Science Careers Blog

As reported today in several German newspapers (see sources below), many German professors should be getting raises next year, thanks to the complaints of a chemist. 

Erasmus, the European Commission's flagship program for training and education, will be 25 years old this year. To date, the program has allowed nearly three million students to study or do a work placement in another EU country.

Early-career scientists need to have a broad view of where their research field is heading so that they can choose a niche where they can make important and innovative contributions, and eventually establish themselves as independent researchers.

In the field of aging research, this challenge has been made a little easier by the release of the FUTURAGE Road Map, which is to constitute the European research agenda for aging over the next decade. Funded by the European Union, the FUTURAGE two-year consultation gathers the opinions of the field's research leaders, medical professionals, policy makers, industry, and older people across Europe to identify seven priority research themes illustrated by specific research questions.

The seven priority themes are:

• healthy aging for more life in years;
  
• maintaining and regaining mental capacity;
  
• inclusion and participation in the community and in the labour market;
  
• guaranteeing the quality and sustainability of social protection systems;
  
• aging well at home and in community environments;
  
• unequal aging and age-related inequalities;
  
• biogerontology: from mechanisms to interventions.

You can find the full Road Map here

Earlier this year Science Careers ran a monthly series with a Focus on Aging for advice on how to develop a career in one of the many fields pertaining to aging research.

Sister site ScienceInsider (SI) is reporting a new scheme in Sweden that aims to provide generous funding to postdocs from around the world to help them move into faculty positions at Swedish universities. The SI post, written by Science Careers contributing editor Elisabeth Pain, says that Sweden plans to offer 25 awards each year for the next 5 years, worth about 7.5 million SEK each -- that's about €820,000 or $1.14 million -- to be paid out over 5 years. That adds up to a total cost of about 937.5 million SEK, or $142 million. It's a private program, funded by the non-profit Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

As highlighted by our sister site Science Insider, the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc) today released a report outlining the working conditions of doctoral researchers in 12 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden).

Among the most striking findings is the discrepancy in funding available to Ph.D. candidates across the various countries. Science Insider writes: 

On Friday, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the winners of its Starting Grants, which offer early-career investigators up to 2 million euros over 5 years to help them establish or build up their research groups at European institutions.

It can be hard for researchers in the economic and social sciences and humanities to know what funding opportunities are available for them within the 7th European Research Framework Programme (FP7), especially beyond the Theme 8, "Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities." The netT4society project (funded by the EU) has just released a report listing current calls in other research areas that are relevant to the socio-economic sciences and humanities; examples include health, nanosciences, and environment. The report, entitled "Opportunities for Researchers in the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities," can be found on the net4society Web site. The report will be updated each year as new funding opportunities arise in FP7 and other European Research Area initiatives.

Among the news highlighted in the podcast: the Researcher Development Framework (RDF) which Vitae developed in the U.K. to help individual researchers and research institutions with their professional development is now undergoing trials across Europe as part of a project funded by the European Science Foundation. (See our previous blog entry for some quick background on the RDF).   

The European Research Council (ERC) today launched its fifth call for the ERC Starting Grants, which are designed to support outstanding early-career scientists as they set up or consolidate their independent research teams in Europe.

The Spanish Ministries for Science and Innovation and for Labor and Immigration today announced that they will jointly fund the initial training in research, development, and innovation of Ph.D.-holders and university graduates after recruitment by industry. The program is part of a national effort to boost innovation in Spanish industry. 

Microsoft's presentation software -- PowerPoint -- is almost universally used at scientific (and other) conferences, but not everyone is a fan. Many scientists have criticized PowerPoint's static and often overcrowded bullet points.

The Spanish Federation of Young Investigators (FJI)/Precarios today denounced delays and errors in the allocation of international fellowships for Spanish postdocs. "The terrible management of the postdoctoral grants maintains more than a thousand young investigators in an unsustainable situation," says the press release (translated from Spanish by this blogger). FJI/Precarios is a Spanish umbrella association that was created in 2000 to improve the working conditions of early-career researchers in Spain.

Research Councils UK (RCUK) have just released a video showing how the public can benefit from interacting with researchers, and how researchers can benefit from engaging with the public. 

ScienceInsider, our sister site, has posted about a new grant program from the European Research Council (ERC) to provide up to €150,000 to help scientists who already have ERC grants to help bring their science to market.

In time for the International Year of Chemistry 2011, the German Chemical Society (GDCh) has published a 72-page booklet in German on choosing and pursuing careers in chemistry and related fields. In it, chemists write in the first person about their careers and everyday life in a variety of work environments, including academia, large industry, small business, and freelance consulting.

The booklet also highlights non-traditional careers such as journalism and teaching. At the end, it offers practical tips on job searches, interviewing, and workplace etiquette. The society will pass out the booklet at its events and has also made it available for download in pdf format.

If you are a Ph.D. candidate or received your Ph.D within the last 2 years, and if you are looking for new avenues to do interesting work for industry, you may be interested in entering for the 'PhD Challenge.'

The European Research Council (ERC) announced the results of its third Starting Grants competition this week.

Altogether, 427 early-career researchers won a total of about €580 million that they will use to establish independent labs in Europe. Launched in 2007, the Starting Grants offer researchers of any nationality and age, and with between 2 and 12 years post-Ph.D. experience, as much as €2million over 5 years to build a research team anywhere in Europe.

On average, this year's ERC awardees are 36 years old. A little more than a quarter of them (26.5% compared to 23% last year) are women. Host institutions are in 21 countries, with the United Kingdom (79), France (71), and Germany (67) attracting the most grantees. Looking at research areas, 45.7% of the winning proposals are in physical sciences and engineering, 35.8% in life sciences, and 22.2% in social sciences and humanities.

A total of 2873 scientists applied for the grant this year, a 14% increase over last year but far below the more than 9,000 applications drawn by the first ERC call. With the ERC budget for the grants rising 40% this year, this year's success rate reached 15%. The budget for these grants is expected to continue to rise.

You can browse the list of winners by country or research domain (social sciences and humanities, / life sciences, / physical sciences and engineering). More statistics can also be found here. The deadline for applications in physical sciences and engineering has already closed, but life scientists may apply until 9 November 2010, and social scientists and humanists have until 24 November.

"Students should think more broadly about what a PhD could prepare them for. We should start selling a PhD as higher level education but not one that necessarily points you down a tunnel...We should not see moving out of academia as a failure. We need to see it as a stepping stone, a way of moving forward to something else."

-Stephen Curry, professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, quoted in Times Higher Education in 'Postdoctoral scientists urged to spread their wings'. Click the link to read the full article and a rather lively discussion in the comments section about that statement.

You may feel that, once you've got tenure and set up your lab and life in a place you like, your scientific career will go on forever. But while it's quite common for professors in the United States to remain active and productive researchers in older age, national laws and cultural traditions make it much more difficult for professors in Europe to do the same.

A recent article in The Scientist highlights the difficulties professors face if they wish to continue running a lab beyond the retirement age imposed by many European countries: "When a recently retired colleague warned [former Karolinska Institutet professor Jan-Åke] Gustafsson, who was quickly approaching Sweden's upper mandatory retirement age of 67, that emeritus professors aren't taken seriously in Sweden, he began to realize it was all too true. Emeritus colleagues received fewer and shorter grants and were more segregated from their departments," the article states.

For many well-established professors, the only way to keep their research going at full speed, if at all, is to start all over again overseas. Of course, you're much more marketable and can land much more prestigious positions if you've got a life-long career's worth of achievements on your CV. But the advice that the later-career professors offer for starting over at a new institution strike me as applicable to scientists at the beginning of their careers. Here's some of their advice:

Research your options
"'Start early, at around 60, to really think about what you want to do,' says Gustafsson... Gustafsson talked with colleagues about the pros and cons of becoming an emeritus professor before making his decision, and once he was sure, began his search for a new institution several years before reaching retirement age." 

Plan ahead
"Careful planning will allow you to avoid the worst aspect of moving - the loss of productivity, says Gustafsson. 'Organize the move efficiently, starting with the administrative details, a year before,' he says."

Don't burn any bridges
"As [former University of Helsinki, Finland Albert] de la Chapelle dissolved his lab in preparation for the move, able to only bring a few junior faculty members with him, he was faced with seven dependent doctoral candidates still at Helsinki. 'We had to really scramble to get their lives organized and get them co-mentors in Finland,' says de la Chapelle... But it was worth it: Today, those graduate students remain his key ties back to the university, he says."

Forced retirement is one reason why you may have to unwillingly leave your institution, at least in Europe, but in these days of economic recession even tenured professors have been made redundant. This makes it all the more important to keep your career-development skills well-honed all along the way for when you might need them.

You can read the full article on The Scientist's Web site.

Last week I attended a talk about presentation skills at the Microsoft Research Summer School in Cambridge, U.K., an annual event for computer science Ph.D. students. I've attended many presentations in the course of my work, but none have left me feeling as energized at 9:30 in the morning as this one did. What made this talk so different? The speaker, Ken Shaw from Benchmark Communication Techniques, comes from a theatrical background, where he learned how to engage effectively with an audience -- and he has transferred those skills to giving presentations brilliantly.

Following a successful career in theatre, Shaw moved into training corporate clients in presentation skills 19 years ago. Since then, he's also worked closely with the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, training future CEOs how to communicate effectively. Then, about 2 years ago, someone from the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge approached him about teaching these skills to academics too, and since then he has been helping Ph.D. students and postdocs bring a bit of corporate showmanship into academic presentations. "Half of Ph.D. students will enter the corporate world and another quarter will regularly interact with corporate companies in their research," Shaw says. "Changes are happening in academia and I'm attending to that need."

Here is a summary of his advice:

Look and sound confident

• Do vocal exercises before your presentation. This will help you articulate your words and sound more confident. Some exercises: Move your tongue to the back of your throat and say the months of the year. Then bring your tongue to the front of your mouth pointing downwards, between your lower teeth and your gum, and again go through the months of the year.

• People often get nervous in front of audiences because they feel like they are being looked at. Instead, reverse this feeling and look at your audience: Who got here early? Is anyone in the front row? Are people clumping together into groups?


Why should the audience listen to your talk?

• Don't just impart information during your talk -- you could do that via email. Instead your talk must be a proposal, with a recommendation backed up by justification. That's when a presentation shifts from being boring to dynamic.

• People shouldn't know that the presentation is over just because you've stopped talking. You should have a clear point to make and when you've arrived at that point, that is the end.


General presentation advice

• Try giving a presentation without using slides and turn the talk into a discussion. By doing this, the audience will feel more comfortable to ask questions. (Showing by example, Shaw used no slides or backdrops during his talk. It was just him on stage, engaging with the audience--and it worked!)

• Think about reversing the norm of having a large segment dedicated to the presentation with a few minutes at the end for questions, because a talk only gets interesting when someone questions or challenges what you've said. For a 30-minute presentation, Shaw recommends 10 minutes for the presentation and 20 minutes for Q&A. Also, instead of just asking at the end if there are any questions, try to steer the discussion into the direction that you would like to take it. This removes some of the fear about the final Q&A segment.

• Allow humor into your talk, but don't fall into the trap of telling jokes. There's a danger your jokes could fall flat -- or worse, offend your audience. You're not there to entertain; your main aim should be content and clarity.
 
• Presenting to a large audience is different than giving the same talk to a small group of people. Large audiences are far more passive and require more encouragement to keep them engaged.
 

It's pretty common for a scientist who participates in a press conference to appear in a news article that same day. And that was indeed the case for Elin Ekblom-Bak, who presented her ongoing work on the possible detrimental health effects of sitting for prolonged periods at a July 4 satellite event at the Euroscience Open Forum in Turin, Italy. But it wasn't her research that made the headlines; it was the critical goal she scored the previous day in a soccer match against the former champions of a professional women's football (soccer) league in Sweden.

Ekblom-Bak, 29, is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Medicine at the Karolinska Institute and the Astrand Laboratory of Work Physiology in the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences. She's also a midfielder for a professional soccer team. It's a combination of activities that she finds complementary. "They're very similar, these two worlds," she says. "At the elite, national level, playing soccer is a competition -- you have to stand out, you have to be tough. Science is a tough world to show off your knowledge and  ... you have to dare to do things. It's really helped me being a soccer player at that level to get the mental strength" for science.

Her research did make headlines in January when she was the lead author on an editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that outlined what has become the core hypothesis of her Ph.D.: That sedentary behavior may be harmful even in people who get regular exercise. In other words, working out hard several times a week may not compensate for the ill effects of a desk job. "We know that not exercising and prolonged sitting are two distinct behaviors," she says. There have been a handful of studies in this area (compared to thousands focused on physical activity and fitness), and animal studies suggest that prolonged inactivity -- 3 to 4 hours or more -- alters expression of lipoprotein lipase, which can affect, for example, muscle glucose levels, fatty acid metabolism, and cholesterol levels. Ekblom-Bak aims to clarify the role of prolonged sitting on long-term health using a population-based dataset at the Karolinska Institute. She plans to do some mechanistic studies as well, she says.

She got into health science and physiology because, as she says, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." Her father is a professor of physiology, and Ekblom-Bak works in his group at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences. "It's really fascinating to be able to work with him. I really adore that."

On the sports side of her life, she has been playing football since she was 4 years old. For her, though, it wasn't a matter of choosing between an academic career and a sports career: "I did not choose. I loved [soccer] too much. But I saw a lot of bad examples of girls playing football and when they were 35 years old they [had] two knee injuries and no job, no education, nothing." She trains in the afternoons and evenings, which leaves her mornings free to study and work on her research.

She juggles more than soccer balls and science. She and her husband (who is the chiropractor for her soccer team) have a 9-month old daughter. She also works as a television commentator for major soccer games, which has made her enough of a celebrity to warrant an article about her comeback after her daughter was born.

Her medium-term plans are to keep playing soccer and keep working on her research -- because both the soccer and science aspects of her life are unpredictable. "It's a tough world. You have to create your own opportunities, search for your own money and your own job," she says. "You have to have good luck to get a good opportunity. If you have the right spirit, I think you can do it."

If you want to start an organization aimed at encouraging and supporting young scientists, get senior scientists involved. This was one of the key messages of a presentation by Jenny Baeseman of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) at this weekend's Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) in Turin, Italy.

APECS was born out of the involvement of young scientists in the 2007-2008 International Polar Year (IPY), a story told on Science Careers in April 2008. Among the goals of the polar year "was to expand the polar community," said David Carlson of the International Polar Year program office in the United Kingdom. "There was nothing in the system preventing young scientists to come with ideas and say, 'we want to be the next generation of polar scientists.'" And that's effectively what the founders of APECS did.

APECS started out with no budget but a lot of enthusiasm and the support of the IPY program office, Baeseman said. Its early members used free tools such as Google Groups and Skype to organize themselves and start creating an active community of young polar scientists. But "from the very beginning, we decided that it is great that young people get together... but we don't want to be by ourselves," Baeseman said. "We wanted to learn from senior researchers ... to continue the continuum of knowledge."

In 2008, APECS signed a memorandum of understanding with two large international polar organizations -- the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) -- that gave them recognition as the primary organization for young polar researchers. This "gave us institutional recognition, even though we were just was a Google Group and Web site," Baeseman said.

