Academic training took me away from my Indigenous homeland—but I found my way back

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From ScienceMag:

The sun is setting as my postdoc adviser and I arrive at a quiet boat landing in northern Wisconsin with a cooler full of ice, sampling bags, and what is colloquially called a fish guillotine. We set up our makeshift sampling station on a truck tailgate and catch up with the folks cleaning the boats—employees of the Lac du Flambeau Tribe’s Natural Resources Department, our collaborators in studying freshwater fish parasites around the Great Lakes. Soon the boat landing is bustling with Ojibwe harvesters maneuvering boats, receiving harvesting permits, and preparing equipment. For years during my scientific training I missed out on the walleye harvest, a vital cultural practice for us Ojibwe. Now, I get to engage with it as a researcher, by collecting samples from harvesters—and a few days later, hop in a boat with my dad to spear.

Growing up, the seasons set the stage for my daily life. Spring spearing season takes place when the ice melts off the lakes and the ogaa (walleye) move to the shoreline to spawn. I remember watching family members prepare boats and head off in the early evening, and later joined the harvest myself, a hard-fought Indigenous right resecured by many before me who endured harassment and asserted our sovereignty in the courts. The fish and the ethereal eggs they produced inspired me to study biology and, later, to focus on developmental biology.

But I had to give up taking part while pursuing higher education, as the academic calendar almost never lines up with the seasonality of Indigenous practices. In college, classes, research, and building community kept me busy, but in the back of my mind I always felt the pull to return to the lakes. Still, I wanted to continue to pursue my research training and joined a Ph.D. program even farther away. I spent the intervening summer interning at the tribe’s natural resources department, happy to have the opportunity to put on my scientist cap and serve my tribe. But I knew that summer would likely be my longest stay at home for a while—perhaps decades if I followed the path of most academics.

As I neared the end of my Ph.D., I was leaning toward moving to a new city or country and starting a postdoc, further delaying any possible return home. But the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into those plans and gave me the opportunity to reflect on my future, explore the work of fellow Indigenous academics and thinkers, investigate the histories of Western science, and be reminded of how tribal nations are still fighting a multitude of issues. And because the pandemic disrupted the usual academic calendar and expectations, I was able to visit home in the spring for the first time in a decade and tag along for a chilly, long, fun night of walleye harvesting with my uncle.

I realized I couldn’t delay returning; I had to do it now, even if just for a year or two, and even if it meant deviating from the typical academic career path. I toyed with working in natural resources or health as an intern or technician, teaching at local colleges, or even completely moving away from biology to learn a new field if nothing else was available in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. I was vocal about my plans to return, including in an interview for my tribe’s weekly newsletter. The stars aligned because a field station near my tribe’s reservation was searching for a researcher to work full time from the station, rather than being based at the university’s main campus. When the station director reached out to discuss a postdoc position, I leapt at the opportunity.

I’m fortunate that I can study a topic relevant to my tribe, my institution, and my degree, all at once. To help more Indigenous folks stay in academia and fulfill obligations we have to our tribal nations, opportunities like this need to be more common. It’s because of my community and Land connections that my postdoctoral work is flourishing. When Mother Nature decides to change the seasons, I’m there, ready to collect samples or jump into a spearing boat and reconnect with friends, family, and my fish relatives.

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Criticism of witticism: Does humor belong in the science classroom?

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From ScienceMag:

Experimental Error logo
Experimental Error is a column about the quirky, comical, and sometimes bizarre world of scientific training and careers, written by scientist and comedian Adam Ruben. Barmaleeva/Shutterstock, adapted by C. Aycock/Science

I’ve had a few funny science professors. I mean, they’re science professors, so the bar for “funny” isn’t exactly sky-high. But in the context of, say, an organic chemistry lecture, every wink, flippant remark, pop culture reference, or moment that the professor said a swear word became Showtime at the Apollo, and for a few seconds, the class would perk up. I may have forgotten most of the behavioral zoology I learned, but I’ll never forget the ornithology professor who told us how he learned to be careful asking at the front desk in a bookstore, “Do you have British Tits?”

I always wanted to be that funny science professor. When I eventually taught science courses myself, I’d try to work humor into my lectures and workshops. The laughter wasn’t necessarily the goal; it’s just that humor has the benefit of instant, unmistakable feedback. You can hear your students laugh. You can’t—unless someone gasps, slaps their forehead, and starts scribbling furiously—hear your students learn. So I’d walk away from each class feeling like the day’s success depended as strongly on whether the students laughed as on whether they learned.

At the same time, I found myself stuck in a state of half-guilt, wondering whether my efforts to be the affable science professor represented nothing more than a self-serving, self-gratifying way to feel beloved, and not just—or maybe even contrary to—an effective pedagogical technique. I’d especially question this choice when a student who seemed to be enjoying themselves in class would fail a quiz, or demonstrate in a paper a complete lack of understanding of a topic about which we’d just finished joking—and, I had incorrectly assumed, learning.

