University Affairs

I just finished a bit of a marathon read which gives advice to early career researchers on how to best situate themselves for success in research. The guide, Charting a course for a successful research career was written by Emeritus Professor Alan Johnson and offers some good advice for early career researchers. Its audience is extremely broad (international early career researchers in all disciplines) and the tone is quite conversational and as a consequence I found it slightly ethereal and felt the take home messages were sometimes difficult to extract. Nonetheless, a targeted read through the table of contents for the section(s) most applicable to you should get some useful tidbits out, so do take a look.

Overall, the guide insists that early career researchers must take control of their own career and focus on planning – with this I could not agree more. We have long advocated on this site the real need for PhD students and postdoctoral fellows to regularly assess their career options. Nobody else is as concerned with what you do with your training (mothers excepted) so please do not stick your head in the sand without considering how much you want to pursue academic research – the environment is too competitive to simply drift into your career.

Check out some previous posts on this topic if you are interested:

• The importance of leaving academic science on good terms
  
• Novel ideas for the biomedical research workforce, anyone in Canada listening?
• Engaging early – changing direction before graduation
• Introducing career streams into academic research
• Career streams in academia: Who foots the bill?
• To postdoc or not to postdoc?
• Professionals in High Demand
• Old Debate, More Participants: What do 80% of PhD holders do for a career?
• Say NO to the Second Post Doc!

For those planning on pursuing an academic career, Professor Johnson makes an excellent point that should not go unnoticed. Think ahead. Not just about where your project will go or what the next cool technique is, but make sure you are thinking about where science is going. Johnson suggests reading vision statements of universities, granting councils and political parties and asking how your research will be funded in 10 years. This is sage advice and will position you much better for hiring committee questions around your future “fundability”.

When I was in Canada going to university in the late 1990s/early 2000s, there was a massive push on training engineers – Nortel was booming, RIM was emerging, and all roads led to the tech sector. When Nortel collapsed, the ripple was felt across the entire sector and many young engineers found themselves without jobs, some of whom are now in completely different fields. Is the life sciences/genomics explosion of the last decade traveling down the same path and will early career researchers who have not thought broadly about their research find themselves on the outside? Currently, Canada is investing quite a lot into regenerative medicine and genomics research and the country is well-respected in both areas, but the industrial biotechnology sector appears to be unable to attract substantial capital. If this continues, will the industrial sector be able bear the huge number of trainees we are producing?

Of course, we cannot predict the future, but it behooves young researchers to keep their heads out of the sand and think about the future – not only of their own careers, but of their field and the other fields around them.

My last post generated a fair amount of commentary both here on this site and on Reddit. It seems that many people have experienced exactly what NIH Director Francis Collins described: they’ve been made to feel like failures for leaving academia. If the vast majority of PhDs and postdoctoral fellows will not become tenure-track academics, then we should be embracing non-academic careers as the default pathway for most trainees. This requires a huge cultural shift away from seeing trainees as generators of science and toward viewing trainees themselves as the product. Making supervisors and institutes accountable for the trainees they produce, keeping lab sizes down to a size where meaningful mentorship can be maintained, and recognizing the value of non-academic careers are all key to making this shift successfully.

Tracking former students and postdocs in a meaningful way

A recent phenomenon at granting agencies has been to track the outcomes of students and postdocs, both in terms of how long they are in the lab as well as what they are currently doing for a job. A big question that spawns from this is whether particular professions or outcomes are more or less valued? If so, who decides if it’s more valuable to create a PhD-level patent lawyer vs. a sessional instructor vs. a professor? I am not sure how this information is used and I worry that it is simply to ask the question “How good is this professor at creating new professors?”

As I mentioned in my last post, the product of a university should, above all else, be its people. We consistently fail this goal by nearly exclusively valuing the production of papers and patents irrespective of what happens to the trainees involved in producing them. Instead we should be measuring a successful research PI by evaluating – in a meaningful fashion – their training and teaching abilities.