APECS soon started organizing career development activities at other organizations' meetings, inviting senior polar researchers to sit on discussion panels and share their experience. "And then we all go for a beer and it gets nice and lively," Baeseman said. APECS also runs discussion forums and technical workshops in which "we invite experts to come and give advice... Nothing that we do is by ourselves," she said. It is "always with senior researchers."

APECS runs a mentorship program with a database of senior scientists interested in mentoring younger researchers. This makes it easier to find the right connections if, say, you're a young scientist in Norway who wants to go and work in Germany, Baeseman said. "You know they are willing to support you," she said. The organization also hosts virtual poster sessions on their Web site, which they like to think of as "the Facebook of polar science," Baeseman said. 

Today APECS is tied into several international organizations, gets involved in science policy, organizes its own conferences, and runs education and outreach activities. "When you're a grad student you're trained to do the science, you're not trained to be a scientist," Baeseman said. "We help to provide the training to be a scientist."

While Baeseman credits the success of APECS to dedicated volunteers, support from established organizations, and support from senior researchers devoted to promoting young researchers, Baeseman's own dedication to the organization belongs on that list. When Science Careers first met Baeseman at a 2007 conference in Lindau, Germany, she was a tenure-track faculty member at Kent State University. "I decided that the tenure track wasn't for me," she said.

The opportunity came up to go to the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States in Fairbanks, Alaska, to continue to develop APECS, so she took it. Toward the end of that time, the association put out a call to individual countries to host an international office for APECS. Norway stepped forward, and Baeseman now lives there and works full time as director of APECS.

She continues to do some research for a National Science Foundation grant she received while she was in Fairbanks; she published a research paper and wrote a book chapter this year. "I think it's important that when you start to make this transition from a research career to something else that you try to keep a foot in the research door."

At the same time, her devotion to APECS and its mission has provided her with a new career: "You have to find your talent and figure out where you can help science the most, and for me I think it's the administration level, helping scientists make science happen."

-by Elisabeth Pain and Kate Travis

Almost any funding application requires you to summarize the academic impact of your research, and many take it a step further and ask for the economic and social impact as well. For the U.K. research councils, that latter statement comes in the form of the newly renamed Pathways to Impact, a two-page proposal document attached to grant application forms. Researchers are expected to explain who could benefit from their work and what steps they will take to reach those beneficiaries.

Cora O'Reilly, Information and Communications Technology Manager with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), led a workshop at the University of Cambridge last week to give some guidance on completing the Pathways to Impact document. Here are some of her top tips:

• Remember that your application will go through a peer review process, and you will have to convince those peer reviewers about the impact of your research.
• Social impact -- that is, how you will enhance quality of life and public services -- is ranked as highly as the economical impact of research.
• When thinking about social impact, think about who your audience is and how you can better engage with them. For example, could you publish your work in an additional publication that will have a wider appeal than a specialty journal?
• Be clear and explain what exactly you will do, and remember that you don't have to completely fill all of the pages in the Pathways to Impact document. Your proposal will benefit from being clear and concise.
• Given how many different ways that research can benefit the economy or society, it's unlikely that your work won't have any impact. Simply stating that your research won't have any impact isn't sufficient; if that's what you put in your proposal, you will be expected to explain why this is the case.
• You can apply for additional funds from your research council to help you fulfil your Pathways to Impact proposal. Extra funding is available, for example, to cover additional publication costs, training or employing people to translate your technical research so that it can be understood by a general audience.

There is an FAQ section and more tips on the Research Councils U.K. Pathways to Impact Web site.

-Sarah Reed

In the U.K. general elections earlier this month, University of Cambridge biochemist Julian Huppert won Cambridge's seat in the U.K. parliament. Huppert has been active in local politics for years in addition to leading a small research group at the university. However, his latest political promotion means he'll give up his lab. Huppert spoke with ScienceInsider last week. Some highlights:

Q: Do you plan to give up research or try to find time for it?

J.H.: Being a research scientist and a member of parliament are both full-time jobs. I will have to leave the lab. It was a tough decision. ... The general perception is that I can probably do more for the research community by being a voice who can speak up for it.

Q: On a more practical level then, what's tougher, science or politics?

J.H.: They're both tough in different ways, and they're both unpredictable in different ways. Certainly politics is more sociable -- it allows you to think more about the whole range of different issues, while science often tends to be very narrow.

Q: Growing up, did you want to be a scientist or a politician? Have you always been juggling the two interests?

J.H.: When I was growing up, I was always trying to do something worthwhile. I was always interested in science. Both my parents are scientists in various ways. And so I studied science. I actually initially intended to switch to law. I worked with the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] for a while, then did a Ph.D. in science. But by the time I got to my Ph.D., I was already an elected county councilor. And so I spent my whole Ph.D. and postdoc juggling these two roles. I got my first academic position and then the opportunity to become an MP came up in Cambridge, and so I switched. It's always been a challenge to find the best way of doing something worthwhile.

Read the full interview on Science's policy blog, ScienceInsider.

Related articles:

• A Matter of Policy
• Finding Your Way Into Policy Careers in Europe
• A Scientist's Roadmap to Capitol Hill
• Communicating Science to Policy-Makers and Policy to Scientists

March is Women's History Month, and this week in particular there have been some exciting highlights of women in science.

For starters, today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day of blogging about women in science. Bloggers can register their posts with the Finding Ada Web site, where anyone can view a map or a list of the posts by the women profiled in the posts. This list will no doubt update throughout the day and perhaps even longer. (Note: Organizers of today's event note on Twitter that they're victims of their own success -- their Web site keeps crashing from all the visitors. If the links above don't work, check back later.)

I was pleased to see on the list a post from SarahAskew's Sarah Kendrew on Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who heads the optical instrumentation unit at the space firm Astrium. I had the pleasure of meeting Maggie at the U.K. launch of the She Is An Astronomer campaign, and we later profiled her in Science Careers. She's one of those people for whom the term "infectious enthusiasm" was invented. Sarah's post definitely confirms that I'm not the only one who thinks that.

Maggie also made The Independent's list of today's women trailblazers in science, published earlier this week. Another scientist on The Independent's list jumped out at me: Ottoline Leyser, a plant biologist at the University of York. Ottoline is a passionate scientist who is also committed to career development. I'm mentioning her because she received the Royal Society's Rosalind Franklin Award in 2003, and the project she did with the prize money was to assemble a book, "Mothers in Science: 64 Ways To Have it All" (links to full-text PDF of the book). I think this is such an excellent idea and a great resource.

Also this week, the Royal Society published a list of the most influential women in the history of science. The list includes Mary Anning, Dorothy Hodgkin, Rosalind Franklin, and Anne McLaren, to name a few.

Take a look at the lists above -- perhaps you'll be inspired to write a blog post of your own about a woman in science who has inspired you. You can also see who's tweeting about Ada Lovelace Day by searching Twitter for the hashtag #ALD10. There are so many great posts out there this week on women in science that I can't link to them all, but feel free to post your favorites in the comments below.

Today marks the 100th annual International Women's Day. Here are a few sites online that are promoting women in science today:

AthenaWeb is highlighting videos of this year's L'Oreal-UNESCO laureates, who come from the United States, Mexico, France, Philippines, and Egypt.

CERN is celebrating International Women's Day by letting viewers peek in at the experiment control rooms to see how many women are working at any given time (when I checked in earlier, it was about half-and-half men and women). Be sure to scroll down to see some great posters of women scientists in various departments at the megalab.

Imperial College London has an exhibit called 100 Women - 100 Visions that features photos and quotes from women at Imperial at all levels -- undergraduates on up to senior faculty.

I'd love to know about more special online events for women in science; feel free to add them in the comments section below.

On Science Careers, we've profiled some awesome women in the last year or so:

• Patricia Alireza, a physicist who started her Ph.D. after her kids were in school and finished at age 45;

• Laia Crespo found that, for her, a career in science meant a career in venture capital;

• Gina Wingood, public health professor who has devoted her career to designing AIDS intervention programs for African-American women;

• Kristala Jones Prather, who is one of two minority women on the chemical engineering faculty at MIT;

• Regan Theiler, a physician-scientist who works in both the laboratory and the delivery room to improve women's health;

• Cecilia Aragon, a computer scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Computational Research Division, who returned to finish her Ph.D. after a more than a decade spent working as a pilot;

• Michal Sharon, a structural biologist at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, who recently landed a starting grant from the European Research Council.

Attending a professional conference can boost the career prospects of science students and postdocs, but getting to these events can be expensive. GrantsNet recently added travel grants from NextBio and the Pasteur Foundation to help students and postdocs defray the cost of attending a scientific conference. NextBio's competition is limited to its student users while the Pasteur Foundation's grants will support student or postdoc attendees at one of its upcoming events.

NextBio, a software company in the life sciences, is holding a competition for Student Travel Grants that will help the winners attend the scientific conference of their choice. The grants are for student researchers currently enrolled in an M.S., M.D., or Ph.D. program and registered with Nextbio. Applicants must submit a one-page essay telling how NextBio has assisted them in their research and must include a link to the applicant's NextBio profile. First, second, and third-place winners will receive funding of $1000, $500, and $250 respectively. Grant applications must be submitted to NextBio by 30 March 2010. Recipients will be notified by 29 April 2010.

The Pasteur Foundation offers travel grants for American scientists who have already registered to attend the International Congress on Viruses of Microbes at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Applicants must be Ph.D. students or postdoctoral researchers who will be presenting a poster or oral presentation at the meeting. Zuccaire Travel Grants-Viruses of Microbes offer funding up to $2000 to attend the conference, which will take place 21-25 June 2010. Send all necessary documents to pasteurus@aol.com and virusmicrobes2010@pasteur.fr. The application deadline is 1 April 2010.

The full announcements and application details for these programs can be found on the Nextbio and Pasteur Foundation Web sites.

If you're interviewing for jobs, the folks doing the hiring will probably do a Google search on your name -- at a minimum. This isn't news; we've certainly written about it before. But it may be surprising to learn that, according to a recent survey of 1100 hiring managers, 70% of U.S. companies say they have disqualified candidates based on what they find online when they do those searches. That same survey found that only 7% of U.S. consumers think their online footprint affects their job search.

The survey, commissioned by Microsoft and released earlier this year, included interviews with recruiters, hiring managers, human resources professionals, and consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. There were some notable differences in responses across the countries; for example, 41% of hiring managers in the U.K., 16% in Germany, and 14% in France said they've disqualified candidates base on what they've found out about the candidate online.

At the same time, 13% and 10% of consumers (who aren't well defined in the report, other than the fact that they use the Internet and half of them were under age 30) in Germany and France, respectively think that online information about them would affect their job search. This figure is 9% for U.K. consumers.

Three-quarters of recruiters and HR professionals surveyed say their companies formally require that hiring personnel research each applicant online. Recruiters reported that they look at social networking sites, photo and video sharing sites, professional and business networking sites, personal web sites, blogs, news sharing sites, online forums, virtual world sites, and online gaming sites, among others, though the percentage of recruiters who search each of these categories varies.

So why would a company reject a candidate based on what they find online? In descending order, the answers given were as follows:

• concerns about the candidate's lifestyle
• inappropriate comments and text written by the candidate
• unsuitable photos, videos, and information
• inappropriate comments or text written by friends or relatives
• comments criticizing previous employers, co-workers, or clients
• inappropriate comments or text written by colleagues or work acquaintances
• membership in certain groups and networks
• discovery that information given by the candidate was false
• poor communication skills displayed online
• concern about the candidate's financial background.

Eight in 10 consumers say they make some effort to keep personal and professional online identities separate. What do they do? Here are some of the responses:

• Regularly search for information about themselves online
• Use alerts to notify them when their name is mentioned online
• Use privacy settings on social networking sites
• Restrict access to personal Web site
• Use multiple online profiles

The take-home message (though not one that's emphasized in the survey report) is that you need to pay attention to what people can find out about you online, particularly if you're doing a job search. Be mindful of what a simple search of your name and your e-mail address will bring up. You can't really do anything about data on people with the same name as you, but if there is potentially harmful or untrue information about the real you, try to get rid of it. And, consider carefully those college photos that anyone can search and find. Our favorite in-house story on that last category: Our editor did a Google search on a source quoted in an article on professionalism and found that the source's Facebook profile photo showed him sitting on a toilet, beer in hand. Fortunately for him, he already had a job.

The full survey report (PDF) and a slide presentation on it are available on the Microsoft Web site.

This week, the U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) announced that it will commit up to £15 million (about US$23 million) to training in food security research and development through its Advanced Training Partnerships scheme. "The scheme will support the development of staff within the sector and help companies with succession planning in niche skill areas. Collaboration between training providers and industry partners will ensure that high level skills relevant to crops, livestock, and food are employed throughout the development pipeline," it says here.

It's a timely announcement, as Science Magazine devotes much of this week's issue to the critical issue of food security -- that is, ensuring an adequate food supply for the world's population, expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The coverage includes reviews, perspective articles, a special news package, and an editorial. This week's Science podcast is devoted entirely to food security.

Science Careers pitched in with two articles on the topic: An overview piece, Careers in Food Security Span Several Disciplines, by Wales-based writer Cath Janes, and a profile, Plant Geneticist Cultivating a Future for Peanut Farming in Uganda, written by freelance writer Gaia Vince.

The articles both illustrate the multidisciplinary nature of a career in food security. "You have to ask yourself how you can get into food security," U.K. science adviser John Beddington told Janes. "There are lots of disciplines relating to food security, and that makes it an attractive career. Yet you have to understand the science as well as how your work is applicable to food producers in tackling a lack of water or their fight against pests."

Greetings to those of you coming to the blog from the Working in the Media event at the University of Cambridge! And hello to everyone else, too. :) Below is a round-up of articles and resources on science writing, editing, and similar careers. Enjoy!

Articles from Science Careers:

Starting a Career in Science Writing

• Articles include:
• Some Thoughts on Becoming a Science Writer
• Science Journalism Degrees: Do They Make a Difference?
• Breaking into the Media -- Do You Need Formal Training?
• Survival Secrets of Freelance Writers

Careers in Science Editing: Feature Index
This feature contains more than two dozen profiles of scientists who have found careers in scientific editing, whether it's at book publishers, journals, or international agencies.

Getting the Message Across: Scientists in Public Relations
More than a dozen profiles of scientists who've found rewarding work in public relations at agencies and scientific organizations.

Science Broadcasting: Feature Index
Scientists from around the world talk about working in radio and television, whether it's full time or an occasional thing.

Careers in Medical Writing: Opening Doors *Feature Index*
Medical writing includes many different types of jobs, from working in biotech companies to regulatory agencies. This collection of essays covers some of these diverse jobs. We also revisited this topic more recently in Working as a Medical Writer.

Associations and Other Resources:

The Association of British Science Writers has some useful resources, including its booklet, "So you want to be a science writer".

The World Federation of Science Journalists has an online course in science journalism, with modules written by experts in each topic.

The European Commission has published the European Guide to Science Journalism Training, which does what it says on the tin.

If you'd like to try out a career in the media, why not apply for a media fellowship? The two largest programs available are the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellows Program and the British Science Association Media Fellowships. (The deadline for the AAAS fellowship has unfortunately passed (it was Jan. 15), but the deadline for the British Science Association fellowship is March 2.)

According to a story published today by Zoë Corbyn in the Times Higher Education supplement, the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom has urged its principal investigators (PIs) to keep a better check on the originality of draft papers written by younger scientists.

