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The future of graduate and postdoctoral training in the biosciences
eLife, 2017
This article summarizes the outcomes of the second national conference on the Future of Bioscience Graduate and Postdoctoral Training. Five topics were addressed during the conference: diversity in leadership positions; mentoring; modernizing the curriculum; experiential learning; and the need for better data on trainees. The goal of the conference was to develop a consensus around these five topics and to recommend policies that can be implemented by academic and research institutions and federal funding agencies in the United States.
The Asia Pacific Scholar , 2020
Given the high investments in training and mentoring graduates who have chosen the research career path, and considering a high attrition of these graduates moving on to non-research type of careers, it is important to understand the factors that motivate young scientists to stay on the job as they could make important contributions to a better world with their scientific endeavours. It is in this context that we conducted an exploratory study to understand the factors that may drive the scientists' performance as well as their expectations to remain in the research career paths. We found evidence for an indirect link (through research commitment) between need-for-cognition and career performance as well as evidence of an effect of research commitment on the anticipated research career length. There was also evidence that continuance commitment (but not other extrinsic factors) affects anticipated research career length, and that organisational support is linked to perceived research performance. Implications of our findings for student selection and graduate mentoring are discussed. Practice Highlights Research commitment and organisational support are predictors of perceived research performance. Research commitment and continuance commitment are predictors of anticipated research career length. Develop intellectually stimulating curriculum and work tasks to promote research motivation and innovations. Develop a holistic curriculum to include knowledge management and domain expertise in graduate education. Encourage STEM employers to create more attractive careers and conducive workplace culture and conditions. I. INTRODUCTION Building a scientist's expert domain knowledge is a long-term investment. Many years of education guidance and training are required to nurture each scientist to be competent in the field of expertise. Although the bachelor's degree is often the stepping-stone in building a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) career, more advanced skills and specialised know-how developed during Masters and PhD programs are often required in order for a scientist to progress. Beyond PhD studies, a researcher aspiring to be independent requires further exposure to the scientific environment through postdoctoral fellowships. During this period, supervisors play an important role in the education and training of these young scientists, guiding, mentoring and nurturing them to be innovative in developing research that is of relevance to the world. In addition to research experience, the scientist needs pragmatic skills such as resource management. Yet, globally, young scientists including the best and the brightest, are leaving research careers for other non-research related careers independent of job competition, availability of funding and number of publications (Callaway, 2014; Roach & Sauermann, 2017). In the early 2000s, when Singapore identified life sciences as the next pillar of economic growth, the government forged ahead to develop this sector, and one of the ways was for the university to become part of the 'university-government-industry' trinity to train and prepare the country's limited human resource for this important sector. Considering that national policies and institutions are obliged to provide long-term and extensive investments to nurture these graduates in order for them to produce research innovations, attract investments, and stimulate economic and intellectual growth, there is an urgent need to understand why increasing number of promising STEM postgraduates opt to leave their scientific career paths to pursue non-research related careers that are not aligned to their prior education and training. While the reasons for leaving STEM research careers could be due to changing job preferences because of self-perceived inability to do research, and misalignment in the expectation and reality of what research has to offer, the factors for this self-perceived research performance and misalignment in expectation and reality of research careers remain unknown. Therefore, this study aims to investigate and understand the factors that may influence the graduates' perceived research performance and anticipated career longevity in scientific research paths. Identifying the factors that lead to the attrition of the STEM workforce will help educational institutions to refine or enhance graduate programs. The findings will also help educational leadership to understand the unmet needs and socio-psychological perceptions of the research scientists, and to address the intrinsic (personalised) and extrinsic (environmental/ organisational) factors which may motivate them to persevere towards successful careers in scientific research. A. Conceptual Framework Review of the literature suggests that a scientist's research career performance and longevity may be rooted in specific motivational tendencies and can be driven by perspectives supported by the organisational culture and environment. It is in this context that the study investigates the factors that determine the scientist's research career path longevity. We propose a conceptual framework as shown in Figure 1 that takes into account the individual traits such as the need-for-cognition, need-for-closure, and intrinsic motivation in identifying career performance. The two constructs, the need-for-cognition and need-for-closure, are integral to one's knowledge-seeking motivation, and they are both linked to driving intrinsic motivation that has a direct effect on perceived research performance, which in turn affects the scientist's
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS: ACADEMIC TRAINING IN LIFE SCIENCE LABS
Research Policy, 2018
Academic training plays a crucial role in the development of scientists, where senior scientists transfer their knowledge and skills to junior scientists through apprenticeship. Focusing on two aspects of academic training, autonomy and exploration, this study investigates how different modes of training are incentivized and how they affect junior scientists' performance and career prospects. Drawing on a sample of 162 supervising professors and their 791 PhD students in life science labs in Japanese universities, this study suggests two fundamental conflicts in academic training. First, autonomy allowed to PhD students under apprenticeship improves their long-term performance but decreases short-term performance. Because the latter effect costs supervisors while the former does not benefit them in general, this inter-temporal tradeoff creates an incentive conflict between supervisors and students, inducing non-autonomous training. The short-term cost for supervisors can be compensated in the form of labor input or reputation gain from previous students in the long term, but this typically happens when students are trained with limited scope of exploration, which hinders the originality of students' knowledge production. This reduces the diversity of knowledge production, presenting another incentive conflict between individual scientists and the collective scientific community.