Bigger is not always better

One of the most frustrating things about measuring the “productivity” or “success” of a lab is that it is almost always done as a cumulative exercise. Rarely do you ask the question, “What is this professor’s productivity per lab member?” Not too long ago, there was an eye-opening study that showed research productivity plateaued at $750,000 of research funding and got noticeably worse as funding went up (as measured by number of publications and their average impact factor). Even this, though, did not break down the production per person, though it can be reasonably assumed that better funded labs have more people.

Big labs produce more papers, that’s very true – but how many careers are buried in the wake of such “productivity”? It would do grant evaluators well to ask how many trainees and employees does each lab have and how is the lab’s publication record distributed over those people. Anecdotally, I can cite several examples of small labs with excellent productivity that get crushed in grant evaluations for having a thin publication record – a “publication per lab researcher” metric would do such labs a great service and push the heads of larger labs to ensure that everyone in their group is being taken care of properly.

Seeing the forest for the trees and the Selfish Gene

On the note of taking care of one’s trainees, I fail to understand why professors don’t see “non-academic” career options as valuable to them. Yes, professors can have tunnel vision when it comes to doing things that benefit their lab moving forward, but surely minting new academics is not the only way to have a positive working relationship with your former trainees.

If you produce a journal editor, might thaey not end up working at a journal in your field? Would you rather have them respect the lab for the way it is run and the science that emerges from it or that they be bitter about their final few months/years and be spreading bad vibes throughout their new circles?

If you produce an industry researcher, might they not end up working for a company in your field? Good relationships with companies have often sprouted collaborations that benefits both the academic and industrial partners both through shared reagents, shared expertise, and good product development opportunities. Even the most selfish professors should be able to see this logic and be keen to have students of all career motivations leave their labs as happy as possible.

Changing the perception

I have long wondered whether people are better motivated by negative or positive reinforcement. Should we reward those professors that invest in training students and postdocs with diverse career goals or should we penalize those  that neglect their university duties? As it currently stands, there does not appear to be much reward for those who invest in training and teaching and there appears to be a sizable cohort of professors who are not well-liked by their trainees.

I suggest measuring output based on all the trainees that pass through a lab by noting where they go and how well they were supported and I would also incorporate productivity per researcher into evaluation metrics. Such measures would stimulate professors to consider carefully those that they take on board and I believe would bring down overall lab size of large labs and increase the productivity per research dollar.

Over the years, our site has had many articles on two major themes: the education and training of scientists, and the effective transfer of knowledge between academic science and other sectors (e.g., industry, policy, science outreach).

Last week, Nature published a short interview with NIH Director Francis Collins concerning the policies being adopted to improve the training situation in biomedical sciences. Briefly, postdoc stipends will be increased along with the number of grants that encourage early career independence, and funding will be made available for training programs that prepare students for a broader set of career options. These are all welcome changes, of course, but I fear the problem of communication between sectors will remain unsolved unless trainees and educators fundamentally shift the way they view “non-academic” careers.

After admitting to not exposing his own trainees to multiple career options, Collins highlights the problem that I will spend the remainder of the article speaking to:

I worry that a number of them (postdocs) are receiving the message that if they don’t get a tenure-track position, they have failed. The good news is that nearly all postdocs are likely to be employed in interesting positions, but many will not travel a narrow academic path.

This is where the human element comes into play. Postdoctoral fellows are generally clever and successful people; they’ve finished at or near the top of their classes in high school and university and clearly like asking questions about things that have yet to be answered. The difficult disconnect comes when, for the first time in many of these people’s lives, they are being told, “No, sorry, you’re not good enough to go down that path, just go figure something else out.”

Many people will counter with arguments about huge swathes of postdocs who actually do not want to have a tenure track position. While data are being collected on this, the relationship that these postdocs have with academic science remains problematic. Observing and competing with the ambitious few who make it, it is reinforced over and over that these young scholars are not good enough to be at the top. This is completely and utterly appalling – it is a damaging cycle and it is sapping the motivation of our best and brightest.

