She obviously deserves some credit, and you can see she got some for her hard work and skills, i.e., she already has a tenure track position set up at Caltech. But rarely do post-docs actually get credit. The credit they get is usually by PIs in seminars where they mention their students or try to get their students jobs. The person who provides the funding for the project, not the one actually doing the work is the one who usually gets the credit in science. She was the first author but not the PI hence her getting credit may be a bit unusual. There have been countless post-docs and grad students who have made discoveries and were never mentioned in press.
However, she may be a superstar, no pun intended, and so her getting almost all of the credit is completely warranted, but graduate student and post-doc are training roles, and a lot of the time the post-doc won't really make a name for themsleves until they establish their own lab, because it is unclear who is producing the ideas.
Citation needed? I’m a postdoc, and that doesn’t ring remotely true.
At least in CS, authors get most of the scientific credit all the time, and not just in citations to “FirstAuthorSurname et al.”, or in giving talks about the work (especially in CS). They’re the ones doing most of the hard work and thinking.
Advisors often range from consultants/consulents to managers. Not because they’re not smart, but because they seldom have months of uninterrupted time to focus on a problem intensely enough.
How kind of you to suggest that she deserves “some credit” for the paper where she was the first author. That totally makes me think this is rooted in something other than you assuming there is no possible way someone who looks like her and sounds like her actually deserves credit for this incredibly fucking cool science.
She started working on this problem in high school, and worked on it across multiple institutions. If the PI should have gotten the credit, she wouldn’t be first author.
