TARA SCHWETZ: All right.
Thank you for joining us all today.
I am Dr. Tara Schwetz.
I am the Acting Principal Deputy Director of the National
Institutes of Health, and I'm also
the co-chair of the NIH Advisory Committee
to the Director Working Group on Re-Envisioning NIH-Supported
Postdoctoral Training.
And I'm really pleased to welcome you
all today to today's session.
Joining me today, we have Dr. Shelley Berger,
who's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,
and she's also a co-chair of the working group.
We also have the pleasure of having two additional members
of the working group join us.
Tom Kimbis, who is the Executive Director and Chief Executive
Officer at the National Postdoctoral Association,
and Dr. Emily Miller, who's the Deputy Vice
President for Institutional Policy at the Association
of American Universities.
Now I just want to take a moment to set the stage for what
brings us all here today, and that's
insuring the future of US competitiveness and innovation
in biomedical research.
This is really of utmost importance to NIH.
And in order to do that, we must promote
the well-being and sustainability
of the biomedical workforce.
Our working group was established
to specifically address growing concerns
about the post-doctoral training system
and academic research investigators'
ability to recruit qualified postdoctoral candidates
in the future.
The goal of the working group is to explore
the status of the postdoctoral training system,
identify and understand critical factors and issues
relating to this perceived decline in the number
of postdoctoral fellows in academia,
and provide recommendations to address those factors.
So today, NIH wants to hear from you, the biomedical research
community, about all of these issues.
Your feedback and input are critical to this endeavor.
So to set the stage, you'll be hearing from a few invited
speakers.
And then we're going to open it up
to structured discussion from all
of the attendees for the remainder of the hour
before we close.
Now we're going to collect comments and input
using the Q&A function on Zoom, which is open now.
I will say that Q&A is a little bit of a misnomer in this case.
So while we may address some clarifying questions,
I want to reiterate that this is a listening session.
And we aim to listen to your comments, your input,
and really importantly, we want your ideas and suggestions
for how we can move forward.
So we ask that you please go ahead and provide either
your comment or a note on the topic of your comment
using that Q&A function.
And you can feel free to use the Anonymous option
and your note will be then read aloud without attribution.
So feel free to start submitting your input and that Q&A box
now.
OK, with that, I'm going to hand it over to Shelley to frame
today's--
the focus of today's session, which
is on compensation and benefits, including
child and dependent care.
So with that, Shelley?
SHELLEY BERGER: Great.
Thank you, Tara.
And I want to reiterate my welcome to all of you.
We're really happy to have you all
here to contribute to the discussion
and to get your comments.
So I want to set the stage for today's conversation
with just a few data points to get us started.
And in this first slide, we've collected our impressions
of the many forces that appear to be driving the decline
and challenges that are experienced by postdocs
in this current period.
These include limited opportunities in academia,
the lengthening time to publish, new opportunities that have
been coming up in pharma and biotech,
expanding research expectations with all the new technologies
and ways that we can approach our research interests,
and then finally, of course, the difficulties in work-life
balance and the cost of living, which really are key--
these are the key forces for today's consideration
when talking about cost-of-living issues.
So now on the next slide, if you take a look at the stipends
that come from National Institutes of Health
for fellows, for postdoc fellows,
which is the NIH's main individual postdoc fellowship
mechanism, here, you can see that they've been steadily
growing over the last 10 years or so, and are now up
to 56,000-plus a bit for someone in their first--
just starting out in their first year as a postdoc.
Now while postdocs on these NIH fellowship mechanisms
are expecting can make more now than they did back
in my day, which is some time ago, nonetheless,
these numbers are not adjusted for inflation.
And of course, the growing cost of living is a major concern.
And I note, it varies considerably
in different regions and cities, which
I'm guessing are going to--
some of your comments are going to be surrounding that,
so we're interested to hear about that.
All right, so in slide 3, let's look
at postdoc pay in comparison to other job avenues using data
from the National Science Foundation 2021
Survey of Earned Doctorates.
Now here you can see that the median postdoctoral pay
is much lower than in other avenues of employment
where graduate students are exiting to.
In fields of particular relevance to NIH,
such as biological and biomedical sciences as well
as health sciences, the median first-year salary
for employment is around 90,000 while postdoc pay
hovers at or below the NRSA level in the low $50,000 range.
So recently in response to difficulties
with hiring postdocs and growing concerns around these issues,
institutions, including MIT and St. Jude Children's Research
Hospital, have raised their starting postdoc salaries
to 65,000 and 70,000 respectively.
You might have also heard about the University of California
system which has reached a five-year contract
with the Postdoc Union to implement a new salary
scale that will result in average increases
of 8% for all postdocs on the scale along with annual pay
increases and experience-based pay increases,
and again, I'm imagining we're going
to hear some comments around these recent changes
from all of you.
