The Scientist has come out with its latest annual survey of the best places to work for postdocs in the US. In the top 40 list, the highest ranking Boston area institutions are:

• Beth Israel Deaconness (#28, up from 97 last year)
• Harvard Medical School (#31, up from 106 last year)
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital (#35, up from 41 last year)

The Globe lists the other institutions that didn’t make the top 40.

• Dana-Farber (#39, up from #67)
• MIT (#53, down from #26)
• Harvard University (#71, down from #45)
• Massachusetts General Hospital (#81, down from #64)

Institutions seem to jump around a fair bit from year to year (this year’s #1, the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston was #29 last year) so it’s hard to interpret big moves up or down the list. I suspect that some schools get pushed down not because they’re doing significantly worse but because others doing something new and better move way up. The article summarizing the results doesn’t give much of an explanation for this although does give some notable examples of schools making life a little easier for postdocs:

• The National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver (ranked 6th) offers retirement benefits to its postdocs, rare among research institutes.
• The J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco (ranked 2nd) pays its postdocs a whopping average of $51,180 a year.

The list of the top 15 gives average salaries and shows quite a range.

In any case, the bottom line seems that Boston-based institutions, being home to an estimated 5,000 postdocs, can’t seem to crack the top 10, or 20 for that matter. Why is that? I’ve heard some speculate that there might be some arrogance…there’s only one Harvard and one MIT in this world so top schools may feel that they don’t have to work as hard to attract postdocs. What do you think?

I wrote an article last year giving a roundup of the postdoc situation around town. Since then, Harvard has at least come out with a decent website for postdocs across all their campuses. One complaint I heard from postdocs last year was that offices, services and policies for postdocs across the Harvard campuses and affiliated hospitals were not consistent. While the hospitals govern themselves, at least the medical school, the school of public health, and the main campus should be more coordinated in these affairs. This website isn’t complete yet, but it’s a start. At least they show suggested base salaries for the medical school and have some information about benefits.