Steeve Boulant

3.0 3.0 / 5 1 reviews
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University: University of Florida
Department: Molecular Genetics and Microbiology
Website: http://www.boulantlab.com
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Total 1 Reviews
Anonymous
Fair
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## Advisor Style & Mentorship
He has a very peculiar way to mentor people. He is super approcheable and human, but he can get extremely pushy and he is a bit of a two faces whiner. You can hear complaints about one lab member (even very gross comments), and just after you see the recipient of these comments having a normal conversation with him, no issues raised EVER. So you will never know if you are doing good or not, as he will never tell you directly. 
He holds 1:1 meetings with his students every week, and that is a very good plus but can also be frustrating, depending on how much he is involved in a project. Postdocs seem to have more freedom (we had only one that should still be there by now, apart from his wife which now is professor) but also they seem to be relegated to very risky projects which may make them or break them, and left with no good support or collaborations.
## Expectations for PhD Students
If you work on virology/innate immunity in the gut, you are expected to publish 1 or 2 papers during your PhD. Most papers will be low/mid IF, but are good enough for a PhD. He is a workaholic himself, so he expects you to be the same. Personal experience from few years ago, he tends to prefer who stays late, Japanese style (that is to say, even if you do not do much in that extra time). Holidays seem not to be a problem, but of course it depends how much he likes you and how much you work. 
PhDs used to graduate within 4 years, apart from one or two who took more time (and it was mainly their fault, not the PI's). Now he just moved to the US so that may change.
## Funding & Support
Knowing him, he surely supports and helps with Visas and healthcare and, if he can, also with salary. This is second hand information as I was working for him when he still was in Germany.
If your project is in virology/innate immunity, you get sent to at least 1 or 2 conferences during your PhD, and he will try to come as well.
## Research
The lab is very straightforward when it comes to research: the virology part is very good to gain expertise in many techniques and be sure to get to at least one publication during your PhD, and a lot of support and collaborations (single cell RNA seq, organoids and so on). You do not really choose your project even if they tell you so. You get assigned one with the option to change, but get pushed on it so that until really nothing can be made of it (and normally you do not realise in a month), you won't get to change it.
The clathrin part is another story: who works there seems to have more freedom of movement, but at the same time Steeve is not in the field anymore. When I left he was not reading anything about it anymore, and was pushing hard only on the virology part of the lab, erasing also all collaborations that he had on clathrin, by simply not showing up at meetings anymore. So my advice would be to avoid any clathrin-related project if you do not have the stomach for isolation and you can't motivate yourself like crazy, as he probably won't help and he would leave you without support.
Paperwise, he is very attentive to authorships and tries his best to include all people that did something for the paper, so that is a biiig plus!
## Lab Culture
The lab is very open minded and people from all nationalities, sexual orientations and so on tend to work together quite well. Like in all environments, sometimes there have been frictions between labmates, and here is the problem: nothing was done by Steeve to solve them until the people involved decided that was enough, but sometimes it took long time, creating a toxic environment. The boss does not want to deal with this stuff as long as results keep coming: you have been warned. 
Back in the days, Steeve would organize parties and barbecues at his place, but in the past years and with the pandemic, this has stopped. I do not know how it is now. Internship in industry absolutely not possible, you have to work in the lab! Unless the internship is to learn a technique that can be used by the lab itself.
Review #95
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