Welcome back, Nancy
Nancy Soni has returned to the Green Cell Wall Dynamics Lab after her maternity leave, and the Wall2Cycle project has resumed with her.
WALL2CYCLENEWS
Laura Bacete
6/20/20262 min read
On 18 June, Nancy Soni, postdoctoral researcher in the Green Cell Wall Dynamics Lab, returned to the lab after her maternity leave, and it is a great pleasure to have her back.
Nancy leads the experimental work of the Wall2Cycle project, which investigates how plant cells adjust cell cycle progression in response to specific cell wall polymers, thereby connecting the composition of the wall to the control of cell division. The project was paused during her leave, so that it would remain hers to develop on her return, and work has now resumed in full. The coming year will be devoted to completing the experiments, consolidating the results, and bringing this chapter of the project to a close, and we look forward to sharing what it reveals about how the cell wall and the cell cycle communicate.
Nancy’s return is also an occasion to reflect on how research careers are organised. Academic careers, particularly at the postdoctoral stage, are often built on short contracts, continuous pressure to publish, and frequent relocation, and these conditions coincide with the years in which many researchers consider starting a family. As a result, parental leave can be perceived as a gap in a career rather than as an ordinary part of life, and this perception may discourage talented people, disproportionately women, from remaining in research. A sustainable research system is one in which having children and growing professionally are not competing choices. In practice, this requires: funding structures that allow projects to be paused or extended without penalty, institutional policies that protect the position and the progression of researchers during and after leave, and research groups that plan around parental leave as a normal and expected event, rather than as an exception to be managed. Each of these levels shares responsibility, and none of them is sufficient on its own.
For our lab, this means treating a project as belonging to the person who leads it, valuing the quality of the work over an uninterrupted output, and recognising that the perspectives people bring from their lives outside the lab enrich the group as a whole. We are grateful to Nancy for the ideas, the expertise, and the good humour that she brings to the daily life of the group, and we are delighted that she can continue to build her career with us.
Welcome back, Nancy. We are very happy to have you with us again.