Because I had a long incubation time, I’m more resilient to the stress that comes with an academic career

No such thing as a standard career path – an interview with Eve Seuntjens

You were originally trained as a pharmacist. What made you decide to pursue an academic career?

We had a pharmacy at home, and out of the 8 siblings, I was the only one who studied pharmacy, so my mother was expecting me to take over her pharmacy. But during my studies, I got more interested in doing science, so I wanted to do a PhD first to know whether academia was for me. I always had this backup plan that I could go back and take over the pharmacy business. In that sense, I think I was a bit naive, because I wasn’t really very purposeful when I entered academia. My training had been very focused on running a pharmacy and not really doing science. I didn’t know the academic world when I started. It was a big jump into the unknown.

How did you end up doing a PhD in developmental biology?

For my PhD, I just picked a lab that somebody told me might have had an open position. It was a pharmacology lab, but in reality, they weren’t doing much pharmacology anymore. They were more into understanding paracrine signalling in pituitary function. My project was different, as I got to study how paracrine factors affected embryonic development of the pituitary. When I started by PhD, I was the first batch of students in our university’s formal doctoral training programme. They organised a few specific courses – one of them was on developmental biology. The professor of that course, Danny Huylebroeck, was super enthusiastic, and he really lit the fire of developmental biology in me. Even though he wasn’t my PhD supervisor, he later supported me to go for a postdoc.

How was your career path after your PhD?

By the end of my PhD, I’ve let go of the pharmacy idea, and I really wanted to go for an academic career. For my postdoc, I was more purposeful, and I went for EMBL in Heidelberg. By that time, I already had my first kid. I thought that raising a family and doing an academic career had to be combinable. It shouldn’t be because you’re raising a family that you’re a worse scientist. In Belgium, there already was a lot of support for women that wanted to pursue careers – universities had daycare and there were schemes for both parents to stay at home for your kids part time. But when I went to EMBL in 2001, I realised that people looked at having a family differently. EMBL was really great as a community with exciting science, but my PI didn’t really understand my viewpoint of having kids and an academic career. When I became pregnant again, he openly questioned why I bothered to have kids if I was putting them in daycare instead of taking care of them myself. I was shocked, because I came from a very different environment during my PhD. After two years, we decided to move back to Belgium; a bit earlier than anticipated, because of a job offer my husband had. I extended my postdoc in Belgium with Danny Huylebroeck and I continued working on developmental biology. He was very supportive of me while I was establishing my career. He also had the financial means to support me for a longer period of time. His lab was like a bio-incubator for postdocs who wanted to start their independent line of research.

You had three children during your postdoctoral period. How was your experience managing the various career breaks?

I didn’t really feel like, scientifically, there was that much impact. Of course, I lost time, because I was a postdoc running my own projects and had to pause them. I also stayed at home for one day a week for a long period. This impacted the speed of my publications, that’s for sure, but my publications were of high impact, and that was why I eventually landed my independent position. It just took me more time. More importantly, at key moments in my career, there were people that stood up for me and pushed me forward. They were not necessarily always the PI that I was working for, but influential people that would write reference letters for me and prepare me for an academic interview.

In the current academic system, where there’s often a time limit to how long a person can be a postdoc, what advice would you give to postdocs who are uncertain and anxious about their next career step?

I think how academia works is that there are windows of opportunity, and these windows open and close. For example, you just published a key paper, then a window opens for you to go to the next step of your career. But if you don’t manage to land a job in that window, maybe you have to go and get another experience somewhere else, make another contribution, and then a new window opens. Institutes are hiring at different levels and looking for different people at different times. I was super slow in figuring out what I wanted to do for my research. I didn’t have a plan to start with, so having more time to develop my plan was useful. Because I had so much incubation time, and worked in different environments and circumstances, I’m a bit more resilient to the stress that comes with an academic career.

During my longest postdoc period in Danny Huylebroeck’s lab, I was really given the freedom to build my own research line and network. I went to conferences and started collaborations on my own as a postdoc. And it was with this network where I shared my anxiety of this endless postdoc period. These people from that network would stand up and support me.

I was super slow in figuring out what I wanted to do for my research. I didn’t have a plan to start with, so having more time to develop my plan was useful. Because I had so much incubation time, and worked in different environments and circumstances, I’m a bit more resilient to the stress that comes with an academic career.

How was your experience applying for an independent position?

I applied to many open positions within and beyond our university in the broader area, because it was difficult to move away from Belgium with my family. I didn’t have many options, and everything failed. I was quite independent already, because of the leadership style of my PI. People in the hiring committees couldn’t really see that, as formal options to show independence, like obtaining grant funding, were not accessible to postdocs. When my contract ended, I didn’t know what to do, so I consulted my network, by sending an email to every PI that I knew, asking if anybody had any bridging money. Luckily, Laurent Nguyen from GIGA/University of Liège said he could pay me for a year. He was one of the key people who were there for me at the right time, at the right place. He helped me prepare for my final academic interview in which I landed the position that I have now.