So in slide 4, in addition, we certainly
note that difficulties for postdocs
extend beyond salary into benefits.
The National Postdoc Association's
2021 Institutional Policy Report polled about 200 member
institutions on benefits policies.
And as you can see here, only about 30% of institutions
offer the same benefit package to all postdocs,
while many use different metrics, including
the postdoc source of funding, connection to their--
connections to institutional payroll and classification
title to determine benefits coverage.
So it can really vary, and I'm guessing again,
we're going to hear quite a lot from you on these points.
One major point of conversation in the working group
has been this variability, and that it
leaves many postdocs vulnerable to loss of benefits
such as health care in particular
if they secure a grant, which is something of considerable note.
And again, I'm sure we're going to hear from all of you
about that.
We want to thank Tom Kimbis, who's here with us today--
in a moment you'll hear from him--
for providing these data to the working group.
Finally, in slide 5, I just want to bring it all together,
that these data demonstrate the real financial
and logistical constraints on young researchers who
choose to pursue postdoctoral training, which, of course, has
quite a lot of value.
I mean, I really believe that, but there are issues around it
that we want to talk about.
So it's very critical for the working group
to carefully consider the experiences and concerns
of postdocs and the biomedical community broadly.
So we're very pleased to have you here to share--
again, share your comments and input.
We want to hear from you.
If you have a question, the question's OK,
but it'd be great if you could add a comment,
add your thoughts, your ideas, your recommendations.
And with that, I'm going to hand it back to Tara
to introduce our speakers before we move to your comments
and ideas.
TARA SCHWETZ: Great.
Thanks so much, Shelley.
So we have the pleasure of having four speakers join us
today, and each are going to share their remarks
and perspectives on the topic of compensation and benefits.
So we're going to start off first
with Dr. Krishna Mudumbi, who is an NCI Outstanding Early-Stage
K99 Fellow at the Yale Cancer Biology
institute in the Lab of Mark Lemmon.
And he studies the kinetics of membrane receptor signaling.
During this time at Yale, Krishna
was the Vice Chair of the Yale Black Postdoctoral
Association and chair.
Of the Yale Postdoctoral Association
where he successfully advocated for child care stipends,
expanded child care access during the pandemic,
and benefits equity for NIH-funded postdocs.
I understand, just recently stepped down from that role.
So with that, I will turn it over to Krishna.
KRISHNA MUDUMBI: All right.
Thank you so much for that introduction,
and thank you for inviting me to share my thoughts today.
I think it's really important.
This topic is really important and it's very near
and dear to my heart as well.
So as Shelley so nicely stated, postdocs have really
been facing a lot of challenges in academia for quite
some time, and this has really been
exacerbated by the pandemic.
We've really all come to know the challenges that we were all
riding through in the beginning, but now
we really are able to clearly focus on these things.
And really, I just want to make a point that we're
all very highly trained individuals who
bring valuable skill sets to the scientific endeavor,
and we really should be treated as such.
And I think it's this lack of, for lack of a better word,
respect, that causes this disparity that we
see between postdocs leaving for industry versus those that stay
to pursue an academic career.
And this is really where we see this deficit
of graduate students as well as postdocs
that leave our industry or leave their current positions
as postdocs to go on to industry or other pursuits.
And one of the points I think that was really brought up
was the fact of salary.
A majority of postdocs live in cities or areas
with a very high cost of living, and the NRSA salary,
which is often used as a guideline as a minimum salary
by most universities regardless of their location,
is really making it very difficult for postdocs
to pursue a career in academia.
Many postdocs are often also moving across the country
or moving across the world to engage
with their academic pursuits, and it's
very difficult for people like that
to have a support network that is typically
available to a majority of early career professionals.
And this is particularly detrimental to postdoc parents
that don't have a network that can support them
as they raise their children.
And really, overall, these disparities, I think,
are most harmful for women, particularly
those that are parents or primary caregivers,
and also postdocs from underrepresented groups.
And I think that if we as a community of researchers,
and if the NIH is truly earnest about retaining our women
scientists and our underrepresented scientists,
and I think we can take some of the following steps,
I think, to really improve this.
And I think the first one is I think to be competitive,
the NIH should really increase the minimum NRSA stipend level,
which is, like I said, often used
as a guideline that the minimum postdoc salaries
by most universities.
And I think the majority of postdocs
typically train in cities with high costs of living, which
really means that we need to start to see salaries that
start at somewhere between 65,000 to 75,000
as our starting salary.
I think the next step that I would really recommend that we
take is that we should have the opportunity for all postdocs
to apply for childcare care funds, not just NRA-funded--
NRSA-funded postdocs.
