December 1, 2009 - Trainees, meet Donna Vogel of the Professional Development Office!

We'll take a break from paper presentations on December 1 and will have a special event for trainees in the reproductive biology labs (PIs welcome too!). Dr. Donna Vogel from the Professional Development Office will come to meet with us. Donna is an MD-PhD with special ties to reproductive biology. From 1987 to 2001, she was a program director in the Reproductive Sciences Branch of NICHD. (In fact, I got to know her when she was the program officer for my first NIH grant, my NRSA post-doctoral fellowship! Some of you might know or have heard of other program directors at NICHD, such as Dick Tasca, Susan Taymans, and Stuart Moss; these are people doing the sort of NIH job that Donna used to do.) Donna next worked with the NCI, with a focus on post-doctoral fellowship programs, then was Deputy Director of the Ellinson Foundation. In 2007, she came to Hopkins and back to her passion of training and mentoring, to head the PDO.

Donna will visit on December 1 to give us a taste of her take on career development, to discuss upcoming offerings of the PDO (especially a course, called Your Research Career, coming up in January), and to answer any and all questions about science, grants, NIH, career, life, and everything. This will be a great chance for trainees to meet Donna in this small, informal setting … and as she will tell you, you can never network too much! Oh, and you should also ask her about Jeopardy! – she was a contestant and made it to the Tournament of Champions!