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.

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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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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From ScienceMag:

Roughly one in five recipients of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) typically works in the life sciences. However, there’s nary an ecologist, neuroscientist, or molecular biologist in the latest batch of 500 fellows announced earlier this month. At the same time, computer scientists captured a much larger share of awards, which provide an annual stipend of $37,000 for 3 years, than they have done in previous rounds.

NSF isn’t saying why this cohort looks so different by field of study than the 1000 fellows announced 2 months earlier. But the new distribution appears to align with President Donald Trump’s push to prioritize artificial intelligence and quantum information science. Some scientists worry it may also reflect Trump’s opposition to any federal investments that broaden participation in science, as most of the students in the latest cohort work in fields that are disproportionately male, white, and Asian.

The program is open to students in any field that NSF funds and has supported 50 Nobel laureates since its debut in 1952. But many scientists saw the size of the initial 2025 class—at less than half previous annual levels—as a retreat from NSF’s historical mission to train the next generation of U.S. scientists and engineers. Their fears grew last month when NSF’s oversight body spoke of its desire to see the private sector sponsor a significant number of future fellows.

NSF’s 13 June announcement of a second round—selected from 3000 applicants awarded “honorable mentions” in the first round—was seen as evidence that the agency hadn’t abandoned the program. However, the striking difference by discipline between the new cohort and the first round (see graphic, below), as well as from previous annual classes, has revived concerns about the program’s future.

An analysis by two former GRFP directors has found that life scientists, for example, were shut out in the second round. Some 214 students in those fields were named fellows in April, and another 962 were designated as honorable mentions, according to data shared with Science by Giselle Muller-Parker and Susan Brennan. Not one of those 962 runners-up was selected for an award in the second round.

Similarly, only seven of the 187 honorable mentions in psychology were named fellows this month, as were only eight of the 114 honorable mentions in the social sciences. Students in the geosciences also fared poorly in the second round, with only 25 of the 242 honorable mentions winning a fellowship.

In contrast, well over half of the 203 honorable mentions in computer science—125—were named fellows this month. Some 101 of the 260 honorable mention students in physics and astronomy won the prize. And 123 of the 594 engineering students initially named as honorable mentions got scholarships.

Congress has tweaked NSF’s mandate for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce training over the decades, most recently in 2022 when it told the agency to address demand “in critical STEM fields.” But the definition of those fields encompasses every area NSF has traditionally supported, from designing more advanced semiconductor chips to understanding how humans respond to climate change. Muller-Parker and Brennan say they don’t understand why NSF would suddenly change direction without a clear legislative mandate.

“In the absence of evidence for why one STEM discipline should be prioritized over another … we find this trend to be ill-considered,” Muller-Parker and Brennan write in a joint email to Science. Continuing in that direction, they add, poses “substantial risk” for training the U.S. STEM workforce.

Former fellow Alexandra Harmon-Threatt, a pollinator ecologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, agrees. “Not investing across the board is extremely shortsighted and undermines America’s scientific future,” she says. “These students won’t be making major contributions for 5, 10, or 15 years, and it’s hard to know where we will have major gaps that need to be filled at that time.”

An NSF spokesperson declined to comment on its criteria for selection or give a reason for the skewed distribution.

The demographic differences between the fields being favored and shunned add to the challenges already facing students from minority groups, says former fellow Christian Cazares, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Diego. “Students like to think the process is merit based,” says Cazares, who was born in Mexico and was the first in his family to attend college. “And GRFP is one of the most important fellowships for early-career scientists. If it’s now simply another way to carry out the administration’s priorities, that sends a message to these students that maybe they aren’t welcome in science.”

Kelsey Lucas, an aquatic biologist at the University of Calgary and former fellow, sees the skewed distribution as a sign that NSF is emphasizing more applied research. “Science is about pushing into the unknown to tackle big problems,” she says. “By cutting GRFP and steering awards toward a privileged few, we are leaving behind perspectives and ways of knowing that could lead to innovative solutions to the problems we face today.”

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From ScienceMag:

The crowd gathered in an auditorium in the Swiss village of Villars on Tuesday applauded as, one by one, three scientists—two women and a man—stepped onto the stage to accept a plaque and their prize of 1 million Swiss francs ($1.1 million) for research into solutions for the ongoing climate crisis. It marked the first time in the Frontiers Planet Prize’s (FPP’s) 3-year history that a woman, let alone two, has won.

Gerard Rocher-Ros, a 2024 finalist and ecologist at Umeå University, was an outspoken critic of the lack of women winners in previous years. This year’s lineup—Arunima Malik, a University of Sydney sustainability researcher; Zahra Kalantari, an environmental and geosciences engineer at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology; and Zia Mehrabi, a climate and agriculture data scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder—“was very comforting to see,” he says.

The women winners also view the award as an important step for highlighting women’s contributions to science. “I see this award as a recognition that we are also among the men, that we are [also] working hard to come up with solutions … to address the social challenges that we are facing,” says Kalantari, whose work focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of cities. And Malik’s winning paper, about the sustainability of supply chains and global trade routes, was written with multiple women as co-authors, she points out.

In the first 2 years the prize was awarded, all seven winners were men, a trend that led a group of women finalists to pen an open letter last year to FPP Director Jean-Claude Burgelman and others, criticizing the committee’s process for disadvantaging and failing to reward women scientists. (Science was unable to reach the authors of last year’s letter for comment.)