And I think the stipend should also be doubled.
I think currently it's 2,400 or $2,500
and I think it should be at least $5,000
to really offset the costs that postdoc parents typically
face when they have to pay for daycare and after-school care.
And finally, I think the NIH should really provide much more
clear wording in terms of NIH-funded postdocs
so that they receive the same benefits as postdocs
that are supported either by their PIs or their institutes.
And this is really penalizing postdocs
that, as Shelley mentioned, are able to get these--
win these competitive and very prestigious funds,
and I think this would really put everybody
on a much more level playing field
and not make us decide whether we really
want to apply for NIH funding or whether we'd rather
be supported by our PIs so that we can have
the benefits that we would have if we were funded
not through the NIH.
So thank you, that's my comment for today.
TARA SCHWETZ: Great, thank you so much.
And next, we'll turn to Dr. Lola Eniola-Adefeso who
is the University Diversity and Social Transformation
Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biomedical
Engineering, and Macromolecular Science
and Engineering at the University of Michigan Ann
Arbor.
She is the Associate Dean for Graduate
and Professional Education in the College of Engineering
at the University of Michigan, and Associate Director
of the Cellular Biotechnology Training Program.
And her research interest is understanding
how immune cells are recruited in response to inflammation
and using acquired knowledge to inform
novel vascular-targeted imaging and drug therapy designs.
So I'll turn it over to you, Lola.
LOLA ENIOLA-ADEFESO: Thank you so much.
I think our first speaker, Krishna,
covered a lot of ground in terms of what some of the key issues
are and offered what I thought are practical ideas on how NIH
might approach solving that.
I should say that it is my view that postdoctoral scholars are
professionals.
They have the highest degree in their field.
And so I want to echo that their pay should reflect that.
I think there is a huge demand or pressure
of coming from the industrial market that is essentially
taking talent that would have been interested in academia
away simply because of the dollar
difference and the difference in the quality of life
that an individual could have as a postdoc versus
employed person in the industry.
So I would even push that number offered higher closer
to that graph that you showed.
If in the biomedical sciences, the average number for salary
is 90K, why can't NIH offer compensation?
Let's pay the people what the market rate is.
And I do want to then pivot to this comment
of most postdocs indeed do train in cities with extremely
high cost of living, and one might even
suggest that part of that is that we know
that only a small handful of institutions in the United
States supply future faculty, which is driving
the movement of postdoctoral scholars
to a handful of cities that are also very expensive cities.
And so I think there is work, actually,
that NIH could do in that space to help
the discipline recognize that there
is cutting-edge phenomenal research being done
across the United States in areas that
offer good quality of life.
And so maybe even pay structure that
are mapped onto the cost of living in different places.
Why don't we pay postdocs higher?
Part of that is the expectation that postdocs
are spending more and more time in this holding pad, six years.
Is that where we want it to be?
I think that has to be part of the conversation.
And the structure by which NIH offers those fellowships
creates uncertainty for what would
be talent that are coming from underrepresented backgrounds,
talent that are coming from low-income backgrounds.
The long runway of six-plus years holding pad
where you don't have job security,
where you don't have retirement benefits, all of those things
make the decision easier for folks to go in the industry.
And so that has to be part of the conversation as well,
I think.
In what ways can we allow postdoctoral scholars
to start building those funds, retirement structure that
essentially brings equity to them in those roles?
If we think that postdoctoral training is
critical to the research enterprise in the United
States, then we need to incentivize
that the folks who are interested
to be able to do so without giving up earning power
because they chose this way.
So science should not be the career
that you choose and then you end up being poor,
which is essentially how we're structuring it.
The uncertainty of how long you're in the training
and whether you might even get a position at the end of it,
NIH could do something in that space
as well, which I think it's coupled to the compensation.
The fellowship structure, when are
we awarding this fellowship, why not move it earlier?
Follow the NSF model where people
bring in their own fellowships.
That might help with some of these issues
around compensation, et cetera.
So I will stop there.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
TARA SCHWETZ: Thank you so much.
All right, we will shift to our third speaker, Dr. Tori
Osinski, who is a F32-funded postdoctoral fellow
at the University of Minnesota.
And her research is at the intersection
of autoimmunity and cardiovascular disease.
She is here on behalf of Minnesota's Postdoctoral
Association, which has been working extensively
with the administration to advance
salary and benefits for postdocs at its institution.
So Tori, turning it over to you.
TORI OSINSKI: Awesome.
Thank you, Tara, and to the rest of the organizers
for this opportunity to speak with you all today.
I think a lot of what I'm going to say
is going to echo the first two, and hopefully I
can inject a couple extra details
just so that everybody gets a clear picture of what
is going on and where we think things should go.
So to start out.
