New Haven in top 20 of life science labor market
The New Haven area is one of the top metro areas in the country in terms of having the greatest density of life sciences workers and producing the highest number of that type of employees, according to a new study.
The first-ever CBRE Life Sciences Talent report has the Boston/Cambridge market ranked first. The New Haven area is ranked 20th among 74 metro areas that were included in the report in terms of assessing life sciences labor markets.
Over the period between 2015 and 2020, the study found that New Haven gained a net 205 researchers and had the largest growth in the number of biological scientists in the nation. New Haven has the nation’s highest concentration of microbiologists and biological technicians, and the third-highest concentration of biochemists and biophysicists.
“Salaries for New Haven life sciences researchers are more favorable in terms of local cost of living than most major Northeast markets,” said David Hansen, vice president of CBRE. “In addition, New Haven has the fourth highest density of biological scientists and biological technicians and the sixth highest concentration of PhDs of any discipline.”
David Stockel, a CBRE senior vice president, said “the connectivity that New Haven has between major life sciences hubs Boston and New York City has helped New Haven emerge as one of the fastest-growing research hubs in the country.”
Nationally, job growth in life sciences professions – from bioengineers and biochemists to microbiologists and data scientists – has expanded by 79 percent since 2001 to roughly 500,000, according to the study. The overall U.S. job growth rate in that same time period was 8 percent.
Stockel said CBRE officials “are very optimistic” about the future of the New Haven area’s life sciences sector. The area benefits from the ideas and talent pool coming out of Yale University, he said.
“It’s a fantastic backbone in terms of access to talent,” Stockel said of Yale. “And the cost of living compared to some of the other markets in the report is very favorable.”
CBRE helps companies in the sector find office and laboratory space and that is one measure by which New Haven doesn’t fare as well compared to other metro areas.
“New Haven is a millionsquare-foot market in terms of life science space and we see that growing a little with some new construction and some conversions over the next couple of years,” Stockel said. “In our world, that’s still a pretty small life sciences market.”
CBRE’s report assessed each market against multiple criteria, including its number of life sciences jobs and graduates, life sciences’ share of each market’s overall job and graduate pool, its number of doctorate degree holders in life sciences, and its concentration of jobs in the broader professional, scientific and technical services professions.
Ginny Kozlowski, chief executive officer of REX Development / Economic Development Corp. of New Haven, said the life sciences sector in the New Haven area “is still maturing and as it does, our ranking will improve.”
“It’s a very competitive field,” Kozlowski said of the number of metro areas vying to attract life sciences companies. “Boston has a higher density of schools that are doing research and that density if certainly a factor.”
A measure of the New Haven area’s growing clout in the life sciences sector can be measure in historical data from the National Institutes of Health, she said.
In 2019, $489 million in federal research funding flowed into Connecticut’s Third Congressional District, of which New Haven is a part, By 2021, Kozlowski said the amount of research funding coming into the district had increased to $557 million.