I haven’t taught science courses in a long time, but I started to think about this again when a new paper was published last month on the preprint server bioRxiv, titled, “Are they funny? Associations between instructors’ humor and student emotions in undergraduate lab courses.” After analyzing lectures from 48 courses and interviewing 462 students, the researchers concluded that “students who perceived their instructor to be humorous reported greater pleasant emotions and fewer unpleasant emotions.” Or, to present the same conclusion differently from the way it has to be written in an academic journal article, laughter—wait for it—feels nice.

The paper also concludes that humor is subjective, which I think we all know in a theoretical sense, but regularly forget in a practical sense. The researchers recorded hours of lectures, reviewed their transcripts, and noted the bits they thought were attempts at levity. But when they asked the students to rate the humor in the lectures, they found a significant gap between what the researchers, and the students, found funny.

Maybe that disconnect exists at least in part because the students had the simple advantage of being there. It’s not a stretch to say a transcript of a recording of a lecture strips out the crucial holistic feeling of sitting in the lecture hall. It also ignores the other pressures in the students’ minds, under the assumption that the joke itself is everything: A room full of undergraduates panicking about an upcoming exam, or pissed off about last night’s overlong problem set, might think lightheartedness comes off as oblivious.

Or maybe, most importantly, students might miss a joke if they’re busy trying to digest the science.

The study doesn’t ask, or attempt to answer, the question I wrestled with: It examines the relationship between humor and students’ emotions, but it stops short of associating these emotions with academic success, instead citing earlier work that associates “instructor immediacy behaviors” (e.g., making jokes) with “academic engagement.” If giving the students a pleasant classroom experience is the goal, it goes without saying that their teachers should strive to make them smile. The study I’d like to see, however, would ask whether the students learn more when they’re happy. Laughs per minute versus points per exam. A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender asks, “Why the long face? Is it because of divergent evolution that prioritized molar surface area to support the fibrous diet of herbivores? Explain in a short paragraph.”

For reasons that will never make sense to anyone, especially my wife who reads Marie Kondo, I still have my old college notebooks. I opened them recently, and while I reminisced—“Look at all the science I used to know and now have completely forgotten!”—I tried to find any correlation between the material I remember best and the professors I had found funniest. The result, of course, is that I remember as little about the professors as I do about the classes, because I’m old, and I took most of the notes while on 2 or 3 hours of sleep. What I did find, however, were lots of jokes—not in the notes, but in the margins.

Apparently my way to maintain a pleasant classroom experience was to self-medicate, drawing little cartoons, making wordplay, huh-huh-ing about science or math terms with inappropriate connotations (ah, the classic integral of e to the power of x). No one ever saw these; they were purely my way of keeping myself entertained—which means I must have derived a benefit from keeping my brain at a baseline level of entertainment. Or maybe I’m just easily distractable, and the reason I don’t remember the science isn’t because I’m old, it’s because I spent the lectures doodling jokes.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to repeat the published study, in a very limited way, with N = 1: my 11-year-old. He started to tell me about one of his science teachers who constantly made jokes, so I asked him, “Do you think that gives the students a more pleasant experience?”

He thought for a moment. “Yeah,” he answered, “because otherwise the teacher’s just yapping.”

The effectiveness of humor in pedagogy may be no more complicated than that: Students appreciate comedy in science class because, for just a moment, we instructors stop yapping. Maybe that’s the lesson here: Science is difficult, lectures can be boring, and even if we can’t turn every class into a headliner set, we can at least remember that our students would appreciate it if we add something, even a small something like a joke, to periodically pause our yap.

And if you’re looking for a way to reward yourself when the class is over, you can go home and try one more feature of comedy clubs: a two-drink minimum.

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My academic job offer was rescinded. I’ll keep going—but U.S. researchers are running out of road

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From ScienceMag:

It took just 30 minutes for my carefully constructed future to crumble. First came the email, at 9:48 a.m. on 3 July. “Due to university budget constraints, we must rescind your job offer,” it read. The tenure-track position I had been weighing for weeks had vanished. Do not panic, I commanded myself. I had a backup option: to stay at my current institution, which despite a hiring freeze had stretched to also offer me a tenure-track position, though with only a small startup package. But a few minutes later, I was on a scheduled call with the program officer for my grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He gently explained that I couldn’t activate the award unless my institution committed much more funding of its own. I sat frozen until day care called: My 2-year-old had bumped his head and I needed to sign an accident report at pickup. That mundane errand became an anchor in a fast-moving river, reminding me there were still dinners to cook, bedtime stories to read, a family to nurture, a life to live.

Twenty months earlier, I had been full of naïve optimism as I started the 2023–24 job season. But 200 hours of applications yielded only two screening interviews and zero offers. Search committees were polite but blunt: “We’re looking for external funding.” So, I threw myself into grant writing. By midsummer 2024 I held a fundable score on an NIH K award, intended to help early-career investigators transition into independent roles. My calendar lit up: screening calls with several institutions, and two on-site visits. Success, I told myself, is a numbers game. File enough grants, book enough flights, and one door will stay open.

Then the political winds shifted. In February, a proposed cut to NIH indirect costs spooked university administrators nationwide. University C, which had planned to invite me for a second visit, froze hiring. University R went silent. Only University A pressed ahead. I delivered a Zoom seminar in March, a chalk talk in April, and received a job offer in May.

