Big Ideas Lab - The Postdoc Journey

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

What happens after a PhD, but before a scientist is fully established? At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, that in-between stage is treated as a proving ground. LLNL postdocs are given rare facilities, hard problems, mentorship, career development time, and a community built around collaboration. The result is more than professional development. It’s the moment a scientist starts becoming the person others look to for answers. Guests featured (in order of appearance): Tomi Akindele - Systems Modeling and Evaluation Group Leader, Physics Division, LLNL Ted Baumann - Chemist and Postdoc Program Lead, LLNL -- Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch. Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Matthew Powell. Script by Caroline Kidd Story Editing by Levi Hanusch. Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell. Narrated by Matthew Powell. Video Production by Levi Hanusch. Brought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the 65th meeting of the Nobel laureates and young researchers here on the shores of beautiful Lake Constance. On the shores of Lake Constance in Bavaria, Germany, some of the most accomplished scientists in the world gather in one place. Every year, young researchers travel to the historic town located here to catch a glimpse of the faces whose discoveries are printed in textbooks and whose work has changed how we understand the universe. The Nobel laureates. The meeting is probably going to be the highlight of my scientific career to date. Meeting the Nobel laureates is one of the biggest honors in science, if not the biggest honor, and to meet these Nobel laureates,

and to see what motivated them during their lifetime. Scientific rock stars. Would be the equivalent of if Margaret Thatcher were walking through a room, and you would know that she's walking through this room, because it would start to see an accumulation of people around her. The Nobel laureates are a picture of what the young researchers in the room could become, a future that feels impossibly far away and yet suddenly close. They are no longer students, but not yet established scientists.

And some of them are standing in that room for one reason. Excellent students from around the world selected to come here. The idea that I got to be so close to so many, Nobel laureate. And I just kept thinking that this only happened because I work at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The journey from grad school to established scientist is one that's earned. With hard work and the courage to keep stepping into rooms where you do not yet know all the answers. How does that early career scientist become the kind of scientist others look to for answers? At Lawrence Livermore, the transformation isn't left to chance. It happens by design.

inside an environment that gives early career scientists the support to grow and the scale of problems that demands they do. And it all starts with a single, deceptively simple title. Postdoc. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow today. Postdoc.

If you've spent any time in a university, the word is familiar. If you haven't, it can sound like jargon. A postdoctoral position is essentially the progression in the academic circles. That's Ted Bauman, a chemist and staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Undergrad, you get your bachelor's degree. You go on to grad school, you get your PhD, and then at that point, you don't have to continue in academic circles. But if you do want to learn a new area, PhDs do go on and do a postdoc. A postdoc is the in-between stage.

You've earned the highest degree there is, and you're no longer a student. It is still a learning position. So you're still acquiring knowledge at that point. It's a really good opportunity not only to learn new areas, but to network with other people, get another circle of professionals that you can interact with. It's one of Ted's favorite things about leading the postdoc program. When I have a postdoc event on the calendar, I kind of get excited about it. It's what makes it fun. I started at the lab before there was any postdoc program in place.

I was fortunate enough to have a really good mentor that helped me navigate integration into the lab. But now we have this whole ecosystem in place to support the postdocs all the way through their appointment. Tomi Akindlele, a former postdoc turned staff scientist, had a similar mentorship experience when she first started at the lab. When I was a graduate student here, I was really fortunate to get to be mentored by a lot of other postdocs. And so whenever I had a question or a concern, I would go to the postdocs that were working in the same research group that I was.

And I would ask some questions. They would help me to make my code more efficient. They would help me to understand a lot of the results that I was getting. And so I used to really view these postdocs, these scientists that could affect walk on water. They had a really elevated view of them because there was no question I could ask that they just didn't know. There's a reason for that. When a new postdoc arrives at Livermore, they're not given a badge and left alone.

They walk into an entire support structure built around them. The lab has created this entire infrastructure that's in place to support postdocs during their time at Livermore, from their onboarding to their integration into the lab culture. all the way through the important step of transitioning out of their postdoc into their next stage of their career. My job as the postdoc program lead is to make sure they're aware of all the resources available to them and to make sure that they know that they're part of a larger community that's here to support them during their time at the lab. At the postdoc program center is the career development account. The idea is simple, but the impact is extraordinary.

The lab sets aside funding so a postdoc. can spend up to a quarter of their time more than a day a week on their own professional growth. It's really up to the postdoc to curate their own experience here. They can go to seminars. They can attend people's group meetings. They can read up on different topics to help them better integrate into other projects. So there's really no limitation. I had the opportunity to use my career development time to go to a series of non-pullipration boot camps or summer.

or week-long activities that really try to ingrain us in what the global security and non-proliferation mission space is. And then I could also spend that time just randomly going to different seminars across the laboratory. I really tried to spend that time to get a better picture of, like, holistically, what it is that we do here at the lab outside of the one building that I'm in. That's not insignificant. That's more than a day a week of their time that they can spend.

