Academic exodus
Postdoctoral researchers are fleeing universities for lucrative biotech jobs. Will science be the loser?
Step inside Natasha Sheybani’s office at the University of Virginia, where she runs a bioengineering lab, and you’ll find a kaleidoscopic sea of sticky notes. She uses purple for ideas sparked by meetings, orange for future grant proposals. But she’s most excited about the yellow stickies, which Sheybani saves for moonshot projects that are highrisk and high reward.
For now, those are just thought experiments. “We actually are not doing those projects,” she said.
That’s because Sheybani has been unable to hire a postdoctoral researcher since starting her lab in 2021. She’s come tantalizingly close, twice, making offers that seemed like done deals. But in each case, the candidate opted for a job at a biotech company.
She’s not alone. Academia is in the midst of an unprecedented exodus of life science researchers, many of whom are leaving for lucrative jobs in the private sector. It’s having a detrimental impact on basic research, slowing the pace of scientific progress. Faculty struggling to recruit and retain researchers say hypotheses are going untested, grant dollars are sitting unused, and projects are languishing for months to years.
These disruptions could become more common as the number of scientists leaving the ivory tower grows. That is raising concern about the long-term health of academia, which births many of the early findings biopharma companies develop into treatments and diagnostics.
“What impact is this going to have on discovery research in our country and maybe the world?” said Shelley Berger, co-chair of a National Institutes of Health working group reenvisioning postdoctoral training. “By and large, I’d say, on average, yes, there’s going to be a huge impact.”
While professors supervise research and bring in funding, they rarely run experiments. That task falls to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, who have long complained of grueling hours and low wages.
National Science Foundation data show that life science PhD graduates are pursuing postdocs at the lowest rate in decades. The proportion of new graduates with firm next steps who plan to do a postdoc dropped from 64 percent in 1995 to 53 percent in 2022. Among graduates with a job lined up, the share going into academia fell from 51 percent to 27 percent during this period, while those going into industry rose from 25 percent to 54 percent.
Kevin Erazo Castillo is no exception. After training in computational biology and chemistry and earning his PhD from Stanford last year, he now works for a Bay Area biotech startup. During graduate school, he said colleagues with academic aspirations would sleep over in the lab to
squeeze in extra work. That was a red flag for Castillo, who was already arriving as early as 8 a.m. and leaving as late as 9 p.m.
The departure of freshly minted PhDs into industry has made it harder for faculty to recruit postdocs. For Sheybani and other lab heads, that has meant some of their most ambitious and promising ideas are going unexplored.
Her lab is devising methods to use controlled bursts of sound waves known as focused ultrasound to kill cancer cells and modify the environment surrounding them in ways that enhance existing therapies. One of the moonshot ideas she’d love to pursue involves labeling drug molecules, using medical imaging to track where they go in the body, and evaluating whether focused ultrasound helps cancer therapies get into tumors.
The work would require someone with a dizzying array of skills. It’s an ideal study for a postdoc. Without one in the lab, the idea is on hold.
Timothée Poisot is an associate professor in the University of Montreal’s department of biological sciences. His lab works in part to identify emerging viruses with disease-causing potential. Three times in the past year, he has contacted funding agencies to request extra time to complete grant-supported research because it took longer than expected to hire a postdoc.
Those requests were all approved, but not everyone has been so lucky. Angela Roberts, an assistant professor at Western University in Ontario, last year failed to hire a postdoc and returned the $75,000 that would have paid the researcher’s salary. She’ll probably have to do the same this year.
As a result, her group’s productivity has taken a hit. Typically, the lab publishes more than 20 papers a year. Last year, that dropped to 15. This year, she expects the total to be 8 to 10.
Faculty aren’t just having a harder time hiring; they’re struggling to keep researchers. And when scientists exit the lab mid-project, the work they leave behind can drag or stall.
Mike Snyder, a prominent geneticist and big data expert at Stanford, had a project that was left unfinished when a postdoc took an industry job while his paper was wending its way through a journal’s peer review process. Reviewers requested additional experiments be done after the postdoc was gone, and now, two years later, the findings still haven’t been published in a journal.
The competitive pressure of industry is especially intense in the Bay Area, one of the nation’s top biotech hubs. The region’s average life science industry worker makes around $150,000 a year, according to trade group Biocom California. Half of Snyder’s lab technicians left for industry jobs, as did two postdocs during the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, when biotech was booming,
He supports their decisions. After all, Snyder himself cofounded more than a half-dozen companies. But he acknowledged that these departures can slow things down.
“It does mean that certain projects that you’re crushing, suddenly you have to scramble to find someone else to wrap it up,” he said.
Mark Kay, a gene therapy expert at Stanford, estimates that over the past decade results from a half-dozen projects in his lab were never published. In many cases, Kay added, lab members intend to finish work after they leave. But priorities change, and so does their availability.
“A lot of the postdocs say, ‘I’ll still work on the paper, even though I’m going to start this new job in two weeks.’ And some of them do,” he said. “But the pace is a lot slower than they indicated.”
The NIH working group on postdoctoral training has held listening sessions over the past year, drawing nearly 3,300 comments and covering issues from ensuring postdocs have solid wages and consistent benefits to better supporting international researchers.
The working group is scheduled to release recommendations in mid-December. One suggestion will be increasing NIH funding for staff scientists, researchers who have permanent positions in labs and competitive salaries. Proponents have long said that staff posts would give scientists looking to remain in academia a way to do so without a faculty position.
While a slowdown in academic research wouldn’t be catastrophic in the short term, the stakes over the long term are high. For example, key discoveries about messenger RNA, which enabled the development of COVID-19 vaccines, were made two decades earlier in University of Pennsylvania labs. The researchers, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, were awarded the Nobel Prize this year.
Those concerned about academia’s future worry that transformative discoveries might not happen without researchers to conduct open, curiosity-driven science.
“There’s an important component of discovery at the university level that hopefully generates unbiased science and allows people to think outside of the box,” Western University’s Roberts said. “Very quickly now, industry is replacing basic science that used to be done in universities. So the question is, ‘Are we OK with that as a society?’”