The faculty's research strategy committee recently recommended "appropriate supervision of postdoctoral staff, 'including the previewing of draft papers' and the use of 'native English-speaking staff to support junior colleagues," Corbyn writes. The recommendation follows a case of plagiarism that led to the withdrawal of a paper that had been published last July. As explained by the faculty's dean of research, "the postdoc had inappropriately copied a large piece of text, and the principal investigator... had not checked his work," Corbyn reports.

Close mentoring and good training are needed to help young scientists learn proper procedures -- some plagiarism is unintentional -- and adopt appropriate ethical standards. But there is something in the recommendation that makes me a little uneasy. While it puts the onus on the PI to guarantee original research and writing, it seems to imply that only early-career scientists are prone to plagiarism. 

To me, a more appropriate recommendation would be to encourage and train both PIs and young scientists on how to avoid, detect, and report plagiarism -- by their younger AND their older colleagues.

Read the full THE story here.

More than 70% of employers say they are not receiving enough applications from doctoral graduates. That is the finding of a new report, "Recruiting Researchers: Survey of Employer Practice 2009," by Vitae, the U.K.-funded career development organization for doctorate holders and postdocs. "What we are looking for is first class brains," one employer noted.

Vitae surveyed 104 employers from a diverse mix of sectors, size, and academic orientation, ranging from, for example, QinetiQ and AstraZeneca to Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Office Depot. Nearly three quarters of the companies are interested in recruiting doctoral graduates, but many employers feel they are not adequately reaching this group of potential employees. This could indicate a trend of increasing interest among employers toward doctoral graduates, the report's authors hypothesize, proposing an additional study for 2010 to establish if this is in fact the case.  

About a third of companies surveyed say they do actively recruit doctoral graduates, and 73% said they would welcome more applications from Ph.D. holders. Doctoral graduates, then, should take note of this and learn to articulate their unique skills to stand out during the ranking process, the report concludes.

What are those unique skills? David Cairncross, secretary of the CBI Inter-Company Academic Relations Group, writes in the report, "The process of achieving a doctorate develops an enquiring mind, problem-solving abilities and the ability to assimilate new ideas quickly" -- which are all highly valued skills even in a tough job market. The participating employers ranked data analysis, problem solving, and drive and motivation as the skills in which they expect top performance from doctorate holders. Project management, interpersonal skills, leadership, and commercial awareness were generally ranked lower.

"We must ensure that there is awareness on all sides of the very real commercial benefits which can be gained by the U.K. economy from employing an extraordinarily talented and diverse group of people," Cairncross writes.

The full report (PDF) and a short summary of the report are available on the Vitae Web site.

- Sverker Lundin

As we waved goodbye to the Noughties (a term I hadn't actually heard until about 2 weeks ago) and welcomed 2010, I found myself doing the annual personal inventory of what I accomplished last year and what I want to do in the next. I kept coming back to a question I heard repeated over and over a few months ago: "How are you going to have no regrets on Sunday?"

This isn't a question about Catholic guilt (unless you want it to be): It's a question for anyone who's due (or overdue) for a hard look at his or her personal goals and career interests. It came from Peter Hawkins, director of the Windmills program, who gave the closing plenary talk at the Vitae Researcher Development Conference in September. He had asked us to think of our lives as a week: You're born on Monday morning. Monday night, you're 12 years old. By Tuesday night, you're 24; Wednesday, 36 years old; and so on.

Sunday is the last "day" of your life ("If you do the health and fitness stuff, you might have a bank holiday Monday," Hawkins quipped). "Where are you in the week?" Hawkins asked. "Where are the people who are important to you in your life? Wherever you are in your week, how are you going to have no regrets on Sunday?"

He led us through a series of exercises to get us thinking about how each of us would answer that question. He started by asking, of the hundreds of skills you have (yes, you have hundreds of skills), do you know which five or six you really love using? What are they? Then, are you maximizing those skills in a way that inspires you every day?

The next set of exercises came from Monday morning -- childhood, in other words. He used six things found on a playground to frame the discussion: Swings (life is full of ups and downs), see-saw (you've got to find balance), a roundabout (merry-go-round to Americans -- life can spin us in circles), a climbing frame (there are obstacles), a bench (the community around you), and a slide (the things you need to do to take the plunge).

I thought the series of questions he asked for some of these items were useful, so I'll share them here.

To avoid getting stuck in the roundabout, think about what you'd like to achieve in four areas:
-In terms of work, what would you like to achieve? What is important in the next 10 or 20 years of your career to have no regrets on Sunday?
-What would you like to learn? What skills and talents would you like to acquire?
-In terms of playing and having fun, what would you like to accomplish? Have you focused on your passions? Have you travelled as much as you'd like? Pursued hobbies you've dreamed of doing?
-What would you like to do in terms of giving? "In a hundred years' time, you won't be remembered for the size of your house, the size of your bank balance, or the speed of your car. You'll be remembered for whose lives you've touched," Hawkins said. How have you used the skills you're passionate about to give to others?

Then, the obstacles: What is the biggest barrier that's preventing you from having no regrets about what you can accomplish? Then, question it. If it's time, how much time? If it's money, how much money? "Is the barrier a real barrier or is it just a reasonable excuse not to live your life?" Hawkins asked.  
 
Next, who is sitting on your bench supporting you? Who are your mentors? Who is missing from your bench?

Finally, think about one thing you could do to push yourself down the slide to accomplish your goals. "What leap of faith are you going to take your personal or professional life forward?" he asked.

At the conference in September, these exercises meant different things to different people at my table. For some, it was a very career-oriented exercise. For others, the questions struck an intensely personal chord. Grab a notebook and answer those questions for yourself if you'd like -- I surprised myself when I saw my answers on paper. If you have a half an hour or so, you can watch Hawkins' presentation on the Vitae Web site. Hawkins also has more exercises on the Windmills Web site.

"We only have one shot at it," Hawkins said at the end of the talk. "We're all going to have the ups and downs, we're all going to have challenges with the balance. We're all going to go around in circles. Find the right people on your bench, and take the plunge."

Happy 2010, everyone: May it be a year full of personal discovery, growth, success, and no regrets.

The author and her husband work on balance during a 50-mile bike ride in the Suffolk countryside.

Rachel Armstrong defies categorization. Trained as a physician, Armstrong practiced medicine for about 6 years before leaving to work in pharmaceutical communications and to pursue artistic collaborations. Now a teaching fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, she was a 2009 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Global Fellow, where her talk centered on her current work on "metabolic materials" to solve architectural challenges -- such as growing a synthetic reef under Venice to save it from rising water levels.

So, it's next to impossible to describe what she does in a few words -- and that's deliberate: "Once you start becoming categorized, you start restricting your available options to solve problems," she told an audience at the Wellcome Collection in London earlier this month.

The work she does now is part synthetic biology, part chemistry, part architecture, all with a healthy dose of creativity: "I'm driven by the fundamental creativity of science," she said. "We hear about the rational side of science, we don't really get to hear about the emotional commitment that scientists make to their research. It is not your rational brain that keeps you in the lab until 11 o'clock at night."

Armstrong loved both biology and art as a kid, but was nudged toward the sciences in school. "By the time I went through school, I was told that sciences was where I wanted to be. So by the time I'd reached university and enrolled in medical sciences, I hadn't even thought about what the outcome would be -- that I'd end up as a doctor."

She found that, while she loved interacting with patients, she felt a sort of ethical conflict in practicing medicine. "The tension I felt was practicing by protocol as opposed to practicing from first principles," she said. "That's where my sense of an ethical conflict came from. You go into medicine as a complete idealist, but then you end up with someone else's politics."

When she left medicine, she worked as a multimedia producer in the pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, she started collaborating with artists such as Orlan and Stelarc. "I used the creative aspects of science to ask the questions that interested me, but outside the laboratory."

Her interest and curiosity converged in architecture. She had been invited to teach students about the impact of technology on the body, she says, but "I realized that rather than making buildings that were body-centric, the paradigm could be reversed so that we could consider our architecture as a kind of artificial ecology," she told me in a follow-up e-mail this week. "This was really exciting as it allowed me to think about the synthetic biology questions that I loved in a new way. Not only was the science that I enjoyed now accessible in a social (rather than a laboratory) space but could be challenged at a whole new level of scale."

At the Wellcome Collection talk, she joked that when she left medicine, she basically had no qualifications as a scientist. "You're good for nothing," she quipped. So I asked her by e-mail this week how she made herself into an expert in this niche of living architecture:

"By having a vision and pursuing it with passion, despite the obstacles and contradictions of not really 'fitting' in with any readily recognizable discipline. But I would also say that I am lucky. I think we are in the midst of a change in the way that we view the world," she wrote. "As we realize that most things are not based on Cartesian mechanics which assumes that objects are made of the sum of their parts, nothing more, we now are having to admit that 'life' is much more complex and interconnected, so we are having to talk across disciplines and fields of expertise and cross-fertilize our knowledge."

Photo credit: Wellcome Images

"Nobody queues like the British," Crispin Harris said recently to an audience of career advisers. At the time, the 50 of us in the room were, in fact, standing in a queue -- a single-file line that snaked around the room, formed within seconds from a chaotic group milling about.

The significance of this might be lost on some, but to an expat (like me), standing in a queue to, say, get on a bus is a uniquely British behavior. Harris and his colleague Pete Bailie are co-directors of VOX Coaching, which runs courses and workshops on giving presentations, networking, and managing relationships. They've recently teamed up with the University of Manchester to develop a course on British culture. The point of the queuing exercise was to emphasize that recognizing such subtle, ahem, cues about behavior can be a key to understanding a person's and a country's culture.

"Very often people just find the English hard to read," Harris said in an interview after a workshop, "Culture Club: Why Are the British Like That?" at the Vitae Researcher Development Conference held in September at the University of Warwick. "It's not that they find the behavior difficult or challenging or threatening; it's that they find it incomprehensible. They can't read it, so they can't learn."

Recognizing cultural differences in behaviors and ways of conducting business can help people interact better with the others around them, Bailie added. "A lot of the information that we're giving off is through our vocal tone and our body language, and that's where we make judgments about people," Bailie said. "So you have to think, OK, what of that is them personally, and what is them culturally?"

This comes into play particularly in the lab, both with supervisor relationships and with relationships with lab peers, who may be from very different regions of the world and have to work closely together. "In terms of management style, the British management style is to give quite indirect suggestions, often with a bit of humor, in a very roundabout way, and then muddle through, whereas the model in Germany or the USA or Japan is very different," Bailie said. "In the States, communication is much more direct and ... people appreciate a bit more inspiration and a bit of sell. In Britain, that really doesn't go down well."

At the September session, Bailie and Harris handed out a worksheet that divided certain cultural characteristics into three groups: linear active, multi-active, and reactive. Do the people around you talk half the time, talk most of the time, or listen most of the time? Are they polite but direct, emotional, or polite and indirect? Do they use limited body language, unlimited body language, or subtle body language?

Acknowledging these types of differences in the people around you is the goal of Bailie and Harris workshops, rather than telling people how to adapt their behavior when they come to Britain, Harris emphasized. "We're not saying that people will learn how they should behave," Harris said. "[They will] just understand some of the processes whereby they will learn by observing, by questioning, by asking for help, and by trying out different things."

This morning I took part in a local career event organized by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) Barcelona and the Parc Científic Barcelona (PCB). This career event, entitled 'Career progression in science -- options beyond the bench' took an unusual format that I think worked really well. 

In a 1-hour session, 7 speakers each talked about their own career transition for 5-10 minutes. A good breadth of career options were represented; among the speakers were a research and innovation manager, an entrepreneur, an investment manager, a science communicator, a European grant program officer, a patent attorney, and a science journalist (that was me).

It was interesting to see the many common themes that emerged from these presentations:  the realization at Ph.D. or postdoctoral level that a career in science is not the right path, either because one doesn't enjoy some particular aspects of research or because one isn't a first-division researcher; the risk that leaving a career in academia represents; the many small steps one has to make to stir his or her career in a new direction; the readiness to experience different jobs and countries; and the importance of continuing to have a wide range of professional experiences even after the transition. 

After these presentations, we all went into a coffee room where each speaker was allocated a table. Attendees were then left free to go and chat with any speaker they were interested in. The smell of coffee and the nice pastries helped give this session an informal and interactive feel.

One theme that kept coming back around my table was, how do you break into science journalism? Should I go for a journalism course or start working right away? Should I get a job or go freelance? These are all legitimate questions, but impossible to answer decisively. I felt I was being asked for a kind of recipe for baking a science journalism career.

My response: try and explore a range of opportunities that is as broad as possible. This will help you get to know the sector and can help you decide whether this is really what you want to do. If you are in the lucky position of having to choose between different opportunities, pick the one that best suits your aspirations and personal circumstances.

Altogether, this informal session lasted for 2 hours, and all of the speakers were kept busy with a constant stream of questions. Both speakers and attendants seemed really pleased with the event. I certainly was.

The number of science and engineering students from abroad jumped 20% at American institutions in the 2008-09 academic year, with the biggest gains recorded in engineering and computer science. Science and engineering students now comprise about half of all international students in the U.S. and nearly two-thirds of international graduate students.

According to the Open Doors survey, conducted annually by the Institute of International Education (IIE, funded by the U.S. Department of State), the number of science and engineering students increased from about 267,000 in the 2007-08 academic year to about 319,000 in 2008-09, an increase of nearly 20%.  That's about half (48%) of the 671,600 international students in the United States in 2008-09, up from 43% of the total in the previous year.

Except for agriculture, international students in all the scientific and engineering categories increased by double-digit percentages in 2008-09. Engineering and computer/information science students increased by about a quarter (24%), while life, physical, social, and health science disciplines all increased between 14-17%. The number of agricultural students from abroad stayed about the same as in 2007-08.

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Nearly two-thirds (65%) of international graduate students at American universities during the 2008-09 study science or engineering. About a quarter (24%) of international graduate students are in engineering programs and 13% of international graduate students are in the physical and life sciences. About 11% of international graduate students are studying mathematics or computer science,  and 9% of international graduate students are in the social sciences.

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About 4 in 10 international undergraduates are in science or engineering programs. Some 12% of international undergrads are studying engineering, while nearly 1 in 10 (9%) are majoring in the social sciences. About 5-7% each are in undergraduate physical/life science, mathematics/computer science, or health programs.

Overall, the number of international students in the U.S. increased by nearly 8% in 2008-09, to 671,600. Of the total, about 41% come from India, China, or South Korea. The number of students from China increased by about 21% year over year. Vietnamese students increased by 46%, to about 12,800, compared to 2007-08 -- the largest increase for any country. (IIE did not provide country breakdowns by field of study.)

Our package on science in Eastern Europe provoked the following reply from Yale Richmond, an expert on the subject:

Elisabeth Pain and Kate Travis in Science Careers (November 6, 2009) are correct in discussing the changes in science that have taken place in Eastern Europe since "The Fall of the Wall." But the two authors are mistaken when they write that "Research in those countries [the Soviet bloc] was done in near-complete isolation from the international community."
 