Postdoc salaries are low and often lack
appropriate yearly merit-based and cost-of-living adjustments.
Unfortunately, this lack of pay coupled
with a number of other factors that make starting in
or remaining in a postdoctoral position even more difficult.
These challenges begin with the increased time required
to graduate from a PhD to publish,
to publish more as a postdoc, to find your open faculty
positions, and then also to obtain those open faculty
positions as I think Lola highlighted well.
With this extended timeline, many postdocs
are older and seeking to be more established
in other aspects of their lives.
And so this lower pay means that individuals
will struggle longer with increased costs of childcare,
housing, and many other essential costs.
This means our life savings, our investment opportunities,
our capacity to start a family, or purchase our first home,
and more continue to fall further
and further behind our peers who choose
not to pursue this career path.
Growing evidence also shows that this lack of financial support
continues to reduce retention of historically
excluded populations in research,
as I think has been highlighted already,
and I think is a really, really important thing
to keep in mind.
Furthermore, I think this transient training-oriented
nature of a postdoc position means
that the following benefits are often lacking from institutions
and I think this is something that we
could pay more attention to.
So these benefits include the status of a full employee.
For example, I'm a T30--
or an F32 recipient here at Minnesota, and because of that,
I'm a non-employee at the university and lack of access
to a lot of resources.
I don't have access, like many other situations,
to retirement accounts, along with contributions
to those accounts by employers.
And there's also a lack of access
to adequate and consistent health insurance
plans that could be dictated by your job code and funding
situation.
After consulting with other leaders
in our postdoc association, some of
the NIH-centric considerations we
wanted to share during the session are as follows.
Current grant mechanisms allow institutions
to designate fellowship recipients
as non-institutional employees, as I touched on.
While receiving these fellowships
is a highly sought after and respected accomplishment,
it often creates further challenges
for postdocs who may have to change their health insurance,
lose access to institutional resources like daycare,
parking, retirement accounts, and adjust to altered taxation
processes as well, which are often without needed advice
and expertise.
Beyond fellowship recipients, though, there
are a number of postdocs whose salaries
are paid for by other NIH grants,
such as R01s and those sorts.
And they do not receive a salary that meets the NRSA scale.
Institutions dictate postdoctoral salaries,
and many principal investigators encounter resistance
when trying to increase their postdoctoral salaries.
And so there seems to be a disconnect
between the institution and them communicating with the NIH
and understanding the scale that they've set.
So I have three proposals for how we could try
to address these challenges.
The first is to increase pay and incorporate
cost-of-living adjustments.
The continued small incremental increases in pay that we see
leave many frustrated with the low pay
standard set for postdocs.
Two, we'd like to see that the rules that
allow grant mechanisms to designate individuals
as non-institutional employees, we'd like to see that change.
I think that creates a lot of the issues
that we struggle with related to compensation and benefits.
And then finally, we'd love for the NIH
to provide requirements that institutions adhere
to base salaries, annual cost-of-living adjustments,
and merit-based raises that if they are receiving NIH grants.
So hopefully that wasn't too much all at once,
but thank you for your time and consideration.
I'm grateful for this opportunity
and look forward to hearing everyone else's comments.
TARA SCHWETZ: Great.
Thanks so much.
Our final speaker for today is Dr. Andrew Campbell
who is a Professor of Medical Science at Brown University
in Providence, Rhode Island.
He served as the 15th Dean of Brown's Graduate School
overseeing the training of unionized and non-unionized
advanced degree students in more than 55 graduate programs
and 34 academic departments.
He is director and PI of Brown's NIH-funded Initiative
to Maximize Student Development Program for PhD Students.
And is Co-Director Co-PI of Brown's NIH-funded Prep
Baccalaureate Program.
He's also a AAAS Fellow, an ASCB Fellow,
and has served on a number of boards,
including serving as the Chair of the Board of Directors
of the Council of Graduate Schools.
So I will turn it over to you now, Andrew.
ANDREW CAMPBELL: OK, great.
Great, thank you very much, everyone.
I'm actually in Asia and I hope my internet connection is not
unstable, so please forgive me if it is.
So first of all, I want to thank the organizers
for the invitation, and I want to thank all of you
for being here to discuss this important topic.
I want to start out by saying, there
are going to be some comments that I
make that are my own comments and not necessarily the views
or positions of my institution, and I
think that's an important thing to note.
So there are going to be places where I cite what we actually
do at my institutions, but I will include some opinions that
are my own opinions.
From the three previous speakers,
it's clear that there are some universal themes that
are expressed here, so I'm going to try not to be too redundant.
Now as Dean of the Graduate School
and thinking about postdoctoral fellows,
I think it's safe to say that what
we see amongst graduate students often
foreshadows what we will see in the future
when we look at the postdoctoral ranks.
