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扩大学术界职业研究科学家的途径

06.01.22 | 11min read | Text byT. Ben Thompson (Ben)和萨沙·查普（Sasha Chapin）

Summary

The U.S. university research enterprise is plagued by an odd bug: it encourages experts in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to leave it at the very moment they become recognized as experts. People who pursue advanced degrees in STEM are often compelled by deep interest in research. But upon graduation from master’s, Ph.D., or postdoctoral programs, these research-oriented individuals face a difficult choice: largely cede hands-on involvement in research to pursue faculty positions (which increasingly demand that a majority of time be spent on管理职责， 例如applying for grants），放弃统治轨道的更高薪水和声望，以便通过低地位的员工职位（例如，实验室经理，研究软件工程师）继续“进行科学”，或完全离开学术领域。

Many choose the latter. And when that happens at scale, it harms the broader U.S. scientific enterprise by (i) decreasing federal returns on investment in training STEM researchers, and (ii) slowing scientific progress by creating a dearth of experienced personnel conducting basic research in university labs and mentoring the next generation of researchers. The solution is to strengthen and elevate the role of the career research scientist¹in academia—the highly trained senior research-group member who is hands-on and in the lab every day—in the university ecosystem. This is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward workforce-pipeline issue that federal STEM-funding agencies have the power to address. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) —two of the largest sources of academic research funding— could begin by hosting high-level discussions around the problem: specifically, through an NSF-led workshop and an NIH-led task force. In parallel, the two agencies can launch immediately tractable efforts to begin making headway in addressing the problem. NSF, for instance, could increase visibility and funding for研究软件工程师，尽管NSF和/或NIH可以考虑提供赠款，以支持由成熟的教授或首席研究员（PI）共同领导的“共同创建”研究实验室，并与一位经验丰富的职业研究科学家一起工作。

这些活动的集体目标是将技术专长注入科学的日常构想和执行（尤其是基础研究），从而加快科学进步并帮助美国保持世界科学领导力。

挑战和机会

The scientific status quo in the United States is increasingly diverting STEM experts away from direct research opportunities at universities. STEM graduate students interested in hands-on research have few attractive career opportunities in academia: those working as staff scientists, lab managers, research software engineers, and similar forego the higher pay and status of the tenure track, while those working as faculty members find themselves encumbered by tasks that are largely unrelated to research.

使STEM专家难以在大学环境中进行动手研究，从而两种方式损害了更广泛的美国科学企业。首先，联邦政府每年都会支付大量的资金，即VIA奖学金资金，研究补助金，学费支持和其他途径，以帮助培训早期职业茎研究人员。保证这笔支出是因为作为美国大学协会explains, “There is broad consensus that university research is a long-term national investment in the future.” This investment hinges on university contributions to basic research; universities and collegesaccountfor just 13% of overall U.S. research and development (R&D) activity, but nearly half (48%) of basic research. Limited career opportunities for talented STEM researchers to continue “doing the science” in academic settings therefore limits our national returns on investment in these researchers.

其次,从学术界slo阻止人才的磨损ws the pace of U.S. scientific progress because most hands-on research activities are conducted by graduate students rather than more experienced personnel. Yet, senior researchers are far more scientifically productive. With years of experience under their belt, senior researchers possess tacit knowledge of how to effectively get research done in a field, can help a team avoid repeating mistakes, and can provide the technical mentorship needed for graduate students to acquire research skills quickly and well. And with graduate students and postdocs typically remaining with a research group for only a few years, career research scientists also provide important continuity across projects. The productivity boosts that senior researchers can deliver are especially well established for software-driven fields (see box).

The absence of attractive job opportunities for career research scientists at most academic institutions is an anomaly. Such opportunities are prevalent in the private sector, at national labs (e.g., those run by the NIH and the Department of Energy) and other government institutions, and in select well-endowed university labs that enjoy more discretionary spending ability. As the dominant funder of university research in the United States, the federal government has massive leverage over the structure of research labs. With some small changes in grant-funding incentives, federal agencies can address this anomaly and bring more senior research scientists into the academic research system.