Using primarily cultural and scientific exchanges, in addition to espionage, the Soviets had a very effective system for learning what scientists in countries of the West were doing. During the 30 years of the U.S.-Soviet Cultural Agreement more than 50,000 Soviet citizens came to the United States on exchange, many of them scientists and engineers, and many thousands more came to countries of Western Europe that had similar agreements. And because the exchanges were reciprocal, U.S. and other Western scientists went to the Soviet Union in exchange. The Soviets were all cleared by the KGB in advance of nomination for their exchange visits, but before their U.S. visas were authorized they were also screened by the U.S. intelligence community to ensure that they would have no access to U.S.-funded defense research, and that the exchanges were mutually beneficial. The watchword was "Is the Soviet scientist going to learn more from us than we will learn from him?"  And they were all "hims," since no women scientists were nominated by the Soviets.

In our "flagship exchange," of graduate students and young faculty for a full academic year, we would send real graduate students in language, history, and literature, while the Soviets, in the early years of the exchanges, would send us mainly scientists and engineers who already had their Kandidat degree, more or less equivalent to our PhD. Each U.S.-USSR cultural agreement, renegotiated every 2 or 3 years, also contained a section devoted to exchanges of delegations of scientists in various fields.

In addition to the exchange programs of the State Department, our National Academy of Sciences and Atomic Energy Commission also had exchanges with the Soviet bloc. To give you an idea of the extent of those exchange programs, when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, we had several hundred Polish scientists stuck in the United States and unwilling to return home. Also, Pain and Travis fail to consider the 11 cooperative agreements in S & T signed with the Soviet Union during the detente years of the 1970s which brought hundreds more Soviet scientists to the United States, and a reciprocal number of Americans to the Soviet Union.
 
After their return home and their debriefing by science officials, the Soviet scientists who had studied abroad were required to give talks to their colleagues on what they had learned during their foreign visit. As a result of all those exchange programs, Soviet science was anything but isolated from the international community.

For more on this, read my book, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).

             - Yale Richmond

(We'll post the authors' reply in a separate post. My thanks to Yale Richmond for his thoughtful reply.)

The Wellcome Trust plans to phase out its 3-year to 5-year research grants in favor of larger and more flexible grants that last up to 7 years, reports Jocelyn Kaiser in this week's issue of Science. The organization will put $183 million toward the new Investigator Awards beginning in 2011.

"The idea is to empower the very best scientists to tackle difficult, long-term questions," says Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, a U.K.-based charity that funds biomedical research. The organization hopes that the awards will help researchers more successfully tackle large research questions without the constraints of low funding or a short grant cycle.

Read the full story in this week's issue of Science, and see the Wellcome Trust Web site for the announcement of the new program.

A Wall Street Journal reader wrote to Toddi Gutner, one of the newspaper's careers advisers, about a question uppermost in the minds of job-hunters over the age of 40: How do you deal with your age in interviews and resumes? The reader said, in his question published today, that he received conflicting advice from people he trusted.

While most Science Careers' readers are early-career scientists, this is not a far-fetched issue for some of our readers. Among our Facebook fans, for example, 6% are age 45 or older. Our  Science Careers story last week about the career of Patricia Alireza, who earned a Ph.D. in physics at the age of 45 after raising a family, got a few "thumbs up" on our Facebook page.

In one respect, the current tough job market may give older job-hunters an advantage. "This is a good time to position yourself as a deeply competent and confident professional in your area of expertise and experience," Rabia de Lande Long, a consultant and executive coach told Gutner. "In uncertain economic times, employers can be drawn more to experienced workers who join with ready-to-use skills and a shallow learning curve."

One specific question the reader asked was whether to include the dates of college degrees on your resume, since they enable hiring managers can calculate your age. Gutner says that in most cases it's a good idea to include the dates. If you don't, it suggests that you have something to hide, which would raise even more questions among H.R. departments and hiring managers. Plus, employers frequently verify dates of previous employment and educational attainment, so there is little reason to hide the dates on your resume.

If you are in your mid-50s and older, be prepared for more resistance among hiring managers. But there are ways to deal with it. A flattering photo on your LinkedIn profile may dispel some doubts. But more importantly, says career coach de Lande Long, you want to use your cover letter to differentiate yourself from the common perception of older candidates, "by showing results, (understanding of) technology and demonstrate ease in interacting with colleagues of all ages," she says.

Another professional advises older job-seekers to avoid the 'been there, done that' attitude. Instead, show interest, commitment, enthusiasm and energy. "If you're bored with your profession, you can be sure that comes through in an interview," says Susan Chadick, a principal at Chadick Ellig, an executive-search firm serving small and mid-size companies and startups.

As a science journalist, I've had the opportunity to interview several Nobel prize winners. Such high-profile scientists are usually pretty obsessed with their science and more than happy to talk about it all day. But it's one thing to ask a Nobel winner to explain how her research fits into our greater understanding of life. It's another to ask if she has any tips for balancing family life with lab life.

Yet I had just such an opportunity earlier this month when I got to listen in on a conference call of this year's four science/economics women Nobel laureates, convened by Science deputy news editor Jeff Mervis. Jeff started off with the policy-oriented issues: What immediate steps should be taken to increase the number of women going into science and improve conditions for those already in the field? Are gender-based awards useful? How is it possible for an organization such as the National Institutes of Health to launch an award competition and announce a class of grantees that is all men?

Once everyone had warmed up a bit, we started in with some more personal questions. For example: To what extent do you have to blend your personal and your professional lives to achieve a balance? Has there been anything that's helped you be successful in terms of managing your time?

Here are some highlights of the conversation:

On work-life balance:

- Elizabeth Blackburn, age 60, professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: "I think that the message of balance is somewhat overplayed, in my view, because if you're doing something intense like having a family and doing science, they're both intense things, and so this idea that somehow every day is sort of balanced I think it's really a bad message, actually, to try and send people. ... So I try and send the message, for goodness sake, don't go for balance. That sounds very boring to me, you know, in this sort of 9 to 5 and you're balancing your life. Go for these things intensely in the periods when you have to go for them and the balance will take care of itself over decades."

- Carol Grieder, age 48, professor of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: "It's actually very nice to be in science because what we're judged on in the end is how productive we are and what we get done and it's not necessarily 9 to 5, and so I feel like I do have a lot of freedom. You know, I'll go out for my son's play at school at 2 o'clock in the afternoon and then come back again, and that kind of freedom to have a flexible schedule, I think, is not always true in other professions. So it's a reason for people to choose science over some other careers that they might have."

- Ada Yonath, age 70, professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry: "In my day-to-day life, I don't sit and think about this, it just comes. This is the way I am and this is the way I run my life, and I don't really sit and organize myself . ... It just happens. And I'm very happy that I have a very fantastic relationship with my daughter and granddaughter, although I'm not what is called a normal mother, if there is something like normal mother." 

On choosing family and career:

- Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom, age 76, the first woman to ever receive the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel: "Well, as a somewhat older participant, I had a clear decision and made a decision not to have a family because in earlier times that would have been a very, very difficult thing to accomplish."

- Greider: "I come from the other spectrum in that I was able to see around me a number of women, including Liz, who were able to have children and have a career, and although there were many fewer women in the higher ranks of academia, there were still some to suggest that it could be done. So just in the same way that you have to go forward with experiments sometime, not knowing what's going to happen, I just went forward with the experiment of having kids and the career and trying to do both full-time."

- Blackburn: "I think there's a lot of conventional ideas about what it should be to be a mother and, you know, certain sorts of formulary and stereotypes are there and I really think that they're not terribly helpful, some of these ideas, because I really think children are busy, you know, scientists do get family lives that are, perhaps, different in some ways but not less good."

And my favorite part of the conversation: Learning that Blackburn's secret to balancing a successful scientific career and motherhood can be found in your grocer's freezer section. I asked the laureates if there's anything that's helped them be successful in terms of managing their time. "Is it time for me to tell the Bagel Bites story?" Blackburn asked. "It's about producing beautiful cookies or cupcakes with beautiful icing and you're up till 2 a.m. making them for your children. This is what motherhood is supposed to be like, right?

"Well, it turns out that if you go to your supermarket, you can buy these little Bagel Bite things, they're called commercially, and you put them in the oven and they have cheese on the top and they bubble and they're lovely and brown and taste wonderful. And you take them to any children's function, and the children swarm over them, they love them, ... and it takes 12 minutes in the oven to cook. So my feeling is there's plenty of time ... to catch the essence of what it is that people like mothers to do, but you don't have to do it in a very laborious, conventional way."

Read more highlights of the interview in this week's Science, listen to highlights in this week's Science podcast, or listen to the entire interview.

And, for more on work-life balance (if there is such a thing) and other related Science Careers articles, check out Work and Life in the Balance, Mind Matters: On Balance, Scientists as Parents, and Reflected Glory: Life With a Nobelist Parent,  

In May 2008, Science Careers' Elisabeth Pain told of recruiting efforts by the European Space Agency (ESA) to find four new astronauts for upcoming missions. ESA is back this month, but this time they're seeking pretenders. ESA is looking for a team to simulate a 520-day mission to Mars. While ESA requires professional credentials of these volunteers, compensation will be in line with taking part in a clinical trial, and not a professional salary.

The crew of six chosen for this mission will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia operated by ESA and Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP). ESA and IBMP hope through this exercise to learn more about the psychological and medical toll on its crew members. The mission aims to simulate a 520-day space flight, including a 30-day visit to the Martian surface. During this surface-exploration phase of the simulated journey, half of the crew will move to a Martian simulation module and the main facility will be sealed off.

Candidates must be in the age range 20-50, in good health, no taller than 185 cm (about 6 feet), and fluent in English or Russian, the working languages of the mission. Candidates must have a background and work experience in medicine, biology, life-support systems engineering, computer engineering, electronic engineering, or mechanical engineering. Participants are restricted to nationals and residents of member countries in ESA's European Programme for Life and Physical Sciences: Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Norway, The Netherlands, Sweden and Canada.

The call for volunteers does not mention compensation, except for "a fixed compensation that is in line with international standards for participation in clinical studies." The deadline for applications is 5 November.

Hat-tip: Slashdot

Most postdocs in the U.K. are generally satisfied with their current jobs and their work-life balance; however, up to a third of them don't feel that their wider contributions are appreciated, according to a new survey published by Vitae, the U.K.'s career development organization for postdocs (a.k.a. research staff) and graduate students.

The survey, which includes nearly 6000 responses, representing 16% of the total number of U.K. postdocs, from all disciplines -- not just science -- asked postdocs about their employment contracts, their job experience, experiences within their institutions, their career planning support, training and development, and their career aspirations.

Of those who responded:

• 21% found their current positions by word of mouth only.
• 71% feel they are integrated into their departmental research community.
• 31% don't feel their efforts in managing staff and managing resources are appreciated.
• 58% hope to have a career in higher education in 5 years' time that combines research and teaching.
• 28% responded that they want to pursue a career outside of research.
• 50% say they have a clear career plan.

In addition, 85% of the respondents had been postgraduate researchers for 1 to 5 years; 12.5% reported that they work part-time; and they're funded by a variety of mechanisms: 21% are funded by the institution, 38% by the research councils, 20% by charities, 6% by industry, 14% by the U.K. government, and 9% by the European Union or Commission.

The report's recommendations are mostly targeted at higher education institutions so they can best meet the needs of research staff. But if you'd like to have a look at the report to see how your answers might stack up against 6000 other postdocs, you can find the report on Vitae's Web site (links to PDF).

The European Commission has launched a public consultation on mobility opportunities in Europe following the release of its Green Paper, 'Promoting the Learning Abilities of Young People.'

The Green Paper focuses on all young people, not just scientists, but it can be an informative read for European scientists considering a move to another European country for the first time. The document refers to European mobility initiatives and information portals, and highlights aspects of relocation that you may not have considered, like the legal issues and the portability of grants and loans.

If you have experience with mobility around Europe, you can take part on the consultation until 15 December, and help new European policy enhance mobility experiences for other young scientists.

 

Monday's announcement of the Nobel prize in economics brought the number of women honored in this year's Nobel Prizes to five (out of 13 total): "The largest number ever to join the ranks in a single year," noted the Nobelprize.org Web site.

It's tough to know whether this is something to celebrate.

Let's set aside the gender imbalance for a moment and instead focus on the women:

On Monday, Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the economics prize (officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for her analysis of economic governance. (She's also a member of Science's Board of Reviewing Editors.) In an interview with Adam Smith from NobelPrize.org, Ostrom noted that economics is a male-dominated field. "I've attended economics sessions where I've been the only woman in the room," Ostrom said. "But that is slowly changing. I think there's a greater respect now that women can make a major contribution, and I would hope the recognition here is helping that along." (See also ScienceInsider's item on the economics prize.)

Last week, Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German writer, became the 12th woman (out of 106 recipients) to win the Literature prize. She, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," according to the Nobel committee.

Ada Yonath, professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, was the 4th woman to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work on the structure and function of ribosomes. "I never thought about me being a woman or not when I did science," she said in an interview last year. Indeed, the wisdom she had for those of us in the audience at last year's European Platform of Women Scientists Annual Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, focused on the process of science rather than on any issue of gender:

"In the 27 years that I was working with ribosomes, ... I took away this fantastic piece of wisdom: According to some theory, almost anyone can be a genius if they focus on a single endeavor to the exclusion of all else," she said. "But how can people today maintain such focus when they face so many distractions? In my opinion, it can only be done by being allowed to work on demanding projects for relatively long periods, even when no physical results are emerging. We worked 20 years until we had the first structure [of ribosomes]. We had a huge puzzle to put together, and every piece was for us a big, gratifying moment."

In fact, it was a Nobel Prize-worthy puzzle. (Click here for ScienceNOW's coverage of the chemistry Nobel prize.)

Last but not least, this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine included Elizabeth Blackburn, professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco; and Carol Grieder, professor of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for their work on telomeres and telomerase. (Click here for ScienceNOW's coverage of the physiology or medicine Nobel prize.)

People often note that there the telomere field seems to be dominated by women. Grieder addressed this in her NobelPrize.org interview and in Tuesday's New York Times. I like what Blackburn had to say in her interview with NobelPrize.org: "It's fairly close to the biological ratio of men and women. It's all the other fields that are aberrant. This is the normal field," she said, laughing.

Smith asked Blackburn if she worked to promote women in the science. "I've only actively promoted what we always hope is good science. It's not as if one would favor a woman researcher in this area over a man researcher in the area. Women have come into this field, perhaps because ... of the kinds of things that I've been doing, and Carol [has been doing]. We are women, and we tended to have women students and postdocs--not 100%; they tended to be 50-50 men and women, which is already higher than the usual ratio. There's a self-perpetuating aspect to that." She continued: "You want women to have access to science because it's such a wonderful thing to do."

Blackburn's comments reinforce the notion that a mentor who looks like you can have a positive effect. So, while it's hard to know whether to celebrate or bemoan the fact that, for the first time ever, 38% of the new Nobel laureates are women, I am happy that these women have been recognized and hope they will be inspiration for the current and emerging generation of women scientists.

The European Commission recently released a book to celebrate the achievements of European women scientists of all times. "For much of human history, women were officially excluded from the scientific realm," Janez Potočnik, European Commissioner for Science and Research states on the book's Web page. Yet "many women, throughout the centuries, have managed to overcome their marginalisation and excel in their chosen field, making vital contributions to the sum of human knowledge."

