Alison McGuigan (right) holds a UK passport, but when she came to look for a postdoc position she found herself in a difficult situation. Because biomedical engineering is such a hot field, she had a better than average chance of getting a key placement. And as she had trained in one of the field's premier labs — the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto — her prospects were even better. But she had spent too much time in Canada to apply for postdocs normally available to Europeans, so she opted for a “fairly aggressive approach” to finding a post.

McGuigan began her search for a postdoc about a year before defending her thesis. She asked her adviser, Michael Sefton, to assist her. She picked the labs she was interested in and targeted people she wanted to work with, and invited them to her presentations at conferences.

Before she completed her application to her first choice, George Whitesides' lab at Harvard University, she set up a website that detailed all of her research experience — information that would not fit on her CV. She put up a teaching dossier that included her teaching strategies and experience. She also made sure that she communicated to the lab the skill sets she already had, what she wanted to learn in a postdoc, and why her skills would be beneficial to the lab. Sefton forwarded her material to Whitesides' lab. McGuigan was accepted as a postdoc about five hours after she applied.

M.W.