It looks like many cell biologists are ditching positions where they are at the mercy of decreased NIH funding for grants. Late last year Claire Waterman-Storer told me that this was in part why she moved from the Scripps to the NIH, where she would have a stable source of funding (no grant writing there!) Now I just found out that two big guys from Yale's excellent XX department will be departing soon ... one will be heading overseas, the other will be moving to the private sector.
Things are not looking good.
P.S. I would tell you who the big shots are, but the news isn't official ... and I don't want to get myself and my boss in trouble ...
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You still need to write proposals at the NIH, right? I remember talking to a PI from NIDDK and he was saying that they were feeling the NIH budget crunch too. I remember him saying that you could get tenure at NIH, but if you failed to get any of your proposals funded, they'd take away your lab and leave you with only an office.
I'm not sure how it works exactly, but you get some institutional funding and thus don't have to compete in the general R01 pool.
you don't compete for R01s, but you do come up for review every couple of years. if you fail the review, you get no money. it's a lot like getting a proposal funded.
So how worried should I be about persuing a career in academia? Will a biophysics B.A. and (hopefully) Cell Biology Ph.D. get me nowhere, no matter how much I want to teach and do research? I know this is a really general question, but it comes up a great deal and most people cannot formulate any sort of concrete answer.
DD,
At a career conference last month the keynote speaker quoted a pretty scary stat: 15% of life science postdocs get a tenure-track faculty position within 5 years of graduation.
In other words, don't give up on Powerball.
Alex, can you divulge the department? We can do the rest.
Look at my banner. That's all I'll say.
DD,
It's hard to say. Funding to the NIH is cyclical, we just went through the belt-tightening phase so conventional wisdom says that it may improve in the upcoming decade ... but I don't have the crystal ball.
Hi.
Therere many outstanding US cell biologists you touched upon Gundersen, Waterman-Storer, Borisy, Pollard, Mitchison
Its interesting: what the portrait of ideal Postdoc for these superstars is?