Tag Archives: tenure

Postdoctoral training in Sweden: too short to grow

Posted on by

hourglassMembers of the Karolinska Institute’s Postdoc Association fear an amendment to Sweden’s Research Bill could create career instability.

In November 2016 the Swedish government announced plans to introduce a tenure track system to make academic careers more secure, to improve mobility and to make research more competitive.

But in July last year an amendment to the Research Bill stipulated that PhD graduates had a maximum of five years (two years less than now) to get an Assistant Professorship (Biträdande Lektor in Swedish). Universities must comply by 1 April 2018.

Continue reading →

The struggles of female and underrepresented scientists

Posted on by

Initiatives to increase diversity among faculty members—particularly in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM)—have prompted efforts to track university recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minorities (URM). Three new US studies shed light on the issues, including salary and publication rates.

nj7668-489a-i1

Continue reading →

Bonding in Boston: The importance of networking in science

Posted on by

Naturejobs journalism competition winner Ashish Nair finds new hope at our Boston career expo.

A long time ago in a land galaxy far far away, there was a great gathering where those weary of the well-trodden trail of tenureships and grants repaired themselves. The gathering in question was the Naturejobs career expo, a free one-day event organized for students and scientists alike. Featuring some truly inspiring speakers, it gave a much-needed boost to my hope for a career in science that can be both emotionally and financially (yes, $$$) satisfying.

Continue reading →

Counting all the ways connections matter

Posted on by

New research shows that the size of a faculty member’s network predicts productivity, promotion, and probability of winning an NIH R01 grant.

Guest contributor Viviane Callier

Connections matter – in terms of productivity, in terms of obtaining grants, in terms of promotion and advancement, and in terms of retention in academic positions, a new Harvard-based study shows. Women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) have a smaller “reach” – a measure of second-order connections – and the discrepancy between the reach of women & URMs and that of white men is greatest at the junior faculty level. This discrepancy may account for differences in productivity, promotion, and retention of women and URMs in academia.

7822101134_6cbcbb435b_o

CREDIT: CC-BY-SA Atos/Flickr

Continue reading →

A week in the life of a tenured professor

Posted on by

A Chinese scientist considers the new responsibilities that come with his role

This piece was cross posted with Nature Asia. You can read the Chinese version here.

Guest contributor Chenggang Yan

I’ve spent ten years of my life in research. In those ten years, I’ve never been completely overwhelmed until I accepted a professorship at Hangzhou Dianzi University. Just like many other young scholars, I’m working hard to win a good reputation with my research. I went into science because – like many others – I wanted to do meaningful work, lead a new era, and benefit humanity in some way. But recently I’m finding that’s just not what I spend my time doing.

DSC_0001 op1-smaller

{credit}Chenggang Yan{/credit}

Continue reading →

The faculty series: A case study

Posted on by

Be pro-active and prepare for long shifts if you want to land a lectureship. That’s how Samantha Terry did it.

Guest contributor Samantha Terry

I have been a scientific researcher for the past 10 years and started as a lecturer at King’s College London in September 2015. Friends said I did well to land my dream job at 30 at a great university. They’re right; but it wasn’t an easy road to get to where I am today.

photo me in lab-2

Samantha in her lab

I completed my undergrad in cell biology in 2006, went straight into a 3-year PhD in radiobiology, and then completed three short postdocs at the University of Oxford, at the Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and finally at King’s College London.

As with any job, during my postdoc I was surrounded by friends and colleagues who, like me, all wanted to move up and land that most sacred of jobs: a permanent research position in academia. We often discussed what employers were asking during interviews for lectureships and how we could maximise our chances of becoming a lecturer. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

 

Continue reading →

US scientists have their say on plans for biomedical workforce

Posted on by
Reply

Posted on behalf of Gene Russo, Nature Careers editor

US biomedical scientists recently had a chance to set their field’s priorities. And what was the most pressing problem they reported? The very real possibility that there are too damn many biomedical scientists.

The balance between the supply of biomedical researchers and the demand in terms of available career opportunities should be the biggest priority for reforming the US biomedical workforce, according to a survey response issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Other big priorities that scientists highlighted were PhD characteristics (i.e. PhD curriculum, length of the PhD training period, and lack of preparation for diverse career paths) and postdoctoral-fellow training characteristics (i.e. a bottleneck of jobseekers causing long stints as postdocs and poor mentoring).

Many of the respondents did not mince their words. On the supply and demand issue, some called the current structure of the research workforce a ‘pyramid scheme’ that takes advantage of cheap student and postdoc labour rather than hiring mid-career researchers. Solutions included tenure-model reform, decreasing the number of funded trainees per principal investigator (PI) and using more staff scientists. On the oversupply issue, respondents suggested class-size reductions, raising programme entry requirements and better training for ‘alternative’ careers. Regarding the contraction of research funding, respondents suggested increasing paylines and limiting the number of large grants a single PI is permitted to have.

The survey, part of an NIH working group effort, asked respondents to prioritize future issues for the biomedical workforce. It had 219 respondents — ranging from graduate students to senior scientists — who made a total of 498 ‘quotations’ about various priorities; multiple comments were ranked and the working group then calculated the overall priority of a given issue.