The book, entitled Women in Science, tells the story of 40 women scientists, some of them well known and some others less so. The book is a reminder that "women scientists, even when the odds are stacked against them, are the equal of men. Celebrating the achievements of the women of yesteryear can provide young women today with role models and examples to aspire to in their quest for scientific excellence," reads the introduction.

You may read the book for free here or listen to the story of each woman in separate audio files.

If you're interested in learning more about Hypatia of Alexandria in particular, you'll even soon be able to watch part of her story in a totally unrelated initiative: Spanish film director Alejandro Amenábar has just made a new movie called Agora that explores the life and work of the Alexandrian astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher. (The movie is to hit Spanish cinema screens on 9 October.)

If you are a European woman in the life sciences who is looking for new professional opportunities, you may want to join the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)'s WILS database of expert women in life sciences.

The WILS database aims to promote gender equality in Europe by making female scientists more visible to the scientific community, research bodies, political institutions, and journal editors. For women life scientists, this could mean opportunities to apply for open positions, speak at conferences, participate in interesting service opportunities, or review research manuscripts for journals. 

You may join the database by submitting an application here. Eligibility criteria include being of European nationality or working in Europe, already having earned a Ph.D., and having at least one international publication as the first or last author. (Current postdocs need to have obtained at least one publication from their postdoctoral work.)

"It is the purpose of the database to increase the participation of women at all levels and make it easy for scientists to identify women who may not be in their direct field. We all know that in particular at the higher level female scientists are scarce, which makes them easy to overlook. The database will fill that gap," Gerlind Wallon, EMBO Deputy Director, writes in an email to Science Careers.

The WILS database will build upon the Database of Expert Women in the Molecular Life Sciences that was launched in 2005 by the European Life Scientist Organization (ELSO). ELSO merged with EMBO at the end of 2008.

 

COST, an intergovernmental framework that facilitates cooperation among European nations in science and technology, has just released a video about its COST training schools. The COST schools, which are run in 9 different research fields, are open to early-career European scientists, and grants are available to cover the cost.

The video briefly outlines the main benefits of attending a COST training school. It's an opportunity, the video says, to learn new theoretical and practical things, look at your research from a different angle, share your experience with other young scientists, expand your network, and initiate new collaborations.

Watching the video can help you decide whether such a program would be worth the investment of a week of your time.

Hat tip: Athena Web

Our colleague Eli Kinitsch has posted an exchange of notes on the Science Insider blog with two early-career scientists about the paperwork burden forced on junior researchers. Their particular gripe is the amount of time devoted to writing grant proposals.  The post is a response to a recent story in PLOS Biology from an anonymous British researcher bitterly complaining about the burden of grant writing to support a lab, including the "salesmanship and networking" required.

The two researchers offer ideas on how to reform the system, including a call for better training in the business skills needed to run an independent lab. It's worth a look.

Science Careers's Elisabeth Pain recently told how several early-career scientists in the U.S. and Europe who achieve independence are coping with this system and offers a list of resources (including related Science Careers articles) to help junior researchers achieve and keep their independence.

One lesson gained from Michael Moore's film Sicko, and from this year's health care debate, is that Americans can learn a lot about health care from other countries. Now, the Commonwealth Fund offers fellowships in health care policy for experts from Europe and elsewhere to come to America, learn, and teach.

The Harkness Fellowships in Health Care Policy offer an opportunity for mid-career health-services researchers and practitioners from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom to travel to the United States to conduct research on health policy and share what they discover.

Awardees receive up to $107,000 to spend 9-12 months working with U.S. health policy experts. After completing their research, awardees will publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal or a report for policy-makers. The Commonwealth Fund hopes that these reports will provide a mix of health care ideas that have worked in other countries that can be combined with a U.S. health care strategy. The foundation expects the research to contribute to a system that provides Americans with better health care options.      

The Commonwealth Fund is a New York-based foundation that promotes the development of a health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency for all people, particularly the most vulnerable: people with low-incomes, the uninsured, minority Americans, young children, and elderly adults.

The deadline for applications is 15 September. More information about the Harkness Fellowships in Health Care Policy, is available on GrantsNet and the Commonwealth Fund Web site.

- Donisha Adams

Donisha Adams is the GrantsNet Program Associate for Science Careers.

The European Commission has launched a feasibility study of pan-European pension funds for researchers, according to a statement (if a blog entry is considered a statement) from Janez Potočnik, European commissioner for research.

The idea is to make it easier for researchers to contribute to, and ultimately collect, a pension fund no matter what country they are or have previously worked in. Science Careers outlined these problems last year in "A Comfortable Retirement." That article summed up the issues nicely:

Although the European Union (E.U.) has made it possible for scientists to cross borders for work almost seamlessly, scientists can be penalized for that mobility when they retire. At fault is the lack of consistent laws regarding pensions across countries: Some don't allow people who take positions outside of their native countries to pay into the system during years spent abroad, and others even penalize them for leaving by cutting their pension payouts drastically. Even when scientists are allowed to pay into pension schemes in the countries in which they work, keeping track of all of them can be a bureaucratic nightmare. Communication among pension agencies is slow and sometimes nonexistent. A retired scientist might have to collect funds from several countries.

A May 2008 European Commission communication, "Better Careers and More Mobility: European Partnership for Researchers," outlined the potential benefits of a pan-European pension fund:

Pension providers should be encouraged to open up pan-EU pension schemes targeted to researchers and companies should be encouraged to use pension providers in other EU Member States. This would allow mobile researchers to contribute to the same supplementary pension fund while working in different EU countries and still comply with the different social, labour and pension legislation in the participating Member States. This will require the possibility of opting out where researchers are obliged to participate in a domestic pension fund by law.

According to Potočnik, the feasibility study will look at how to best meet the needs of researchers while complementing the established pension schemes in member countries. The original tender for the study listed it as an 11-month contract (which was awarded to Hewitt Associates), so, if the study stays on schedule, expect results next summer.

"For me, the link between the work in this area and securing the sustainability of our future research economy is clear," Potočnik writes. "A more mobile, more professionally secure and confident European research workforce is in everyone's interest. And this is especially important when research careers are more 'mobile' than most and are often based on short-term contracts. We owe it to researchers!"

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon. But four decades later, how much do we know about how space flight affects the human body?

A new master's degree in human space exploration sciences at the University of Houston (UH) aims to open up the science behind human spaceflight. According to a cleverly timed press release, the new course will cover human physiology in space and how humans may cope with environments on Mars and the moon. It will also teach techniques for building and testing hardware used in space flight, management skills, and the history of the space program.

The course, it says here, is aimed at a variety of people, from students hoping to continue into Ph.D.s in human spaceflight to current space industry workers looking to broaden their knowledge. Course faculty will include NASA's Gary Kitmacher, an expert in astronaut health and habitat; Johnson Space Center's Charles Layne, a human coordination expert; and William Paloski, a UH professor of health and human performance and former NASA researcher in how space flight affects postural stability of astronauts.

Although this may be one of only a handful of degrees devoted to the subject, there are several research groups around the world studying the effects of space flight on the body. Here are some of them:
 

Space Life Sciences division, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas
Universities Space Research Association's Division of Space Life Sciences (DSLS), Houston, Texas
National Space Biomedical Research Institute, Houston, Texas
Cleveland Clinic Center for Space Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio
Vanderbilt Center for Space Physiology and Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee
Institute of Aerospace Medicine, Köln, Germany
The Yuri Gagarin Russian State Science Research Cosmonauts Training Centre, Moscow

-Claire Thomas

All this week, Vitae will be publishing new articles daily on research careers and the recession. The first article, written by career adviser Fiona Christie from the University of Salford, has some good general tips: know your sector; know the status of research funding in your country and at your institution; use the careers service at your institution as a resource; and know yourself, your skills, and your limitations. Read the entire article here, and watch this page for new articles throughout the week.

Elizabeth Wilkinson at the University of Manchester has also put together a series of recession-related articles and discussions here. Wilkinson (who recently spoke to us for an article on social networking) also maintains the Manchester Postgraduate Careers Blog.

For a few recession-related Science Careers articles, see Tooling Up: The Cold, Hard Truth About Finding a Job in 2009; In Person: Finding Opportunities in a Dysfunctional Job Market; and Financial Crisis Reshaping the Life Sciences Industry.

This week's Darwin Festival is drawing to a close in Cambridge. It's been an amazing week of lectures, discussions, plays, and performances all to celebrate Charles Darwin on his 200th birthday.

All of us at Science Careers tend to ask people what or who inspired them to go into science. Some people cite Darwin as their inspiration; they are more likely to say that his life's work is inspirational. There's another name that comes up frequently, particularly here in the U.K.: David Attenborough.

Also Cambridge-educated (he studied geology and zoology at Clare College), Attenborough is best known as a television presenter. Off and on for 50 years, he's written and presented countless programs about the natural world -- among his most famous are Life on Earth (and the entire "Life" series), The First Eden, and Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives. Earlier this year he hosted a show called Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life. His excitement and fascination with the natural world shows through in his programs, and he's brought the the natural world to the TV screens of generations of viewers, young and old.

Now 83 years old, Attenborough was the special guest at a sold-out dinner last night at King's College, Cambridge. "Above all, Darwin demonstrated ... that we are members of the natural world, that we're not separate from the natural world, that we're subject to its laws. And if we deny that, we deny our responsibility to ... the future. Charles Darwin is indeed the man who put that in our minds, and for him we should all be grateful."

Why hold the Darwin Festival in Cambridge? Long before the HMS Beagle voyage, settling in Down House, or writing The Origin of Species, Darwin was an undergraduate theology student at Christ's College, Cambridge. Here he developed a love for the natural world, and studied under botany professor John Henslow. He collected beetles on the banks of the River Cam, a hobby he would continue for much of the rest of his life.

The festival has been a testament to the reach of his work: nobel laureates Paul Nurse and Harold Varmus spoke here this week; Lords Martin Rees and Robert May, current and former president, respectively, of the Royal Society, made appearances as well; as did evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. But the festival isn't just for scientists: Authors Terry Pratchett and Ian McEwan, among others, were here to discuss Darwin's influence on literature. At dinner last night I sat next to a lecturer in literature at a U.K. university who has written a book about Darwin in poetry that will be published this autumn. Darwin certainly influenced a wide variety of careers, both in science and out.

An article published last week by The Scientist looks at the short- and long-term consequences of scientific misconduct on the careers of those who perpetrated it.

In Life After Fraud, three scientists give their versions of the facts that led the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to declare them guilty of scientific fraud. These scientists were barred from applying for federal funds for up to 5 years, and their names appeared in official documents together with details of their wrongdoings.

While guilty scientists have their names removed from official blacklists once they've paid their dues, remaining traces of their wrongdoings on the Internet keep haunting them long afterwards. All three scientists in the article managed to stay in science, but they had to deal with a tarnished reputation, which sometimes led employers to withdraw job offers after doing a Google search.

In an accompanying editorial, The Scientist's editor and publisher Richard Gallagher finds that "the current ORI procedure for the investigation of fraud seems fair. And the range of penalties for the guilty look, if anything, too lenient." But Gallagher argues that scientists found guilty of scientific misconduct suffer harsher penalties than intended. "A debarment from receiving federal funds for 3 years can effectively turn into a life sentence for researchers, permanently shutting down opportunities and eliminating career advancement," he writes. Gallagher makes a controversial call for a new system of dealing with fraud that also allows the rehabilitation of offenders.

 

Biology doctoral student, blogger, and Science Careers Facebook fan Danielle Lee points us to a competition that gives the winner an all-expenses-paid trip to Antarctica. The contest offers bloggers--Danielle is one of the contestants--a chance to post an essay on why they deserve to win the voyage. Visitors to the site vote on who they believe most deserves to go.

Quark Expeditions is holding the contest. The company says it has conducted commercial polar expeditions since 1991. Bloggers must post their essays, no longer than 300 words, on the Quark Expeditions site. The contestant who receives the most votes and a companion will receive a free cruise in February 2010 on one of Quark Expedition's vessels, plus round-trip air travel to Ushuaia, Argentina, where the ship departs.   

So far, 188 hopefuls have entered. A quick review of the entries shows that many science students and early-career scientists from around the world have signed up, as well as environmentalists of all ages. The competition opened on 19 June and continues to 30 September. Registration with the site is required for voting.

Up to this year, National Science Foundation (NSF) offered artists and writers opportunities to visit Antarctica, but that program has been put on hold. Here's last year's GrantsNet entry describing the program. NSF hopes to continue it after 2010. 

It was just a coincidence, but last Saturday I went to see a movie that tied in with the career renewal feature we published just the day before on Science Careers. If you get a chance, go and see it. It's a lovely story providing food for thoughts for academics.

 

'The Visitor' features a university professor in Connecticut who has spent his career researching and giving lectures on the economic development of poor countries. But, as 62-year-old Walter Vale (played by Richard Jenkins, an Academy award nominee for best actor) writes his fourth book, he realizes that it has been years since he felt excitement for his subject. All Vale has been doing lately--though he has been doing it very successfully--is pretending to work.

 

The pretence starts to crumble when a colleague he wrote a paper with gives birth and is unable to present the research at a conference in New York City. Asked to substitute for her, Vale initially declines. His contribution to the work was to put his name on the paper--nothing more. But Vale eventually agrees, to avoid having the issue go to the dean.

 

The conference becomes a life-changing experience for Vale, though not for academic reasons. Upon coming to stay in a flat he owns in New York City, Vale finds out it has been illegally rented to a couple of young immigrants. Vale allows them to stay until they find another place to live, and an unlikely friendship develops between Vale and the young man, a musician from Syria. Under his guidance Vale enters a new musical world that revitalizes his life and awakens a new passion in him--playing the African drum.

 

Vale is dragged into yet another world as the young musician is arrested for being an illegal immigrant. Despite Vale's passionate efforts to help him, the young man is deported back to Syria. The movie stops there, but it is easy to imagine Vale's encounter with the young man renewing his professional life. Left with a feeling of injustice, anger, and uselessness, Vale may have felt compelled to document the everyday struggles of citizens of developing countries who come and live in the United States, and other countries, as illegal immigrants.

Anywhere from 30% to 60% of doctoral graduates in the sciences end up in research, depending on the discipline. That's according to a new report, "What Do Researchers Do? First Destinations of Doctoral Graduates by Subject," released yesterday afternoon by Vitae, the U.K.-funded career development organization for doctorate holders and postdocs (called research staff in the U.K.).

The report builds on previous reports the organization has put together, including "What Do Ph.D.s Do?", which we reported on in 2007. Now, though, the folks at Vitae have 5 years' of data to work with, which means they could analyze where Ph.D.s end up by specific subjects, not just by broad categories.

For example, the biological sciences overall had the highest percentage of graduates entering research careers -- some 60% go into research, whether that's as a postdoc, in some other form of academic research, or in industry. Among a narrower slice--biochemistry, molecular biology, and biophysics graduates--that number is above 70%.

In the physical sciences, about 43% of doctoral graduates end up in research roles. That percentage was around 60% for the geology and chemistry graduates and below 30% for mathematics doctorate holders. As a whole, 7.8% of physical sciences and engineering graduates reported that they went into business and finance; among the mathematics subgroup, some 25% of doctorate holders went into the business and financial sector. Check out the report to see where people in your field end up after getting their Ph.D.s.