But ecstasy quickly gave way to anxiety when my husband, who works in biotech, couldn’t find a job in the same city. June blurred into spreadsheets and insomnia. Should we live apart so he could keep his current job? Perhaps, but who would the kids live with? I’d be launching a new lab; it couldn’t be me. Yet I’m their mother, and I want to kiss them good night every single day until they won’t let me. How about one parent with each child, on a rotating schedule? Too chaotic. Could my husband work in my lab? Aside from nepotism rules, I’d also like to stay married. I told University A I needed more time to decide.

If I stayed at my current institution, how much preliminary data could I generate on the limited startup budget? I feared a hopeless loop: no data, no new grants, no money to generate data. University A granted me a 1-week extension. But before I had a chance to decide, Congress passed the new spending bill, and I received that email saying the offer was canceled.

I allowed myself 1 day to mourn, rage‑scribbling in my notebook, eating ice cream for dinner, calling friends who had survived academic limbo. Their stories shared a common theme: Careers look linear only in hindsight. Offers vanish, grants get triaged, political tides turn. We keep going. But exactly how many detours can a junior scientist afford before running out of road?

That sleepless night, a flood in Texas claimed more than 130 lives, many of them children. Faced with real tragedy, my hardship shrank. A tenure‑track position is not life or death, and most setbacks are temporary (at least I hope!). Write one more grant even when the last review stings. Send one more email asking for an opening. Accept that “yes” can morph into “no” overnight, and sometimes back again.

I still don’t know whether my institution can piece together a patchwork startup big enough to activate the K grant; the department chair promises to “see what we can do.” I don’t know when I will unlock a lab door bearing my name. I can’t predict the next hiring cycle or the next election. But I can keep doing the science I love while I still have a bench. Between mouse surgeries and bedtime stories, I’ll write the next proposal. That, I’ve decided, is what resilience really means.

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I faced stigma as an HIV-positive scientist. Now, I’m living my dream

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From ScienceMag:

I was less than a year into my Ph.D. when I learned my scholarship had been canceled. I was heartbroken. Studying in Germany was meant to be a fresh start, a chance to escape the stigma I’d faced back home in Costa Rica since testing positive for HIV. After years of struggle, I finally felt my dream of a scientific career was back on track. But securing medical insurance for my treatment had proved difficult, which eventually led the scholarship organization to cancel my funding. I was forced to return home.

I’d always wanted to be a scientist. As a child, I spent hours catching insects in the garden and watching nature documentaries. I made it into a prestigious science-focused high school in the capital, and then into an undergraduate microbiology program.

But something else was unfolding beneath the surface. I’d long known I was gay, and at university I found a community and came out. I dated and explored my identity. But in my final year, I started to lose weight and developed a swollen lymph node. My doctor told me it could be cancer or HIV. I was terrified. A part of me even hoped it was cancer, because society tends to view cancer survivors as brave, whereas HIV-positive people are still heavily stigmatized.

Eventually, the diagnosis came: I was HIV positive.

The response from many of my colleagues was deeply hurtful. Some said that, as a microbiologist, I should have known how HIV spreads and been more careful. At the time, I was a student in a bacteriology lab located in the same hospital where I was receiving treatment. The infectious disease doctor managing my case regularly visited the lab, and to see him in that context was unsettling. One day, a colleague casually mentioned they had processed my laboratory samples. I felt exposed, unsafe, and overwhelmed.

Telling my family was excruciating. My relationship with my father fell apart. Some friends disappeared, too. One said I was a burden on the health care system; another called me a bad person. The stress led to a mental health crisis and a psychotic episode, and I had to take time off from my studies to recover.

But I didn’t give up. I completed my degree and began working as a research assistant, even as my mental health struggles continued. I was hospitalized again and eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. The stigma only deepened. Now, I wasn’t just HIV positive, I was “crazy,” too.

Eventually, I decided I needed to get away. In Costa Rica, most microbiologists work in hospitals, places I could no longer bear to be in. After years of trying, I was awarded the scholarship in Germany. It felt like a new beginning: It was a relief to simply exist, without having to talk about my diagnoses. But the private health insurance provided by the scholarship organization excluded HIV treatment—and I couldn’t get public insurance without a job, which was incompatible with my study program. The organization said it could not fund me without coverage. I was devastated. I thought I’d lost everything I had worked so hard for. I felt ashamed: ashamed to explain to my supervisor why my scholarship had ended, ashamed to tell others what had happened, ashamed of having to return home. At some point, I began to believe I was simply a failure.

Fortunately, I still had people to support me. My former supervisor connected me with researchers in Italy, who offered me a Ph.D. position—this time with full insurance. From the beginning, my new supervisors knew about my HIV status, and I soon told them about my mental health. They regularly checked on my well-being, even coming with me on an initial visit to a psychiatrist. It meant the world to know that some people believed in an HIV-positive scientist with a mental health condition. I began to believe that speaking about my scars might help, that it could foster understanding, and perhaps even awaken empathy in others. If we don’t talk about HIV or mental health, the stigma will never end.

I completed my Ph.D., and am now living my dream as a postdoc. My mental health is stable, and I have not had a crisis in a long time. I’ve been undetectable for nearly a decade. Living with stigma is hard—but life didn’t end. I’m still here.

