Research has always been a
challenging and creative venture—requiring some luck and a lot of hard
work. But in recent years, as the National Institutes of Health budget
has failed to keep up with inflation, even established researchers with
successful labs are having a hard time securing funding for their work.
To add to these pressures, the past decade has seen institutions,
especially in the university setting, burdening researchers with larger
administrative staffs, which see research as a means to an end—money
from the commercialization of products—rather than the pursuit of
knowledge.
For the past 10 years,
The Scientist’s
Best Places to Work in Academia surveys have followed changing trends
as reported by academic researchers, asking them to highlight the
aspects of work they value the most—such as support, access to great
research, and collaborations—as well as areas they wish their
institutions would improve, such as appropriate family-care policies.
Back in 2003, researchers around the world valued relationships with
their colleagues and collaborators above all else; next came a desire
for strong core facilities. In this year’s survey, while collegiality
and core facilities remain highly important, the second most desirable
factor is good health-care coverage; the first is the personal
satisfaction their workplace offers.
Despite the challenges and financial restrictions, new institutions
are springing up to address unmet needs within the research community.
One example of an innovative not-for-profit company is this year’s #2
institution, Sage Bionetworks. The medical research organization opened
its doors just 3 years ago thanks to scientific luminaries Stephen
Friend, formerly a senior vice president at Merck, and Eric Schadt, who
helped Pacific Bioscience develop its SMRT single molecule DNA sequencer
and remains its chief scientific officer while heading up the Institute
for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine
in New York. (Read about Schadt’s research in our July 2008 issue.) Sage
Bionetworks aims to spur collaborations among computational biologists
and academic and clinical researchers to make sense of the data deluge
coming from some of the most advanced sequencing and proteomic analyses
in order to develop disease models for rational drug development.
Another example is this year’s #4 institution, the Research Center
for Molecular Medicine (CeMM), in Vienna, Austria, whose new, year-old
facility gives it an edge in translational research. “We have the
second-largest hospital in the world right next to us,” helping to
reinforce the ties between researchers and clinicians, says Andreas
Bergthaler, a viral immunologist at CeMM.
Read more about this year’s top-ranking institutions and find out why their scientists think they are great places to work.
—Edyta Zielinska
Top 10 Institutions
| Rank | Institution | No. of life
science researchers | Strengths |
|---|
| 1 | J. David Gladstone Institutes
San Francisco, CA | 27 | • Tenure and Promotion
• Job Satisfaction |
| 2 | Sage Bionetworks
Seattle, WA | <30 | • Job Satisfaction
• Pay |
| 3 | Stowers Institute for Medical Research
Kansas City, MO | 227 | • Management and Policies
• Research Resources |
| 4 | Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (CeMM)
Vienna, Austria | 116 | • Research Resources
• Job Satisfaction |
| 5 | Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, MA | 1,445 | • Peers
• Job Satisfaction |
| 6 | La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology
La Jolla, CA | 239 | • Infrastructure and Environment
• Peers |
| 7 | Institute for Systems Biology
Seattle, WA | 155 | • Teaching and Mentoring
• Pay |
| 8 | St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Memphis, TN | 614 | • Research Resources
• Pay |
| 9 | Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Israel | 1,084 | • Tenure and Promotion
• Management and Policies |
| 10 | Blood Systems Research Institute
San Francisco, CA | 18 | • Teaching and Mentoring
• Research Resources |
See the full Top 25 list, along with details of the institutions’ strengths, weaknesses, and publication records.
Open Doors at Sage Bionetworks
Founded
only 3 years ago, Sage Bionetworks has already attracted top-notch
researchers to create up-to-date disease models and software for
optimizing collaborative research in developing effective drug
treatments for human diseases. The core mission of this year’s #2-ranked
institution is to provide a framework for biomedical researchers to
analyze the constant torrent of new molecular and genetic information
and develop software for sharing data.
Sage Bionetworks campus in Seattle, Washington.Sage Bionetworks
Sage has already produced promising results in studies that would not
have been possible 3 years ago. For example, one compound originally
developed for asthma was run against one of Sage’s comprehensive disease
models, which correctly predicted that it would also alter insulin and
glucose levels—suggesting diabetes as a potential new indication for the
drug.
With fewer than 30 researchers, each with a different specialty, Sage
Bionetworks is an “incubator for innovation,” says senior scientist
Brian Bot, who feels that weekly interactions with software engineers as
well as oncologists with direct patient contact help him put “a
different spin on things.”
Located on the campus of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
in Seattle, Washington, Sage Bionetworks also benefits from all that the
larger institution has to offer, plus perks like a rooftop patio
overlooking Lake Union, where you can “gaze at the Space Needle while
seaplanes coast overhead to land on the lake,” says senior software
engineer Bruce Hoff.
Last year, the institution received $6 million in federal and private
funding. “Because we are well funded, we can do our job right,” Hoff
says. “We have the breathing room to design and implement software using
industry’s best practices.”
Sage works firmly in the open-science paradigm. The entire
organization of 34 scientists and staff members meets every 2 weeks,
encouraging researchers to become invested in the institution as a
whole, says principal scientist Lara Mangravite. “We all get to have
feedback into where the organization itself is going,” she says. The
reward for meeting this year’s goals is an entire week off in the month
of July. Next year, the Sage Bionetworks team is aiming for 2 weeks.
