Hot air balloon (Credit: Floete2008) Credit: Floete2008 "If you come to scientific administration as a fallback because you couldn't get funding for your lab or because nothing else worked out, you're not going to like it. But if you really like developing science from an aerial view, … then science administration can be very fun and rewarding." --Irene Eckstrand It's a given that peer reviewers ...
ribbon cutting Comstock "Many awardees have been able to leverage the award to go on the job market right away."--Walter Schaffer, NIH These days, biomedical scientists are taking longer to score their first major research grants than they used to. According to a widely disseminated statistic from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Ph.D. biomedical researchers are, on average, 38 years...
Bold ideas, solid research qualifications, and a passion for discovery are no longer enough to guarantee a satisfying and lasting career; serious researchers also need financial knowledge and a businesslike attitude.
Steve Rissing (Ohio State University) Steve Rissing (Ohio State University) "To a large extent, we lose students when the material doesn't have meaning, when they can't find themselves in the subject." --Shirley Malcom If you let it, teaching can soak up more time than you can spare--including hours you might otherwise devote to sleeping. Yet, especially if you're at a research-intensive univers...
Gene Protein Cluster networks (credit: National Science Foundation) (National Science Foundation) "It's still social science, but it involves a broader set of principles and analytic tools that fit into the physics literature." --David Lazer In the age of Facebook, it's easy to grasp the idea of networks and of the endlessly variable and sometimes puzzling interactions that can occur among their ...
Harley McAdams (Courtesy, Harley McAdams) "If things get bad enough, in a sense it opens you up to try stuff because you have nothing to lose." --Amishi Jha You spent more than a decade training to become a researcher, then several more years getting yourself established in your scientific field. Getting where you are has taken years of hard work, insecurity, and personal sacrifice. So what if on...
Choosing a research adviser is as critical as any decision you will make during your scientific training. To choose wisely, you'll need to ferret out some information, both scientific and cultural.
Mark Biggin Mark Biggin "If you are a person with a Ph.D. degree, that means you are good at at least one thing, whether you get tenure or not. You know how to solve problems." --Clifford Mintz The day chemist Rebecca Conry's tenure decision came at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), she sat waiting alone at home for the department chair to call. Conry had warned her students that if she wasn'...
Kristofer Helgen. Credit: Shai Meiri Kristofer Helgen (Photo: Shai Meiri) "It's the kind of environment that welcomes scientists who are interested in, say, a single subfamily of beetle or a person who is known among colleagues not as a marine biologist but as 'the leech guy.' Those kinds of specialists have more or less disappeared from universities. I would say we're almost human relics." --Sus...
University of Delaware campus (Mathieu Plourde) Photo: Mathieu Plourde "I would not want to be looking for a faculty job in this environment." --Eric Wilcots, University of Wisconsin California State University, Long Beach, search postponed. Dartmouth College, search canceled. Johns Hopkins University, search canceled. University of North Carolina, search canceled. University of Pittsburgh, searc...