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Large study of scientists who move their labs reveals how location drives productivity

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The mantra “location, location, location” isn’t just about real estate. For life scientists, more than 50% of their productivity can be attributed to the institution where they work, according to a new study that tracked the publications of researchers as they moved during their career. The findings, published this month as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, play into an active and long-running debate over how to allocate limited research funding—and whether to implement policies that prevent grant dollars from being concentrated at a handful of big-name universities.

The study quantifies a phenomenon that’s probably familiar to many academics, says University of California, Berkeley economist Carolyn Stein, who wasn’t involved in the new study. It’s easy to imagine that “you can pick someone up and move them to a more productive place, and it will make them more productive.” Still, the magnitude of the observed effect is striking, she says. “The role of luck and path dependence in science is maybe larger than I’ve completely appreciated.”

The new study compiled data for about 300,000 U.S.-based life scientists who published between 1945 and 2023. Boston-area researchers had the highest productivity—publishing two or three times more papers per year in 15 journals that cover basic life science research, including Cell, Nature, and Science, compared with researchers in many other metropolitan areas. When a researcher moved from a less productive institution to one with higher average productivity, they became more productive as well, according to a “wandering scholar” analysis that included about 38,000 scientists who had a publication record from before and after moving between institutions.

The team wasn’t able to pinpoint what institutional characteristics led to productivity gains. Lead author Amitabh Chandra, an economist at Harvard University, notes that “it could be something about resources, facilities, graduate students.”

A previous study backs that up: Faculty at top U.S. universities who work in fields where collaboration and co-authorship are the norm were more productive in large part because they led larger lab groups, researchers reported in a 2022 paper published in Science Advances. “It’s this labor that increases faculty productivity, not really inherent characteristics of the faculty themselves,” says Aaron Clauset, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and senior author on the 2022 study.

Chandra and Harvard colleague Connie Xu began the new study well before President Donald Trump’s administration took over and halted the flow of research funding to Harvard. But the findings indicate how much research could be lost if funding isn’t reinstated. “Entire countries produce less than what Harvard produces,” notes Chandra, whose analysis found that his institution publishes 3.6% of the global output of top life science papers—the most of any single institution in the world. “When we turn off the funding to one of these large producers … the implications are colossal.”

Recent political developments aside, the paper also plays into a decadeslong policy discussion about how to allocate federal grant money. Should funders aim to maximize output—resulting in a concentration of grants at relatively few elite institutions—or would it better serve the public to spread funding around more broadly? The new study makes plain the benefits of favoring the elites: “If … funders are choosing between two equally productive scientists, one at an institution whose average research output is twice the other’s,” Chandra and Xu write, “funders could get more than 50% more research by prioritizing a scientist at the more productive institution.”

But Chandra acknowledges it’s also “perfectly valid” to base funding decisions on priorities other than research output, such as reducing funding disparities. He hopes the data in the new study can provide solid numbers to inform the debate. “The point in our paper is not that you should not spread the money around, but you should know why you’re spreading the money around.”

Others say the argument against further enriching highly productive intuitions is already clear. “Those institutions are in a position to make faculty that much more productive … because they’ve received large amounts of research support over many, many decades,” says University of Vermont Vice President for Research and Economic Development Kirk Dombrowski, who also serves as board chair for the EPSCoR/IDeA Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes science in underfunded states. Allocating resources to them disproportionately would “reflect more of the historical inequities that have created differences,” he says.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has made some steps to try to address concerns that researchers at elite universities benefit from reputational bias in the review process. In January, the agency changed its grant review procedures to try to de-emphasize the importance of a researcher’s expertise and institutional resources. Reviewers can note potential concerns in those areas, but they’re no longer given a numerical rating. “You should judge [a proposal] on the quality of the grant that’s in front of you,” says Sharlene Day, a cardiologist and physician scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and former chair of an NIH study section.

NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF) also have long-running programs, called IDeA and EPSCoR, respectively, that reserve a portion of their budget for projects in states that receive the least funding through traditional funding tracks. As the prospect of major funding cuts looms, some worry about the future of such programs. But in comments last month at a Senate hearing about the upcoming fiscal year’s budget, NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya voiced his support. “It’s absolutely vital that NIH investments are geographically dispersed,” Bhattacharya told West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R), whose state receives less than 1% of NIH grant dollars annually. “In my mind, it’s probably … less funded than it ought to be.”

Typically, about 94% of NIH’s budget goes to researchers in just 27 states, points out Prakash Nagarkatti, an immunologist at the University of South Carolina and former university administrator. But there’s evidence that when grants go to researchers in other, less well funded states, “they are really productive, and they publish quality papers.” His own research, published in PLOS ONE in 2023, shows that in underfunded states, the research community publishes more research articles and garners more citations per million dollars in federal grant funding than those in states with greater federal support.

But spreading out the funding makes sense regardless of recipients’ output, Nagarkatti adds. Additional funding for hiring and training a Ph.D. student, for example, could boost the pipeline of locally produced researchers and result in work that solves regional problems. “Overall, every state gets benefit[s], rather than few states.”

