Check out the NEW Science Careers blog

Go to the new Science Careers blog to get the latest job market news, career advice, and funding opportunities from Science Careers, and links to other stories about career success in the sciences. The new blog has a better comments capability, trackbacks, and picks up where this blog leaves off.

We look forward to seeing you there. Thanks for your readership of Science Careers.

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More from Arizona: Postdocs and Retirement Plans

The goveror of Arizona has signed into law a bill that would exclude postdocs from the state's mandatory retirement plan. The idea is to allow postdocs to keep the money they would pay into the plan as salaries or stipends, helping them pay bills and pay off student loans instead of being forced to save for a distant retirement. You can find the full story at ASU Insight, the news-and-information publication of Arizona State University.

- Posted by Jim Austin

Permalink | Tags: Arizona, postdocs, retirement

Scientists as Patent Lawyers - Alternative Careers Hit the Mainstream

Here's a sign that alternative careers for scientists have penetrated the public consciousness--an Associated Press article on scientists choosing careers as patent attorneys.

"It's an exciting area of legal practice right now," said University of Pennsylvania law professor R. Polk Wagner. "Every year I see more and more people coming into law school with technical backgrounds."

You can read "Scientists Leaving Labs for Niche in Courtrooms" at azcentral.com, the online home of the Arizona Republic.

- Posted by Jim Austin

Permalink | Tags: alternative careers, Arizona, patent law

U.S. Passports - Not a Pretty Picture

At Science Careers, we have articles and entire features on the value of mobility for scientists that describe the great experiences awaiting researchers when they venture abroad. But before American scientists or any Americans can get anywhere, they need to have a current passport, and getting a passport has become an adventure.

The main story here is: if you plan to travel outside the United States in the next few weeks, and you do NOT have a valid passport, you better hustle. Current waiting times for routine service run as long as 12 weeks, according to the State Department's Web site. Expedited service, for which you pay an extra $60.00 over the regular $67.00 fee takes 2-3 weeks, according to the site.

Those time estimates may be optimistic. According to Whirled View a blog run by buddies from my Foreign Service days, the regular service can run up to 16 weeks. Whirled View has been following this issue since February and in their latest post on the subject, they offer tips for moving the process along. (tip no. 1: Apply early and pay the $60.00 extra for expedited service.)

This is a topic in which I have more than a passing interest. I hope to join my wife in Italy in November, but my passport expired this month. I sent in my renewal application with the old passport three weeks ago. My bank says the check for the fee ($67.00 for regular service; my colleagues can testify to my frugality) cleared on 2 May. As a test case of this situation, I will keep readers posted on its progress.

By the way, the last time I renewed my passport in 1997, it took one week and cost $55.00.

- Posted by Alan Kotok

Permalink | Tags: Department of State, mobility, passport

HHMI's Open Investigator Competition

The deadline is approaching for the first-ever open competition to become an HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) Investigator, one of the sweetest gigs in science. For the first time, HHMI is focusing on early-career investigators. The application deadline is 13 June at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.

In this competition, HHMI expects to appoint 50 new investigators. Once appointed, HHMI Investigators become employees of HHMI--the institute pays 100% of salary--although they keep their faculty appointments and continue to work at their host institutions. Appointments are for 5 years, but renewals are routine. Research budgets are flexible and generous, covering staff--postdocs and technicians but not graduate students--and operating costs. (HHMI considers requests for major equipment periodically in separate competitions.) HHMI Investigators are encouraged to change directions when changing directions is a good idea and to try out new ideas. If your research takes years to bear fruit, don't worry: HHMI will wait.

The new competition is different from previous ones in several respects. For the first time, HHMI is seeking early-career scientists--specifically, people between years 4 and 10 of their tenure-track faculty (or equivalent) appointments. For just the second time, scientists can apply directly to HHMI--there's no institutional endorsement involved--and there's no limit to how many applicants can come from a single institution. In earlier competitions, except for a small competition last year limited to physician-scientists, the eligible institutions nominated scientists to compete to become HHMI investigators.

