students. Voting ends Monday, September 28, 2020 at 11:59 PM. You can vote for up to two (2) candidates.
As a reminder: The two highest-ranking candidates will be offered the co-chair positions; the remaining candidates will be offered vice-chair positions. Each position is to be held for a one-year term.
👉 CAST YOUR BALLOT HERE: https://forms.gle/LVtdZeQusWSYVHrn7
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions at academicaffairs@broadinstitute.org.
Candidates
Victoria Beja-Glasser
Lisa Cervia
Nasim Jamali
Harris Lazaris
Sean Moran
Elena Torlai Triglia
Victoria Beja-Glasser
My name is Victoria Beja-Glasser, and I am a fourth-year graduate student at the Broad and MIT in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. I work under Dr. Guoping Feng’s mentorship, studying the functions of Abca7 and Trem2 in the intact brain, which are key genes that increase the risk for Alzheimer’s disease when mutated. I joined NextGen two years ago in hopes of learning how to navigate the Broad and to integrate into its community.
Serving as a chair of the NextGen Association this past year has been an honor! If elected again this year, I will continue advocating on your behalf to make Broad an even better environment! By building on what NextGen has accomplished this past year, I plan to:
- expand our career resources and networking opportunities for trainees;
- provide outlets and events for managing stress;
- recruit more graduate students and foster a more collaborative workplace for current postdocs and graduate students;
- work towards making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of the Broad culture.
I hope to serve as your NextGen Chair again this year to promote a warm, supportive environment for all Broad trainees and am looking forward to hearing your feedback on how to improve NextGen!!
Lisa Cervia
Hi fellow Broadies! I had the honor of serving as Co-Chair of NextGen this year and Vice Co-Chair the year before. I am a proud member of the Cancer Program at the Broad and am dedicated to connecting trainees (PhDs and Postdocs) through NextGen. We worked on planning a lot of exciting things this year including seasonal socials, the trainee talks lunch seminar series, the re-launch of the Facing Forward faculty lunches, and the 2019 Trainee Retreat. We are working on new initiatives including providing resources to prepare different career paths, creating opportunities for teaching and mentoring, planning the 2021 Trainee Retreat, and overall strengthening the trainee community. Since beginning my postdoc, I participated in multiple events hosted by NextGen. Among these great events and resources, the NextGen Retreat and the monthly meetings have stood out as experiences that have made me feel welcome at the Broad AND provided me with a variety of settings to meet other Broadies! In the current climate, community is especially important and I’d like to continue to work on ways to grow our community. I am always open to hearing your ideas and suggestions. I sincerely enjoy working with peers to organize events that benefit us socially and in our professional development. I’d be honored to serve as part of the NextGen council and to represent trainees. I look forward to meeting you and hearing new ideas and suggestions that you might have that I could help implement through NextGen!
Nasim Jamali
Hi wonderful Broad trainees,
I’m a second year postdoc in the Imaging Platform. I joined the NextGen Association last year, and introduced a new series (Non-academic Job Mock Interview) for trainees. This series aims to introduce the non-academic opportunities in life sciences and help trainees to practice the interview process. We had four events from this series so far (Non-academic STEM career options overview, Networking & Informational Interviewing, Resume writing, and a Non-academic Panel Discussion). Stay tuned for the next event, which will be on applying for mock non-academic positions and practicing the interview process.
My past experiences from working in non-academic sectors, co-founding a non-profit trainee focused consulting group, to actively developing and planning workshops, retreats and meetings, gave me a better understanding of what trainees would need to better prepare for their next adventure (inside or outside of academia).
It has been an honor being a member of NextGen last year and working with Angela, her team and other NextGen board members. If elected as your NextGen Co-Chair, I am committed to hearing your suggestions, advocating on your behalf and planning events through NextGen.
Harris Lazaris
I would be thrilled to serve the NextGen Association as a co-chair, as I firmly believe that there is potential to enhance its current activities and broaden its role in the following ways:
- As a person with a dual background in molecular and computational biology, I would like to help wet-lab postdocs get exposed to computational biology.
- I believe that postdocs who want to follow academic careers are not typically exposed to leadership opportunities, opportunities to train others, or formal training on how to run a lab (budget, leadership, management skills). Broad as an organization offers some opportunities in these areas and this could be extended to postdocs.
- Given the shrinking number of tenure-track positions, I would like to contribute to the efforts of the NextGen Association to inform postdoctoral scientists on what options they have in or outside academia.
- I would like to contribute to the efforts of the NextGen Association to promote diversity and inclusion. This is not limited to populations that are traditionally considered underrepresented in the sciences but also to other groups such as first-generation college graduates or talented individuals who have not had enough opportunities to work in scientifically stimulating environments such as the Broad Institute, the Whitehead Institute, and other world-class institutions in Kendall Square and the Greater Boston area.
- I would like to stimulate discussions and exchange ideas with postdoctoral-level scientists within and outside Broad on how to improve life quality, training, and job prospects for postdoctoral scientists.
Sean Moran
Hi Trainees! My name is Sean Moran and I am a 1st year postdoc in the Pan lab working in the Stanley Center’s therapeutics group and I am excited for the potential opportunity to serve as one of your co-chairs for the NextGen Association of Broad Trainees. For a little background on me, I have extensive experience planning, organizing, and executing events through my previous roles as the social chair of the Vanderbilt University Brain Institute’s student organization as well as serving as an elected board member of several other student organizations during my graduate career. In these roles, I hosted fun events targeted at increasing trainee engagement and providing a fun break from the postdoc/graduate student grind. Through other board member roles, I secured independent funding that was used for travel awards prizes for various fun trainee competitions. By serving on the NextGen Board, I will continue to emphasize the importance of having a diverse array of social events and will work with the other NextGen members to ensure a very healthy scheduling of professional development events.
Personally, I am most interested in a career in drug discovery and will therefore push for a strong interaction with the tremendous and ever-growing Boston biotech community. However, I know that everyone has different career tracts in mind, and I will thus ensure that all career-fields are represented in our professional development events.
Lastly, community outreach is important to me and I hope to continue to enthusiastically support all the current community outreach that the Broad has been doing and to drive new community engagement programs forward, such as science-policy engagement. In conclusion, I look forward to the opportunity to continue to serve trainees as I have in the past, and I will do my best to help each of you make the most of your Broad Experience. Until then, stay well!!
Elena Torlai Triglia
Hi fellow Broad trainees!
I am a postdoc in the Regev and the Bernstein labs and, in this past year, I had the pleasure to serve as a Vice Chair of NextGen. We organized Career Development events for academic and extra-academic paths, socials and virtual Trivia nights, and restarted Facing Forward, which will continue in the coming months. We have also organized a new Survey to collect data on trainees’ needs during these crazy last months (thanks for participating!), to better understand how we can support you and which kind of events you’d like to attend. I am running as a Co-Chair of NextGen to continue this line of work. I am committed to use the survey data, together with the suggestions from the Trainee Town Hall, and to work with all of you to advocate for improvements in trainees’ lives, to further develop our Broad experience and career opportunities!
NextGen Association 