Plan of Action

菲deral STEM-funding agencies — led by NSF and NIH, as the two largest sources of federal funding for academic research — should explore and pursue strategies for changing grant-funding incentives in ways that strengthen and elevate the role of the career research scientist in academia. We split our recommendations into two parts.

The first part focuses on encouraging discussion. The problem of limited career options for trained STEM professionals who want to engage in hands-on research in the academic sector currently flies beneath the radar of many extremely knowledgeable stakeholders inside and outside of the federal government. Bringing these stakeholders together might result in excellent actionable suggestions on how to retain talented research scientists in academia. Second, we suggest two specific projects to make headway on the problem: (i) further support for research software engineers and (ii) a pilot program supporting co-founded research labs. While the recommendations below are targeted to NSF and NIH, other federal STEM-funding agencies (e.g., the Departments of Energy and Defense) can and should consider similar actions.

Part 1. Identify needs, opportunities, and options for federal actions to support and incentivize career research scientists.²

将学术就业转移到更欢迎职业研究科学家的模型中，将需要将特定的新计划以及对现有资金结构进行的大小变化混合在一起。但是，尚不清楚应优先考虑哪些改革。我们的第一组建议旨在开始必要的讨论。

Specifically, NSF should start by convening key community members at a workshop (modeled on previous NSF-sponsored workshops, such as the workshop on aNational Network of Research Institutes [NNRI]) focused on how the agency can encourage creation of additional career research scientist positions at universities. The workshop should also (i) discuss strategies for publicizing and encouraging outstanding STEM talent to pursue such positions, (ii) identify barriers that discourage universities from posting for career research scientists, and (iii) brainstorm solutions to these barriers. Workshop participants should include representatives from federal agencies that sponsor national labs as well as industry sectors (software, biotech, etc.) that conduct extensive R&D, as these entities are more experienced employers of career research scientists. The workshop should address the following questions:

• How can NSF minimize the effects of the “research scientist tax”?³

• 以科学家为中心的劳动力可以解决哪些具体问题？

• What tools does NSF have to affect academic-employment structures? Are there ways to incentivize the employment of research scientists within a project-based funding framework?

• Are there ways to relax grant-funding constraints such that PIs could hire contract research scientists when appropriate?

• In what areas of research and education does the faculty-as-manager paradigm dominate and in what areas are senior research scientists critical but currently unavailable? To what extent do these areas (problematically) overlap?

• 职业研究科学家如何支持NSF“推进研究和教育”（包括培训研究生）的核心使命？

• 在为职业研究科学家提供高薪机会的行业 - 就业格局中，NSF如何支持人才保留的大学？

• 可以从国家实验室和行业中现有的就业模式中收集什么最佳的招聘和保留职业研究科学家的最佳实践？

• 是否有工具会增加学术界非教师但面向研究的职位的声望和吸引力？

The primary audience for the workshop will be NSF leadership and policymakers. The output of the workshop should be a report suggesting a clear, actionable path forward for those stakeholders to pursue.

NIH应该采取类似的事实调查努力，可能是作为一个working group of the Advisory Committee to the Directorate。This working group would identify strategies for incentivizing labs to hire professional staff members, including expert lab technicians, professional biostatisticians, and RSEs. This working group will ultimately recommend to the NIH Director actions that the agency can take to expand the roles of career research scientists in the academic sector. The working group would address questions similar to those explored in the NSF workshop.

第2部分。启动两个试点项目，开始扩大职业研究科学家的机会。

飞行员1.创建一项新的NSF计划，以征求和资助研究软件工程师（RSE）支持。

Research software engineers (RSEs)build and maintain research software, and train scientists to use that software. Incentivizing the creation of long-term RSE positions at universities will increase scientific productivity and build the infrastructure for sustained scientific progress in the academic sector. Though a wide range of STEM disciplines could benefit from RSE involvement, NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate is a good place to start expanding support for RSEs in academic projects.

