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Not Enough

August 03, 2012

"Today's trainees are sold promises that their hard work in the lab will pay off with tenure-track positions in academia," writes the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology's Benjamin Corb in a post at the organization's News From the Hill blog. "Nearly one in three biomedical PhDs will end up with a career in the private sector, and yet our community rarely if ever provides training to PhDs that will both prepare them for alternative careers and educate them on realistic employment options that will be available."

And so, Corb says, while groups like the US National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the Director's Biomedical Workforce Working Group have advocated for broad training options for biomedical PhDs, it is simply not enough. "If we are using NIH dollars to train PhDs for the research and academic careers we want for them but only 23 percent of them are reaching that goal, it is time to find answers to critical questions," he says.

Corb and the rest of ASBMB's public affairs team are soliciting suggestions for how to fix the PhD training problem, which they intend to submit to the NIH.


Well the premise that PhD

Submitted by Biotreker on Mon, 08/06/2012 - 17:26.

Well the premise that PhD training is on a path to an academic career is nonsense on the face of it. At any one time, a typical busy research department in most universities might have about 10 tenure-track faculty and maybe 5 - 15 non-tenure track PhD staff, and about 30 PhD sudents with an average training cycle of about 5 year duration. This only works as steady state replacement if the average faculty career length is about 10/30*5 years, or about 1.67 years - short even for the junior faculty churn at Harvard.