The real problem comes when the majority (Collins quotes greater than 75%) of these people obtain non-tenure track jobs. Just like all the nasty emotions that flare up when you are rejected in a relationship, science leaves the bitter taste of failure and the defensive walls get built up. Is it possible that such walls are still intact when it comes to dealing with academics in future positions? I have visions of disgruntled former academic postdocs (getting more disgruntled as the human resource crisis escalates) being in science policy and industry positions and making the gap between governments, industry and academia grow even larger. We need to find ways to support the choices of trainees earlier and resist the demonization of non-academic career choices.

Research labs at universities should be places of training, not small businesses. Having a skilled worker move on to something else is potentially bad for business, but should be seen as an excellent end product for a university.

I am certainly not advocating for the pampering of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, but there are several approaches that I will propose in my next post to take better advantage of the huge investment that we make in the training of these young scholars. Career training programs like those the NIH will support are a good step, but until postdoctoral fellows stop flying under the radar of their supervisor when they partake in such programs, we’ll still be constructing walls that will need to be torn down later.

This past weekend, I attended the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Administrators in Ottawa. As with most inaugural meetings, there was a combination of excitement and confusion but it appeared that the overall theme was one of identifying common ground and working together in the most productive way possible.

The stated aims of CAPA are to share best practices and to promote the environment for successful postdoctoral scholarship and training. The organization is made up of senior administrators and staff from universities and research organizations across Canada that focus on postdoctoral fellow issues. The steering committee currently comprises David Burns (UNB), Graham Carr (Concordia), Richard Fedorak (U of Alberta), Mihaela Harmos (Western), Sue Horton (Waterloo), Martin Kreiswirth (McGill), and Marilyn Mooibroek (Calgary). While not formally involved in the steering committee, postdoctoral fellows are consulted through the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars via guest status at teleconferences.

Many interesting items arose in the meeting and it would be hard to properly include them all, so I will restrict myself to some of the items that I found most interesting (all topics are found here, please write me if you would like more information):

Survey of stakeholders

Mihaela Harmos presented the results from 34/50 respondents to the stakeholder survey run in 2011. There are apparently 8,900 postdoctoral fellows in Canada, 45% of whom are not originally from Canada. Only half of these postdocs have minimum stipends and just 2/3 have some sort of benefits package available to them. Of these, approximately 25% pay for 100% of their benefits. Does such inconsistency exist for other professionals in training (e.g., accountants, lawyers, medical doctors)? Readers will know our opinion on this already.

In any event, such surveys will be interesting to monitor in the future to track changes in the quantity and quality of postdoctoral research support in Canada.

Legal status of postdoctoral fellows

We had an informative presentation by Lisa Newton, a lawyer based at Queen’s University, who shared some important points about the legal status of postdoctoral fellows. A major case came out of U of T this year that said postdoctoral fellows were employees of their universities. According to Ms. Newton, provinces look to the Ontario Labour Relations Board for precedent, so this will likely impact future rulings as they crop up.

As Queen’s postdoctoral fellows have recently unionized, Ms. Newton had particularly good insight and listed off some of the key challenges specific to collective bargaining for postdoctoral fellows:

• Job postings (timelines, impact on international recruits)
• Seniority (specializations of postdoctoral fellows are very different)
• Hours of work / overtime
• Postdocs are rarely discussed in university IP discussions whereas faculty members are typically considered. Generally it is thought “he who creates, owns”, what about postdocs?
• Mix of PI-funded and independently funded postdocs complicates collective bargaining

In discussions later on that day, it came up that there are union representatives pressuring postdoctoral fellows at several universities to unionize – have any of our readers experienced this?

NSERC CREATE numbers

As fast as my little pen would move, I scrambled to copy down NSERC’s numbers for its CREATE program.  I’ve not seen these presented on their website in such a breakdown, so I thought it would be useful to share.

The vast majority of CREATE grants are for 1.65 million over 6 years and are meant to fund trainees under themed programs of research. CREATE does not fund actual research costs and 80% of the funds go into trainee stipends with the other 20% being for coordination and travel.  So, who do they support?

