Science Careers Blog

The arrest of financier Bernard Madoff on 11 December on investment fraud charges has sent waves crashing into scientific institutions and philanthropies that invested in Madoff-backed schemes. Madoff contributed widely to and served on boards of various Jewish and Israeli charities and institutions, many of which invested in his hedge fund. Prosecutors say Madoff's fund was a $50 billion scam.

Yeshiva University in New York, home to the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, has apparently taken a significant hit. The Albert Einstein school is a major research facility, as well as a medical training institution. Sources at Yeshiva told the JTA news service that the school has lost at least $100 million from its endowment because of Madoff investments. Madoff served as treasurer of Yeshiva's board of trustees.

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel, invested in Madoff's securities, according to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, which estimates its losses at about NIS 25 million ($6.5 million).

Victims of Madoff's apparent fraud include foundations headed by household names such as Nobel laureate Elie Weisel, Senator Frank Lautenberg, and film director Steven Spielberg, as well as many smaller family foundations and institutions that serve Jewish communities in North America, Europe, and Israel. Madoff managed most of the investment income of Spielberg's Wunderkinder Foundation, which donated some $3.3 million for medical research to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Charities with larger exposure to Madoff's schemes were less fortunate. The Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation of Salem, Mass., which supports exchanges of teachers and students between Israel and the United States, invested all of its $8 million in Madoff's fund and has shut down.

The Madoff scandal has further shaken an already nervous environment for philanthropies. John Ruskay, executive vice president and CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York told JTA, "Already in the context of a very challenging economic environment this will present another significant difficulty. We don’t know yet the extent of the wreckage."

By Alan Kotok on December 16, 2008 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz reports today that Israel's Council of Higher Education--a consortium of the country's seven public universities--met with Finance Ministry officials for the first time in a week to resolve a funding dispute that threatens the scheduled opening of the schools on Sunday. The institutions' presidents have told students to stay home if the dispute is not resolved by then.

The Forward, a New York weekly on Jewish and Israeli issues, reports in its current (31 October) issue that the university presidents have also promised to close down libraries and research facilities if the dispute carries on into the second week of the school year.

Both sides agree that Israel's public universities need a boost in funding, and the Finance Ministry has promised the equivalent of $100 million a year for 5 years, to make up for budget cuts since 2000 that took place while student enrollment increased 10%.  Ha'aretz says that in the past 5 years the schools have together cut some 800 jobs, equivalent to all the jobs at a single institution.

Part of the dispute is over who controls the money. Ha'aretz says the Finance Ministry has earmarked the money for institutional reforms. The universities call that demand an attack on their academic freedom.

The Forward points to other strings attached to the money: the Finance Ministry is insisting on a tuition increase. But in Israel, according to the report, tuition rates are set by the Knesset, (Israel's parliament) and not the universities. Facing an election, the Knesset has not raised tuition. Zvi Galil, president of Tel Aviv University, told the Forward, "We are in the absurd situation that we are facing financial devastation because the government has not met its own precondition for releasing funds to us."

Strikes over funding have become commonplace on Israeli campuses in the past few years. Two years ago, students went on strike for 6 weeks, and last year lecturers walked off the job for 13 weeks. Now it's the administrators' turn to take to the barricades, literally. The university heads joined students yesterday in a protest convoy that blocked traffic and caused large traffic jams on the busy Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway.

By Alan Kotok on October 28, 2008 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A political science graduate student was among four Americans killed by a bomb in the Sadr City section of Baghdad on Tuesday. According to the Washington Post, Nicole Suveges, 38, along with a State Department civilian employee and two U.S. soldiers, died when the blast occurred during a meeting of an Iraqi district council.

Suveges, employed by Department of Defense contractor BAE Systems, was assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team for the 4th Infantry Division to help carry out political, social, and cultural engagements with local Iraqi institutions. According to CNN, she had previously served as a reservist with the U.S. Army in Bosnia in the 1990s and had worked in Iraq in 2006 as a social scientist for an Army contractor.

Suveges was also a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. According to her faculty advisor, she planned to use her latest experience in Iraq to collect data for her dissertation on the experiences of ordinary citizens under a transitional government.  At Johns Hopkins, she was managing editor for the Review of International Political Economy. Suveges also earned a masters degree political science from George Washington University in Washington, DC and an undergraduate degree from University of Illinois at Chicago.

By Alan Kotok on June 27, 2008 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tucked away in a news release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on 11 April is a notice that DHS has proposed doubling the fee for student visas from $100 to $200. The fee is required of all new applicants for visas to attend academic and vocational schools in the U.S., and is non-refundable. DHS wants to raise other fees as well, including a nearly five-fold increase in the fee to certify American schools to accept foreign students, from $350 to $1,700

The proposed regulations--fee increases are officially considered regulations--are open for public comments, which can be submitted online. The due date for comments is 20 June.

Hat tip: Boston Globe

By Alan Kotok on May 1, 2008 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We had a steady flow of guests at the Meet the Science Careers Editors session yesterday (15 February) at the AAAS annual meeting. Here area few photos from the event.

