For many years, postdocs have been “a category of individuals [to whom] institutions have not paid any attention, … a category that needs a status of its own and its own infrastructure and administrative structure,” says Nancy Schwartz, dean for graduate and postdoctoral affairs at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Now, an influential academic body has taken a major step toward establishing that clearer status and a structure that can help institutions deal with postdocs’ issues and concerns.  

when French graduate Sandrine Etienne-Manneville inquired about the possibility of doing a postdoc in his lab, Alan Hall, then a principal investigator at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University College London, invited her for a visit. "She gave a very nice talk and had clearly done very well during her Ph.D.," Hall, now chair of the cell biology programme at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, recalls in an e-mail to Science Careers. "However, I had had a couple of other postdoc applicants visit during that time and they too gave very good talks."