This may well be the topic of another blog post about the CREATE model which has its benefits and drawbacks. For now, it is interesting to note how these awards stack up against the US National Institutes of Health recommendation from earlier this year which was to shift the balance away from grant-funded postdoctoral fellowships in favour of fellowship and training awards. The NIH shows that postdoctoral fellows who obtain merit-based awards (e.g.: fellowships) are more likely to gain independence sooner. It would be very interesting to see what comes out of CREATE in terms of times to graduation, publication record, and age of independence for these trainees vs. NSERC’s fellowship/scholarship funded trainees.

On a side note, in another session the topic of transition awards in Canada (e.g., NIH K99/R00 awards) was brought up and it seems that the biggest challenge for these from granting councils is to figure out where the money could come from. It seems they’ve made these awards a priority at the NIH – perhaps our leadership will see them as valuable as well.

Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS)

Luckily, the CAPA meeting also meant that many of the CAPS Executive Committee were in town and we took the chance to meet the day before the conference to carve out the key components of that organization. Members were very active in the CAPA meeting drilling home the three primary concerns of Canadian postdocs that the member university representatives agreed on:

1. The need for clarity on the status, timeline, and treatment of PDFs at universities and partner institutes.
2. More extensive professional development for PDFs (both academic and non-academic).
3. Communication and collaboration between CAPS and CAPA and the national granting agencies.

There were several pleas made for more involvement of postdoctoral fellows in establishing policy that affects them (e.g., the NSERC decision to restrict fellowship applications to once per lifetime) and it seemed that the message was well-received, but the proof will be in the pudding as we move forward. Stay tuned for updates on the CAPS website and we’ll continue to give regular updates of advocacy efforts on this site.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research have announced their October 2012 call for applicants to the Science Policy Fellowship Program. As in years prior to this one, it seems that the fellowships are available only in partnership with Health Canada:

1. Exploring ways of integrating academic clinical trials into Health Canada review process of therapeutic products
2. Health and health system returns on investments in interprofessional collaboration
3. Blood safety and emerging pathogens
4. Intervention evidence to inform public health actions on childhood obesity

The topics look broad and this will likely attract an equally broad set of applicants – remember that you need to obtain a letter of support from the agency prior to the Dec. 5 application deadline. Clock’s ticking!

Now that two rounds of fellows have been appointed and presumably completed (or are close to completion), it would be great to hear from either employers or fellows about how well the program works and what the fellows are now doing … any of our readers out there who know someone who has been involved and think they might be ok to speak on the issue, please get in touch with me at contact@scienceadvocacy.org.

This quarter has been a very busy one for both Jonathan and me. Unfortunately from my end, this meant that the scienceadvocacy.org resource site is not yet live. Things are starting to take shape and it should be launched this autumn. We hope this will be an easier-to-navigate resource page that can direct early career researchers and policymakers to the items they need without having to dig around too much or re-invent the wheel. We’ll certainly keep readers posted on its progress.

For now, here’s the quarterly recap for those readers that have been busy too!

Articles written

Jonathan:

Playing the devil’s advocate on low salaries

A framework for changing the current research economy

Academic burnout should be a major cause for concern

Supply and demand in the knowledge market

The truly bleak job prospects for young scientists in the life sciences

A response from the health minister on the lack of opportunity for early-career scientists

Dave:

The state of science in Canada: Not bad, but the devil’s in the details

A new way to help you choose your science-related career

UBC tops in Canada? Rimouski 7th in sciences? New metrics for measuring research

Come on NSERC, really – you’ve completely missed the point…

Grumpy old men (and women) – feedback on proposed CIHR reforms

Novel ideas for the biomedical research workforce, anyone in Canada listening?

Our other activities

Dave published a feature article in BlueSci, Cambridge’s science magazine on the training of scientists, entitled Whose Training is it Anyway?

Discussion highlights

In response to my comments on the NIH and NAS reports, S_C pitched a question to readers that sadly went untouched. I think we’ll have to follow up on it. It’s an interesting suggestion to create research-focused assistant professors for 5-10 years and evaluate their performance – good ones stay, bad ones go (I see Cambridge doing similar things, Boston too).

