Big Ben in London (Anthony Kelly) A wide range of organizations offer science policy-related jobs. In the United States, it’s not hard to find formal training in science policy; many institutions offer programs that directly open doors to science-policy careers. But in Europe, it’s a different story: Don't expect to find many open doors there. Instead, prepare to look for a partially open window,...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Many graduate students and postdocs today are choosing to pursue careers outside of research. My transition from bench science to science policy has been exciting and fulfilling. As a graduate student, I attended many "alternative" career workshops. Patent law, management consulting, pharma, and biotech were often presented as options, but science policy was--at least in...
UPDATE: 23 May 2007 The Policy Research Initiative advises that it no longer offers the Canadian Policy Research Awards described in this article, nor does have information on its Web site about these awards. This page is offered for historical interest only. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sick of sitting at the bench, having ...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Recently, I was asked to sit on a career options panel at the American Geophysical Union?s spring meeting. There I was, less than a year out of graduate school, and already being held up as an alternative careers poster child. Preparing for the session, I felt like one of those reluctant superheroes who is unsure about becoming a role model. Although I had left academia ...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX The nation's leaders struggle with bioterrorism, the supposed birth of a human clone, military nanotechnology, and battles over oil under desolate arctic tundra. These might sound like plots from a Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton novel, but they're actually all in a day's work for those in Washington's science policy community. And they are just a few of a vast array of s...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX It seemed like an easy choice senior year in college--go to graduate school or be a bartender in Spain the year after graduation. I never saw myself as a scientist, but rather a potential science writer (I minored in journalism), so the bartender option was very attractive. However, everyone has one favorite influential teacher or professor; mine was my immunology profes...
People working in science and technology policy don?t form a community as much as they form a large extended family that occasionally shares holiday letters or attends family reunions. I was reminded of that this spring, when a graduate student conference I helped organize (with colleagues from George Mason University, George Washington University, and Virginia Tech) was combined with a workshop ...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Are the biomedical sciences and the social sciences completely separate worlds? For a long time, I thought that they were. I was one of those students who continually had a hard time deciding what to study during my undergraduate years. I started out in biology at the University of Alberta, considered switching to the Faculty of Arts, and finally decided to specialize in...
Lucy Heady (New Philanthropy Capital) Lucy Heady (New Philanthropy Capital) "The main, satisfying thing is when you feel you've made a good case for a charity you think is really effective and can make a difference." --Lucy Heady One of the best-known alternative career paths for physicists is that of the "quant," or quantitative analyst, in the financial services industry. But when theoretical p...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Managers of both public and private enterprises are beginning to realize that informed policy and program management decisions require adequate information on both the economic and social factors affecting a project. But given time constraints, the problem becomes one of ensuring that specific economic or social schools of thought do not bias the information provided. Th...
Editor's Note: John H. Marburger, III, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Policy Advisor to the President of the United States, presented the keynote address at the 2002 Postdoc Network meeting. We are encouraged by his willingness to work with postdocs, faculty, administrators, and funding agency officials to try to address the federal-level workforce issues faci...
In an Op-Ed piece published 11 October on the Web site of the National Academies, Jerome H. Grossman, a member of the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable of the National Academies and a senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, claims that the pool of science and technology talent in the United States is inadequate. "As the country struggles to contain terrorism and ...
Public health is a field that spans many areas, from disease prevention, outbreak control, and health promotion to epidemiology, environmental health, health care, health policy, and even bioterrorism. Public health professionals play a critical role in monitoring a population's health, controlling disease, and fostering policies to improve and promote health and health services. These individual...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX I began to appreciate the importance of advocating and lobbying in support of biomedical and health-science research as I was completing my Ph.D. in pharmacology. During my tenure as a graduate student, I observed the impact of the government's commitment to double the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget. There was a perceptible shift among faculty members, from p...
What's it like being the conduit between the very different worlds of politics and science? Ask Nancy Kingsbury, and she'll tell you that her work as a science advisor for the government of Canada is a lot like being an interpreter. "I translate science to the bureaucrats and politicians and translate the bureaucracy to the scientists." Kingsbury has been the Science Advisor on Climate Change for...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX The Bridge graduate fellowship program at the University of British Columbia ( UBC) is the first of its kind to integrate public health, engineering, and policy in a way that cultivates interchange among the disciplines. The program is one of 51 innovative Strategic Training Initiatives announced by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research ( CIHR) last June, which aim ...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Each day when we pick up our newspapers or sign in to read them online, one of the headlines will invariably address a cutting-edge health law issue: cloning, HIV/AIDS, privacy, mental illness, access to the health care system, allocation of health resources, or end-of-life practice and policy. And every day we witness spectacular developments in health research--advance...
Next Wave reported recently that there is a strong line of thinking that says women in science need to be studied less, but that more action needs to be taken on their behalf ( Enough Talk, Let's See Some Action!). Is this true? As organiser of the Athena conference on New Research on Women, Science and Higher Education reported in that article, I would question that view. Over the years there ha...
New developments in European science and science policy suggest that a new landscape is forming, one in which scientists move about as freely in Europe as they go between Massachusetts and California in the United States. The great scientific traditions of Europe have had strong national identities; one naturally thinks of Pasteur as French, Newton as British, Pauli as German. But in the movement...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Had you told Kathie Olsen (pictured left) years ago that she, a neuroscientist, would be chief scientist at NASA and, eventually, assistant director for science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), she "would have started laughing!" Olsen's career started in the typical way. She earned her Ph.D. degree at the University of California, Irvine, did a post...