—Hayley Dunning
CeMM: A View from the Top
Working at the Research Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences isn’t
all
about soaking up the astounding views of Vienna’s skyline from the
facility’s rooftop terrace. But that feature of the relatively young
facility is emblematic of the collaborative and fun atmosphere that
makes the center a great place to work, its researchers say. “They
definitely know how to party,” says epigenomicist Christoph Bock of the
CeMM staff, which adjourns to the terrace every month after joint lab
meetings with the medical university next door.
CeMM research building© CeMM/I.Ranzinger
But researchers at the #4-ranked institution also know how to work.
Last year, for example, a team led by CeMM Scientific Director Giulio
Superti-Furga reported the discovery of a novel regulatory mechanism
that may become a therapeutic target for chronic myelogenous leukemia.
The 140 staff members at CeMM collaborate across disciplines in three
key areas of research: cancer, inflammation, and immunity. And the
camaraderie that researchers and students share certainly helps foster
this collaboration. “We really know each other very well,” says Anannya
Bhattacharya, a first-year PhD student in the lab of viral
immunobiologist Andreas Bergthaler. “You’re not bound by your own lab
bench; you always interact with other lab groups.”
The collaboration even extends beyond the walls of CeMM to clinicians
and repositories at the Vienna General Hospital, which is literally
right across the street, adds Bergthaler, whose lab studies mouse models
of oxidative stress in viral hepatitis. The hospital houses tissue
banks, reference libraries, and patient samples that CeMM researchers
can access, Bergthaler says. “This is one of the advantages of being
embedded in a medical campus but at the same time having a basic science
focus as well.”
Bock, who has a joint appointment with CeMM and the hospital, says
that the center’s first-rate technological facilities, plus the ability
to see the clinical relevance of his work in the epigenetic aspects of
cancer, really makes a difference. “My work is a combination of work
driven by the medical need of the neighboring hospital and [research]
enabled by next-generation sequencing technology,” he says. “It gives
you direction in how you approach a problem.” Of course, the view from
the roof doesn’t hurt either.
—Bob Grant
Administrative Overload
In the 10 years during which
The Scientist has been
surveying researchers in academia, funding has remained essentially
flat, and universities have put freezes on hiring, even forcing faculty
to take unwanted leave. But through it all, the administrative workforce
in academia has continued to increase.
ATOMIC
IMAGING AT LA JOLLA: Dirk Zajonc, a protein crystallographer and
structural biologist at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy &
Immunology (#6), studies cells at the atomic level to uncover new
information about disease processes.La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology
“In the past couple of decades, we all have noticed an enormous
expansion in university administrative ranks,” with some schools’
administrative staff-to-student ratios rising by more than 300 percent
between 1997 and 2007, says Ben Ginsberg, a professor of political
science at Johns Hopkins University, and author of the recent book
The Fall of the Faculty. (See “
Faculty Fallout,”
The Scientist,
August 2011.) “This greatly undermines both research and teaching,” he
says. “To the faculty, the purpose of the university is research and
teaching.” To the administration, “research is valued only in terms of
the dollars it brings in.”
This puts incredible pressure on faculty in the life sciences to
develop commercial products—not only skewing the course of research, but
also causing conflict when researchers are ready to publish results.
“Academics want to see their ideas publicized,” Ginsberg says. “More and
more, this is thwarted by university patent offices, which don’t let
any ideas [be] shared unless [they are] properly patented and
commercialized.”
This pressure to commercialize research is compounded by increased
competition for funding. “The money has dried up, both federally and at
the state level,” says Martin Snyder, Senior Associate General Secretary
at the American Association of University Professors. “One place that
[academic researchers] are going is to private sources—the oil industry,
tobacco industry, pharmaceutical companies. But the research money
comes with strings attached.” The companies will have particular topics
that they want researched, for example, and may want to avoid publishing
results that reflect negatively on their products. “It’s just the
antithesis of academic freedom and research,” says Snyder.
Moreover, while the commercialization pressure continues to mount,
full-time faculty who are in a position to deliver such products are
getting cut. “Seventy percent of faculty in the U.S. are part-time, or
[on] short-term contracts,” and don’t have traditional tenure or
tenure-track jobs, Snyder says. In the last 30 years, the proportion of
university faculty working full time has fallen from about 60 percent to
less than 40 percent. Now, for many academics, the “only security is
the state of their funding,” Synder says. “I’m not sure how you build a
research career on that kind of unstable foundation.”
Research isn’t the only thing affected by this shift toward a
part-time faculty—teaching and mentoring students are also hindered.
“Administrative overload . . . is clearly crowding out the teaching,”
says Malcolm Kline, executive director of Accuracy in Academia, a
nonprofit research group reporting on political bias in education. “This
is why you see big-name adjuncts . . . who have other highly visible
jobs.”
“The typical part-time teacher in California doesn’t even have an
office, doesn’t have a computer, will keep class records in the trunk of
his or her car and meet students in the parking lot for conferences,”
Snyder says. “They call them ‘freeway flyers’ because they have no home;
they’re simply on the road all the time. It’s a pretty dismal situation
right now.”
Still, it’s unclear how this trend will play out in the future, he
adds, though he suspects the development of more partnerships between
academia and industry will continue. “What you’re going to see less and
less of is the kind of pure scientific research that in the long run
will produce the great advances in knowledge.”
—Jef Akst
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