Ric Weibl, Director of AAAS's Center for Careers in Science and Technology welcomes the guests.

Jim Austin, Brooke Allen, and Anne Sasso

We catch scientists VERY early in their careers

Vid Nukala and Babette Pain

Carol Milano, Jim Austin (foreground), and Kate Travis check out the Science Careers site

Sean Sanders (left), with Vasana Maneeratana (center), and José Fernández

By Alan Kotok on February 16, 2008 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The AAAS annual meeting, which  begins next week in Boston, will give attendees a chance to get together with friends old and new. In that spirit, we've scheduled a Meet the Science Careers Editors session on Friday 15 February at 3:00 p.m., in room 307 of the Hynes Center, where the annual meeting takes place. That room is just off Exhibit Hall D, where the Science/AAAS Career Fair will be going on. All of the Science Careers editors, including our European colleagues, will be there. If you have ideas for articles we should consider, have something else to tell us about careers in science (yours or in general), or would just like to meet us and chat, we'd love to see you.

Later that same afternoon, at 5:30 p.m., is a meet-up of the AAAS Facebook group, in Grand Ballroom K (fourth floor) of the nearby Marriott Copley Place. Watch the AAAS Group Facebook page for details (Facebook membership required).

With so much of our professional lives conducted online, these opportunities to interact in person are rare indeed. If you're in Boston for the AAAS meeting, or there for any reason, we hope you will drop by.

By Alan Kotok on February 8, 2008 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Institute of International Education (IIE) announced yesterday the 2008 winners of its Best Practices in International Education awards, and the first prize went to an internship program in Japan for science and engineering students. The NanoJapan initiative that won the top rating provides undergraduate summer internships in nanotechnology at Japanese labs.

The program is run by University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and Rice University in Houston. The two schools fund the initiative with a grant from National Science Foundation's Partnerships for International Research and Education program.

NanoJapan is open to freshman and sophmore students from any American institution with an interest in nanotechnology. Student interest in nanotechnology will be evaluated on the basis of their studies in topics such as nanoscale semiconductor devices, nanophotonics, and carbon nanotubes. While students in any discipline may apply, engineering and physics majors are preferred. And while the program encourages applicants with no previous travel to Japan, applicants need to demonstrate an interest in Japanese language and culture.

The program's learning experience doesn't end with the internship. On their return, the 2007 NanoJapan interns took part in a colloquium (PDF) at Rice University where they presented posters on their research. According to IIE, the program has encouraged 6 of the 16 2007 participants to continue their studies in Asia. Applications for 2008 NanoJapan internships close on 8 February.

By Alan Kotok on January 29, 2008 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When GrantsNet began adding new U.S. government science grants last spring, the volume of new funding opportunites on a given month tripled, which meant the monthly Funding News also tripled in size. To make it easier to find the grants you want in each Funding News, we added a search feature for each month's entries so you can avoid scrolling up and down the ever-lengthening Web page.

For those who have not visited the Funding News recently, we also moved the Deadline Watch to a separate page to make the Funding News less forbidding. The Deadline Watch lists GrantsNet entries with deadlines in the next four weeks.

The search feature uses Yahoo Pipes, an engrossing -- one may even call it addictive -- service that lets you create little applications like this one without writing computer code. In this case, we combined the two Funding News RSS feeds, for research funding and student and institutional support, and added a search box.

By Alan Kotok on January 18, 2008 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For three years, Science Careers has devoted its last issue of the year to highlighting our editors' choices for the best articles of the year, and we continued that tradition this year. Our editors could apply whatever criteria they deemed fit to the decision, but had to limit their choices to five articles only. The results are a mix of how-to articles, inspirational profiles, personal perspectives, and job-market commentaries.

You will notice that the last paragraph of the text before the article list asks readers to give us their take on how we're doing. While we respect our editors' opinions, it's you the readers who really matter. You can add a comment to this posting, send us e-mail, write on the wall of our Facebook page (run by GrantsNet database manager José Fernández), or discuss with peers and experts on the Science Careers Forum. If you really got something to say about your career in science or scientific careers in general -- more than few paragraphs -- send us an "In Person" essay.

Enjoy the Best of 2007, but let's hear from you in 2008. Best wishes for the new year.

By Alan Kotok on December 27, 2007 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Educational Testing Service (ETS) reported that it had to postpone the scheduled offering of its Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) on 15 December. According to the organization's Web site, ETS suffered "an internal service disruption during the check-in procedure" for the test. ETS offers the test at hundreds of locations worldwide, and uses the Internet to capture the test-takers' spoken and written responses. It still offers a paper-based TOEFL test in some locales.

ETS says it will offer a make-up test early next year. It will also provide on request a letter with an explanation of the delay to institutions expecting the test results for applicants.

TOEFL tests the ability of non-native speakers to use English in university settings. It measures abilities in reading, listening, speaking and writing English.

Hat tip: Inside Higher Ed.

By Alan Kotok on December 19, 2007 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)