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I thought imposter syndrome caused my Ph.D. struggles. I was wrong

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The first time I saw my byline on a news story published by my scientific society, I jumped up and down. I had never felt so much pride and ownership about something I did, and for a moment I was free of the habitual self-doubt that had plagued me as a Ph.D. student. But a few months later, when I told my lab group I was writing for the society, there was an uncomfortable silence. To fill the pause, I blabbered about how little the role meant to me. “It’s really not a big deal,” I told my labmates. Later, my reaction bothered me. Why did I act embarrassed about something that had finally given me the passionate spark I had been looking for in science?

My decision 4 years earlier to pursue a Ph.D. was a lot more practical and exploratory than I let on. The work permit the U.S. government had granted me after I finished my bachelor’s degree was coming to an end, and I had two options: stay at the biotech startup where I’d worked for a few years, which had offered to sponsor a new visa application if I signed a 5 year contract, or go back to school. At 22, I hadn’t yet figured out what I wanted to do with my life, so I opted for school.

I started feeling like a fish out of water early on. Everyone around me seemed to be driven by their burning love of science. I felt out of place, uninspired, and incompetent. “It’s just imposter syndrome,” everyone told me. For years, I believed them, thinking that with more experience and confidence, things would change.

But as time went on, the feelings only got stronger. In my fourth year, I started reading blog posts and watching videos in all flavors of “How to know if you should quit your Ph.D.” One YouTuber asked, “Does the idea of someone taking your Ph.D. away make you angry or relieved?”

I thought about the question. The idea didn’t make me angry, despite how much work I’d already put into my dissertation research. “Relieved” was more like it. But at the same time, I knew that I had too much fight in me to leave my program. “That’s fine, I’ll get my degree,” I told myself, “then quit science and pursue something else entirely.”

Partly in search of this “something else,” I began writing. At first, I mainly used it as a creative outlet. But eventually, it led me to explore science communication. I connected with an editor at my scientific society’s magazine, who gave me an opportunity to write articles about newly published scientific papers.

Suddenly, the world of science became much more appealing. In reading and writing about research that had nothing to do with my own, I felt curious, enlightened, and empowered—all the things I didn’t feel as a scientist. The work fed the side of me that, as my mom would say, was always interested in “way too many things.” I began to entertain the idea that my problem wasn’t imposter syndrome—maybe I truly was a fish out of water, and all I needed to do was leave my life on land.

I decided to tell my academic mentors about my new passion. I’d hoped that my discovery would elate them as much as it did me, and that they would bless my desire to explore new waters. Instead, like my labmates, they could not understand why I would want to pursue anything other than research. They blamed imposter syndrome and offered their support. “You can do this,” they told me.

Truthfully, I did worry about what my life would look like if I left the world of scientific research. My family might be disappointed and I might face visa obstacles. I shared those concerns with a writing mentor, who at one point had also been an international student. “Follow your heart, and the rest will follow,” she told me.

I knew in my heart that I wanted to pursue science communication after I graduated. And once I chose to trust that feeling, I found that I no longer struggled to breathe. I still felt out of place in academia. But I now knew where I belonged and how to get there. That gave me the confidence to not only complete my Ph.D., but also tell my colleagues that I was moving into science communication without feeling awkward or embarrassed.

So, if you’re feeling like a fish out of water, remember that there are little ponds and streams all around you. All you have to do is trust that feeling and—sometimes—jump.

Do you have an interesting career story? Send it to SciCareerEditor@aaas.org. Read the general guidelines here.

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So, academics, whatcha doin’ for summer break?

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From ScienceMag:

Experimental Error logo
Experimental Error is a column about the quirky, comical, and sometimes bizarre world of scientific training and careers, written by scientist and comedian Adam Ruben. Barmaleeva/Shutterstock, adapted by C. Aycock/Science

I know you’ve heard the question.

A family member, or a friend, usually well-meaning, casually asks what fun plans you have for your 3-month hiatus. They might just be making conversation. They might be trying to tee up a dig that ranges from passive aggressive (“Gosh, it must be so relaxing to have the entire summer off!”) to aggressive aggressive (“I wish I could just walk away for June, July, and August every year, but I suppose I’m one of those suckers who, you know, HAS A JOB”).

Or, they might simply be unaware of the truth: that summer, for an academic scientist, might include a slight change of activities, but, uh, no, you don’t get a break.

Sure, there are differences compared with the “regular” school year. Summer starts with dapper-looking parents helping their kids load beanbag chairs into SUVs. Then, after occupying every nearby restaurant for lunch, they vanish. An odd quiet settles over the quads. The usual lines for the cafeteria and rec center die down; on-campus parking transitions from scarce to slightly less scarce; and lampposts and bulletin boards shed their stapled fliers like oaks in the fall.

But meanwhile, scientists head to the lab, same as usual.

When I was in grad school, the question about my plans for summer always felt more annoying than naïve: No, I didn’t have some school-sanctioned break, and as for fun plans, I intended to spend quality time with millions of subcloned bacteria. The question about summer break was yet another reminder that most people not only found my chosen career path to be inscrutable, but worse, that they misperceived it as relaxing.

