Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

I can 100% say that this was not the plan when I started my postdoc. I was all-in on staying in academia and starting my own lab. But things change. I learned more about academia, my interests, my long-term goals, etc and realized that I needed to change plans.

This new position is a stepping stone. There are larger things in the works that I can't currently talk about. But the entire decision is based on getting back on track with my real long-term goals for my career, which are firmly centered on therapeutics.

My entire decision to get my PhD was based on a desire to develop technologies and therapeutics. I first worked in a human genetics lab and was endlessly frustrated that we could tell families what caused their children's diseases, but had no way to actually treat them.

The goal back then was to eventually help treat and/or cure these disorders. But along the way I really fell in love with basic science, so much so that my vision shifted to academia for the long-haul.

This isn't inherently bad. Academia is for many reasons amazing and it's been VERY good to me. But recently, thanks to an ongoing hate/hate relationship w/ peer review, I've found myself less excited about the idea of spending the rest of my career in this environment.

The reality is that my long-term goals within academia have still been related to therapeutics. But I find myself wasting sooooo much time and energy answering questions tangential to those for the sole purpose of getting a paper published, especially in a "high-impact" journal.

And the reality is that this process of chasing high-impact publications wouldn't end anytime soon in our current academic climate if I were to pursue a tenure-track position. I'm not saying I couldn't do it or couldn't be successful, but it's just not what I'm passionate about.

You can argue that academia is so much more than that and you'd be right. But the job market is small and students/postdocs need committed and emotionally invested mentors, so my space should be made available for those who truly want to do that work.