Over the past 15 years, there has been an enormous shift in the human resources completing scientific research. The training period has lengthened significantly and adjustments must be made to address the growing concerns of young scientists. Many individuals, who do not have permanent positions, share a unique set of experiences and challenges that need to be better addressed in order to avoid wasting the substantial resources invested in their education and training.
Since October 2009, we have been running the Black Hole blog to provide resources and topical discussion on issues affecting early career scientists. We are really pleased to join the University Affairs blogging team and hope that we can expand the network of people talking about the critical issues in how we educate and train scientists in Canada.
In order to gain a feel for our network of bloggers and the issues that tend to crop up, please visit the old site for an archive of these posts and consider reading some of the items that attracted the most attention:
- The people (Changing Human Resources, Say NO to the 2nd Postdoc, Making Little Scientists (having kids))
- The jobs (Non-Academic Careers, The 80:20 problem, To postdoc or not to postdoc?)
- The politics (Taxation on Scholarships/Fellowships, Peer Review, Science and Evidence Based Policy)
Over the coming months, we will overhaul the old site to make the archives more user friendly and will be generating new content under the University Affairs banner. We are looking forward to engaging a wider stream of readers and inspiring some lively discussion in an effort to improve the scientific training environment in Canada. At the outset, I will mostly be joined by Dr. Jonathan Thon (a postdoctoral fellow in Boston), but as has been the case for the old site, we are always enthusiastically seeking guest bloggers to write about issues relevant to early career researchers.
Always feel free to contact us with your questions and concerns at contact[at]scienceadvocacy.org and consider following us on twitter or Facebook.
Looking forward to hearing from our new and old readers.
Dave
Everything looks ok !