Postdoc Appreciation Week Germany Toolkit

The Postdoc Appreciation Week (PAW) has been celebrated in the USA and UK for years to bring postdocs into the limelight. We are strongly convinced that postdocs in Germany also deserve more attention, visibility and support given their key role in the German academic system – and their difficult working conditions and career perspectives coupled with an often very one-dimensional evaluation culture.

We composed this toolkit for all those who want to contribute to the PAW. Be it as a professor or teamleader, a postdoc network or a postdoc service or other stakeholders who want to thank postdocs for their great work and who want to support them!

We would like to thank our colleagues from the National Postdoc Association in the U.S. who inspired us to establish a Postdoc Appreciation Week in Germany and provided us with valuable material in the form of their “National Postdoc Appreciation Week Toolkit”. We have added our own ideas and best-practice examples from the first German Postdoc Appreciation Week 2022. We also thank the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) who created the PAW logo.

Please spread the word and feel free to share our materials with your colleagues, teamleaders, social media managers, and everyone else involved in supporting postdocs in Germany.