Are you an intermediate fellow, unestablished lecturer, young group leader, clinical lecturer, or are you in another temporary post at the intermediate stage of your academic career? Do you feel like there are so many things you want to do, but don’t know how to within the School or University? Are you not sure when or how to transition to a more senior position? Do you have increasing responsibilities in your lab and at home, and would sometimes like to share your experiences?
Then you’re not alone. There are over 100 academics at intermediate levels within the School of Clinical Medicine in Cambridge. The Mid-Career Fellows (MCF) Network brings us all together in a peer-support network.
What we aim to do
Our objectives are:
- To provide peer-support, through a platform where recently established independent academic and clinical researchers can meet, exchange experiences and provide advice and support each other.
- To organise social and career-related activities to improve interaction and training of Network members.
- To make the voices of mid-career fellows heard in the School of Clinical Medicine and University of Cambridge, and together improve the culture and opportunities for all researchers ‘in transition’.
We receive administrative support from the EDI network at the School of Clinical Medicine, and are mentored as a network by Prof Charlotte Coles and Prof Fiona Karet.
We work closely together with the School of Biological Sciences Early PI network.
At the moment, we mainly run face-to-face coffee mornings once a term with a speaker on a topic relevant to mid-career fellows. Details and a list of previous events can be found on our events page. We also have a teams channel and email group to get in touch with each other and share information.
Would you like to join us?
Members of the MCF Network have many different job titles and funding sources. These include (but are not limited to): Senior Research Associate, Research group leader, MRC programme leader, Lecturer, Clinical Lecturer, Assistant professor, Associate professor, Clinical fellow, Sir Henry Dale Fellow, Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, Wellcome Clinical Research Career Development Fellow, UKRI Future Leaders, BHF Intermediate Fellow, Medical Research Foundation Fellow, Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow, …
As long as you consider yourself an academic or clinical researcher somewhere in the middle of your academic career, are establishing a new research group, or feel in transition towards independence or to a more senior position, you will hopefully find something useful in this network.
If you’d like to join us, email one of the MCF Network coordinators below, or contact us via darren.foulkes@admin.cam.ac.uk.
If you have recently joined the School of Clinical Medicine, we can pair you with a more experienced buddy within the MCF Network. They can help you with practical advice, share their experience, or simply have a chat over a coffee or tea. Just get in touch, and let us know you’d be interested in a buddy.
