This article provides an overview of how you can use foundational concepts of business strategy and business development to help achieve your research goals and move a research program forward. Starting and running an academic research laboratory has many similarities to starting and growing a company. While many academics have tended to avoid business lingo, we invite the reader to keep an open mind with respect to the ‘business speak’ that has been deliberately built into this article, as we believe that it provides a useful context for thinking about laboratory...

A simple fact drives the movement to prepare doctoral students for diverse careers: Most of them won’t become professors. Given that reality, when should departments and professors start offering graduate students practical advice on their career options?

The answer is: very early.

Despite more than a decade of news coverage and social-media warnings about too few tenure-track positions and too many job candidates, most people who apply to graduate school still do so because they hope to teach at the college level. They usually have some idea that the academic job...

I had just received a private tour of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and seen treasures like B.F. Skinner’s famous Teaching Machine, but as I sat in a curator’s office and looked out over the National Mall, all I could think about was my dissertation.

With a big deadline looming, I was angry at myself for taking a whole three hours away from my writing. I had asked to meet with the curator because I had applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at the museum, but the...

Early-career researchers worldwide are availing themselves of an important but formerly obscure resource: three downloadable databases of hundreds of global funding opportunities and fellowships.

The databases — one for graduate students, one for ...