It reminded me of other similarly irritating inquiries—questions that implied that, while my peers sweated in the real world, I had slipped into Neverland as a perpetual student, living off their income taxes and seeing nothing wrong with life as a 23rd grader (or 28th grader). To name just a few that plagued me, and I’m pretty sure many of you:

When will you graduate?

This has to be the top of the list, because for so many people, the idea of an academic program with no set end date sounds like absolute madness. This is probably because it is absolute madness. But it’s the madness you’ve chosen, and you somehow have to justify why you agreed to a life plan that may sound, to them, like you’ve signed a contract for a 500-year mortgage. This question applies to postdocs as well. Tell them it’s like a job, but it also isn’t, and you’re only there until a different job becomes available, but one might never become available, and shut up I’m not crying, you’re crying.

How can you possibly afford to pay for so many years of school?

This misconception reinforces the idea that scientists are the elites who can afford years of expensive training. I still remember the look on a friend’s face when he asked this question, and I responded, “Because in a Ph.D. program, you don’t pay the school. The school pays you!” Regardless of whether you deliver this last line in a Yakov Smirnoff voice, once their shock has dissipated, you’ll want to reassure them the same way I reassured my friend: “Don’t worry … it doesn’t pay you much.”

Why do you have to go to the lab at midnight? Is someone making you do that?

Well, you can tell them, yes and no. It’s a delicate social balance wherein your adviser isn’t exactly telling you that you must be in the lab at midnight, but if you show poor progress at your lab meeting, and you justify it with a derisive snort and the response, “Well, I wasn’t exactly going to go into the lab at midnight, now was I?” you’re not doing yourself any favors. Even if your adviser is the nice kind who seems to be aware that Work-Life Balance isn’t the name of a granola bar, someone or something might still “make you” go to the lab at midnight. Depending on your flavor of science, you might be subject to the whims of bacteria, mice, chemical reaction timelines, or telescopes. Either way, just let your naïve friend assume you’re a go-getter who’s earning lucrative overtime.

Ooh, you’ve published! Where can I find your article when it comes out?

It’s not easy to explain that, no, your article won’t be on the front page of any magazine they’ll encounter at the newsstand; and no, they probably wouldn’t want to read it anyway because it’s not exactly written in “words” in the traditional sense; and no, they probably wouldn’t want to pay however much it costs to access. And, no, you also can’t afford to access your own article.

How can you possibly have a social life with this kind of career?

I don’t know, you should answer, how can you possibly have a social life when you’re so preemptively judgmental? Then concede that maybe they’re right, and you should submit a grant application to study the social lives of scientists.

Do you need anything? Would $5 help? Here, take $5. Don’t worry about it. Seriously, you need it more than I do.

This offer is wildly insulting and moderately helpful.

This summer, as you breathe a little easier on your empty-ish campus, try not to lose your mind over the questions your friends and family ask you. Explain that you’re working on something you feel passionate about, and research never takes a summer break.

But go home at 11:59 p.m. tonight. You’ve earned it.

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‘It’s a nightmare.’ U.S. funding cuts threaten academic science jobs at all levels

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From ScienceMag:

It was a conversation neither wanted to have. Last month, University of Maryland professor Anne Simon broke the difficult news to Xiaobao Ying that she didn’t have funding to extend his assistant research scientist position beyond July as they had originally planned. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had agreed last year to fund a field trial for their team’s work on citrus greening, an economically important crop disease, which would have covered his salary for 2 years. But after President Donald Trump’s administration took over, the funds were frozen. “It’s very hard because you’re devastating people’s lives,” Simon says of the conversation with Ying. “I’ve never had to do this in 38 years.”

Ying, a single father who has worked in Simon’s lab for 5 years, is now scrambling to find another research job. He’s only seen one position that he felt qualified to apply for. “I don’t think it will be easy,” he says. “Everywhere funding is short.” In the meantime, he plans to try to get by as an Uber driver.

Similar conversations are taking place across the country as the federal government has paused or terminated billions of dollars of grants, proposed slashing research funding by more than 40% for key research agencies in the next fiscal year, and tried—so far without success—to cut overhead payments to universities. In response, graduate schools have reduced the size of their incoming cohorts and faculty have been anxiously watching their budgets and worrying about their own careers. “My lab is definitely going to shrink,” says Arthi Jayaraman, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware, Newark.

So is U.S. academic science as a whole—perhaps dramatically. Numbers released in May by the National Science Foundation (NSF) indicate that if Congress approves the cuts to the agency proposed by the White House, the number of early-career researchers it supports could fall by 78%—from 95,700 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs during this fiscal year, to 21,400 in 2026. Young researchers supported by other agencies would also be hit, and even senior faculty worry about their future. “It’s a nightmare,” Simon says. “I really fear for the future of science.” (NSF declined to comment for the story.)

Multiple industry representatives tell Science they are seeing notable increases in the number of scientists applying for jobs, with Regeneron saying applications from people with doctorate degrees are up 20%. But it’s not clear that industry will be able to absorb all the Ph.D.s currently on the job market, especially given the flood of former federal scientists also looking for work.

For young researchers, “there is a lot of pressure to essentially leave the country or not pursue research,” says Emilya Ventriglia, a neuroscience Ph.D. student at Brown University who once thought she’d do a postdoc—but now isn’t so sure. “I’m looking at these people who … are extremely accomplished, some of the top in their field,” she says of the postdocs she knows, “and the door is closing on them.”

