Satinder Singh aimed high for an NIH Kangaroo Award and landed at Yale; Nancy Van Prooyen vows not to let her postdoc go too long; Elizabeth Johnson helped usher in Duke’s progressive postdoc policy.

But Van Prooyen is also realistic about her position and she has no intention of being a postdoc—with the typical 80- to 100-hour workweek—for any longer than a few years. Her wages are paltry, as well, even with her recent postdoctoral fellowship from the A.P. Giannini Foundation.

Low wages are the norm. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Research Service Award stipend for starting postdocs, which many institutions use as a guideline, has been stuck in the mid-$30,000s since 2003. “We’re all in our 30s, we have a lot of education, and we’re still scraping by,” Van Prooyen says. Add to that the constant stress of the publish-or-perish lifestyle on what is usually a year-to-year contract. “It’s a sacrifice, I think, to do a postdoc.”

		In part 1 of this series, readers learning how principal investigators find and train the most promising postdocs. (See HHMI Bulletin, February 2011).

Once an optional pit stop on the road to professorship, a postdoc position like Van Prooyen’s has become a required apprenticeship. Because their positions are temporary, it’s easy for postdocs to go unappreciated, and some simply don’t receive the training they deserve. With these positions stretching four years or much longer, some enthusiastic young scientists molder in a kind of postdoctoral purgatory, hoping for a career that seems further away with each passing experiment.

Even so, a postdoc that doesn’t drag on is well worth it for the opportunity to untangle biology’s mysteries and a shot at the professor’s chair, Van Prooyen says.

		Who Speaks for the Postdocs? Postdocs now have their own national association. Read More A Different Kind of Postdoc Experience Zainab Jagani took a postdoc that let her explore the industry side of research. Read More

Postdocs have won some victories lately, asking for and getting employee benefits and other perks with help from national associations and unions (see Web Extra, “Who Speaks for the Postdocs?”). But a big worry still looms large: what comes next? At the end of that long, hard slog, the desired reward may turn out to be just a mirage.

“Getting out of the gate continues to get harder,” says Sean B. Carroll, HHMI’s vice president for science education. With intense competition for grant monies, moving from a postdoc to a faculty position can take a few cycles to achieve funding and get a new lab going. He’s seen some talented young scientists faced with these frustrating facts forgo academic research for other options.

The Postdoc: Defined and Counted

“Postdocs are an invisible work force for a university,” says Elizabeth Johnson, president of the Postdoc Association at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, from 2004 to 2008. Today Johnson is associate director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

“They do science, write grants, mentor grad students,” Johnson says. “And yet they don’t have full status as core members of any institution.” Instead, postdocs inhabit a sort of career limbo—a vague midpoint between student and independent professional.

In 2004, Duke started working on its own postdoc policy. The first task was to figure out who the postdocs were. Johnson asked around for numbers and heard estimates as low as 70 and as high as 2,500. With postdocs often hired by a handshake and just as easily cut loose, no one knew. Once the committee defined who was and wasn’t a postdoc, and performed a head count, the actual number was between 600 and 700.

No one has a solid figure of the number of postdocs in the United States. A 2008 National Science Foundation (NSF) survey counted more than 54,000 postdocs, up 6.5 percent from 2007, but included only those at degree-granting institutions. The National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) cites a range of 43,000 to 89,000 postdocs. That includes scientists who got their degrees outside the United States; NSF data show 55 percent to 60 percent of U.S. postdocs are foreign citizens.

Photos: Singh: Chris Jones, Van Prooyen: Tom Kochel, Johnson: Jeff McCullough

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