In addition to PhD characteristics and postdoctoral-fellow training characteristics, the working group asked for comment on six other categories: postdoc training, biomedical research career appeal, clinician characteristics, the staff-scientist career track, effects of NIH policies and the training-to-research grant ratio. Based on respondents’ comments, it then added four more categories to its analysis: diversity, mentoring, early educational interventions and industry partnerships.

It’s not a big sample size. But the message is clear: improving satisfaction among early-career biomedical scientists and boosting the efficiency of a system that churns out far more scientists than academia alone can accommodate will require big changes. And these changes will have side effects. Want labs with more full-time staff scientists, and fewer students willing to work 60-hour weeks? Lab productivity and publication rates could suffer (see ‘Mid-career crunch’ for more discussions around changes to NIH grants). Want to curtail tenure? Some argue this would threaten academic freedom and deflate the enthusiasm of academia’s rising biomedical research stars (see ‘The changing face of tenure’ for more).The NIH working group — whose ongoing charge includes developing a “model for a sustainable and diverse US biomedical research workforce” — certainly has its work cut out for it.

Careers hold scientists back from having children

Posted on by
Reply

Many scientists at top US institutions have had fewer children than they wanted as a result of their careers, according to a new study.

Nearly half of all female scientists and a quarter of male scientists said they would have liked more children — and a quarter of both women and men said they are likely to consider moving to a career outside science as a result.

Sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund from Rice University and Anne Lincoln from Southern Methodist University surveyed 2,500 scientists at more than 30 leading universities in the United States for the study, which was published last week in PLoS ONE.

The survey showed that 36 percent of male postdocs and 22 percent of female postdocs had children, rising to 75 percent of male faculty members and 64 percent of female faculty members. Female faculty members had fewer children on average than their male colleagues — 1.2 children for women versus 1.5 for men.

Despite women being more likely to have wanted more children, men were unhappier about having fewer children than desired. Both men and women with children worked fewer hours than those without children. However, contrary to the researchers’ expectations, women with children worked the same number of hours as men with children — approximately 54 hours a week on average.

“Academic science careers are tough on family life,” says Ecklund, citing long hours and the pressures of working towards tenure as the main pressure points. She and Lincoln suggest on-site day care and improved mentoring programmes may help improve scientists’ work-life balance. “Universities would do well to re-evaluate how family-friendly their policies are,” says Ecklund.

What’s your reaction? Are you putting off having children as a result of your career? Is the situation similar outside the United States? Share your thoughts below.

Faculty salaries worth less while presidents see real-terms rise

Posted on by
Reply

Average faculty salaries in the United States increased at less than the rate of inflation for the second year in a row, according to a report released today by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) – but many college and university presidents saw substantial increases.

The overall increase in faculty salaries was 1.4% between 2009/10 and 2010/11, while the AAUP’s favoured measure of inflation, the consumer price index for urban consumers (CPI-U), increased by 1.5% during 2010.

The change in remuneration varied between categories of institutions, with faculty at public institutions receiving an average increase of just 0.9%, compared with 2.1% at private institutions. And, despite the recession, the average pay increase for presidents was twice that of faculty at public institutions and nearly three times higher at private institutions.

AAUP director of research and public policy John Curtis said he was particularly surprised that presidential pay continued to increase in real terms during the recession. “When other staff are required to take unpaid furloughs, salary and hiring freezes, and cuts to benefit programmes, it seems especially inappropriate for presidents to receive double-digit salary increases,” he told Naturejobs.

Curtis said presidential salaries seemed to be primarily driven by a type of prestige competition. “Each board justifies the president’s salary by paying more than a competitive institution,” he explained. “The cycle then just keeps repeating itself, ratcheting the salaries upward.”

The report, based on a survey of over 1,100 institutions, also showed that while the number of faculty members grew, most of the new appointments were in non-tenure-track positions.

What’s your reaction to the report? Should presidents get bigger pay increases than faculty? Are you considering a move to a private institution because of your pay? Share your thoughts below.

New squeeze on tenure in the United States?

Posted on by
Reply

Hundreds of tenured staff are taking early retirement deals on offer at US universities, Times Higher Education reported last week. Universities are offering incentives of up to two years’ salary in a move that some see as a way to further reduce the proportion of tenured positions in academia, according to the report.

John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors, says that although the incentives are not targeted at tenured staff, they may be contributing to tenure’s continuing decline. “Many of the tenured faculty members who are retiring, or who depart a particular university for a different reason, are not being replaced by a tenure-track colleague,” he told Naturejobs.

The proportion of faculty members in the tenure stream in the United States has been dropping for the past 40 years, falling from around three-quarters in 1970 to around 30% in 2007 (see ‘The changing face of tenure’). Curtis says that faculty members in limited-term or part-time positions are essentially ‘at-will’ employees, referring to the mode of employment that basically means staff can be fired at will without good cause, and are therefore wary of pushing their students too far or speaking out on controversial topics. He says universities moving away from the tenure system are failing to invest in their core mission of teaching and research.

What do you think? Have you been affected by the early retirement of a tenured colleague or professor? Are you struggling to find a tenure-track position? Do you live in a country where there is no tenure system? Post a comment to let us know your thoughts.