By looking at the data in the report, "you can do a sense check" of what you think your career options are, says Janet Metcalfe, chair and head of Vitae. "Then, you can look at the variety of sectors and occupations people go in, and you can realize there's a whole world out there of exciting jobs and possibilities." 

The data come from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey, which captures information on the first jobs of doctorate holders who graduated in 2003 through 2007. There's a caveat, though: The new report only analyzes data on U.K. graduates who stay in the U.K. The occupations are reported in 14 categories, including commercial, industrial, and public sector managers; scientific research, analysis & development professionals; health professionals; education and teaching professionals; marketing, sales, media, and advertising professionals; and even numerical clerks and cashiers, clerical, retail, and bar staff. (Geology and math doctorate holders have the highest percentage of cashiers and bartenders among them, with 4.4% and 4.7%, respectively.) 

Also released yesterday, a collection of 40 profiles of doctorate holders who are now in jobs ranging from lecturers, research associates, program managers, consultants, and even a chairman of a banana business (his Ph.D.: plant science). They all highlight that there is no one research career path and no single solution to what is the "correct" career path.

 

A new study finds a strong correlation between hidden or unconscious stereotypes that link males with science and mathematics to higher achievement among males in those fields. The findings, by University of Virginia psychology professor Brain Nosek, are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study matches data from two independent databases, one on common biases and the other on science/math achievement. The first database, dubbed Project Implicit, examines hidden, unspoken stereotypes lurking among people in all walks of life, even those who consider themselves fair and open-minded. The project gathers data on gender, race, age, religion, and other social stereotypes and has collected data on the attitudes of more than 4.5 million people worldwide. Project Implicit has used Web-based questionnaires for data collection since 1998.

Nosek and his team matched the Project Implicit data to the achievement results in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). TIMSS gathers achievement data from 4th and 8th grade students worldwide. The latest TIMSS effort collected achievement results in 2007 on 8th grade students in 48 countries and 4th grade students in 36 countries.

Using the TIMSS 8th grade data, Nosek found that 70 percent of the Project Implicit participants in 34 countries with TIMSS  results hold implicit stereotypes connecting science and math to males more than females. And in those countries where the stereotypes were most pronounced, the gender differences in test scores were also more pronounced.

Project Implicit asks respondents to quickly associated male terms (e.g., he, father, son) or female terms (she, mother, daughter) with science terms (physics, chemistry, biology) or liberal arts (literature, history, arts). Most participants associated science terms with male terms rather than with female terms. The study also found these implicit connections at about the same rate among male and female respondents.

Nosek used data collected by Project Implicit from July 2000 through July 2008. The Gender-Science Implicit Association Test is one of the several demonstration tests on the Project Implicit site, if you want to test your own potential biases.

The full report of the March 2009 conference, Tomorrow's Women, Tomorrow's World, is now available online from the U.K. Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering, and Technology. Conference reports aren't usually page-turners, but I attended this excellent meeting, and I think the report sums everything up nicely and succinctly. For me, the highlights were:

-Meeting Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who launched the U.K. portion of "She is an Astronomer" at the conference. We profiled her in Science Careers last week.

-Hearing Wendy Schultz talk about her work as a futurist. I'm so glad the world has people like her to think about about change on a global level. (Hear her plenary talk and see her workshop materials.)

-Appreciating BBC journalist Maggie Philbin's contributions to the discussion and her excellent job as meeting moderator (hey, it's a true skill to move discussion forward and keep everyone on schedule).

-Talking to so many fabulous women scientists, including Rhian Chapman, a recent engineering graduate who's now at Selex Galileo -- who later spoke with us for an article on careers in the defense industry.

If reading a brief conference summary is still too much, how about Tweets? I did my first experiment with Twitter from this conference, and the highlights are below. (We now have an official Science Careers Twitter feed, @mysciencecareer.)

>Lord Drayson: Children should be learning about more modern science heroines.

>Silvia Walby: women have moved out of the home so now the whole world can exploit them.

>Susie Uppal: Why is it that something as wonderful as having children can have such a negative effect on women's careers?

>Annette Williams: gender equality doesn't require 50/50 representation, it requires equal choices and equal opportunities

>UKRC statistics: percent of SET employees who are women now: 18.5%. In 2030: 20.9%. Good? Not so good? (SET=science, engineering, tech)

>Helen Walker: "Most female astronomers marry male astronomers. Must be those long nights."

>Royal Society of Chemistry: intention of staying in research halves among women between beginning and end of chemistry PhDs.

>"at times of war, turmoil favors the bold woman."

>Quick poll taken here: does working from home improve work-life balance? 83.9% say yes. Agree?

>That's all from Tomorrow's Women, Tomorrow's World. Check out women in SET blog here: http://tinyurl.com/6jmfup. KT in London, over and out!

----------

All the workshop materials for Tomorrow's Women, Tomorrow's World are collected here. Enjoy!

Earlier this month, the Guardian talked to computer scientist Wendy Hall about her career choices, her experience as a woman in a male-dominated field, and her latest project, among other topics. (Hall spoke to Science Careers in 2007 for an article on career frameworks for early-career scientists.)

Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire earlier this year. ("People may knock the honours system, but they can't knock the fact that very few people make it to this level, and to have made it for science and technology is fantastic," she tells the Guardian.) She's the former senior vice president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the Council for Science and Technology, and a past president of the British Computer Society.

She's a visible presence on the women-in-science circuit in the U.K. At the same time, she notes in the Guardian interview, "Every minute I'm standing up talking about women in science or talking to young women, my male colleagues are writing the research papers, getting the grant proposals, getting increases in salary."

She says something few women will say out loud, particularly to a reporter -- she didn't think she could be a mother and a successful scientist: "There was always something more interesting to do than have babies, and I didn't feel I needed a baby to complete my life. But I did always think that I couldn't do both. I'm very in awe of women who do manage to."

Hall is one of the founding directors of the Web Science Research Initiative, an interdisciplinary effort to create the field of Web science. "We're trying to track what's changing with the technology and how that allows people to do things differently," she tells the Guardian. "These are longitudinal studies, which we tend not to do in computing - tracking users over time against the background of what the technology's doing."

Good stuff. Click here to read the full article.

The days when all Ph.D. holders worked at universities are long gone: According to a new report from the European University Association (EUA), more than 50% of the doctorate holders in Europe are in careers outside of academia, many of whom land in industrial R&D and non-research positions. Given the reality that many doctorate graduates are destined to leave academia, new demands on their training are arising, the report says, and involving industry in doctoral training is one way to prepare students for corporate careers.

The report, "Collaborative Doctoral Education: University-Industry Partnerships for Enhancing Knowledge Exchange," examines existing industry-university doctoral programs and describes both the advantages and the challenges of them, putting emphasis on the employability of students in such programs. The report points out that, when at its best, a collaborative doctoral program benefits all parties: the university, the company, and student. Students gain a deeper understanding of how to turn ideas into business and how to handle legal matters such as intellectual property rights and market regulations. As one student interviewed for the report put it, "Yes, it made me more employable in industry. Industry employers appreciate that you have gained experience in working with their particular industry and gained insights in how it functions."

However, the report points out some concerns to keep in mind if you're considering a collaborative doctorate program. You should look into how intellectual property rights issues will affect your ability to publish your results, as your need for speed may be in conflict with the company's wish to capitalize on your research. As you are likely to have supervisors both from the university and the company, good communication becomes even more essential than in a conventional Ph.D. project. All parties need to be committed to the project and have similar expectations in the outcomes, otherwise you may find yourself torn between supervisors trying to mediate a solution, which will inevitably take valuable research time away from you.

The EUA report found that companies in general have high expectations of the research knowledge a doctorate holder has. However, the companies are also interested in soft skills, such as an understanding of the market, a business mindset, and good communication abilities. Small and medium-sized companies tended to have higher demands on these skills, possibly because an employee fills multiple roles in a small company while in a larger one there is more room for specialization.

A take-home lesson from the report is to always point out any strengths you have in business skills and communication, especially if you're applying for a job in a smaller company, as it may give you some leverage over candidates who fail to do so. Also, if you're doing a Ph.D. right now, it's worth considering how you can strengthen your transferrable skills so you're more attractive on the labor market, particularly if you are interested in pursuing an industry career.

-Anna Ehrlund

Designer Geoffrey Beene LLC is leveraging its iconic status in the men's fashion world to help elevate the status of science among students. The Smart Set blog points out that Geoffrey Beene's philanthropic arm unveiled a new ad campaign in the June issue of GQ magazine featuring photos of high-profile rock stars getting down with leading scientific authorities.

The campaign, called Rock Stars of Science, aims to increase support for public research funding, particularly for Alzheimer's research, a continuing concern of the Geoffrey Beene Gives Back philanthropy. But the campaign also promotes awareness of research issues and seeks to improve the image of science among students. The Rock Stars of Science site plans to add an online petition and allow visitors to nominate future Rock Stars of Science.

The spread in GQ leads off with Francis S. Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project at NIH and Harvard neurology/genetics professor Rudy Tanzi (both in shades), along with Aerosmith's lead guitarist Joe Perry. And don't miss the Black Eyed Peas' Will.I.Am getting rhythmic with Ron Petersen of the Mayo Clinic, Steven Dekosky of University of Virginia, and Sam Gandy of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

My favorite: Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, accompanied on guitar by Grammy Award winner Sheryl Crow.

Combining a high profile in the fashion world with the cause of science is nothing new. L'Oréal Paris has joined with UNESCO since 1998 to highlight the contributions of women scientists and encourage other women to join their ranks. Disclosure: The company sponsors a booklet on young women in science now on the Science Careers Web site.

Hat tip: Ric Weibl, AAAS.

[Updated 29 May 2009]

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced the winners of its latest recruitment competition for the European Astronaut Corps--the first such competition since 1992. Among the 6 new astronauts who will now join ESA are two Italians, one German, one Danish, one British, and one French. The group includes one woman and five men. You may read their short biographies on the ESA Web site.

"We are now entering a new phase of utilisation of the unique capabilities offered by the ISS [International Space Station] and preparation for international exploration of the Moon and beyond," ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain stated in a press release. "This new phase required the recruitment of young talent...able to become, step by step, the representatives of Europe in space who, together with their international colleagues, will live, work, explore and bring back to planet Earth and its citizens their unique experience, their accomplishments and their confidence in the future. They all represent the generation that will move from low earth orbit to the Moon."

ESA received more than 8,400 valid applications from all over Europe and the selection process--which involved psychological, medical, and aptitude tests--took a little less than a year. The six new astronauts are now to start training at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne in Germany.  

 

Tomorrow (Friday, May 8), Science Careers and the Cambridge Research Institute are putting on a day-long workshop, "Broadening Your Scientific Career Horizons," here in Cambridge (the U.K. one). Topics will include industry career paths, bioentrepreneurship, making the most of your postdoc, and networking.

If you don't happen to be in Cambridge, never fear: I'll be live-Twittering the event on @mysciencecareer and with #sciencecareers, doing my best to extract the key messages in 140 characters or less. (If that sentence made no sense to you, just go to http://twitter.com/mysciencecareer some time tomorrow to read short, hopefully useful tidbits and tips from the workshop.)

And if you're in the mood for even more career advice, check out the archived Webinar, "Nontraditional Careers: Opportunities Away from the Bench," which was recorded April 28 in Washington, D.C.

AND, don't forget to become a fan of Science Careers on Facebook, where you'll find links to recent blog posts, articles, and upcoming events.

Portugal has added Harvard Medical School to the list of American universities it collaborates with extensively.

On 27 April, Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education announced a long-term collaboration in translational research and education. The HMS-Portugal Program, to be launched officially on 21 May, will fund 12 collaborative translational and clinical research projects, streamline postgraduate medical training in Portugal, and provide career development awards to Portuguese M.D. trainees.

The overall aim of the new program is to "help populate Portuguese research institutions with an increasingly sophisticated clinical and translational research capacity, and to expand the rate and quality of Portuguese clinical and translational research contributions to the international community. The program is also designed to foster longlasting collaborative ventures, both within Portugal and between Portuguese and Harvard research groups," the press release states.

The HMS-Portugal program is part of a broader initiative launched in 2006 by the Portuguese government to give a boost to the country's research and education capacity. Already, similar programs exist between Portugal and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas, Austin (UT Austin).

To get a glimpse of what it's like to be involved in one of these programs, from both sides, read former Science intern Sara Coehlo's article on Science Careers.

To get ahead in industry, "confidence is everything," says Ruth McKernan, chief scientific officer of Pfizer's new Regenerative Medicine Unit in Cambridge, England. McKernan spoke yesterday at a meeting of the Cambridge Association of Women in Science and Engineering.

 McKernan began her career with joint honors biochemistry and pharmacology, followed by a Ph.D. in molecular neuroscience. After a much enjoyed postdoc at the University of California in San Diego -- "I had a great time. I learned to surf" -- she settled into a job at Merck's former neuroscience research center in Harlow, England. She became the center's head 17 years later. In 2005, she moved to Pfizer, eventually helping launch the Pfizer Regenerative Medicine Unit in November 2008.

 Moving into industry can be a daunting prospect for Ph.D.s and postdocs, but it's not as foreign as you might think, McKernan says. You'll have to give presentations often, and much of the time you'll be working on collaborations with industrial and academic partners, "so you need to be a good communicator."

Industry research is well-funded, but you'll be working on projects that benefit the company, rather than focusing on your pet topic. "If [for example] you are totally passionate about protein structure, and that's all you ever want to study, then this is not the job for you," McKernan explains. But if you are passionate about science in a broader sense, or about making medicines, it could prove a good personal career move.

One huge contrast between academia and industry is the corporate aspect. "There is a different way of encouraging people in industry compared with academia," McKernan says. "You will be evaluated against your peers every year. Money will be used to label your performance in a way you won't have experienced before." This can be intimidating. But it means you'll know when you're doing a good job, she adds.

However, don't get too caught up in the rivalry, McKernan cautions. Don't view everyone as a competitor. Instead focus on what they can bring to your team. That's the guidance she received from a mentor in her early career and it has proved useful. "They don't have to be your best friend, but your competitors may be your partners somewhere down the line. So don't burn your bridges."

So how do you to make that first leap into industry? "Contacts," McKernan stresses. If you send your resume to the recruitment department, chances are it'll get lost in the pile. "Get names and contact details," she says. "Go to meetings and find out who in industry is working in you field."

Once you get to the interview stage, make sure you know your skills, she advises. There will be technical questions about your research, and employers will be looking to see how well you can apply this knowledge. Accentuate your positives, be confident, but be honest about what you can do. "If you come across as smart, flexible, and easy to work with, that will trade off with a lack of wholly specific skills," McKernan says. "If all else fails, pretend to be someone else," she quips: Think of a confident person you admire and try to emulate them. "I often think, what would Susan Greenfield do?"

Eurodoc, the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers, is conducting an online survey of the working conditions of doctoral researchers in Europe.

A collaboration with the International Centre for Higher Education Research at the University of Kassel in Germany, the survey aims to gather the testimony of 100,000 doctoral researchers all over Europe. Answering the survey will take about half an hour of your time, and you may do so until 31 May 2009 (the original 30 April deadline has now be extended).

Set up in 2002 with the mission of representing doctoral researchers in Europe, Eurodoc aims to use these data to further improve the training and research conditions of doctoral researchers in Europe.

In the Society for Science & the Public's ScienceNews blog, Janet Raloff puts her finger on an issue that may at first seem minor and not politically correct, but is nonetheless important.