So just as the undergraduate population
represents a four-year preview of the future
of the graduate ranks and a look at the graduate student
population also provides for a preview
of what the near-future of the postdoc ranks will look like.
Again, I don't want to be too redundant,
but just very briefly I want to make a couple of points.
First, I want to talk about work-life balance.
Thinking about supporting those who are birth
and adopting parents and elder care providers.
So each year, we obviously see more and more individuals
in the graduate ranks with children
who are elder care providers, having responsibilities
for those who are not necessarily
pursuing the careers they are.
These individuals eventually flow into the postdoc ranks,
and so they remain as non-employees
and they don't qualify for the employee benefits or employee
plans that traditional university employees do.
And so as the number of trainees who have this responsibility
increases in the postdoctoral ranks,
I think serious consideration needs
to be given to their needs.
Some institutions have made efforts,
and sometimes these are a little bit difficult
because even though some postdocs can be granted access
to employee programs, there are tax consequences, federal IRS
complications that make it difficult
for other institutions to actually do that.
So what we actually have done at Brown
is that we actually provide paid time off
for graduate students who are birth and adoptive parents.
Now I know not all institutions can do this,
so maybe one can consider how we can support institutions
that can't do this and encourage those who can do it to do that.
We have a parental relief policy.
In that policy, graduate students
who are in good standing, who are supported by stipend--
so you can imagine, this might be true also for postdocs,
they're eligible for parental relief
for the care of newborn infants or adopted children up
to the age of six.
Our students can request parental leave up to two times
during their tenure as students.
And instances where co-parents are both students, or could
be postdocs, both parents are eligible for parental relief,
and this relief provides a stipend for a period of time,
and you can imagine, that would be the semester or summer.
In addition to that parental relief,
we also provide childcare subsidy,
which really helps to provide funding and costs
for degree-seeking students by granting them
awards up to about $5,000 a year per child for up to three
children for those who have a total adjusted household
income, I think, of about 100,000 or so,
so that's sort of the limit.
That subsidy is going to cover childcare
for dependents between the ages of zero and six,
and it's going to vary from family to family and year
to year really depending on the family's financial need
of range.
And there's also a backup care.
We provide backup care for those who are taking care
of children, and that care really helps when a child
cannot go to daycare, a daycare is closed,
the school is closed, when a child is sick or is under
the weather, or it covers holidays.
So these are things that I think really
need to be considered as we think about how
we support child care needs and benefits
of postdoctoral fellows.
And also, we provide a subsidy when
it comes to insurance coverage.
We provide as much as 75% subsidy
on the cost of enrolling dependents in health insurance
programs.
So that's something that really needs to be considered.
And that's up to the age of 26 before a child becomes
a non-dependent, so those are important factors.
Now the one area I want to comment on,
I think this is more where I make my own statement,
and this is in the area of compensation and HR management
and the area of increasing unionization.
So I was the first graduate dean to oversee
unionization in the Graduate School at Brown.
And so graduate students are one part training,
one part student, one part activist, if you will.
And more graduate students exist today
than they did five years ago.
And so we really need to think about is these individuals
flow into the postdoc ranks, what are we going to do?
How do we manage if a postdoc employee strikes?
What are the obligations that the federal government will
assume as funded with regards to training compensation
during strikes?
Striking postdoctoral fellows affect research productivity,
and even in the case of IRACDA Fellows,
it can affect teaching at multiple institutions.
And when we also think about those places
where there are postdoctoral units where
we do see salary increases, sometimes those increases
are greater than the increase we see in the compensation NIH
provides to those fellows.
So we have this gap, this unfunded mandate,
this gap that must be picked up by PIs or by the institutions.
And that puts a strain on PI grants
and institutional resources.
And that could actually threaten the size
of our postdoc populations.
Now not all institutions have the capacity to cover that gap,
and so that's where the concern really is.
And also, I think as more institutions
recognize postdoctoral unions, are postdocs tied more
to the institutions or to specific advisors
or laboratories?
And so NIH really has to really determine the responsible party
when it comes to grant-related work and work
progress being affected by those sort of events.
So you think about benefits, you think about
support for postdocs-- and again, I
want to refer back to looking at the graduate student population
because I think we'll see a lot of changes
in what the needs are and what the pressures are
on the federal system.
So I'll stop there.
And again, if there are additional questions,
I'm happy to answer them.
TARA SCHWETZ: Great.
Thank you so much to all four of you
for providing those really insightful comments.
We're now going to open the floor
to all the comments from everyone
else who is on the line, all about 400 or so of you.
As noted at the beginning of the meeting,
please share your input using the Q&A function.
Many of you already have.