One of the most heavily commented and read articles on our site, the discussion that ensued from the article on NSERC restricting postdocs to one fellowship application per lifetime, was very heated. This is one of the poorest decisions that NSERC has ever made and I really think they’ve failed to see the hugely negative impact that it will have on the system – see the CAPS letter in response to this.

Popular posts this quarter

Come on NSERC, really – you’ve completely missed the point… (5,214)

The truly bleak job prospects for young scientists in the life sciences (1,914)

UBC tops in Canada? Rimouski 7th in sciences? New metrics for measuring research (1,397)

A new way to help you choose your science-related career  (1,217)

Academic burnout should be a major cause for concern (880)

Last week, the Council of Canadian Academies released their The State of Science and Technology in Canada 2012 report and trumpeted the success of Canadian science and technology over the last six years (University Affairs has a news story on the report here). Overall, it seems we are performing well when research output, citation rate and international reputation are considered. If you simply read the executive summary you would certainly feel things are pretty rosy for Canada’s scientific community and their world performance. However, after a full reading of the report, I have noticed several very worrying trends that concern me going forward. While I wouldn’t say Canada is doing poorly, I would say that this is not a time for complacency and policy makers should be keenly aware of the details in this report, not just the summary.

Share of world papers and citations

One of the most striking omissions from the report’s findings was marked with a small asterisk concerning “General Science and Technology.” This category may seem like any other until you realize that the categorization of publications is primarily done on specialized journals, and all general journals (e.g. Science, Nature, PNAS, etc.) fall into this category. Ironically, despite high relative performance in many fields, Canada shows strikingly poor performance in general S&T. Further concern comes when you realize that the U.S., with its 27% of total papers, also lays claim to over 40% of the papers that fall in the top 1% of cited papers.

Of further note is our relatively poor output (measured by number of papers) in physics and chemistry, though this is amply compensated for by strong citation rates of those articles that are produced. This raises a red flag that can’t be properly resolved without further information – is Canada driving more money into fields that have higher citation rates (e.g. clinical medicine) at the expense of fields that traditionally do not produce as many papers? The panel, correctly I think, performed their analysis by couching relative impact within specific fields of research, but in doing so, I think they avoid assessing which fields are over- or under-supported by research dollars. The latter is a critical question for policy makers.

R&D spending

Canada is the only country in the entire OECD that had a net decline in research and development spending from 2005-2010 (-6%) compared to an average 17% increase across other OECD countries. This is particularly acute in the private sector (see Figure 3.3 and 3.5) and is a worrying trend.

Perhaps not surprising to many readers, most R&D expenditures in Canada take place in Ontario, Quebec, B.C. and Alberta, but 92% seems awfully high. While I grant that the bulk of the population also reside in these provinces (~85%), this is still quite imbalanced and makes me wonder how growing hubs like biotechnology in Halifax are meant to compete without appropriate investment.

Innovation still lagging behind

I won’t dwell on this one too much, as it has been a persistent thorn in the side for Canada – on average we patent less and generate far less money from royalties and licensing fees. Funnily enough, though, the citation rate of Canadian patents is amongst the highest, “indicating considerable impact in the development of related technologies.” The executive summary reads as if the latter far outweighs the former, but I would imagine that most people interested in Canada’s innovation culture would not be convinced. Not my specialty really, though there is a very telling fact tucked away in the report: we spent about $5 billion more licensing patents than the revenue generated from other countries licensing our intellectual property from 2005-2010.

Some final stamps to add to the collection

Other interesting tidbits concerning specific areas of research pop out of the report that didn’t really fit thematically with the other sections, but I thought they were worth mentioning:

• On average the world has substantially increased its investment in research related to folklore – Canada has not.
• Despite huge investment in natural resources, Canada’s investment in geology research is very low.

Overall, though, the expert panel has used broad and reasonable metrics to evaluate the state of science and technology and Canada appears to be on the right track. The only frustrating part of this report is that I think it will lull policymakers into complacency – “everything is fine in Canadian science, no need to pay attention.” I can only hope that people read beyond the summary.

