“Following Protocol” Blog Contest Winner – Joanna Komorowska-Müller

Congratulations to Joanna Komorowska-Müller for winning the “Following Protocol” Blog Contest! Thank you to all of our other entrants for your outstanding articles, make sure to be on the lookout for them on the “Following Protocol” blog in the weeks to come.

Joanna’s winning piece discusses steps that can be taken to help students avoid toxic lab environments and ways to help those who may already be in this type of environment.

How to tackle the problem of toxic labs and abusive PIs

Over the course of my studies, I came across a significant amount of people that were working in unhealthy environments or/and under the tyranny of an abusive PI (Principal Investigator). Academia is supposed to be about a pursuit of knowledge and creativity, but how can one do their best when they are chronically stressed and can barely breathe? I was lucky to always work under amazing, supporting PIs, but the recurring situations that my friends were facing made me wonder if there is anything we can do to help? I think that we can approach this problem on many different levels. While I was writing this blog post, a short article was published by Akiko Iwasaki in Nature Medicine entitled, “Antidote to Toxic Principal Investigators”. In this discussion starting piece, Prof. Iwasaki not only highlights the
global problem of abusive PI’s but proposes ready-to-implement solutions that promise to improve the situation instantly. She also mentions that the issue may be tackled at different stages…