CISE has previously invested in nascent support structures for professional staff in software and computing fields. The CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) was created to build research independence among early-career researchers working in CISE-related fields by funding graduate-student appointments. Much CRII-funded work involves producing — and in turn, depends on — shared community software. Similarly, the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) and RCD Nexus are NSF-supported programs focused on creating guidelines and resources for campus research computing operations and infrastructure. Through these two programs, NSF is helping universities build a foundation of (i) software production and (ii) computing hardware and infrastructure needed to support that software.

However, effective RSEs are crucial for progress in scientific fields outside of CISE’s domain. For example, one of this memo’s authors has personal experience with NSF-funded geosciences research. PIs working in this field are desperate for funding to hire RSEs, but do not have access to funding for that purpose. Instead, they depend almost entirely on graduate students.

As a component of the workshop recommended above, NSF should highlight other research areas hamstrung by an acute need for RSEs. In addition, CISE should create a follow-on CISE Software Infrastructure Initiative (CSII) that solicits and funds requests from pre-tenure academic researchers in a variety of fields for RSE support. Requests should explain how the requested RSE would (i) catalyze cutting-edge research, and (ii) maintain critical community open-source scientific software. Moreover, academia severely lacks strong mentorship in software engineering. A specific goal of CSII funding should be to support at least a 1:3 ratio of RSEs to graduate students in funded labs. Creative evaluation mechanisms will be needed to assess the success of CSII. The goal of this initiative will be a community of university researchers productively using software created and supported by RSEs hired through CSII funding.

Pilot 2. Provide grants to support “co-founded” research labs jointly led by an established professor or principal investigator (PI) working alongside an experienced career research scientist.

Academic PIs (typically faculty) normally lead their labs and research groups alone. This state of affairs leads tohigh rates of burnout，可能导致不良的研究成功。在某些情况下，与联合创始人建立雄心勃勃的新项目或公司，使这项努力更有可能在压力和孤立的压力和孤立的情况下成功。联合创始人可以提供一套互补的技能。例如，启动孵化器Y Combinator以希望团队与CTO构建器和设计师一起工作的首席执行官和经理闻名。相比之下，学术PI在经营现代科学实验室的各个方面都有才华。开发的机制可以帮助科学家聚集在一起，并从互补技能中受益，这对于科学资金机构来说应该是一个重中之重。

We recommend that NSF and/or NIH create a pilot grant program to fund co-founded research labs at universities. Formally co-founded research groups have been successful across scientific domains (e.g., theAbuGoot Lab在麻省理工学院和Carpenter-Singh Lab广泛的研究所),但仍然相当罕见。菲deral grants for co-founded research labs would build on this proof of concept by competitively awarding 5–7 years of salary and equipment funding to support a lab jointly run by an early-career PI and a career research scientist. A key anticipated benefit of this grant program is increased retention of outstanding researchers in positions that enable them to keep “doing the science.” Currently, the most talented STEM researchers become faculty members or leave academia altogether. Career research scientist positions simply cannot offer competitive levels of compensation and prestige. Creating a new, high-profile, grant-funded opportunity for STEM talent to remain in hands-on university lab positions could help shift the status quo. Creating a pathway for co-founded and co-led research labs would also help PIs avoid isolation and burnout while building more robust, healthy, and successful research teams.

Conclusion

Many breakthroughs in scientific progress have required massive funding and national coordination. This is not one of them. All that needs to be done is allow expert research scientists to do the hands-on work that they’ve been trained to do. The scientific status quo prevents our nation’s basic research enterprise from achieving its full potential, and from harnessing that potential for the common good. Strengthening and elevating the role of career research scientists in the academic sector will empower existing STEM talent to drive scientific progress forward.