Prize administrators say there was no intentional change in the award process, chalking up the difference in this year’s results to “pure coincidence.” The FPP jury does not consider the gender of the lead scientist while deliberating, says jury chair Johan Rockström.

Despite the positive change this year, systemic inequities in scientific research awards can persist because the prize rules require that research institutions nominate a single representative from the team behind a published paper. These representatives are part of a pool to be the sole national champion representing their country and finalists for the FPP. The structure effectively means these solo winners are also the sole recipients of the prize money; a strategic choice meant to facilitate investment into the winning project and optimize real-world impact, organizers say.

But with this winner-take-all system, nominating bodies may be likelier to elevate more established, senior researchers—who are predominantly men—to increase their chances of winning the money. The FPP website urges nominating bodies to actively confront unconscious biases. Still, more than half of this year’s 19 finalists were men or from countries in the Global North.

Prizes that award single researchers can also reinforce “the great man myth”—the idea that scientific knowledge is built on the discoveries of solitary genius scientists, rather than the collaborative efforts of many, says Cassidy Sugimoto, who studies gender disparities in science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Mehrabi’s winning paper, for example, about diversifying crops and animals on individual farms to improve biodiversity and costs, had 60 co-authors, involved hundreds of other researchers, and partnered with thousands of farmers. A solo-winner prize “pushes people towards a certain hierarchical division of labor, a certain competitiveness within teams, that doesn’t necessarily create the most robust systems of science,” she says. “We have to think about giving prizes to scientific teams rather than to the individual.” For his part, Mehrabi plans to use the prize money to expand this coalition to implement his paper’s climate solutions across the world.

Despite some of the criticism, Burgelman emphasizes that the current process is the best way to invest in climate science and planetary boundaries research. Previous winning projects have gone on to save 15 million hectares of the Amazonian forest, he notes, and have saved hundreds of thousands of lives from parasitic disease in Senegal. “What I am really looking forward to seeing, as the prize enters its fourth year, is the impact of the research that we have funded.”

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From ScienceMag:

When I interviewed for my current tenure-track job, I had a stellar training background and solid publications over my 20-year career. But I was unemployed. I didn’t mention that fact, but my CV had other gaps shaped by events beyond my control: shifting politics, economic crises, a mentor relationship that turned bad, and COVID-19. I had stayed on the academic path—if only barely—through sheer determination. The interviewers were friendly and I felt good about my performance, but I wasn’t expecting the offer I received a month later. To my surprise, I later learned the committee had valued a factor rarely considered in an academic world obsessed with publications and impact factors: my resilience.

Growing up in Puerto Rico prepared me well for life’s challenges. I witnessed my parents working hard to provide for our family, despite the ongoing economic turmoil that plagued the island. My mother, an elementary school teacher, taught me to believe in myself and offered unwavering support. The rigors of graduate school and the responsibility of becoming a father at a young age also helped build my resilience—which has turned out to be the defining feature of my career.

The first test came in 2004, when I was a graduate student in a well-funded lab, conducting research I was passionate about—until suddenly, Congress slashed the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) budget. Our lab had to scale back, and I needed to put in a lot more hours to graduate before my adviser’s grant dried up. Some days, I didn’t see my 4-year-old daughter at all because I got home long after her bedtime.

My wife at the time was in school as well, and my income supported our family. But as I looked for a postdoctoral position in the midst of the NIH budget crunch, most labs told me they had no funds to take on a new trainee. With persistence, I secured a postdoc at the Neurosciences Institute, a place fueled primarily by private donations. For a while, things looked stable.

Then came the 2008 recession. The private donations dried up. Staff were laid off, and several prominent investigators left. Morale plummeted. The writing was on the wall: I had to leave.

Job hunting in 2008 was brutal. I sent out applications, knowing my family depended on me, but opportunities were scarce. Finally, a last-minute interview at a conference led to an offer for a lab in France. It meant uprooting my family and stepping away from the research path I had carefully built, but it was the only way forward. So, we packed up our lives and moved. For a while, things were good, but several years into my project, my relationship with my adviser soured, and I had to leave.

I eventually got a job as a staff scientist at the University of Chicago. I had to prioritize my new lab’s research focus and could only work on my own research in spare moments, but by the end of 2018 my career was gaining traction once again. But the stress took a huge toll on my personal life, and my wife and I split up. Then COVID-19 hit. Labs shut down, slowing research and my own project. When I submitted a grant for review, it was rejected for what the reviewers said was a lack of relevant publications. I found myself once again facing unemployment.

When I finally landed my current position in 2021 it was a huge relief. A couple years later, I learned that one of the committee members had followed a path similar to mine and saw my commitment and perseverance as key factors in my favor.

But not everyone will have such an advocate. I believe we should be asking candidates for academic jobs what challenges they’ve overcome and how they have persevered. Applicants with CVs featuring high-profile labs and prestigious publications tend to be the ones who get jobs. But others of us have taken a slower, bumpier path, and I believe we deserve a closer look. We’re the ones with the resilience to get through tough times.

Right now, I’m anxious about our nation and the future of biomedical research in the United States, but I’m not worrying for myself. If my career has taught me anything, it’s that resilience alone doesn’t guarantee survival. But sometimes, it gives you just enough time to catch the next opportunity before the door closes.

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