You do not need your own research group to encounter leadership as a researcher.
As a postdoc, you may already be supervising junior researchers, taking responsibility for projects and collaborations, or making decisions that affect other people’s work.
Thilo Chillon, PhD, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Clinical Biochemistry, Odense University Hospital, and one of the nine researchers behind the new Comment, recognises that experience:
“During my PhD and postdoc, I encountered many different forms of leadership: leading my first experiments, supervising a lab intern, taking responsibility for a project, mentoring a student, coordinating a collaboration, or simply stepping up when something needed to be done.
As a postdoc, I realised that I was already using leadership skills, even though I did not necessarily think of myself as a leader.”
These experiences are at the heart of a new Comment, Leadership for the postdoctoral to independent investigator transition, published in Nature Reviews Endocrinology.
The central message is simple: leadership development should not wait until you become a principal investigator (PI). Three areas are particularly worth thinking about now: your own career direction, the research team you want to build and how you navigate conflict.
Becoming a scientific leader starts with leading yourself.
What matters most in your next move: the research itself, the people you work with, opportunities to develop new skills, professional impact, work-life integration, where you live – or something else? Thinking about these priorities together can make the trade-offs clearer and help you make career decisions based on what matters to you rather than perceived prestige.
And the next move does not necessarily have to be towards a traditional academic career. Skills developed during a postdoc – including critical analysis, project management, communication and decision-making – are relevant across many different career paths.
Moving towards independence also means thinking about how you want to work with other people.
What kind of group do you want to build? Do you see people working closely together towards shared goals, or working more independently on individual projects? And which technical and soft skills will you need across the team?
Thinking about this before you have your own group gives you a chance to be deliberate about the culture you want to create – rather than letting it develop by default.
Research brings together people with different goals, expectations, values and ways of working. Disagreement is therefore not necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong. The question is what you do with it.
Recognising disagreements early and creating space for open dialogue can help uncover the different expectations and needs behind them – and make it easier to find a way forward.
Not every disagreement can be resolved. But learning how to approach conflict constructively is itself part of becoming a scientific leader.
The Comment began with discussions at the DDEA Postdoc Summit 2025, where postdocs from different countries explored scientific leadership through their own experiences and perspectives.
For Thilo Chillon and eight fellow participants, those discussions were worth continuing after the Summit:
“The discussions at the DDEA Postdoc Summit were too valuable to end when the Summit did.”
Together with Leonardo VM de Assis, Richard M. Blay, Madilyn Coles, Taylah Gaynor, Mathilde Palmier, Aswathi Surendran, Elpida Vounzoulaki and Ingrid Wagnon, Thilo Chillon took the ideas further and developed them into the Comment. The publication combines experiences and discussions from the Summit with existing research on leadership development.
The publication also credits the wider group behind those discussions: all participants in the DDEA Postdoc Summit 2025 are acknowledged for contributing their experiences and perspectives.
For DDEA Managing Director, Tore Christiansen, the publication shows why DDEA has made early-career researcher ownership a priority:
“Giving early-career researchers real ownership has been a deliberate part of DDEA’s approach for years, not just for this event. ECRs today co-organise our courses, sit on our Committee for Education and our Board of Directors, and shape the priorities we pursue. The fact that a discussion from the Postdoc Summit has now turned into a Nature Reviews Endocrinology publication is exactly what that long-term investment is meant to produce”
Leadership for the postdoctoral to independent investigator transition
Nature Reviews Endocrinology
Leonardo VM de Assis
Department of Physiology, Institute of Biosciences, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Richard M. Blay
Department of Physiology, University of Ghana Medical School, Ghana
Thilo Chillon
Department of Clinical Biochemistry, Odense University Hospital, Denmark
Madilyn Coles
School of Medicine, Western Sydney University, Australia
Taylah Gaynor
Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Mathilde Palmier
Université de Lille, Inserm, CHU Lille, Institut Pasteur de Lille, U1167, France
Aswathi Surendran
Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Pathobiochemistry, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Elpida Vounzoulaki
Diabetes Research Centre, University of Leicester, UK
Ingrid Wagnon
Lille Neuroscience & Cognition, University of Lille, Inserm, CHU Lille, France
EAN: 5798 0022 30642
Reference: 1025 0006
CVR: 29 19 09 09
