SPOTLIGHT ON FACULTY POSITIONS

Formula for success

The most important thing is to keep an eye out and get an idea of what is available, when you're not desperate for a job. Johanna Kallio, European Molecular Laboratory

In a competitive market, demonstrating your abilities can help to secure a job as a professor.

DOROTHY SCHAFER had a tough choice to make. Her neuroscience background brought offers of faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts Medical School outside Boston, Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, and the University of Virginia. Not only did she have to decide which job was best, she also had to deal with the dreaded “two-body problem”; her decision had to account for her husband's career as well. A year earlier he had taken a job at a private foundation near Boston that funds medical research. “He liked his job and was willing to move for me, but it had to be the right job.”

Afer weighing it up, she started the UMass job as assistant professor of neurobiology in January 2015. It was a good fit and meant she wouldn't have to uproot her family. Still, she felt bad that her decision meant she had to turn down the other offers. “These are friends and colleagues and they put a lot of effort and investment into you, but you have to make the best choice for yourself and your family.”

Dorothy Schafer, University of Massachusetts Medical School Credit: DOROTHY SCHAFER

Tough as that experience was, she admits, “it's a good problem to have.” Not every researcher finishing up a postdoc career is faced with the choice between several offers. There are far more people with science doctorates than there are faculty positions for scientists (see Tight times). Many end up working instead for industry or government, often using their experience to do a variety of science-related jobs that don't entail bench work. But, there are steps early career researchers can take to improve their chances of getting that first junior faculty position. Much of it comes down to demonstrating that they have much to contribute to a department by participating in the scientific community; publishing results, laying out a research vision, and attracting financial support.

Play Well With Others

The first step is to be a good colleague, says Sandeep Datta, assistant professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS), who helps run a workshop for Harvard-affiliated postdocs interested in finding faculty jobs. Long before people apply for jobs, they should be attending scientific meetings, talking to everyone from grad students to established veterans, contributing wherever they can. “You want to make sure you have a strong relationship with a mentor, be an active member of the community,” Datta says, “so you're known and to become more confident interacting with that community.”

Staying connected with fellow scientists early in your postdoc career can let you know where positions are likely to open up. “The most important thing is to keep an eye out and get an idea of what is available, when you're not desperate for a job,” says Johanna Kallio, a protein crystallographer at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. Applying when there's still a year or two left in a postdoc contract takes away some of the pressure, and people who get offers while still under contract can negotiate starting dates.

In Europe, positions become available at any time, whereas US faculty jobs are generally advertised in the autumn with interviews conducted in the spring. On the other hand, whereas Americans will send in dozens of applications at once, Europeans often proceed one at a time. It's more efficient to target multiple jobs in one go, says Sylvia Cremer, an evolutionary biologist at the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria. It gives job seekers a chance to compare different institutions to find the right fit, increases their odds of getting an offer in a given time and strengthens their negotiating position if they have more than one offer.

“You know when you're ready to apply,” Schafer says. “You just get to a point when 'I feel confident, I know I can do it.”

Publish or Perish?

One sign of readiness is having published results. Most people believe applicants get more traction from a single paper in a prestigious journal than several in lower impact journals. Papers, though, are not the determining factor, says Angela DePace, a systems biologist at HMS who runs the workshop with Datta. “I know people who have gotten their jobs with no papers. I know people who have not got a job despite a ton of papers,” she says. Papers under review or exciting results presented at conferences that could be published can be used as alternatives.

Secured funding can increase your chances of success. Fatma Kaplan, adjunct lecturer at the University of Florida and independent researcher for the US Department of Agriculture, sent out dozens of applications, but didn't receive any requests for interviews until she started including information about federally funded research grants she had co-authored. “Nowadays, there are so many qualified candidates, search committees do not need to find talent,” she says. “However, they need to find a way to screen qualified candidates and grant funding is an easy screen,”

Cremer secured a five-year European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, which paid for some of her remaining postdoc research and provided funding for any new position. These grants provide up to 2 million euros for up to five years to researchers with two to seven years' experience, and they can be transferred to any new faculty position the group leader takes in Europe. “It makes you attractive for an institution to bring in some research money,” Cremer says. Shafer won a K99 award, the US National Institutes of Health equivalent to the ERC Starting Grant. This pays for up to two years of postdoc work, then transitions to a research grant for up to three years in a tenure-track position.

The job-search process of applying for a grant demands laying out a clear research plan and demonstrating results, then going through peer review, so it's worth applying for one, even if it doesn't result in funding. If nothing else, Schafer says, it sharpens a researcher's focus and prepares them for explaining their scientific vision to a school's search committee.

A Clear Vision

Having a specific research plan and being able to clearly explain it is important. At the interview stage, applicants must be able to talk in detail about the questions they want to pursue and how they plan to do that, but they should also give some thought to the larger questions in their fields.

Sylvia Cremer, IST Austria Credit: IST AUSTRIA

If there's a particular technique or methodology necessary in their research, applicants should be able to show some expertise in it, or demonstrate how they can acquire that expertise. While what they've done in the past can demonstrate their skills and knowledge, where they plan to take their research is just as crucial. They have to show how their work stands out as distinct from the labs they've worked in.

When preparing for their interview day talk, DePace recommends researchers spend a lot of time explaining their research to a wide variety of people, from scientists in other fields to laymen, and listening to their feedback. This will demonstrate to hiring committees their ability to teach because the audience should come away feeling they learned something. “The talk really tells people a lot about you,” she says. “It's when people get to see how excited you are about your own work and also your ability to get others excited about it.” The process can be nerve-wracking, but people can relax somewhat if they start early, and if they learn to not worry about the aspects of it they can't control, says Datta. And DePace says it helps for applicants to realize that they and the hiring committees have the same basic aim: to match a person's skills, research goals, and personality with the rest of the department. “Ultimately these are people on the other side looking for wonderful people to work with, so everybody's looking for the same thing, which is a good fit,” she says.

Tight times

Sandeep Datta, Harvard Medical School Credit: KARINA SAKMAR

The market for faculty positions is tough and even well qualified researchers might not find a spot. Vitae, an international career development programme in Cambridge, UK, published a survey in 2013 that found that about four-fifths of postdocs hope for a job in academia, about three fifths believe they'll get one, but in reality only about one fifth find faculty positions.

In the US, meanwhile, the National Science Foundation found that of the people who held doctorates in science and engineering and had jobs in academia, only 75 % of them had full-time faculty positions in 2010, down from 90 % in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the number of non-faculty jobs, including postdocs, was growing faster than the number of faculty.

“I think the competition for jobs is stiffer than it was 10 years ago,” says Sandeep Datta, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School (HMS) who offers a workshop for people seeking faculty positions. “You're going to face a lot of rejection. That's true for everyone.”

One source of advice Datta suggests is Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty, developed by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The first chapter provides tips on navigating the job application process.

His colleague in presenting the workshop, HMS biologist Angela DePace, says that while there may be hundreds of applicants for a single position, that shouldn't discourage people who are really interesting in a job from applying for it. “It you want to try, you should try your best, and the number applying doesn't change anything about how you do your best,” she says.