HHMI Investigators must be working on biomedical problems but don't have to be biologists. HHMI puts chemistry, physics and biophysics, biomedical engineering, and computational biology on its nonexhaustive list of eligible fields. HHMI Investigators do, however, have to work at one of 200 eligible institutions; there's a list on HHMI's Web site. Applicants must have one or more "active, national, peer-reviewed research grants that provide at least 3 years of support, such as an NIH [National Institutes of Health] R01 award." Career-development awards and mentored grants don't count. HHMI Investigators cannot be federal employees, they cannot receive material research support from for-profit entities, and they must be able to spend at least 75% of their time on research. Finally, HHMI Investigators can't change institutions during their first (5-year) appointments.

Application packages should include a CV, a 250-word summary of major achievements, a 3000-word or shorter description of current and planned research, and PDF files of five carefully chosen publications. Letters of reference are not allowed during the first stage, although they will be solicited for semifinalists, which will be announced in the fall. New HHMI Investigators will be announced next spring.

HHMI expects the competition to be "keen"--but don't let that deter you. Be bold.

- Posted by Jim Austin

Permalink | Tags: biomedical, competition, funding, HHMI

Feedback on "A Tunnel to Atlanta"

This is a comment on the article titled "A Tunnel to Atlanta", written by Beryl Lieff Benderly (4 May 2007). The author talks about the importance of networking within ones own ethnic group and how that can help people in their scientific careers. While this may be true to an extent, it also leads to some very avoidable situations in scientific environments. The biggest potential problem posed by excessive intra-ethnic networking is the formation of closed groups (popularly referred to as 'mafias') of foreigners in the work environment, often leading to a chasm between the members of this group and everyone else. In many situations, such groups result in its members lacking confidence or developing a sense suspicion when it comes to interacting with other nationalities or cultures: ghetto-isation in other words. This negates any advantage an international experience can have and can only be bad for science for two reasons. The first is that Science is and should be an international activity involving active interaction between different ethnic and cultural groups. Most high profile laboratories, irrespective of the field, are highly international in composition. Secondly, being scientists, we must endeavour to be above the boundaries of culture, language, religion and ethnicity, at least in the workplace.

I can give myself as an example of a person who had an excellent start to my scientific career without having another person from my country or culture anywhere near me. I left my native India to do my PhD in a Macromolecular Crystallography lab in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I was the only person from my country in the whole building but never experienced any homesickness during the six and a half years of my stay there. My colleagues in the lab and my boss were fantastic and very supportive, so much that I did not feel the need for any support from people of my own cultural background. This has had an effect of making me immune to the effects cultural differences usually have on people, and I can now feel comfortable anywhere. I like to believe this is a good thing.

To sum up, I believe that active interaction with other cultures makes one a better person and a better scientist. Culture shock is a great thing to be experiencing all by oneself.

Dr Ganesh Natrajan
Post-Doctoral Associate
Macromolecular Crystallography group.
European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
Grenoble, France.

Permalink | Tags: feedback, France, India, Tags: culture

Seeking a Physics Postdoc ... or Not

Workforce statistics can provide useful guidance to job seekers in any field, but they can get a little dull even for experienced number-crunchers. American Institute of Physics (AIP), which serves a group often considered tolerant of quantification, produces "Workforce Trends" flyers including colorful, easy-to-grasp charts, and its Spring 2007 collection is available for free downloading.

One flyer, on initial employment of Ph.D.s, shows whether 2003-2004 doctorate recipients in astronomy and various fields of physics found temporary positions--postdocs or "other temporary"--or more permanent gigs. If you're in biophysics, be prepared to do a postdoc, the numbers indicate--that's where nearly 9 in 10 new biophysicists from the 2003-2004 classes ended up. In several other sub-disciplines--nuclear physics, particles and fields, condensed matter, astronomy, astrophysics, and atomic and molecular physics--6 to 8 out of 10 new doctorate recipients took postdoctoral positions. A few in each group took other temporary assignments.

If you'd rather have a job that's potentially permanent, then applied physics is the best choice. About half of the new 2003-2004 Ph.D. recipients in that field took jobs with the potential to be permanent. Almost as many new doctorates--about 4 in 10--took potentially permanent jobs in optics and photonics, atmospheric and space physics, and materials science.

