- CAREER NEWS
Europe pumps €10 million into effort to combat brain drain
Education and research advocates in the European Union have dedicated millions of euros to a series of government programmes aimed at boosting job security and well-being for early-career scientists. By establishing an EU-wide database for tracking career progression, providing universities with incentives to develop policies that support their employees and working with industry to form partnerships, EU member states hope to staunch the flood of scientists seeking opportunities elsewhere.
In response to a widespread brain drain, the Council of the European Union agreed in May 2021 to prioritize working conditions for junior scientists, who face job insecurity, precarious funding and discrimination, bullying and harassment. Last year, attendees at a policy conference in Brussels began drafting a manifesto to highlight possible resolutions. That document was released last September and was presented to research commissioner Mariya Gabriel on 10 January.
Through a spokesperson, Gabriel says that the EU urgently needs to work with member states, universities, research organizations and industry to ensure that it can continue to recruit and retain researchers.
Many countries, many stories
Each of the EU’s 27 countries faces unique obstacles, making consensus about solutions difficult to achieve. In Germany, for example, 90% of academics work on short-term, temporary contracts, and in Italy, long-standing economic challenges have led to wage stagnation and a series of hiring freezes in academia. The European Research Council (ERC), a major source of research funding, has confirmed that it has noted a dip in the number of junior applicants in the past few grant cycles, which run once a year. “It is only very recent, so we cannot say that it is a trend,” a spokesperson says. They add that the ERC wants to continue to support junior researchers, but has not yet provided information on specific changes that it might implement if the decline continues.
Patricia González-Rodríguez, a junior faculty member at the University of Seville in Spain who researches Parkinson’s disease, says that, in her experience, many academics are leaving Spain for other nations, particularly the United States. The Spanish government paid for her education, including her PhD. After graduating in 2012, she did a postdoc in Seville, but felt she couldn’t progress further without international experience. So she left for a postdoc at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, studying the role of autophagy in neurodegenerative disease.
Nature special: Young scientists
She then returned to Spain to be near her family, but says that many scientists remain abroad. Even now, in a relatively secure position, González-Rodríguez says she struggles to find funding for her students and staff members, a preoccupation that eats into her lab’s productivity. The current struggle, she notes, is trying to work out how to keep her laboratory technician, who is employed on a temporary contract, funded beyond May. “In just a few months, she may not have any job,” González-Rodríguez says.
The EU is not alone in having poor conditions for those early in their academic careers. Almost 50,000 students across the University of California’s ten campuses went on strike last year, demanding fair compensation, health-care and childcare subsidies — part of a broader push towards student unionization in the United States in response to poor working conditions. A survey published last year1 found that only 57% of 500 early-career scientists in Australia reported being satisfied with their job, echoing the findings of a handful of studies done in other countries. “The loss of junior or early-career investigators is happening around the world,” says González-Rodríguez. “It may be really bad here, but it’s not just Europe.”
Opportunities and partnerships
Attendees at the 10 January presentation announced several other initiatives, some of which were shaped by the document’s suggestions. The manifesto’s endorsing parties — which include more than 50 professional organizations and hundreds of scientists and members of parliament — say that more data are needed to track the career progression of EU scientists. To that end, manifesto co-author Manuel Heitor, director of the Technology Policy Lab at the University of Lisbon, says that a research and innovation careers observatory will be launched later this year to monitor jobs and working conditions.
Heitor and his colleagues also want to re-energize the EU’s funding landscape for junior scientists. Currently, the most prestigious fellowships, including the ERC Starting Grant and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowships, award money to individual researchers for up to five years, and rarely result in a permanent position, Heitor says. To complement these awards, he is working with the European Commission to pilot a scheme that will award money directly to universities that are deemed to be supportive of early-career researchers. These awards, he says, will help universities to boost their numbers of tenure-track faculty members.
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00527-x
References
Christian, K., Larkins, J.-a. & Doran, M. R. Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.06.519378 (2022).
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