We've already gotten over 50-some-odd comments coming
through.
And you can provide your comment directly or a general topic
of your comment.
The facilitators, Emily and Tom, will then
invite specific participants by name to share their thought.
And once invited, the host will enable that person
to unmute and share their common out loud.
Now we expect to have more comments
than we can address today, so we ask that each participant limit
their comments to about one to two minutes
so that we can hear from as many of you as possible.
If you wish for the facilitators to read your comment out
loud, please note that in the Q&A function
and they will be pleased to do so.
Alternatively, if you prefer to comment anonymously,
please use the Anonymous option in the Q&A function
and one of the facilitators will read it aloud
without attribution.
So now I am going to turn it over to Tom
to go through the comments.
TOM KIMBIS: Thanks, Tara.
And just before we start, a blanket apology if we--
Emily and I, if either one of us mispronounced your name,
we're just reading off of your comments.
So apologies in advance if we do so.
And also, we'll be looking at these questions real-time,
so with the volume of questions and comments coming in,
we may have a couple of ones slip through the cracks,
but hopefully we'll get to you as many as we possibly can.
So we'll start off with an anonymous one
who states, my concern is that if the NIH is serious
about increasing diversity in academia,
and by having such low salaries for grad students and postdocs,
we're selecting for people who can afford
to stay in these underpaid positions for so long
rather than the brightest, most innovative, et cetera.
NIH recognizes low SES as an underrepresented group,
and yet it seems like the only people who can, quote,
"make it" in academia are ones who
have a hefty financial support system.
So with that comment, I'll turn it over to--
back to Emily.
EMILY MILLER: Thank you, Tom.
We have another anonymous comment about the variability
in stipends.
My HR pushes back on stipend raises
and I've not received a raise since 2020.
Starting postdocs make more than I do.
It doesn't feel fair that there are such discrepancies when
I'm paid off an NIH grant.
I submitted the F32 and did not get it
despite favorable comments.
Thank you for expressing your lived experience,
we will bring that back to the working group.
TOM KIMBIS: Thanks, Emily.
The next question we have, or comment,
is in regard to child care.
And it's from Monica Vasiliu.
And if you're there, Monica, you should
be able to unmute and ask your question.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for this session.
One issue we have is we receive 2,500
for each trainee every year beginning last year,
and not all trainees have children.
Do you use those funds only for the trainees
which actually have children instead of sending
the funds back to NIH?
Hello?
TOM KIMBIS: Yes.
Thank you-- thank you for your comment, and it's something,
of course, we'll be thinking of.
Something we've heard already from some of our speakers
today, we'll be taking it up and discussing in the working
group, so thank you very much for that.
AUDIENCE: And I have one other question if I can speak.
TOM KIMBIS: Sure, go ahead.
AUDIENCE: OK.
So some of the postdocs have to move
from one part of the country to another part of the country,
and they need funds for-- like moving expenses.
Well, the stipends-- I mean, would you
consider to support moving expenses as well?
TOM KIMBIS: Well, thank you for that, and just--
thank you, Monica.
And it just is a reminder, so this is--
your questions are welcome.
Comments even more so since this is intended
as a listening session.
We'll be listening and taking this information back
as a working group and capture all of this information
and discuss it within the group, but we won't be
answering the questions here.
But thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
Thank you.
TOM KIMBIS: Absolutely.
Emily?
EMILY MILLER: Yes.
We have a real distinction and a comment
here about training versus an employment.
Anonymously submitted, I think we
need to stop comparing postdoc compensation
to other employment.
A postdoc is not supposed to be a career.
It should be a step towards a career.
I believe reduced compensation is reasonable, as long as
is paired with corresponding training that sets up
a successful career transition.
This is why medical residents receive decreased compensation.
They are receiving critical training
that will establish their careers and subsequent higher
earnings.
We would benefit by talking about postdoc positions
in a similar way.
Thank you.
TOM KIMBIS: And we have another anonymous comment in regard
to benefits and protections.
Look to labor unions representing postdocs
and graduate student workers as models
for addressing the needs of early career researchers.
Compensation is important, but so are
protections against discrimination,
support for parents and people who
are pregnant and lactating, and many, many other
more rights, protections, and benefits.
So thank you very much for that comment.
Again, that's a theme I think we've seen throughout this--
the beginning of this session and in discussions
we've had already with the working group, so thank you.
TOM KIMBIS: Some general points have
been raised about advancement.
About 25 to 30 years ago, almost all PhDs
were assured a good role in academia, industry,
and were considered experts.
In the current era, there are way too many PhDs,
and greater than 75% of them are in limbo.
This accounts for lower pay, no benefits, and finally,
being treated like trainees when they are really experts.