Raloff refers to how strong foreign accents can make it difficult for talented and actually articulate scientists to communicate effectively. At a recent international conference, "while I could understand most of what was spoken during the majority of presentations, there were a few that I just couldn't fathom, no matter how hard I tried," she writes. "The presenters I'm referring to are smart. They've done clever work. And now they're trying to share their findings with the world. Except that their non-native inflections erase any chance of the audience following more than what's on their PowerPoint pages." This can advance neither science nor their reputation, she adds.

That's a tricky issue. As a non-native English speaker pointed out in a feedback comment, foreign speakers are already making a significant effort to speak in another language. So in return "it will be very reasonable that native English speaking people shall be wider in their interpretation of our language mistakes," the reader says. As a non-native English speaker myself, I agree that sometimes a greater comprehension and exposure of native speakers to foreign accents would help. But you cannot count only on that.  

Raloff sees getting someone else to talk for you while you are perfecting your accent as a possible solution. "Sometimes it might be as simple as handing a typed paper to another person to read or asking a colleague to describe what you've done," she wrote in reply. "The goal should be to minimize confusion and mistakes -- and to help people get appropriate credit for their research accomplishments."

In my view, it might be a short-term solution, but it's unlikely that one will be able to progress that way. If you live in an English-speaking country, after a while your accent should start improving. But if you are based in another country, international conferences will often be the only setting you have to speak in English yourself.

Raloff also suggested giving a written hand-out of your talk to the audience, and this seems a better option to me. In another feedback comment, a native English speaker who often gives talks in foreign languages also recommended paying greater attention to preparing slides.

Perhaps another solution, provided you have some native English-speaking colleagues or friends, would be to ask them for their honest feedback and a little bit of help with the pronunciation.  

Following a recent meeting in the Czech Republic, the European University Association (EUA) has released a new strategy to successfully face global challenges. Out of the 10 measures outlined in the new EUA Prague Declaration, 4 are directly relevant to students and young researchers.  

 

In particular, the EUA pledges to widen opportunities for higher education; to provide study programmes that are innovative and relevant in today's rapidly-changing job market; to improve research careers by giving postdocs more independence and making recruitment and promotion procedures more transparent; and to provide students and university staff with more and better opportunities for mobility between sectors and institutions.

 

The EUA is also holding out for a major investment in Europe similar to the recent U.S. economic stimulus package, which supports research, students, and families struggling to pay for higher education. "Europe must not sacrifice a generation of young researchers: a Europe-wide stimulus programme is needed to create opportunities and incentives to maintain young researchers across the continent in research careers," the EUA Prague Declaration also states.

 

It seems young researchers would have everything to gain from it. "In return, as universities, we commit to enhancing career opportunities for young researchers and to ensuring implementation of the issues addressed by the European Commission's Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers."

 

If, that is, the measures become concrete ones. The declaration will be presented to 46 education ministers at the Bologna Process Ministerial Summit on 29 April.

This week, Sheril Kirshenbaum over at The Intersection published a great list of science policy fellowships she assembled with the help of AAAS staff and interns. We wrote about getting into science policy this time last year in the article, "A Matter of Policy," where you can read about several scientists who did policy fellowships. Factoring heavily in both our article and Sheril's summary are the AAAS science and technology policy fellowships. Applications have closed for this year, but definitely bookmark that link and that of any of your professional societies that also offer policy fellowships.

Here in the U.K., I just got an announcement that the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Wellcome Trust are offering 3-month policy internships to Wellcome Trust-funded Ph.D. students. They're offering four internships, one at a time, between September 2009 and September 2010 to basic biomedical students in their third or fourth year of their Ph.D. The deadline is April 27, and there's more info here.

Over the years, many European countries have put in place funding programs that allow early career scientists to do Ph.D.s jointly in academia and industry in an effort to bridge the two worlds. A survey carried out in France suggests that these programs have been effective in helping Ph.D. scientists enter industry. But the survey shows that doing a Ph.D. in partnership with a company may also make it more difficult to find a job in academia.

The survey, which was released by the French National Association for Research and Technology (ANRT), looked at the CIFRE (Convention Industrielle de Formation par la Recherche) program (also run by the ANRT). Since its launch in 1981, the CIFRE program has allowed more than 12,700 students to complete Ph.D.s under the joint supervision of an academic and an industrial supervisor in France, with a completion rate of 87%. 

The survey drew a response rate of 22% and the vast majority (86%) of the responding CIFRE graduates said they had fulfilled their career ambitions.

Ninety-six per cent of the responding CIFRE graduates reported obtaining a job within a year of their graduation. Almost half of them (42%) were recruited by their host company, while 16% continued working in their academic Ph.D. labs. Altogether, about one fifth of them (22%) continued with a postdoc, most often in France.  

At the time of the survey, the majority of the responding graduates worked in a large company (38%) or in a public higher education and research institution (27%). Almost a quarter of them (23%) worked in a small or medium-size company and another 5% were employed in a non-research public institution.

Three quarters of those who obtained their Ph.D.s in the 1980's reported having some managerial responsibilities, and between 20 and 30% of the respondents with most experience reported salaries higher than 60k€. 

Altogether, 40% of the responding graduates had either taken a new position or left for a new employer at least once in their career. In the majority of the cases, this career change occurred in the year following graduation.

"It seems that the doctorate, supported by the CIFRE program, has served the respondents' careers well, significantly at the beginning of their professional careers, with the rapid and relatively durable stabilization of their employment and sector of activity," the ANRT report concludes.

Seventy per cent of the responding graduates felt that doing a Ph.D. under the CIFRE program indeed helped them overcome the misconceptions that industrial employers traditionally have in France. Yet the study also shows that those who chose to come back to academia had a harder time: 40% of the respondents felt their CIFRE Ph.D. closed university doors. Thirty per cent of those who eventually found a job in academia felt it had been a handicap, a feeling that was shared by almost half of the respondents working in industry at the time of the survey.

The data indicate wariness among academic science toward research projects done in partnership with companies, the report says. Consequently some CIFRE graduates may also have been thwarted in their hopes to one day join academia, the report adds. Ultimatelty, if your career goal is to eventually work in academia, a CIFRE Ph.D. may not be the best preparation.  

You can download the full report from the ANRT Web site (in French)

Despite the low salary, landing on the first permanent rung of the academic career ladder in France is difficult, and not just because they are highly competitive. The procedures for applying can also be daunting. If you are new, or foreign, to the current application system for a position of maître de conférences in France, this step-by-step guide published (in French) by David Allais on the news on French higher education Web site, the Observatoire Boivigny, is a good starting point.

If you're a researcher in training in France, or if you're considering faculty employment at a French university, you may be interested in the following, which suggests that financial prospects for young faculty members are, in a word, grim.

In an article published on Rue89, a French Web site for information and debate, Marie Conquy puts the financial situation of Jérôme P., a French enseignant-chercheur in physics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, under the microscope.

In his first year on the faculty, Jérôme P. earns about 1,800 euros a month after taxes, with a bonus of 500 euros per semester. Given the high living costs in the French capital, Jérôme P., aged 29, says he can not afford to rent a two-roomed flat, so he lives with his parents instead. He estimates that he spends around 500 euros a month in food, 230 euros for transportation, 100 euros in Internet and phone bills, and 130 euros in health and car insurance. Thanks to the expedient of living with his parents Jérôme P. is left with significant disposable income: between 600 and 700 euros, which he splits between hobbies--mainly fishing--and savings towards a flat.

This article drew many comments, mainly from readers outraged at seeing 10 years of study being rewarded with a low salary. One reader, tony38, commented that he left the CNRS to work in Canada, where he now earns more than twice his French salary. And according to Ongaku, a recent graduate from a French Engineering School, entry-level ingénieurs (who in France are traditionally perceived as being better equipped to compete for jobs than doctors) earn between 2,000 and 2,500 euros a month in industry.  

Still, we all know that, whichever your country, if you go into academic research it's not really for the money. "When choosing this profession, I have never looked at the salary. I am really passionate" about it, Jérôme P. says in the article. 

Read the full article and comments (in French) here.

 

Yesterday's New York Times tells about increasing problems with visas encountered by foreign postdocs and students in the United States, particularly those in science and technology disciplines.

The problems, according to the article, involve delays, missing paperwork, and less-than-helpful U.S. embassy staff. They appear to be more serious for visitors from China, India, the Middle East, and Russia. A postdoc in genetics at MIT, from Belarus, ran into 3 months of bureaucratic delays and lost documents when she tried to renew her visa with the U.S. embassy in Minsk on a visit home. She ended up having to go to Moscow to get the visa.

An anonymous State Department source told the Times that delays like these (2-3 months) are common and a result of "an unfortunate staffing shortage." The Belarus postdoc, by the way, has decided not to do further work in the U.S.

The international student director at MIT says the problems often occur when the students or postdocs leave the U.S., for brief visits home or to attend scientific meetings. Trying to get a visa to return is when the problems often begin.

Visa procedures tightened markedly after the 11 September 2001 attacks but in recent years, the U.S. government improved the procedures that cut delays to about two weeks, and students began returning. In the 2007/2008 academic year, according to the Open Doors survey by International Institute of Education, the number of international students on U.S. campuses jumped 7% over 2006/2007. And the 2006/2007 year itself showed a 3% gain over 2005/2006. The Open Doors surveys also show that life science, physical science, computer science, engineering, and mathematics account for more than one-third (34.5%) of foreign students in the United States.

The problems, according to the article, caused AAAS (publisher of this blog and Science magazine) to convene a meeting with the National Academy of Sciences and several dozen other science organizations, to bring those problems to the attention of the State Department.  As the MIT international student director told the Times, "There are other countries that want these folks. They are the best of the best. They have other options."

Update: The Times story reminds us of a 2004 account in Science Careers of Haitham Idriss, a Thomas Jefferson University postdoc who went to Canada one weekend for some R&R. When he tried to reenter the United States, he was told he needed to register for a program called NSEERS, the provisions of which he found onerous. He refused and was not readmited. Outside the U.S., he never found another scientific position.

The last time we spoke to Idriss, we learned that he had given up on research and started a new scientific journal, Annals of Alquds Medicine, which now seems to be defunct. It was a pretty standard journal in all but two respects: it didn't allow submissions from an Israeli address, and it didn't allow references to evolution--which, Idriss maintained, contradicted Islamic orthodoxy. Make of this what you will. 

Going back to the workplace after being away for a number of years can be difficult for anyone, but especially for parents who choose being a full-time mom or dad. Today's Wall Street Journal reports that companies and institutions in science and engineering are setting up programs to help women (many more moms than dads leave the workplace for parenting) return to their former professions.

For employers, career re-entry, as this process is called, offers a source of experienced, skilled, and reliable talent. Even in tough economic times, their investment apparently pays off.

The Journal article by Sue Shellenbarger cites re-entry programs by companies such as Honeywell, IBM, General Electric, and BBN Technologies that provide training, mentoring, and referrals -- and sometimes even jobs -- to help women rejoin their working colleagues. The article also mentions programs by the British government and a General Electric initiative at its research center in Bangalore, India, as examples outside the U.S.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge offers a 10-month "Career Re-engineering" training course for engineers and scientists returning to work. MIT expects enrollment to grow from 10 to 24 by next fall.

Science Careers has covered career re-entry in some detail, particularly as it affects women outside the U.S. A story by Chelsea Wald in March 2008 detailed a number of career re-entry programs in Europe. And last month James Pauff and Misty Richards looked at this and related issues affecting women physician-scientists.

The Web site iRelaunch.com, described in the Journal article, has additional advice and resources.

Note: Paragraphs 3 and 4 corrected, 25 February 2009

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 signed into law last week (a.k.a. economic stimulus bill) contains provisions that make it more difficult for some companies -- those involved in the TARP financial bailout package -- to hire workers on H-1B temporary work visas. Beryl Benderly discussed the impact of H1-B visas in her column last month in Science Careers.

According to ComputerWorld, an IT industry publication, the stimulus bill says that for 2 years companies receiving funds from the government's Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) are deemed "H-1B dependent." This designation, usually reserved for companies where H1-B holders comprise 15% or more of their workforce, imposes limits on companies seeking to hire more H-1B staff.

Companies deemed H-1B dependent must attest that they've made good-faith efforts to find American workers to fill their openings before recruiting H-1B talent. These employers must certify that they have offered minimum prevailing wages during their recruitment. The measures are aimed at preventing the company from claiming that they could not find workers while offering unrealistically low pay.

There are other restrictions on H-1B dependent companies. They cannot lay-off an American worker 90 days before or after filing an H-1B petition. And they must also have offered the job to to an American worker who applied and is at least equally qualified than the H-1B worker. If a company claims to have followed these rules, but a subsequent audit shows they did not, they can be banned from further participation in the H-1B program. According to the immigration law firm Shihab & Associates, the Department of Labor has recently increased these H1-B audits. 

The practical impact of this provision in the stimulus bill on hiring will likely be minimal. The limits affect new hires, not existing holders of work-related visas. And while the amount of TARP money is staggering, the number of companies involved -- generally in the financial services industry -- is relatively small. Only about 1 percent of workers in this industry have H-1B visas. Our look in November at the financial services industry as a source of alternative employment for scientists suggests this segment of the economy isn't poised for explosive growth anytime soon.

The stimulus bill also does not impose any limitations on outsourcing, which according to Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ron Hira, has increased among American banks since the rescue bill passed last fall. Charles Kuck, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, however, told ComputerWorld, "These banks will not able to hire qualified foreign talent to pull them out of this mess -- if that was necessary." Kuck added,  "Maybe we've got all the homegrown talent we need to pull us out of this mess, because now we have to hope we do."

Update, 25 February 2009: The Economic Times of India reports a growing protest in India to the stimulus bill's provisions, including calls for a boycott of American multinationals.

Update, 10 March 2009. The Charlotte Observer reports today that Bank of America has rescinded job offers to "a small number of foreign-born business students" who held H-1B visas, because of the restrictions in the stimulus bill. The bank, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, did not say how many offers were rescinded. The story reported, however, that in 2008 Bank of America applied for less than 100 H-1B visas to work in North Carolina, mainly in computer engineer and programmer positions.

The global economic downturn has affected each European country's science and education system differently. Some countries are pumping more money into higher education, while in others, the weakening economy hasn't had much of an effect because science and education were already chronically underfunded.

But most countries lie somewhere in the middle, and last week the European University Association released a Snapshot of the impact of the economic crisis on European universities. The report notes that universities in Norway haven't felt any direct effects yet; universities in Denmark will receive extra funds for research that the government put aside in 2006. Budget cuts for universities are being proposed or have been enacted in Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, and Poland.

In Germany, a government stimulus package will pump money toward university infrastructure. In the U.K., funds that relied on endowments have suffered, as have universities with investments in Icelandic banks. However, no change in government funding is expected. In Greece, "Chronic under-financing of Greek universities should not be eclipsed by the current economic crisis," the report states.

Outside of universities, there are examples of fiscal belt-tightening. For example, in the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has suspended several of its smaller funds because of concerns about returns on capital investments. In the U.K., the Wellcome Trust released a statement this month announcing that the charity, whose assets have dropped £2 billion compared with last year, is cutting its 2008/9 budget by £30 million, to £590 million. The organization has also warned its grant applicants that there will probably be increased competition for upcoming grant cycles due to reductions in funds elsewhere.

