The postdoctoral community is an essential component of the academic and scientific workforce. As economic and political pressures impacting these enterprises continue to change, the postdoc experience has evolved from short, focused periods of training into often multidisciplinary, extended positions with less clear outcomes. As efforts are underway to amend U.S. federally funded research policies, the paucity of postdoc data has made evaluating the impact of policy recommendations challenging. Here we present comprehensive survey results from over 7,600 postdocs based at 351 academic and non-academic U.S. institutions in 2016. In addition to demographic and salary information, we present multivariate analyses on the factors that influence postdoc career plans and mentorship satisfaction in this population. We further analyze gender dynamics and expose wage disparities and career choice differences. Academic research positions remain the predominant career choice of postdocs in the U.S., although unequally between postdocs based on gender and residency status. Receiving mentorship training during the postdoctoral period has a large, positive effect on postdoc mentorship satisfaction. Strikingly, the quality of and satisfaction with postdoc mentorship appears to also heavily influence career choice. The data presented here are the most comprehensive data on the U.S. postdoc population to date. These results provide an evidence basis for informing government and institutional policies, and establish a critical cornerstone for quantifying the effects of future legislation aimed at the academic and scientific workforce.

Almost all effective treatments for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) involve reduction of adiposity, which suggests the metabolic axis between liver and adipose tissue is essential to NAFLD development.Since excessive dietary sugar intake may be an initiating factor for NAFLD, we have characterized the metabolic effects of liquid sucrose intake at concentrations relevant to typical human consumption in mice. We report that sucrose intake induces sexually dimorphic effects in liver, adipose tissue, and the microbiome; differences concordant with steatosis severity. We show that when steatosis is decoupled from impairments in insulin responsiveness, sex is a moderating factor that influences sucrose-driven lipid storage and the contribution of de novo fatty acid synthesis to the overall hepatic triglyceride pool. Our findings provide physiologic insight into how sex influences the regulation of adipose-liver crosstalk and highlight the importance of extrahepatic metabolism in the pathogenesis of diet-induced steatosis and NAFLD.