Author Archives: Rachel Bowden

How would you define a successful career in science?

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Last week Naturejobs joined more than 100 representatives of funding agencies, research councils, universities and research institutes from across the globe for a workshop on how to track researchers’ careers. The workshop, held in Luxembourg and coordinated by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and Luxembourg’s National Research Fund (FNR), covered a wide range of topics – including how success in a science career should be defined for the purposes of career tracking.

It’s an important issue for both decision makers and scientists to consider because career-tracking studies can be used to judge the impact of funding. And although there have been surprisingly few studies to date – primarily due to running costs – the profile of attendees at the workshop suggests career tracking will play a larger role in funding considerations in the future. So how would you, as a working scientist, define a successful career in science?

Several factors for defining success were put forward by the attendees at the workshop, shown below in no particular order. Please vote for your top three in our poll, and let us know what you think of the suggestions by leaving a comment below. What would you prioritise or dismiss? What is missing? And would you agree or disagree that there are a variety of successful careers for researchers, including those outside academia?

The results of the poll and comments posted below will be considered for inclusion in the final report of the ESF-FNR workshop, and may influence future career-tracking studies, so please feel free to make your views known.

Factors for defining success in science careers

  • Generation of new research ideas (original research and methods)
  • Production of research relevant to society
  • The impact of research on society
  • Personal satisfaction/quality of life
  • (International) networking and professional contacts
  • Diversity (including gender)
  • Employment
  • Leadership position
  • Attractiveness to next generations
  • Salary/income (in relation to national system)
  • Independence
  • Flexibility
  • Security
  • Quality of working environment
  • Quality of research infrastructure
  • Publications
  • Awards
  • Funding

AstraZeneca to cut 2,200 R&D jobs

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As part of a major restructuring programme, pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced yesterday it would be cutting 2,200 jobs from its research and development (R&D) workforce.

The bulk of job losses will affect employees in its neuroscience arm as the company looks to outsource more of its R&D via external collaborations. It will set up a ‘virtual’ neuroscience research unit comprising 40 to 50 AstraZeneca scientists working with partners in academia and industry, such as the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The unit will be based in Boston, United States, and Cambridge, United Kingdom, while R&D activities will cease at two sites that are focused on neuroscience: Södertälje in Sweden and Montreal in Canada.

In a statement, AstraZeneca’s president of R&D, Martin Mackay, said: “We’ve made an active choice to stay in neuroscience though we will work very differently to share cost, risk and reward with partners in this especially challenging but important field of medical research.”

US scientists have their say on plans for biomedical workforce

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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.

United States sheds high-tech jobs

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The United States lost more than a quarter of its high-technology manufacturing jobs over the last decade, according to a new report from the National Science Board (NSB), the policy-making body for the National Science Foundation.

During the same period, US multinational corporations rapidly expanded the number of their research and development (R&D) jobs held overseas, according to the Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 report. The proportion of US multinationals’ R&D employment outside the United States increased from 16 percent in 2004 to 27 percent in 2009, contrasting with a very modest growth in R&D employment in the United States by foreign companies.

In a statement, the NSB’s José-Marie Griffiths said the world had changed dramatically in the past decade. “Other nations clearly recognise the economic and social benefits of investing in R&D and education, and they are challenging the United States’ leadership position,” said Griffiths. “We are seeing the result in the very real, and substantial, loss of good jobs.”

On a slightly more positive note, the NSB report highlighted that job losses from the 2007-2009 recession were less severe for scientists than for the US workforce as a whole, and that in 2010 the median pay for scientists and engineers was more than twice that of the median income for all US workers ($73,290 compared with $33,840).

Other key figures released by the NSB include the following:

–  State funding for the top 101 public research universities in the United States declined by 10 percent between 2002 and 2010

–  In China, the number of natural science and engineering degrees rose from 280,000 in 2000 to one million in 2008, and the number of doctorates awarded in these fields in 2008 (26,000) exceeded the number earned in the United States

What’s your reaction to the report? Will it affect your job search? Let us know your thoughts below. You can also vote in our latest reader poll, which asks where you are most likely to look for a new job this year.

Women increase their share of biological science PhDs in United States

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Women continue to be awarded the majority of biological science PhDs in the United States, according to the latest data from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Statistics released this week show that 52% of biological science PhDs were awarded to women in 2009, the second year running that more women than men received PhDs in the field and up by almost
2 percentage points from the previous year.

In contrast, less than a third of PhDs in mathematics and statistics or physical sciences were awarded to women in 2009, although the proportion of PhDs awarded to women has increased in all fields of science and engineering since 2001.

The NSF also asked doctorate recipients about their post-PhD plans, and found that of those who had a definite plan, men were more likely to be heading into the industry sector than women.

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Number of new US science PhDs falls for first time in seven years