After almost 16 years as a postdoc, you finally got a PI position at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). How did you find the first few years as a PI?

The Department of Biology at KU Leuven was the perfect place for me to start my own group, because it was close to home, but in a new environment within a different group of people who saw me as somebody that brought something new. They also welcomed somebody who is Dutch speaking, because of the teaching language of our university in the Bachelor’s programme. I arrived in an environment that was very friendly, welcoming and sharing. It was an eye opener to me, because I was in a more competitive environment before. Having a close group of people that support you is so important at the beginning. Throughout the years I have been in different labs, institutes and universities, and these experiences have given me the impression that in times and places where there is not a lot of money, everyone collaborates more, shares more, and makes things work with the limited funding. That sense of solidarity I also experienced in my current environment, and it gave me peace of mind to endure times when grants wouldn’t come through easily.

Can you briefly talk about what your research is about? How did you find your niche?

I was always very interested in how nervous systems are built. For a long time, I collaborated with centres for human genetics. We would get genotype phenotype correlations and then build mouse models for human disorders. But when I started my lab, I had this crazy idea of going more in the evolutionary direction. Instead of using mice to study the mammalian brain, I got interested in cephalopods, which have a very unique and independent way of building a large nervous system. I didn’t have funding for it, but I thought it was fun and found somebody who got very excited very quickly. That was Graziano Fiorito (Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Napoli, Italy) but he was working on adult cephalopods, whereas I wanted to look at how the brain is built. Through a COST action network I met Eduardo Almansa (IEO, CSIC), who had access to octopus embryos. It took me a while to get funded for the octopus work, but I convinced collaborators and took bits and pieces from my other funding to start it up. Now, I almost only have money to do octopus research. I completely stopped working on mice because it was too much to keep the colonies running at the same time in my relatively small group.

How did you convince your institute to provide the space for raising octopus??

In my department, I can just ask, and we will get together and try to find a solution. My colleagues did ask if I was really sure to make that investment, but otherwise everyone was just helpful and excited for me. They were fine as long as I would pay my bills, and I wasn’t really asking for tons of space. A professor who worked on chicken just retired, so the chicken room became free. I asked whether I could put my system there. It was very small. I’ve always taken baby steps – nothing too radical or drastic. Gradually we started getting grants and papers on our cephalopod work.

You seem to be very good at reaching out to people and finding a supportive network. How do you manage that?

What I think saved me a lot of times, is my naivety and optimism. I always try to see the good in people, and in return, I feel like people are also more supportive of me. For example, during my inaugural lecture, I laid out my plan to study protocadherins in brain development in mice. Then as a sidenote, I said, but weirdly, there is also this protocadherin family expanded in cephalopod, so maybe it’d be nice to look at this in cephalopods as well. During the drinks after my lecture, a colleague from ecology (ecology evolution wasn’t really on my radar at the time) asked whether I was serious about working on cephalopods. He said he could introduce me to Graziano Fiorito. So, I got in touch with him, who invited me to join the COST network CephsInAction, a network of people interested in the research on cephalopod biology.

Have you ever revisited topics from your pharmacist background? Did you take anything away from your pharmacist training?

I moved away from pharmacy completely. The only thing I got from it is the way I work in the lab. As a pharmacist, you have to be super attentive. You cannot make any mistakes, because you could kill someone, so I’ve learned to be very precise. Coming from a pharmacist background into the developmental biology field, I was not too bothered by the dogmas of the field and that made me see different perspectives that other people don’t see, which I see as an advantage.

What’s the most memorable piece of career advice that you’ve heard/received?

I have spent a long time in this postdoc anxiety phase, where you have no idea where you’re going to land, and people keep asking whether you have a plan B, C, D and E. This anxiety is so draining. At some point someone asked me: “Where do you get your energy?” It’s a simple question, but to me it was an eye-opener, so my advice would be: try to identify what gives you energy and where your intrinsic motivation can be found. I tried plan B and C and D as well, but I kept failing in my applications for non-academic jobs, because during the job interviews, it would turn out that my heart was in academia. I think identifying the source of your energy is very important throughout all the steps of your career.

I kept failing in my applications for non-academic jobs, because during the job interviews, it would turn out that my heart was in academia.

What were your plan B and C? What other jobs did you explore?

They were all science related. I applied for a role as a grant advisor in a funding institution. There was another opportunity in the university for a role that scouts for international funding opportunities. I also interviewed for a company that was doing probiotics, because of my pharmacy background. After all those interviews, I figured out I was very poor in those things. I also found that going through the job application process is super draining for me, because you have to envision yourself in another job that might be very different from what you’re doing now. I massively underestimated the energy and time it took to apply for those jobs. In the end, the academic interviews were much easier for me.

Finally, what do you like to do in your spare time?

I like to swim and snorkel. I also like gardening and being outside. But in general, I don’t have any regular hobbies really! There is so much planned in my agenda during the day that I really like to have the freedom of doing just nothing.

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