Postdoc recommendation letter
December xx, 20xx
To the Fellowship Selection Committee:
I am writing in support of Janet Lerner’s application for an NSF Fellowship. Janet is genuinely a gifted student with great potential as a research scientist. I encourage you to give her your most careful consideration.
Janet has been conducting an independent honor’s research project in my laboratory for the past year. Without a doubt, Janet is one of those rare individuals that comes along only once every few years; she is highly intelligent (her transcript is blemished by a single “B”), inquisitive, motivated, and creative. Janet has just the right combination of assertiveness and respect to make her a joy to work with in the lab. She takes directions very well, but she is not timid about questioning experimental details or rationale. This is a student that I will enjoy watching develop into a highly productive research scientist.
For her honor’s thesis I have given Janet a demanding project that I would normally reserve for my graduate students. Even before entering my lab, she had read a large number of articles that described recent advances with the virus that we study in the lab—JC virus (JCV). Expecting that I would need to explain many of the techniques used in these studies and to discuss the rationale behind the experiments, I was surprised to discover that she already had a firm grasp of these concepts and was ready to discuss the science on a much higher level. Together we decided that her project would entail a mutational analysis of a specific functional domain of the major regulatory protein of JCV, the multifunctional T protein.
To emphasize the scope and importance of Janet’s work, a summary of the relevant science follows.
JCV is an important opportunistic pathogen; it has infected >70% of the world’s population and it remains latent in the kidneys and brains of most of us. In severely immunocompromised individuals,
JCV may cause the fatal demyelinating brain disease
To the Fellowship Selection Committee:
I am writing in support of Janet Lerner’s application for an NSF Fellowship. Janet is genuinely a gifted student with great potential as a research scientist. I encourage you to give her your most careful consideration.
Janet has been conducting an independent honor’s research project in my laboratory for the past year. Without a doubt, Janet is one of those rare individuals that comes along only once every few years; she is highly intelligent (her transcript is blemished by a single “B”), inquisitive, motivated, and creative. Janet has just the right combination of assertiveness and respect to make her a joy to work with in the lab. She takes directions very well, but she is not timid about questioning experimental details or rationale. This is a student that I will enjoy watching develop into a highly productive research scientist.
For her honor’s thesis I have given Janet a demanding project that I would normally reserve for my graduate students. Even before entering my lab, she had read a large number of articles that described recent advances with the virus that we study in the lab—JC virus (JCV). Expecting that I would need to explain many of the techniques used in these studies and to discuss the rationale behind the experiments, I was surprised to discover that she already had a firm grasp of these concepts and was ready to discuss the science on a much higher level. Together we decided that her project would entail a mutational analysis of a specific functional domain of the major regulatory protein of JCV, the multifunctional T protein.
To emphasize the scope and importance of Janet’s work, a summary of the relevant science follows.
JCV is an important opportunistic pathogen; it has infected >70% of the world’s population and it remains latent in the kidneys and brains of most of us. In severely immunocompromised individuals,
JCV may cause the fatal demyelinating brain disease