A prominent chemistry blogger who has tracked the faculty job market for 9 years wrote on his blog in April that he expects faculty job openings to be down by at least 20% over the coming year. “Universities are under tremendous governmental and financial pressure,” he wrote. Others note that if researchers begin to scale down their labs and take on larger teaching roles, teaching positions could decline as well.

Current junior faculty are also feeling nervous, fearing they will lack the money and the staff to get their research program off the ground and fulfill tenure requirements. Biophysicist Krishna Mudumbi, who began his position as an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University in January, has been carefully weighing how to spend his limited startup package, uncertain whether new sources of funding will materialize anytime soon. The anxiety, he says, “really reduces my ability to do high-risk, high-reward type of experiments” because by the end of a project, he wants to be sure he’ll have research findings to show for it.

Plant biologists in lab
Plant biologists Anne Simon and Xiaobao Ying have seen federal funding frozen for their work on a disease plaguing citrus trees.Steven Ramsland

Many academics Science spoke with said they hope universities will adjust tenure expectations, as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic. Otherwise, some fear assistant professors will lose their jobs in the coming years simply because they did not have the funding to amass a strong research record. “It’s a very, very scary climate for a lot of junior faculty members,” says Barbara Landau, a cognitive science professor at Johns Hopkins University who is particularly worried that universities will see a reversal in recent gains in gender and racial diversity.

At Duke University, even some tenured professors are worried about their job security. In May, basic science researchers in Duke’s School of Medicine were told that if they don’t pull in enough external funding over a 3-year period, their salary could be adjusted downward. “It’s a creative way to go around the tenure system and force tenured professors to quit on their own,” says a Duke professor who spoke with Science on the condition of anonymity.

In an email to Science, Duke officials wrote, “We are looking at every aspect of our finances with the goal of preserving as many jobs as we can.” Faculty salaries is one aspect under consideration, they added, but no final decisions have been made.

If the policy does take effect, its staying power may depend on the outcome of an ongoing lawsuit filed by professors at the Tufts University School of Medicine against a similar policy enacted at their institution in 2017. That lawsuit is scheduled to be heard in court later this year.

Many are looking ahead, wondering what all this portends for the future of U.S. academic science. “The sands are shifting,” says Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas who has spent decades studying the scientific workforce. “Academic science has become a much more risky career proposition in this environment.”

The situation could make it challenging for professors to recruit lab members—especially those coming from abroad. Temporary visa holders currently account for 41% of Ph.D. students and 58% of postdocs at U.S. universities, according to a 2023 survey of the science, engineering, and health fields. But that influx of talent could run dry if foreign candidates are alarmed by funding cuts and visa cancellations and decide to go elsewhere. Jayaraman, who was once an international student in the United States herself, says that under the current circumstances, “I probably wouldn’t come here. … I would invest my time in a place where there’s stability.”

Meanwhile, some U.S. students and researchers are weighing whether they’d be better off elsewhere. One university in Canada launched a program to attract 20 doctoral students whose acceptance into a U.S. graduate program had been rescinded or who were reconsidering attending. And in Europe, the newly created Choose Europe For Science program is poised to invest €500 million between now and 2027 to attract researchers at a variety of career stages.  

Ying, a green card holder originally from China, says he wants to find a research job in the U.S. But he’s not sure that will be possible anytime soon. “The situation is very stressful,” he says. “I have trouble sleeping.”

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An unplanned pregnancy rocked my Ph.D. My academic village helped me make it through

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From ScienceMag:

I was in my first year of grad school, preparing to present my research plans to my thesis committee and department for approval. I kept brushing away the feelings of sickness. I could not afford to be sick with an 18-month-old to take care of and my presentation looming. But after a few days, at the encouragement of my supervisor, I went to the student clinic—only to be told I was pregnant. It felt as though the floor had been pulled out from under my feet. I had fought to carve out a space for myself in science as a hard-working Black mom. An unplanned pregnancy seemed like certain professional doom.

Juggling parenthood and my studies was already challenging, but I was determined to follow my dream. I had gotten married and had my first child while pursuing the second bachelor’s degree I needed after having finally found my professional direction. In 2020, I was ready to apply for grad school—not an easy feat during a global pandemic, let alone as a parent. For one virtual interview, I was not able to secure child care. The professor—who would go on to become my Ph.D. supervisor—graciously allowed the interview to continue with an infant bouncing in my arms. But I knew then and there that to succeed in graduate school, I should wait before having more children. Once I entered graduate school, I had no doubt about that choice. I quickly realized I would have to commit to my work as never before to succeed as I hoped, flawlessly checking every academic box.

After going to the clinic, I didn’t return to the lab. Instead I went home, quietly panicking. Two days later, my supervisor called to check on me, having noticed my absence. I told her everything. She listened kindly and offered me a key piece of advice: Don’t panic. I realized she was right, and instead of retreating from others and spiraling into silence, what I really needed was community.