doing this. You're not going to find that in academics. You're not going to find that in industry. It's permission to explore, ideate, and execute. This is an extreme example, but you can come in and say a biologist, and if you have other interests, you really can branch out and start working in material science, physics, or better yet, create collaborations with other postdocs or early career staff. Some of our most creative ideas that we see submitted as proposals really come from the cross-pollination of a postdoc in one field, meeting a postdoc in another field at a social event, they start talking and they realize that there's some synergy in their ideas. And then you can write up your proposal, you can get it funded. So there's really not a lot of limitations, provided

again that there's resources available to work on those areas. That's how the advanced manufacturing lab, home to much of Lawrence Livermore's 3D printing work, began to take shape. Most of that was built through strategic postdoc hires, bringing in person. personnel from academic institutions, right out of grad school that had experience with these 3D printing technologies, and then they became staff members and hired in more postdocs that had that expertise. A postdoc can arrive to do the work and end up helping build the future shape of the lab itself. For Tomey, it came true in a way she never expected. There was a project where we were approached to build handheld neutron multiplicity.

counter in a year. A neutron multiplicity counter is a tool used for nuclear security. But the assignment wasn't just to build one. It was to make it handheld in a single year. That was quite challenging in the sense that I know that we could have built a handheld neutron multiplicity counter at some point. But when it was time bound to a year, I pushed back and said, I'm not sure that we can do this.

probably nine out of the 12 months. It was just like, I don't know if this piece is going to arrive in time. I don't know if we're going to be able to perform analysis on this piece. You wanted to make sure that when you turned it on for a demo, that the entire thing doesn't explode. And Tommy's solution to the time crunch happened in the most unexpected, mundane place. The hallway. With a tight deadline and parts still coming in, Tommy's project depended on more than the people officially assigned to the project.

The benefit of Livermore is we were able to have conversations with people who have done things similar or tangential to the work that we were interested in doing. And so they were able to offer a lot of assistance in either, hey, I know you're waiting on this scintillator to arrive, but I have this scintillator that might not be the right size that you can start doing tabletop experimentation on. The missing piece may not be in your lab yet, but the person who can help you keep moving might be just down the hall. Oh, hey. The whole thing was the team effort.

Everyone had substantial contributions that really led to the development of this detector in such a short period of time. And I think that's one of the benefits of Livermore is that we do team science. Collaboration is embedded in the culture at Lawrence Livermore, and with it, networking. A word that in other industries can sound transactional, but here means something else entirely. And so really this ability to network, and it doesn't even feel like networking, but it's really calling up an old friend

or calling up a friend that you enjoy talking to and interacting with and understanding how the work that you're doing in one area can also benefit them in the area that they're working in. When you're a postdoc, they really spend a lot of time teaching you how to really not just network with other people around the lab, but also other postdocs at the lab with you. And so as you move on in your career, they also move on to their careers. And so now you have this opportunity to reach out into academia and to call up an old friend who might have a really great graduate student that they want you to mentor. It becomes a living map of people who understand the work and know where to turn when a problem crosses into unfamiliar territory.

But even with that map, the leap from postdoc to staff scientist is challenging and not always technical. The biggest challenge that I've really found was trying to convey my ideas in such a way that was palpable to a funding agency. You have a brilliant idea. You put it on paper. And the people reading it have no idea what you're trying to say. The gap between complex science and the people. who need to understand it is why Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab co-founded the event covered in our last episode. The Research Slam, a competition where scientists have three minutes to make their work matter to a room full of people who know nothing about them.

For Tomey, that meant explaining how she looks for a faint signal hidden inside an ocean of background noise. From a particle most people have never heard of. three minutes to make the invisible understandable. And in a place like Livermore, that skill does not stay on the stage. It follows you back into the lab, into proposals,

collaborations, and eventually into the moment when someone from another field comes to you for help. Where I started to feel more confident or more comfortable at the lab was when you would start to have other people, people in other areas coming to you to solve a problem for them. The idea that you could be helpful to someone you don't even know just based off of reputation alone

was pretty comforting but also terrifying. The grad student who once thought postdocs walked on water had become the person others came to. And the cycle continues. So now I'm in a position where I mentor postdocs and despite the fact that I'm mentoring them and the roles are effectively reversed, I still feel in awe of the fact that they just carry so much knowledge. All of the career development and community is engineered toward one thing, building confident scientists who aren't afraid to try something new. I'm so grateful for my postdoc experience because it really gave me the opportunity to learn more about different

subject areas, but then also learn more and feel comfortable and failing. What makes someone a good fit is the willingness to take on new science challenges, especially if they're outside of what your past research experiences have been. The time as a postdoc is short. Just a few years and then a scientist moves on into staff roles, other labs, academia, and problems we haven't even imagined yet. The goal of the postdoc program is to prepare postdocs for the next stage of their career to become an independent scientist.

So if we do our job while they're a postdoc, then they're ready when they become staff scientists to take on those responsibilities. Postdocs learn while they work. In the proposal that does not land, in the conversation down the hall, in the project that feels impossible for nine of its 12 months. It's not just what happens after a PhD.

It's the moments a scientist starts becoming the person, others look to for answers. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening.