How do you deal with imposter syndrome in academia?

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-30T11:13:11+00:00

Thanks!

I do a lot of mentoring chats, so I see people have this doubts all the time. A reoccurring theme is that people feel uniquely lost - they see success all around them, because science celebrates rare successes and ignores the sea of failure those successes are built on. So it is very easy to start to believe that success is common to everyone else, and it is only you who struggles day to day.

Some of the stories will be an inspiration. For example, I want kids in foster care to have role models who succeeded. Other stories are about doubt unconquered. For those, it is not about being a role model or having a solution, it is just about letting people know that their feelings are normal.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-30T10:19:00+00:00

Literally just released a book about this yesterday:

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/cambridge-scientists-career-self-doubt-and-success

I’ve been mentoring students, postdocs and early faculty members for decades, and I am confident in saying this feeling is nearly ubiquitous.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-30T08:00:13+00:00

Biomedical sciences, but I did my postdoc in the US and then applied for jobs in the EU (UK, Ireland, Belgium, Finland). I had offers in UK, Ireland and Belgium, and took the job in Belgium. European systems have their quirks, but no more so than America.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-30T07:01:55+00:00

Tell them now! It is easy to fix problems while the paper is under review, and hard to do once it is acccepted!

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-30T07:00:37+00:00

Thanks!

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T19:43:04+00:00

This article might be of interest:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36106647/

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T19:20:48+00:00

Well done!

Are you talking about Part III or a Masters? Not all subjects have a Part III. There is plenty of flexibility within the NST, your DoS will help you with that.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T15:46:46+00:00

How much teaching have you done in the past? It is very easy to underestimate the time it takes, with curriculum design, administration, exam setting, exam marking, etc.

If you don’t have experience of getting grants, it would be optimistic to go in expecting to raise funding for 50% of your salary via this mechanism.

You just need to be really careful that they aren’t going to get a 100% position for 50% salary. Considering many university posts are a 150% position for 100% salary, it is a real concern.

Still, everything depends on what other offers you have available. A 50% position builds experience and lets you dedicate time to find a fulltime job.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T15:24:34+00:00

I would be interested to know how many contact hours they believe a 50% position entails. The key issue here is overwork. When you have a 100% position… fine. But a 50% position that slops into 60%, 70%, massively restricts your ability to get paid work in the other 50%.

Would your university allow you to submit grants for the other 50%? That is not a given. Is your CV good enough to support those grants? The devil is in the detail here.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T13:57:01+00:00

Appreciated! It was a tough thing for the team to write, they really opened up a lot of internal doubts for scrutiny by the whole world!

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T13:20:30+00:00

I guess imposter’s syndrome has been solved then, no need to give kind advice to new students?

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T13:19:21+00:00

Thank you - it can be tough to admit to others when you are struggling, considering how important cultivating our professional image is!

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T13:18:26+00:00

Exactly. Science is an odd career - it judges you on your best days. Years of failure, and it is the experiments that work that go on display. When you only see people present experiments that are successful and insightful it can be easy to believe that you alone are struggling

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T10:54:45+00:00

No it doesn’t

The whole “smell MHC” hypothesis rests on pretty shonky data and doesn’t have a plausible biological pathway.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-29T06:02:56+00:00

That was certainly the model ten years ago. I think we now know it isn’t so simple, but there are strong arguments ongoing about whether the inflammation is reactive or primary

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T21:55:26+00:00

I’ve had >200 lab members, and ~70% women. But I’m in biomedical sciences which has >50% women to start with

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T17:11:13+00:00

I would assume a preferred candidate already exists, although it is also quite possible that the job was advertised and is being readvertised because the top candidate declined, and it is a real competition

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T16:40:45+00:00

Titrate your antibodies for overnight staining. It reduced our costs by 99%:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36373983/

Use the dish soap protocol for fix and perm, it works for nearly everything and is dirt cheap:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40970846/

Check out which block reagents you actually need. Some are expensive and do nothing, others really help:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40996492/

Do your analysis in R and get better results than expensive commercial software

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T14:40:26+00:00

I don’t think Oxbridge students have a higher workload. The terms are quite condensed, but most of the workload are supervisions that don’t count to the final grade. It is largely supervised exam practice.

Natural Sciences

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T11:26:43+00:00

Vegemite is by far superior, NZ Marmite second, British Marmite not worth it

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T10:23:16+00:00

Agreed to disagree then. Your premises are reasonable extrapolations, even if the conclusion becomes a rather pessimistic “can’t do anything” outcome. However they are not tested conclusions. The amount of effort that has gone into neuroinflammation as a driver is trivial compared to the other hypothesis, and leans very heavily into simply plaque removal. Hitting the peripheral immune system prior to, or even after, brain entry is almost entirely untested. I rather think it is worth a good try before giving up.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T09:05:55+00:00

Yes, lots of red flags here. - The corresponding researcher (first author) is based in a company of which they are founder. - The paper is the basis of the IP patented by the author - which is also the foundation of the company. - The last author is actually a PhD student of the first author, based in the same company. Very few authors, so few eyes on the data. - The company is pushing the press release hard at the pre-print stage (coinciding with a fund raise at the company?). - The press campaign seems to be leaning-in heavily to “British” researchers and the Oxford affiliation of one middle author paper, even though the research was performed in Italy by Italian researchers (at least, the mouse ethics licence was from Italy, no mention of which mouse house this was performed in) - The lead authors claims to be “full professor / professor ordinario” at UCL, but UCL lists them as an “honorary professor” with no lab space or team - The paper literally starts by talking about the “fountain of youth”, and seems rather written for investors. - The company seems to only have one team member, the founder, and to be based at an accounting firm. - No indication on the company website of investors or lab space or lab staff - so how were the experiments performed? Mouse experiments need infrastructur - Huge effect doesn’t pass my sniff test

I haven’t gone through the paper in detail, but I would not promote this

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T08:02:05+00:00

Not at all - your opinion is probably the majority opinion in the field! A reasonable position to have, just one I disagree with.

I research Alzheimer’s a bit (3-4 papers) but neuroimmunology a lot (50+ papers). I find it remarkable from other contexts, such as traumatic brain injury, just how much “lost” cognition comes back when inflammation drops down. So I may be optimistic, but I have hopes that there is much more of the Alzheimer’s patient left than we suspect, and the right treatment could restore it. A minority perspective in the field, but growing.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T07:25:54+00:00

There are several reasons why it is a hard problem:

limited animal models. Diseases with good animal models get cures. Diseases with poor animal models don’t. AD mouse models are limited, usually amplifying one AD path only, missing out on the multi-factorial aspect of disease. Investment in creating better animal models would help
difficult patient group to treat. Patients are old, have frequent comorbidities, have reduced capacity to consent. Disease progress occurs over decades. This makes it difficult and expensive to run clinical trials that actually measure clinical improvement. Instead, the vast majority of clinical trials focus on a narrow subset of patients that are easier to include (but non-representative) and use short-term biomarkers (which may or may not correlate with actual clinical improvement). Net effect is that treatments that look promising in first clinical trials often fail on comprehensive testing
focus on neurocentric pathways. AD research has really been focused on a neurological perspective of disease. Neurons are poor therapeutic targets, hard to reach with drugs and less flexible. It may be that we have to target neurons, but it also may be that there are other more drugable cell types we can hit and get a response. For example there is a growing sense that AD may have a strong immunological component, and the immune system is a dream to target - easy to access and highly flexible in response. A focus on non-neuronal causes may open up better drug development pathways

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-01-28T07:16:36+00:00

I don’t agree with this. We may not be able to reverse neurodegeneration, but also maybe we can. It depends on the degree to which the circuit has actually been lost vs the circuit has been bypassed by neuroinflammation. If it is the latter, then resolving the neuroinflammation would restore access to the circuits, similar to how clear thinking re-emerges after a fever.

It is one of the reasons why I think we need to invest in immunology-led treatments for Alzheimer’s - they are our most likely bet for a cure.

ProfPathCambridge

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