I called my best friend, mom of two teenage boys, to cry and vent. I barely knew how to process everything I was feeling—shame, fear, grief, frustration about being pregnant in a foreign land far from my family—but naming those feelings helped. Over the following weeks, I began to understand that surviving graduate school as a pregnant student would take a village, made up not of blood relatives, but of fellow graduate student parents. They helped babysit my toddler when my husband was away so I could battle morning sickness or take a nap. We drafted schedules to coordinate day care pickup and babysitting when one of us had a long experiment, a conference to attend, or an emergency. Sometimes we just met up to talk about life and the challenges and joys of being parents in graduate school.

It wasn’t all rosy. I often had to call my supervisor for help to complete experiments because pregnancy symptoms left me too dizzy. I missed deadlines because of intense nausea and conferences because of anemia and low blood pressure. Peers questioned my commitment, whispering comments when I had to leave early for appointments or showed signs of morning sickness. One attributed my few successes during that period solely to my supervisor, making me feel inadequate as a student and scientist. Still, the steadfast support of my village and my supervisor, and my own determination to achieve my professional goals, saw me through. I persisted, at home and in the lab, and my definition of success expanded to include resilience.

My younger child is now almost 3 years old, and I expect to graduate next year. I now know that my unexpected pregnancy didn’t make me less of a scientist. Redefining what success means to me was liberating, allowing me to become a scholar shaped by motherhood rather than diminished by it. Now, I pride myself not just on academic and research successes, but also on celebrating my kids’ milestones, showing up for playdates, being present for tantrums and bedtime stories. I am grateful to my supervisor, who reminded me, “You belong here. Even like this. Especially like this.”

Do you have an interesting career story? Send it to SciCareerEditor@aaas.org. Read the general guidelines here.

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How do research careers compare across countries? New global database has some answers

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From ScienceMag:

In which countries do scientists earn the most? Does having a doctorate degree provide greater job security than having a master’s degree? What sectors and jobs do Ph.D.-holders in different parts of the world end up in?

These questions and more are now easier to answer, thanks to a new database that provides a one-stop shop for detailed information covering 53 countries across the world. The publicly available interactive platform, launched earlier this month by the Research and Innovation Careers Observatory (ReICO), aims to guide policymakers’ decisions to improve training and working conditions for researchers—and help scientists make informed career choices.  

Having a single go-to source for reliable careers data across countries is “incredibly useful,” says Nicola Dengo, vice president of the grassroots early-career researcher organization Eurodoc. But unless each country fully embraces the initiative, he warns, “the observatory is not going to grow to its full potential.”

As the number of researchers has risen across the world in recent decades, so have concerns about the working conditions and sustainability of research careers—but national data remained patchy and inconsistent. “Without robust and comparable data, countries cannot benchmark their systems, identify structural challenges, or assess the effectiveness of policy reforms,” says Neda Bebiroglu, who coordinates an effort from the French-speaking community of Belgium to collect career data about researchers there and contributed national data to the new project. “And for individual researchers, these blind spots can limit progress toward more sustainable and inclusive research careers.”

ReICO is a response to these issues. Cofunded by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission, the project has so far been able to gather data from 53 countries, spanning Europe, Asia, Oceania, South Africa, and the Americas. In addition to collecting data that were already publicly available, ReICO has created a network of 45 countries that pledged to participate, with 31 of them providing so-far unpublished data.

Visitors to the ReICO website can use interactive dashboards to explore this data in detail. For example, the platform reveals that across the 19 countries that supplied comparable income information, Ph.D.-holders in the United States are compensated best, adjusting for purchasing power (approximately $126,300 annually), closely followed by those in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Norway. When it comes to the gender pay gap, Colombia leads the way with near pay equality, whereas employed women Ph.D.-holders in Italy earn just 62% of what their male colleagues make. Luxembourg shows the greatest apparent brain gain, with a net increase of 4.62% of researchers in 2023, according to an analysis of the affiliations noted in scientists’ publications; South Africa experienced the largest brain drain, with a net 1.88% of research authors leaving the country.

Having begun development of the observatory just 1 year ago, both the OECD and the European Commission stress that this is a work in progress. The platform is still in its beta version, and users are encouraged to experiment with the platform and provide feedback. The observatory plans to release updated data annually; in the future, it hopes to include data on the roles and skills in demand in industry, where researchers are increasingly employed.

To paint a clearer picture of the global research landscape, individual countries will need to invest more into providing transparent and high-quality data, says Verity Elston, co-director of the Graduate Campus at the University of Lausanne. That could prove challenging in certain areas: for instance, little is currently known about postdocs, she says. Bebiroglu agrees that information about postdocs is critical. “We often lack even basic data—like the average length of their contracts. This makes it difficult to assess the scale of the problem or to design effective policy responses.”

The shape and terminology of research careers also vary considerably across countries, so figuring out some sort of standardization is key to allowing meaningful analysis. “If countries collect data, but … the underlying definitions are inconsistent, that data becomes difficult—or even misleading—to compare,” Bebiroglu says. Now that ReICO has set up a sound methodological process for international data collection, the next big challenge for the observatory will be to go further into establishing a “common language.”

Despite the limitations, Dengo sees ReICO as a step in the right direction. “We really need something like this to work,” he says. “It’s fundamental to solv[ing] the issues of research careers.”

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