Postdoc Cover Letter

Postdoctoral training and research is a key step to becoming a professor or a group leader in industry. Use our postdoc cover letter sample and writing tips to land your next position.

January 1, 2024

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Postdoc cover letter sample written for a biology job with a sea green header

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Postdoc Cover Letter Template

Don’t forget to use the right cover letter format so that it looks professional.

Copy-paste Postdoc Cover Letter (Text Format)

FIRST AND LAST NAME

Email: your.email@email.com

Phone: (123) 456-7891

Address: Street, City, State

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/yourprofile

[Today’s Date]

[Hiring Manager’s Name]
[123 Company Address]
[Company City, State xxxxx]
[(xxx)-xxx-xxxx]
[hiring.manager@gmail.com]

Dear [Dr./Mr./Ms./Mx.] [Hiring Manager’s Last Name],

I am writing to express my interest in a postdoctoral position in your lab. I am a PhD Candidate in the Andrew Dwyer lab at James Hill University expecting to graduate in June 2022. My graduate work, published in Science this year, investigated the RNA virome in various aquatic environments using metagenomic analysis. My future research goals are to apply my computational skills and develop my skills working with non-human primate models to better understand and design therapeutics against pathogenic viruses. I believe my strong background in virus biology, library preparation, and next-generation sequencing analysis make me an ideal candidate to study respiratory disease viruses in your lab.

In my thesis lab, we use viral evolution to find trends that unite eukaryotic disease viruses. However, our current picture of RNA virus taxonomy is still incomplete, with the five-clade organization largely informed by human and agricultural animal and plant studies.

Therefore, to refine and complete our understanding of the global RNA virome, I sampled multiple complex aquatic environments and performed metagenome analysis. Confirming that the five-phyla classification based on RdRP sequence comparisons holds true, my analysis nearly tripled the number of currently known RNA viruses.

Host assignment proved to be tricky during my thesis. But I tackled this problem through various methods, including developing machine learning algorithms and comparing RNA viruses to size-separated microbial preparations subjected to DNA and RNA sequencing. I am continuing to characterize the novel and more highly divergent RdRPs discovered by our sampling. Also I mentor one graduate and one undergraduate student with their independent projects drawn from my work.

While I have focused primarily on RNA virus ecology and evolution during my graduate work, I am comfortable extending my research to studying RNA viruses in human disease. I collaborated with Dr. Henry Fields on a publication, currently under review at Frontiers in Immunology, studying rhesus macaque responses to MERS-CoV. The skills I learned through our collaboration, as well as from electives and literature search in immunology and human virology, have prepared me well to transition from studying viruses to studying virus-host interactions. Additionally, I look forward to applying my computational skills toward single-cell sequencing analysis examining the effects of age, diet fat content, and viral strain on primate responses to SARS-CoV-2 challenges, building on the methods and results in your recent Cell Reports Medicine paper. I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to talk with you more about my fit in your lab. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Your Name

How to write your postdoc cover letter

The goal of your postdoc cover letter is to assure the principal investigator (PI) that you require minimal training, can drive your projects, and can assist with other tasks, such as writing grants and mentoring graduate students.

While our postdoc cover letter is written for a position in the STEM fields, the following tips for writing a postdoc cover letter work equally well for positions in the humanities.

Use the standard postdoc cover letter format to make it quick and easy for a busy PI to glean your important information and compare you to other candidates.

In this order, the three sections of a standard postdoc cover letter include an introduction, a research summary, and a section discussing your fit in the target position.

1. Write a direct and information-rich introduction

Include identifying information, such as your:

PhD advisor
university
expected graduation date
graduate research topic (one sentence)
goals (one sentence)

If applicable, mention your connection with the hiring manager in the introduction. Did you meet at a conference? Has your PhD advisor collaborated with this PI before? Do you have mutual colleagues?

End this section with a sentence that captures your top skills — either hard or soft skills — and why they make you a good candidate.

Hard skills are technical skills and knowledge most often learned through formal training. Use the job ad and your research into the target position to help you decide which hard skills to include.

Adding soft skills, or skills developed from your personality and life experience, distinguishes you from other candidates with the same hard skills as you.

Highlight soft skills that all PIs are looking for, including:

independence and initiative
creativity
curiosity
perseverance
commitment
teamwork

2. Summarize your job-relevant research

Describe your research succinctly, aiming for the approximate length and detail of a paper abstract. While you can discuss one main project, you can also summarize all the work that comprised your thesis, including smaller projects or projects with collaborators.

Use the And, But, Therefore method to summarize your graduate work:

And: Provide only the necessary background information
But: Motivate the research — what’s the problem or knowledge gap that needs to be filled?
Therefore: Describe the way you uniquely filled the knowledge gap

To make your postdoc cover letter stand out, emphasize the broader impacts of your findings to the field and people in general.

In addition to communicating which problems you solved, your research summary should also show how you solved problems.

When recapping your research, demonstrate your critical thinking skills by weaving in the answers to some of the following questions:

How did you form hypotheses or models?
What was the next step to support or disprove your working model?
How did you troubleshoot an experiment that wasn’t working?
What was an orthogonal way you thought about a problem or tested a question?
Did you have sufficient evidence for your claims?
What were the potential pitfalls in your thinking, technique, experimental design, or model? How did you address these pitfalls?

The research summary section is also the place to discuss your accomplishments, including:

grants and fellowships
publications in high-tier journals
awards (e.g. thesis or service awards)
research patents

Only list one or two relevant and high-profile publications in your cover letter. Your complete list of publications belongs in your academic CV.

3. Describe how you uniquely fit the position

To connect your skills and expertise to the target position, propose a project you could do if hired. Besides expressing your interest in the research group, a general project proposal demonstrates your critical thinking and creativity.

Recall the discussion-of-fit section in our postdoc cover letter sample:

Example of how to demonstrate your skills and experience match the position in a postdoc cover letter — Mention a project, paper, or specialty of the target PI when customizing your cover letter.

The candidate mentions their relevant research experience, coursework, and transferable skills, tying them to the overall study area (virus-host interactions) and a recent publication (Cell Reports Medicine paper) of the target lab.

Below are alternate ways to show what you can bring to a PI’s research program:

I have experience with X technique and want to apply it to [new project].
I have a degree in X. I would like to study [new project] from X perspective.
I have always been interested in [broad question]. Studying [new project] will help me answer [broad question].
I studied X area in Y model organism, and now I want to study X in [target lab’s model organism].

For postdoctoral fellowships in industry labs, emphasize hard skills and research experience over teaching and mentoring. Aim for a one-page-long cover letter for industry postdoctoral positions (and two pages maximum for academic positions).

Use action verbs like the following to communicate your fit with your target lab and make your cover letter more engaging: