How Staff Scientists, Long Invisible, Could Save Biomedicine

M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle

It was in late August, upstairs at the Blue Moon Bar & Grill just off campus, that the staff scientists of the University of Wisconsin at Madison began to organize.

These researchers occupy a mysterious niche. They all hold doctorates, yet rather than chase tenure-track faculty positions, they’d opted for technically demanding roles inside laboratories. They get benefits, but their salaries depend on grants pursued by Wisconsin’s faculty. They don’t have tenure. They take little for granted.

At the three meetings they’ve held so far, a few topics have dominated, said Andrea Bilger, a cancer researcher who helped put the group together. Grant dependence is one. So is the limited possibility of pursuing faculty jobs. The scientists chafe at the limits the university seems to place on their ability to teach.

For many of the scientists, the meetings were the first time they had met more than a handful of researchers in their hard-to-describe situation.

“I don’t think people have any idea of what it means,” said Ms. Bilger. She says her title, associate scientist, is “completely generic.”

“My siblings still don’t quite understand, and they live here and I’ve been telling them about my position for 16 years.”

These vaguely understood jobs, which already serve as the invisible glue of the research university, are poised to become more central. Leaders of the scientific community are seeking to elevate the role of university staff scientists. Improving these jobs, they say, could be one solution to reducing the glut of graduate students and postdocs flooding biomedicine and other sciences. Many of these postdocs serve as staff scientists in all but name — and without benefits. And just like their peers in the humanities, scientists are grappling with the limits of growth.

“The current structure of the biomedical research enterprise is basically unsustainable,” said Dinah S. Singer, director of cancer biology at the National Cancer Institute. Labs rely on the cheap labor of graduate students and postdocs, who then go on to compete for their own jobs and create more students. “You have an exponentially growing system that has gotten to what most people would agree is a crisis size.”

Staff scientists serve a diverse set of roles on campuses, and each university tends to treat, and classify, them differently. Some staff scientists run core research facilities that handle work, like producing cell cultures, that’s too intensive for single labs. Some serve as executive officers in large labs, mentoring trainees, mitigating crises, and monitoring experiments. Others run their own fiefdoms, avoiding the administrative and teaching duties of lab directors.

“We’re still involved,” said Linda Reilly, a staff scientist at the University of California at San Francisco. “We’re still in the game. But we’re not in this insane, high-pressure-cooker racetrack part of it.”

It’s a career path others might welcome. Indeed, this year, when Nature conducted an online poll about how to fix the broken postdoc system, three-quarters of the nearly 20,000 respondents voted first for creating more staff-scientist positions — a rare surge of scientific agreement.

A number of well-trained scientists love doing research but don’t want to be principal investigators, Ms. Singer added.

But such jobs are notoriously insecure and lacking in prestige. “There was no mechanism,” she said, “that allowed them to have a stable career.”

Ms. Singer and her colleagues have begun to change that. Last month her institute set up a grant that would allow staff scientists to secure salaries directly from the government, including overhead costs. The experiment, guided in part by similar positions inside the National Institutes of Health created more than a decade ago, will finance up to 60 proposals. Universities and policy makers will watch it closely to see if it succeeds.

Such grants could go a long way toward improving the lives of staff scientists at research universities, where so often attention and merit are based on the money people bring in, Ms. Reilly said.

“There’s some recognition from the administration that those people need to be valued, and their career tracks need to be valued in a way that recognizes their expertise,” she said. “Which is really great. It’s about time.”

‘Whose Responsibility?’

There’s no typical career track for an academic staff scientist. Few researchers set out as graduate students to hold these positions. Nick Patterson certainly didn’t.

After earning a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, Mr. Patterson had assumed that he would have a conventional career as a math professor. But he began job hunting during a recession in the 1970s and could not find an attractive position. Instead, he served for several decades as a cryptographer for the British government, then spent a decade on Wall Street. Only in his third act did he end up in academe, serving as deputy lab head to David Reich, an influential geneticist at Harvard Medical School.

While Mr. Reich has to worry about staffing, financing research, and finding lab space, Mr. Patterson can focus instead on cracking complex computational problems. His previous careers made him less concerned about pay, a worry for many staff scientists, who often make little more than a postdoc, depending on their experience.

Throughout academe, a generation of early-career researchers who took staff jobs in disciplines like genomics, which barely existed a decade ago, needs to figure out a path. Are staff scientists limited to these careers? Can they move into faculty positions? “Their career progression is not so clear,” Mr. Patterson said. “And I think that could be a problem.”

Like Mr. Patterson, Ky Lowenhaupt thought she’d get a faculty job.

Several decades ago, she was on her second postdoc, working in the lab of Alexander Rich, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They were studying a strange DNA variant. It was a complex, consuming problem.

“The thing I’ve never been able to do as a scientist is pick easy projects,” she said. In Cambridge, she was also free to chase other interests, like directing plays. She didn’t want to spend her life writing grant proposals. She wanted to design experiments. And so, rather than pursuing a faculty job, she stayed, becoming a staff scientist.

Mr. Rich received financing into his late 80s with Ms. Lowenhaupt as his right hand. But once he retired, she faced the insecurity inherent to her role. She wasn’t going to get a faculty position. She eventually accepted a role as a scientist and lab manager with Timothy K. Lu, a rising star in synthetic biology at MIT. The lab has nearly 40 young engineers. Ms. Lowenhaupt now feels more like a Wendy, she said, taking care of the Lost Boys.

“I sew on their buttons,” she said, “but still join in their adventures.”

Few labs can feel as secure in their financing as Mr. Rich’s once was. Science has faced a decade of flat federal financing, and that has made it difficult to hire staff scientists, especially when postdocs can serve similar roles more cheaply.

Retaining staff scientists isn’t something universities reward, even if their skills and institutional memory are often the difference between incremental science and moving mountains, said A. Hope Jahren, a geobiology professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

Next spring Ms. Jahren’s memoir, Lab Girl, will be published by Knopf, and it will detail her struggle to keep her collaborator, Bill Hagopian, employed. Mr. Hagopian is a gifted lab scientist, she says, who has little patience for the trappings of academe. “This is somebody that needs to be a scientist,” Ms. Jahren said. “If there’s no role in science for someone like Bill, then God help us.”

Mr. Hagopian has barely been acknowledged by the universities where Ms. Jahren has worked. Indeed, she’s moved her lab three times, largely to secure start-up money for his employment.

“Keeping Bill for 20 years is not something I can put on a progress report to the dean,” she said. It’s the proudest accomplishment of her career, she added. “The question is, whose responsibility is he? I’ve never been in a scenario where it doesn’t come back and say mine.”

Career Tracks

Wisconsin has been one of the more proactive universities when it comes to discussing systemic problems in biomedicine. The university convened an 80-person workshop in April, after the Blue Moon meeting, which Ms. Bilger attended. It was there she realized that the staff scientists needed to band together — after all, even the postdocs had already done it.

Between 20 and 40 scientists attend her group’s meetings, and they expect to propose improvements in their positions next year. In the meantime, they’ve tried to better understand their odd role.

“We really felt underinformed,” Ms. Bilger said. Their faculty members don’t really know what it means to be a staff scientist either, she added. “The actual rules of engagement often are not clear to anyone.”

The most widely shared concern about elevating staff scientists is that these positions would simply be renamed senior postdocs, prolonging lab service without increased responsibilities. The National Cancer Institute is aware of that risk and has taken steps to avoid it, Ms. Singer said. Recipients of the NCI salary grants will gain independent recognition in their system, and the faculty they work with won’t be able to spend the money that previously supported these researchers on other personnel — only on more experiments.

“The goal here is not to allow labs to get bigger,” Ms. Singer said. “We hope people will see this as a real career track as opposed to a steppingstone.”

The dream of a faculty job is tough to give up, however. Vaibhav P. Pai’s position, as a staff scientist at Tufts University, is exactly that — a steppingstone. He received his Ph.D. during the recession and felt fortunate to find a postdoc. He saw it would take years to build up the research necessary to win an NIH grant.

By taking a staff position, Mr. Pai, originally from India, could apply for a green card. He received benefits. He also felt less stigma in taking the role than he would have five years ago, as he’s seen the research community wake up to the importance of staff scientists, he said. It helps that his lab director treats the job as more than a postdoc, allowing him to initiate collaborations and take on multiple lines of research.

If Mr. Pai gets a chance to create his own lab, he wants it to include technicians and staff scientists. He doesn’t want to rely on a dozen cheap graduate students and postdocs, as he sees so often today. But ultimately that choice may not be up to him. “I hope the incentives are changed,” he said, “so I’m not forced to do that.”

Paul Voosen is a senior reporter covering the sciences. Write him at paul.voosen@chronicle.com; follow him on Twitter @voooos; or see past work at voosen.me.

Correction (12/14/2015, 2:56 p.m.): This article originally misstated the scope of an experimental grant program at the National Cancer Institute. It will finance up to 60 proposals; it is not likely to offer up to $60 million in salary support. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.