Anne Rogers wrote:
And it's not just how the uni in question perceives you. To get
funding, particularly NIH, if you haven't been active in research for
more than a year, it will be extremely hard to get a grant funded. No
grant funding means no research. And what do you do with your lab in
the year you're off? Your students, post-docs, etc? If by 'off' you
mean, check in every few days, meet with students and post-docs to go
over their projects, write papers whilst at home, go in to teach the
occassional class, then yeah, it's doable. If by 'off' you mean not
step foot in your lab for a year, well, you're very lucky you managed
it. Even my colleagues in the UK would argue they'd have a hard time
collaborating with someone who was absent from their lab for so long.

I think that was part of why my supervisor was so happy for me to have a
baby during a phd, he thought that long term that would be better for me and
no skin of his nose,


Whereas mine would have had a panic attack.

When you're doing a PhD, you're working on a specific project that is
usually of interest to the PI as well. If you stop the project for a
year, how "OK" that would be depends upon the research environment.
Stopping it may mean you get scooped - a bad thing for your PI as well
as the student.

If, OTOH, you're willing to ditch the project entirely and pass it on
to someone else, then come back later and start on an entirely new
project from scratch, then it could work.

This is also a little bit different in how the course of research goes
for a US PhD vs. a UK one. Obvioulsy, this is not true for all, I'm
speaking from experience of myself and many colleagues in both
countries. In the US, a student is more likely to start a prject from
scratch, taking a couple of years to develop, lay the ground work, if
there's field work involved then setting up the preliminaries. In the
UK, a student typically comes on to an already defined already
established project, of which they take up one component. As a result,
leaving it and passing it along to someone else is a littler easier
than it would be in the US. Again, this does indeed vary (I was at a
few different US universities and have been involved in 2 UK ones), but
I found this generalisation to be mostly true.