Welcome to the UC Santa Cruz Postdocs Association webpage!

The USPA is a postdoctoral-led organization that aims to provide career training and resources to postdoctoral scholars here at UC Santa Cruz. Each year the USPA organizes a symposium, and a series of workshops to highlight postdoctoral research, provides postdocs with career planning support, and build a stronger postdoc community.  Our goal is to create a welcoming environment for new postdocs and a supportive group of peers to navigate this pivotal career stage together.

The USPA is part of the larger network of Bay Area Postdocs.

Activities of USPA include:

  • postdoc science and social hour
  • career development workshops
  • annual symposium

Check out our upcoming events and:

Latest from USPA

Postdoctoberfest Party 2022

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Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 5:00–9:00 p.m.
Venus Spirits Distillery, Westside | 200 High Road | Santa Cruz
You’re invited! Let’s celebrate us – postdocs – and the research we do at UCSC! 
Program:

We’d like to keep this event informal and thus encourage everyone to participate in and co-create the program. Everyone will get up to 5 minutes of stage time, and you can use this time any way you like. Options include:

  • Talk: Give a brief presentation about your research project or diversity-minded mentoring experience. Think what would be useful for other postdocs to learn.
  • Slam: Choose a member of the audience to give an improvised presentation from your slides. Ideally, somebody from a completely different field to maximize the surprise factor 🙂
  • Jam: Do you have a knack for poetry? Singing? Dance? Share it with us!

If you prepare slides, please bring them in a platform-independent format, such as PDF or Google slides.

Depending on the mood and time, we’ll close the evening with a panel discussion between several senior postdocs to touch on any questions that especially new postdocs might have.

It’s been a long since we met each other. Looking forward to see y’all!

Goodies:

Food and non-alcoholic drinks will be provided. We’ll have regular, vegetarian, and vegan options. If you have any special dietary concerns beyond that, please let us know in the above RSVP form.

IBSC’s Coffee & Snacks for Postdoc Appreciation Week

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In celebration of National Postdoc Appreciation week, the Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells (IBSC) will be hosting a coffee and snack event for postdocs to attend, tomorrow (Friday Sep 23rd ) 11am-noon at the Red Square (Science Hill)!

RSVPs here to help ensure there are enough snacks and coffee to fuel everyone for their day.

We take this opportunity to mention the postdoc funding/training programs offered by IBSC: https://ibsc.ucsc.edu/postdoc-training

Science Communication Matters

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Have you ever wondered how to effectively explain science to the public? Why is communicating science in understandable words important? Come learn more in a remote conversation with award-winning storyteller, consultant, and trainer, Dr. Virginia Schutte!

Audience: Graduate students and postdocs in science disciplines
What: Science Communication Matters
When: Wednesday, July 13th from 12-1 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)
Where: Join Zoom Meeting Meeting ID: 931 0136 4419

Please share with any graduate students and postdocs in science disciplines who might be interested!

Please send questions to Karen Arcos.

Postdoc workshop Data visualization using R and ggplot2

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When: July 14th, 10am-noon
Where:

We are hosting an interactive workshop on data visualization using ggplot2 (an R package), Thursday July 14th, 10am-noon, hybrid zoom / in person on main campus

ggplot2 works especially well to plot your data in a fast and organized way, and makes it a lot easier when working with large datasets. It also has many options for visualization (plot types, colors, annotations, highlights, etc.). It’s a free package that can be loaded into RStudio (free too), is widely used in the scientific community, and has a huge amount of online resources to learn from.
Feel free to bring your own data to play with!

image credit: @allison_horst