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Securing the Early Career Research Pipeline Paul Panipinto, PM, PhD Candidate Washington State University, College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Science
Executive Summary Post-doctoral researchers have long been a critical component of U.S. biomedical research. Over the last two decades the job quality of these positions has degraded significantly, causing double digit decreases in the number of biomedical post-docs. The NIH has been unable to address this issue substantially leading to piecemeal attempts to address the problem by states. This has caused considerable disruption to academic budgets and workers. Comprehensive changes including a minimum pay scale, attaching the growth of future pay to fair market value and adequate funding by congress to enable this without harming U.S. research output are critical to restoring America’s early career biomedical research pipeline.
Critical Shortages of US Post-doctoral Researchers Between 2001 and 2021 the U.S. Post-doc rate – the rate at which newly minted PhDs enter a post-doctoral training position – for biological and biomedical sciences declined from 76% to 65%. This substantial drop is even more concerning given that every other field tracked by the National Science Foundation (NSF) demonstrated strong growth in the same 20-year period, with most showing double-digit increases. Anecdotal reports of difficulty finding people to fill post-doctoral positions, even for well-established and funded labs, have been relegated to the career sections of journals like Science and Nature with very little done to improve the issue. The White House and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have begun to act by holding listening sessions to gather the opinions of stakeholders. However, as the COVID pandemic demonstrated, the security of our biomedical research pipeline is a critical issue that affects the sustainability of the U.S. health science system that the world depends on. As participation in these positions decline in the U.S., they will inevitably move to international
competitors, further hindering a field that has long set the standard for the world.
A Decade of Education Rewarded by Low Pay and Poor Working Conditions The two most common routes for biomedical PhDs have long been either moving to an academic postdoc at a research university or moving into the biomedical industry. Academic post-docs have for decades been the traditional position for those who receive a PhD and are intended provide further training to prepare PhD holders for a faculty position. Over the last two decades these positions have become more focused on producing science than producing faculty with only 9% of post-docs reporting working only their contracted hours and 61% reporting that they work more than six hours a week over their contract, often without compensation. Additionally, 55% of post-docs spend less than an hour a week with their faculty mentor, stymieing development and creating confusion about what the purpose of the position is2. A survey of top concerns by the National Postdoctoral Association found that 94.8% of postdocs thought their lives were negatively affected by their salary, 90.4% reported a lack of clarity about the pathway to their next position, 87.4% had an unclear definition of their current role, 86.6% were insecure about their job and 92.1% of international post-docs reported additional vulnerabilities due to their visa status. Together these data demonstrate that the professional state of some of our most highly skilled and educated workers is one of crisis.
Piecemeal Attempts and a Federal Solution As noted, the NIH has established working groups to provide potential solutions to this problem. The 21-member committee recently laid out a series of guiding principles that include increasing pay, encouraging employers to provide benefits and capping the length of post-doctoral appointments at the predicted cost of reducing the total number of post-docs supported by the NIH. These would be strong first steps, however, they are nearly identical to
The Pharmacologist • September 2023