All of them may have equal expertise,
but it is important to value the efforts
and treat all postdocs the way they are meant to be treated.
This is the best way forward according to me.
Thank you.
This was a theme that has been expressed
in a number of our working group discussions
and across the listening sessions.
Tom?
I think we'll be recognizing Leslie?
TOM KIMBIS: Yeah.
Thanks.
Thanks, Emily.
Leslie Vosshall, if you'd like to unmute, the floor is yours.
AUDIENCE: Perfect.
Thank you so much for holding the listening sessions
and elevating all the voices.
So I work for HHMI and we're very
excited that these discussions are happening.
We do feel like getting the minimum across the country
to 65 to 70,000 will be essential for the continued
sustainability of academic science in the United States,
and so that that's my comment.
And so my question is, unfunded mandates don't work,
and so have there been discussions--
difficult discussions at NIH for how you're
going to fund the gap given that money doesn't grow on trees
and the modular budget hasn't changed in two decades?
Where will the money come from if you
do what I think is the right thing, which is to raise
the minimum to 65 or 70?
TOM KIMBIS: Thank you, Leslie.
Talking about compensation and how that delta can be made up
is something that the working group is discussing, including
various mechanisms for doing so, but it certainly
is a critical one.
And thank you for bringing that to the attention
of this whole group.
I'll pass it back to Emily.
EMILY MILLER: Yes, next we're going
to hear a comment from Rachel Buckley.
You can unmute yourself.
AUDIENCE: Hello.
Yes, I appreciate the chance to speak today.
My comment-- I had a few different comments
that I wanted to make.
They were mainly on recommendations
because that was something that was mentioned.
I really do think that the NIH salary guidelines are far too
low.
This has already been mentioned by a few different people.
Based on the graph that was presented earlier
on in the talk, it does seem like to be
commensurate with industry and other non-academic jobs,
it looks like the starting salary should actually
be higher, I think, than 65 or 75,000.
But my thought had been to go so far
as to think about adjusting based on the city--
the location.
Certain cities have far higher cost of living--
I'm thinking of places like San Francisco
and New York, Boston--
where the salary may need to be adjusted higher.
Also, the budget threshold of 500,000 and the modular budgets
need to be increased in order to help incentivize
lifting the salaries of postdoctoral fellows
within the budget constraints at NIH.
And just to mirror again some of the comments that
have been made already by many of the speakers
and some of the people on this call,
postdocs are often starting their job
at a time commensurate with starting a family,
maybe purchasing a house, and there
needs to be a consideration of those costs.
Childcare costs in particular are extremely high, certainly
in similar cities that I've been mentioning before,
and some amount of benefit associated with childcare
would be critical.
Particularly for women in STEM, and I can speak
to my own experience of that.
And I really appreciate everybody hearing my comment.
Thanks very much.
EMILY MILLER: Thank you.
Tom, I was going to just read a comment that
came that was also in this space about regional issues
and around salary.
So a comment was put in, in New York City, most of our postdocs
are getting 60 to 65,000.
Salary satisfaction is very low among all postdocs making
under 75,000.
The Boston recommendation of a 75,000 floor
is much needed in New York City.
If folks want to start a family with two to three kids,
child care costs 15,000 and housing costs 35,000.
It's very much-- it's very much not
affordable for most families and is
likely to discriminate against women and members
of marginalized communities.
Child care should be paid for by the NIH
regardless of the grant.
I'll turn it back to you now, Tom.
TOM KIMBIS: Thanks, Emily.
And the next few are comments anonymously regarding
inequality at different institutions
and within those institutions.
How can we actually implement standards at a university level
that are being discussed?
At UNC Chapel Hill, the starting minimum for postdoc--
0-level postdoc is 47,000.
Many postdocs enter at that salary
and they never see a raise throughout their five years.
I propose that universities be required
to disclose what they're paying their postdocs
and justify why they're paying below the NIH minimum.
In Chapel Hill, you just cannot survive off of $47,000 a year.
So thank you for that comment.
Again, I think you're seeing this theme
throughout discussion and that the working group is very aware
of in terms of what levels are actually
tenable for postdocs in 2023 and beyond, so thank you for that.
And Emily, flip it back over to you.
EMILY MILLER: Thank you.
We have a comment by Kathleen for an idea of new grant
funding.
So Kathleen Ehm?
AUDIENCE: Hi, this is Kathleen Ehm from Stony Brook
University, and thank you for having this session today.
I just wanted to comment specifically
on some of the challenges with appointing our postdocs
on fellowships.
We've heard a lot about inequities
between employee-appointed post-docs
and those who are on fellowships,
and they have this prestigious opportunity
and yet they're losing their benefits.