Our colleagues over at ScienceInsider have also highlighted a few cutbacks around Europe; Sara Coelho writes about the research-funding cutbacks in the Netherlands and specifically at Leiden University. And in December, John Bohannon wrote about budget cut scares in Austria.

Welcome to those of you coming here from the Cambridge Media Event -- and welcome to everyone else, too! We often get questions about careers in science writing, editing, and similar careers. So, I thought I'd take the occasion of the Cambridge Media Event to assemble some links to our many features and articles on this subject.

Starting a Career in Science Writing

• Articles include:
• Some Thoughts on Becoming a Science Writer
• Science Journalism Degrees: Do They Make a Difference?
• Breaking into the Media -- Do You Need Formal Training?
• Survival Secrets of Freelance Writers

Careers in Science Editing: Feature Index

This feature contains more than two dozen profiles of scientists who have found careers in scientific editing, whether it's at book publishers, journals, or international agencies.

Getting the Message Across: Scientists in Public Relations

More than a dozen profiles of scientists who've found rewarding work in public relations at agencies and scientific organizations.

Science Broadcasting: Feature Index

Scientists from around the world talk about working in radio and television, whether it's full time or an occasional thing.

Careers in Medical Writing: Opening Doors *Feature Index*

Medical writing includes many different types of jobs, from working in biotech companies to regulatory agencies. This collection of essays covers some of these diverse jobs. We also revisited this topic more recently in Working as a Medical Writer.

If you'd like to try out a career in the media, why not apply for a media fellowship? The two largest programs available are the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellows Program and the British Association for the Advancement of Science Media Fellowships. (We wrote about the BA fellowships earlier this month; the deadline for applications is March 10.)

One of the fun parts of working for Science Careers is that we get to meet people -- all sorts of people. And when you meet someone who's so totally passionate about her or his science that it's infectious, well, that's great fun.

For this week's article Keeping Order, I interviewed entomologist Erica McAlister in the staff cafeteria at London's Natural History Museum. We had a good conversation, but it was during a tour of the collection later that afternoon that Erica's excitement and enthusiasm really came through. She  lights up when she's explaining the insects, and she was incredibly patient with me in explaining even very basic concepts about insects. And when I later listened back to our interview and started writing up the article, I found myself thinking how cool it would be to be a curator in entomology. (I have absolutely no qualifications to do this.)

Those of you living in the United Kingdom and curious about how the media work may be interested in applying for a British Science Association Media Fellowship. These fellowships offer researchers with at least 2 years of postgraduate experience the opportunity to spend between 3 and 8 weeks working with a print, broadcast, or online media organization. You can read about past fellows' experiences and find details on how to apply on the British Science Association Web site. Deadline for applications: 10 March.

These fellowships are intended for scientists who want to stay in research (which doesn't mean you can't use one to make a career switch to science journalism). If you are interested in leaving the bench to become a press officer, a new guide released by Stempra, the PR association for U.K.-based science, technology, engineering, and medicine, offers practical guidance on writing press releases, preparing scientists for media interactions, and dealing with ethical issues. This guide is likely to be most helpful once you've landed a PR job. But even now it can also help you understand what a science-PR job would be like so you can decide for yourself whether such a career is for you.

A report released last week by the European Commission offers the latest snapshot of scientific training and employment in the EU-27 countries in comparison to global trends. Below are some of the key findings. 

First, the 2008 Science, Technology, and Competitiveness key figures report found that the number of researchers has grown twice as fast in the EU-27 as in the United States or Japan. Yet in 2006, Europe ranked second in total numbers, counting 1.33 million researchers compared to 1.39 and 1.22 million in the U.S.A. and China, respectively.  

The report largely attributed the growth in the number of researchers in Europe to greater employment in the private sector. But with about half its researchers employed in companies, the EU-27 business sector still employed proportionately fewer researchers than the United States (79%) or Japan (68%).

Another interesting trend is the increase of the number of doctoral researchers trained in the EU-27 by 4.8% annually, compared to 4.6% in Japan and 3.3% in the United States. In real numbers, the EU27 ranked first with around 100,000 new doctoral degrees awarded, compared to 53,000 in the United States and 15,000 in Japan in 2005.

The 169-page report looks at all aspects of European research, from trends in R&D investment and patenting to international collaborations. The full version may be found here.

For a summary of the funding trends see Daniel Clery's coverage in this week's Science (subscription required).   

 

 

A real-life experiment has just shown how easy it is to compile the story of your life just by following the traces you're leaving on the Internet.

I first read about it in the French national Le Monde, but many French media outlets have now reported on the mésaventure of a young architect in France who not long ago discovered the entire story of his life published in the French independent magazine Le Tigre.

With the aim of showing how careless we are with the dissemination of private information over the Internet, Le Tigre drew its "first google portrait" by collecting details of the young architect's professional and private life from Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. The article first appeared in print in December and has since been replaced on Le Tigre's Web site with a softer and more anonymous version at the young architect's request.

The young architect suffered no serious consequences, but the story shows that you may encounter pieces of yourself on the Internet that you'd rather not see aired quite so publically. As Alex Türk, the president of the national French Data Protection Authority (CNIL), said in that same Le Monde article:

"During a job interview, a young man saw himself being shown a picture of his buttocks. His potential employers had found it on the Internet. This image was the consequence of a night with plenty of wine. He didn't get the job." 

Have you tried googling yourself recently?

See also: Opportunities: E-Persona Non Grata

and: Tooling Up: Enhance Your Job Search Online

Continuing my attempt to catch up on Chemical and Engineering News...

In the 15 December issue, lots of bad news. Leading off is news about massive layoffs at Dow, DuPont, and other companies.

Just two pages later comes Hard Times for Academe, which describes the effects of severe budget cuts on chemistry departments resulting from state revenue shortfalls and endowment losses.

Want more bad news? The suffering isn't limited to the United States. Germany's chemical industry, the largest in Europe, expects "stagnation in 2008 and decline in 2009."

And finally, amidst all this bad employment news comes word that the number of chemistry degrees awarded at every level continues to increase: more people seeking fewer jobs. (ACS membership required for access.)

Myron Rolle, star defensive back at Florida State University, has chosen a Rhodes Scholarship studying medical anthropology over the immediate riches of an NFL career. Rolle completed his pre-med undergraduate degree in 2 1/2 years and is considered a top prospect at strong safety by NFL scouts.

Unlike most student-athletes, where the emphasis is on "athlete" rather than "student," Rolle found as much satisfaction in the classroom and lab as on the football field. Tim Logan, a biochemistry professor at Florida State, recognized Rolle's talents and offered him a chance to conduct research on metabolic characteristics of human mesenchymal stem cells. For this work, Rolle received Florida State's 2008 Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Award.

Getting the Rhodes Scholarship turned out to be a minor adventure as well. The interviews for Rhodes finalists were scheduled for Saturday 22 November, in Birmingham, Alabama,  the same day as Florida State's game at the University of Maryland. Rolle went to Birmingham for the interviews--then, with the help of a police escort and a private airplane, flew to College Park, Maryland (outside Washington, DC) in time to play the second half of the game, where Florida State trounced Maryland 37-3.

After completing his master's degree at Oxford, Rolle intends to enter the 2010 NFL draft. He also plans to go to medical school. There's no word whether Oxford intends to recruit Rolle for its rugby side.

Over at the Survival Blog for Scientists (named for the book by Ad Lagendijk), Ramy El-Dardiry relays, from George Orwell's book Politics and the English Language, some simple but excellent rules for communication.  "It (the English language) becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish," Orwell writes, "but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." Hence the importance of simple, clear, jargon-free language.

Click on the link to read the rules. Lots of other good stuff at the Survival Blog for Scientists.

While reviewing this week's article "Smarter Than the Average Desk" I had to ask what the term "digital natives" meant. The answer, once you hear it, is obvious: 'digital natives' are the youngish people who grew up surrounded by digital technology. In the article, we note that scientists, engineers, and educators are designing classroom technology that must meet the needs of these digital natives, who have been exposed to electronic gadgets and fast-paced multimedia since birth.

On his blog Zero Percent Idle, Tim Windsor elaborates on digital natives by excerpting from Don Tapscott's book Grown Up Digital. This new generation (or 'Net Generation,' as Tapscott says) wants freedom in everything they do, loves to customize and personalize their technology, and seeks entertainment in all aspects of life: work, education, and social life. These are the factors that those in education technology have to keep in mind when creating devices and learning technologies meant to captivate their audiences.

These characteristics will be on display as this generation enters the workforce; for example, this cohort is used to constant socializing and collaborating through social networking sites and online projects. Understanding these generational characteristics will be important for employers who want to recruit and maintain their workforce. We discussed these issues in last year's article, "The Truth About Gen Y."

In an article titled "How to Fix Your Life in 2009," Wednesday's Wall Street Journal offers a list of helpful hints for 2009 covering personal finance, retirement planning, health care costs, and a few career issues. The piece has contributions from several of the Journal's writers and focuses on particularly troublesome issues related to the recession.

The career-related hints, however, seem to apply to any economic conditions. If your job hunt has hit a dead-end, Sarah Needleman recommends investing time in networking, attending business meetings and events, and fixing your Facebook or MySpace profile so it does not display inappropriate content. She also suggests creating profiles on more business-oriented networks (e.g. LinkedIn) and hiring a career coach to critique your resume and improve your interviewing skills.

(On the last point, we think you could save a little money and read Science Careers to get much of the same information. Admittedly, we're a little biased.)

Elsewhere in the article, Joseph De Avila tells how to get your name off embarrassing photos that others might post on Facebook and MySpace, and how to avoid it in the future.

Sarah Needleman returns later to advise readers how to update the resume they haven't touched for 5 years.  Start with an objective that summarizes the kind of job you are seeking, says Needleman. Then outline your work history, describing your contributions to each employer. Then have someone review and proofread the text. If you want to use an outside resume service, Needleman tells how to go about choosing one.

Other timeless advice in the column includes how to keep your produce from rotting too quickly (store fruits and vegetables separately) and what to do about those four-inch stiletto heels that are killing your feet.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced last week a £250 million investment in 44 doctoral training centers across Britain. The move will generate more than 2000 new Ph.D. students in areas such as climate change, sustainable energy, and global security.

Britain needs "scientists and engineers with the right skills to find answers to these [21^st century] challenges, build a strong economy, and keep us globally competitive," U.K. Minister of Science Paul Drayson said at a press conference announcing the program. "EPSRC’s doctoral training centers will provide a new wave of engineers and scientists to do the job."

The centers, which will be located at 22 universities across Britain, will include formal taught coursework designed to develop a broad set of skills combined with research in a multidisciplinary environment. Seventeen of the new clusters will be industrial training centers where students will also acquire business and entrepreneurial skills. 

The project is funded with £250 million from the EPSRC training and education budget. The centers will receive funding for 5 years, with a review after the first 3 years. Each center will take in around 10 students a year starting in 2009.

-Sara Coelho

In early December, three German research organizations are offering information sessions in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles about research and research training in Germany. The sessions, called "Research Careers Made in Germany: Explore Opportunities in German Academia," will include representatives of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH).

The meetings are aimed at current and prospective Ph.D. students, postdocs, and faculty. The presenters will discuss Germany's Excellence Initiative to promote university research and support young scientists. The meetings will also cover the academic job market in Germany and opportunities for international collaboration.

Here's the schedule for the sessions ...

Washington DC:
  Monday, 1 December 2008
6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
  German Historical Institute
  1607 New Hampshire Avenue NW
  Washington, DC 20009

San Francisco:
    Tuesday, 2 December 2008
6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
    Goethe-Institut
    530 Bush Street
    San Francisco, CA 94108

Los Angeles:
    Thursday, 4 December 2008
6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
    Goethe-Institut
    5750 Wilshire Boulevard
    Los Angeles, CA 90036

To enroll in one of the meetings, send an e-mail to daadsf@daad.org by Monday, 24 November 2008. DAAD asks enrollees to put "Info Session SF," "Info Session LA," or "Info Session DC" in the subject line. More details are available on the DAAD-New York Web site.

Dear Editor,

My name is Debora Keller, I am a 1st year PhD student in Molecular mechanisms of Cancer at the Federal Polytechnical School of Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and also member of the Young European Biotech Network (YEBN).

While reading your article on the "political scientist", I could not help but agree.  Yes, young scientists tend to focus on the scholarly output first (if not only), and yes, the advisors (aka "boss") also tend to see any other activity apart from being in the lab and doing experiments as a waste of time. And trying to communicate with the media or with policy makers is the worst of betrayals and will keep you from becoming an excellent scientist...or so it seems!

Scientists in general, be they younger or older, also tend to lament themselves when politicians reduce the funding, or pass laws that just make no sense, scientifically speaking! But how can these politicians take "informed" decisions when only 5% of them have a scientific background (at least in the European Commission, according to Zoran Stancic, deputy director general of the European Commission's Directorate General Research)? Can we expect the same politicians to take the right decisions to promote research and development, and life sciences in general?

During the EuroBio2008 conference (the european counterpart to BIO) that took place in Paris from October 7th-9th, 30 young scientists and students in Life Sciences from the Young European Biotech Network and coming from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Switzerland decided to get involved in the political process and engage with policy makers and stakeholders of Europe.
This event, bringing together researchers, industry and decision makers, was meant to discuss the future shape of the Life Sciences and Biotech sectors and issue a "Call for Change" report to Make Change Happen in a Europe that wants to become THE leader of a knowledge-based economy (according to the Lisbon Agenda).

The "rising generation" was key in bringing forth their vision of the future and debated passionately with international stakeholders on several hot topics such as "axe the CAP and spend money on R&D instead" or "nationalism is the greatest enemy of Biotechnology in Europe" during the House of Commons. They contributed actively with critical comments and concrete questions and proposals to the BioDialogues on Red, White and Green Biotechnology. After all, they would be working in these areas in the coming years and, as Professor Federico Mayor (former director general of the UNESCO) pointed out at the reporting plenary,  the future is indeed in the hands of the young generation!
The enthusiasm and dedication of these young scientists that dared to set aside for a few days their important scientific experiments and take vacation to attend EuroBio2008 and become "politically active" led to the comment by Eric Poincelet - Commissioner General of EuroBio2008" : "next time, you will not be thirty only, you will be one hundred"!

This comment is already a success in itself. It was definitely NOT a waste of time for these young scientists to participate to these debates, and the appreciation for this will be measured by the outcome of the conference, the "Call for Change" report, as our YEBN chairman Francesco Lescai pointed out: “The YEBN contribution to EuroBio2008 was an example of the fresh inputs these kind of discussions need most: our students and young researchers were capable to break the schemes of the discussions and highlight some critical points to be addressed with high priority. Everyone seemed to appreciate: we will be able to measure this appreciation with the number of suggestions that will actually appear in the Green Paper to be delivered to the European Commission".

So, as stated in Peter Fiske's article, when "many members of the scientific community retreat to the comfort of their laboratories or lecture halls" we believe that it is the "Science's next wave" that has to take a step forward and make their voice heard. We encourage our young scientists that pursue excellence in their research to become "political YOUNG scientists" and Make Change Happen!

Yours sincerely,

Debora Keller
Young European Biotech Network (YEBN)
Communication Task Group Leader