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"Generally, I find that people are attracted to enthusiasm if it's unfettered and for the right reasons," says Hendrik Poinar, director of McMaster University's Ancient DNA Laboratory.

"I like to move very fast and take a lot of risks compared to the traditional Swedish way."

--Mohammed Homman

"This choice was more practical because you try to build up a career, and if you do what people are already doing, you need to be very good, but also lucky, to make it," says Edwin Cuppen.

“I’d like to be here [longer]. But now my wife and my baby are in Japan, so I have to go back.”

Azevedo strongly advises other postdocs to start applying even if they feel it is too early in their career.

“In the last 15 years, I had some good intuition that I always made sure I followed up on,” says Pierre Dutilleul, an applied statistician at McGillUniversity.

"It's easy to find things that work. But to produce them on a large scale and market [them], it's a whole new thing, and it requires a lot more expertise that maybe in-house researchers just don't have," says Hélène Chaisson, Vice-President of Research and Development, Codena.

Oldroyd had found an ideal research area to build his career on. "I made very conscious decisions about which fields to go into," recalls Oldroyd.

"The most important concept you have to remember is that technology doesn't mean you have a company." Says Roger Bernier, Vice-President of Foragen Technologies Management.

It is a successful formula for this target group.

"I think it's very important when you're young, not to put limits on yourself," says [Celine] Ster.

Got a funding question? Send it to the GrantDoctor:
grantdoctor@aaas.org.

"Cases very soon demonstrated a great capacity for working with software and developing systems, a capacity that is unfortunately quite exceptional in experimental biologists." --Systems biologist Alfonso Valencia.

If you wish to win an NRSA, you need to become a trainee again, and that means doing something new.

"You can look at the endpoint and think 'nice path,' … but it was hard." --Javier Palatnik

Cosma encourages young scientists from nations like Italy not to become oppressed by their national systems, to believe in themselves and what they can achieve, and to be willing to move abroad to achieve their full potential.

"It is definitely an asset to work with more than one system. It opens us up to different ways of thinking and keeps us flexible and less likely to sink into dogma. The differences in how the various systems are wired are as important as the similarities." --Sabeeha Merchant, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Briscoe believes that evolutionary biology is an important--and growing--discipline that will continue to offer a range of career opportunities.