Other new workforce flyers from AIP cover where bachelors-degree grads in physics go to work, 2006 faculty salaries, and trends for hiring women with bachelors degrees in various scientific and technical fields. In the women's hiring chart, which covers 1966 to 2004, all of the trend lines head higher over the period except one. Until 1985, the percentage of women with bachelor's degrees in computer science rose from 10% to about 35%, mirroring the other fields. But after 1985, the percentage of women in computer science declined steadily, reaching about 25% in 2004.

- Posted by Alan Kotok

Permalink | Tags: astronomy, computer science, physics, statistics, women, workforce

Updates to the "GrantsNet Guide to Financing Your Research Exchange in India."

Martin Reddington, Director of Scientific Affairs and Communications at the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), pointed out a couple of errors in our discussion of HFSP's research funds involving India in our article "GrantsNet Guide to Financing Your Research Exchange in India." This article is part of our feature on research opportunities in India.

Here's an excerpt from Reddington's message explaining the organization's policies ...

We updated the article page accordingly.

- Posted by Alan Kotok

Permalink | Tags: feedback, Human Frontier Science Program, India

Flattened by the Boom

This week in Focus, Science reports on the struggles of young investigators to get their work funded in the wake of a massive expansion of the biomedical research enterprise. Link to the full text is provided courtesy of Science magazine.

- Posted by Jim Austin

Permalink | Tags: Funding, NIH, Science magazine

Feedback on "Moving Out of the Shadows"

Dear Science Editor,

The discussion in Elisabeth Pain`s "Moving Out of the Shadows: Publishing From the Rest of the World" points to the typical publishing scenario in Brazil, where the mother tongue is Portuguese.

Indeed, Brazilian researchers can be an exemplar of those from most of Latin America, when it comes to getting published in English in international journals. The difficulties range from limited English skills to lack of funding to afford language-editing services. Brazilian scientists have contributed to approximately 1.6% of what is published in ISI-indexed journals, and this small percentage notwithstanding, it is the result of a steady growth in academic productivity in the last decades. However, as in most South American countries, attempts to understand research output is mostly focused on traditional indicators of research performance, which does not include English proficiency.

If sound science and readable English are markers of a manuscript's quality, why is the role of English in non-native English-speaking (NNES) countries undermined? A number of editorials and full articles have devoted attention to language constraints involved in publication by NNES scientists, and this problem appears to affect novice and experienced writers alike in South America. However, concerning Brazil, lack of awareness of the extent to which it could affect their authors' publication output reveals a blind spot in policy making.

According to Pain, "While researching the issues faced by scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, Curry and colleagues found that 'scholars sometimes don't have high-level English proficiency but publish in high journals.' Their success, Curry says, is 'because they can draw [on] a network of people that help out.' " Such a network can certainly be the difference between having a manuscript accepted or rejected in high-impact journals. But in the case of South American authors, the fraction of "off-network" scientists is considerable, and being off network in this English-only research world is even more disadvantageous. Reducing the language gap among scientists would thus be well worth the effort.

It is thus about time South American scientists paid more attention to English proficiency in their countries. It is true that compared to other research priorities, this issue can be regarded as minor, but it may be huge for NNES authors who produce sound science and take an enormous time to gain visibility because manuscripts have to be re-re-rewritten because of poor English. In Brazil, research in the Science Education Program of the Medical Biochemistry Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro has investigated the correlation between the English proficiency of more than 35,000 Brazilian scientists registered in the National Research Council (CNPq) and their publication in international journals in English. The preliminary data have pointed to higher output for those whose writing skills are better developed.* Is this a trend that may turn out to be similar for other South American countries?

Sonia Vasconcelos
PhD Student
Science Education Program
The Medical Biochemistry Institute
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

Supervisors: Profs Dra. Jacqueline Leta and Dra. Martha Sorenson

* Vasconcelos, S.M.R., Sorenson, M., Leta, Jacqueline. "Scientist-Friendly Policies for Non-Native English Speaking Authors: Timely and Welcome." Concepts and Comments. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research, 2007, in press.

Permalink | Tags: Feedback, Language, Publishing