Published online 1 July 2009
Postdoc journal
The simple life
Joanne Isaac
Joanne Isaac was a postdoc studying the effect of climate change on biodiversity at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. She is now in the United States so that her husband can complete a postdoc.
Motherhood has its benefits
I became a biologist because I wanted to travel to exotic places and save endangered species. This may not be the ideal place for such an admission, but there it is — my own inconvenient truth. Although this was the naive notion of a working-class adolescent, unacquainted with academia, I have been lucky enough to travel from Outer Mongolia to the Outer Hebrides to work on fascinating species — from voles, to pikas, to Tasmanian devils.
Now I find myself the full-time mom of a three-year-old; my field-work wings clipped. My husband Brett has the postdoc and gets to see the cool stuff — coyotes, bobcats, salamanders and rattlesnakes. But motherhood has its benefits. I get to spend my days bouncing on giant inflatable castles with my son Kai, splashing around in the fun pool and hiking the trails of San Francisco Bay in search of snails, squirrels and fox poop.
Some days I would gladly trade toddler-dom for sampling parasitized frogs with Brett, but this forced distance from academia has helped me realize that, somewhere along the winding road of my career, I lost sight of my reasons for studying biology in the first place. With the help of Kai and the snails, I am starting to see the natural world as I did when I was a kid — all the wonder, all the possibilities. I know I still want to be a biologist when I grow up.
Postdoc Journal Keepers 2009
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Julia BoughnerJulia Boughner is a postdoc in evolutionary developmental biology at the University of Calgary, Canada.
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Bryan VentersBryan Venters is a postdoc in biochemistry and molecular biology at Pennsylvania State University.
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Joanne IsaacJoanne Isaac was a postdoc studying the effect of climate change on biodiversity at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. She is now in the United States so that her husband can complete a postdoc.
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Sam WalcottSam Walcott is a postdoc in theoretical biophysics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