P.S.:  And, two things you’d only notice if you were a Newfoundlander: the use of NF as an abbreviation when NL has been the official two letter code since 2001 and for some reason Newfoundland ranks 5th in Canada in terms of producing PhDs per capita. Imagine if they counted the number of us who have graduated from other schools …

Related posts:

Council of Canadian Academies: Another Progress(?) Update

Bold New Toppings: A closer look at the Council of Canadian Academies 3 year plan

A few weeks back, the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars circulated a newly released online tool from the AAAS called my Individual Development Plan (or myIDP). I’ve finally had a chance to sit down and browse through it (and do the self-assessments) and I would highly recommend PhDs and postdocs to take a look as well. It doesn’t take long to set up and fill out and, if nothing else, it will make you think about what you actually want to do for a career.

It is divided into three self-assessments:

1. Scientific Skills: identification of “the scientific skills and knowledge areas in which you are proficient”
2. Interests: defining the “scientific tasks that you enjoy doing”
3. Values: helping you figure out “What is most important to me? What rewards or outcomes do I want from my work?”

Basically, you go through a quick series of rankings (you have to keep the range broad or it doesn’t work!) in each area and it spits out your best career matches based on your skills and interests. It is a welcome sight to see that they’ve collated 60+ careers that you could do as a trained scientist – food for thought!

For those that are curious, it told me that I shouldn’t be a tenure-track professor, but rather I should look at options in science policy, science writing and public health. While it hasn’t pushed me from the tenure-track quest just yet, it is interesting to consider such options and I’d be interested to know if others find it a useful/accurate tool.

Overall, this type of tool underscores a very real need for PhDs and postdocs to take an active role in their own career planning. Do not wait for someone to tell you to move into another career and do not be brainwashed into thinking that academia is the only option. If you want academia, you should be actively choosing it, not passively accepting it as the only credible option. Thinking about other possibilities will only help affirm your decision and get you more motivated to dig deep for the uphill struggle.

It is not the only tool available of course and the Science Careers site is a fantastic place to start. In particular, take a look at the Tools & Tips page where there are excellent resources to help guide you through the process. Also, remember to take a look through our series from two summers ago called “So you want to be…” which gives some advice on how to first start looking for non-academic career options.

For those who want to stay in the academy, the Individual Development Plan is still useful – it will help you identify which skills you need to get the professor job and hopefully it will also motivate you to organize a step-by-step plan to get there. Of course, you’ll need to pop out a few publications on the way, but remember that the research itself is only one component of the battle (albeit the most important one!).

While science training programs try to reach the appropriate levels of career guidance, I cannot stress how important it is for PhDs and postdocs to make this sort of self-assessment – is academia the only thing you could see yourself happily doing? If not, you really owe it to yourself to get out there and explore.

I always knew that bad news was released on Fridays in the summer… but last Friday was pretty ridiculous.  NSERC has just announced that in order to improve its success rate (just clocked at 7.8% in the most recent competition) it will now reduce the number of times an individual can apply for a postdoctoral award from two to one.

…  now that your jaw is back in place,  let’s look at what really matters.  The absolute number of fellowships awarded by NSERC represents how many scholars it supports each year through its program, and no matter how many people are applying, this is the most important number.

Sadly, the last five years have seen NSERC’s funded fellowships drop dramatically (awards / applicants):

• 250 / 1169 (2008)
• 254 / 1220 (2009)
• 286 / 1341 (2010)
• 133 / 1431 (2011)
• 98 / 1254 (2012)

This is unbelievable and it cannot be sugar coated with a letter about streamlining or complaints about increased applicants (just a 7% increase in applicants from 2008 to 2012).

The sad facts are that NSERC is awarding 66% fewer fellowships.  As you can imagine, this has had an effect on success rates, but NSERC’s solution is to try and reduce the number of applicants in an effort to bring up the rate so that they can rid themselves of their sub-10% success rates.

I can’t even begin to explain everything that has run through my mind while writing this post other than repeating that NSERC has completely missed the point.

If you would like your comments to be raised at the next CAPS executive meeting, I strongly encourage you to write them below.