Recently here at Stony Brook, we've
been working on following the request from NASA for some
of their fellowships on how they're now
going to be requiring that we appoint
our post their postdoc fellows in employee-like positions
and providing grants that have the appropriate fringe
rate in order to pay for full employee benefits.
And we finally figured out how to do it.
And so I would encourage the NIH and other funders
to look at similar modes so that we don't have these haves
and have-nots between fellows and employees
and maybe can have a more level playing field between the way
that we provide benefits.
EMILY MILLER: Thank you for this recommendation.
We'll be starting to bring it back to the working
group for discussion.
Tom?
TOM KIMBIS: Thanks.
And next we have a comment from Noel
about expanding loan forgiveness.
Noel, you can unmute.
Noel if you're having issues, I can go ahead
and read your question.
And if you are able to unmute, please do so.
So Noel had asked, would it be possible to expand access
to student loan forgiveness to more postdocs?
For many, this presents a significant financial burden
that the current salary doesn't help much in covering.
Many postdocs have also deferred payment on undergraduate loans
through graduate school and have to begin repayment
during the postdoc training phase.
The current LRP program is quite restrictive,
and although I'm in the biomedical science field,
I've been told, along with several of my colleagues,
my research does not qualify.
So thank you for that comment, Noel.
It's something we'll certainly take a look
at within the working group.
Back to you, Emily.
EMILY MILLER: Asha Lahiri has a comment
on requirement of institutions to pay in line with NRSA
recommendations.
Asha?
I invite you to unmute.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, thank you.
Thank you very much for having these listening sessions.
I completely agree with so many of the comments that
have been made, and a lot of my comment
was in line as well, which is, the NRSA level needs
to be increased, but also, there needs
to be more accountability for universities.
I personally am a postdoc and I'm currently
being paid significantly below the current NRSA stipend level
for my years of experience, and I
know that I'm not the only one.
And I do think the NIH is in a position--
that should be a powerful position--
to negotiate with universities and require these kinds
of things that stipends--
sorry, that salaries remain in line with NRSA stipends.
And I also think that NIH needs to be thoughtful about where
the money comes from.
I don't think that PIs' grant money should
have to cover all of it.
In my view universities, rely on a largely unpaid workforce
from their point of view, and they should have to contribute.
Particularly large universities with a lot of money,
they should really have to contribute
to paying their workforce, their research
workforce in a fair way.
Yeah, sorry.
EMILY MILLER: Thank you for your remarks and your reflections.
I think we have another anonymous comment, Tom,
that you're going to take on?
TOM KIMBIS: Absolutely.
So question-- or comment regarding minimum salary.
I would like to add that while we
tend to say that the NRSA minimum is adopted
by many universities as the minimum salary for postdocs,
we forget that there are still lots of universities, including
my own, even though those in a higher cost-of-living
area that don't even use that NRSA as the minimum,
but instead, use the FLSA exemption minimum salary that's
around $47,000.
So thank you for that comment.
Again, I think you're seeing this continuing
trend around minimum compensations
and trying to find the accurate level of compensation
for postdocs in today's competitive environment.
But thank you for that, and back to Emily.
EMILY MILLER: Yes, we have--
I'm going to invite Ariangel Zolke?
Talking about financial stability.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
EMILY MILLER: Apologies for my pronunciation of your name.
AUDIENCE: It's OK.
It's Ariangela Kozik.
EMILY MILLER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
I was just going to comment on how the combined
effect of the cost of living with the child care
demands with the benefits with the inconsistent
application of employee status, all those things really
come together to affect multiple areas of financial stability
where we can be shut out of being able to buy a home.
Rents are also going up.
And at the end of the day, what happens
is you are advantaging folks who have
an external source of financial support,
whether that be like family or a partner who is not
an academic who maybe has more stable salary, and it's really,
really is serving to push people out of the pipeline
because at a certain point, I mean, we have to make decisions
based on where we can survive, and that
is going to continue to have people
choose alternative career paths because it's not tenable.
And that is sad, because as we've
learned over the past three years,
science is really important, and we want the best and brightest
doing this kind of work.
And so the way that we do that and the way
that we need to survive needs to be commensurate with the value
that we place on the work that's being done.
EMILY MILLER: Thank you.
This has really been a theme that's
been echoed through a number of conversations
with the working group, so thank you for sharing and reinforcing
that message to us.
Tom?
TOM KIMBIS: Thanks.
So we have a comment from Emily Rothwell.
Emily, would you like to unmute.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
Can you hear me?
TOM KIMBIS: Yes we can.
AUDIENCE: Great.
Thank you so much for calling on me.
Lots of what I'm going to say--
I'll focus on the parts that haven't been mentioned.
I just want to give a bit of an example of what
someone might go through with these challenges.
So in the course of my three years as an F32 Fellow,
most of the issues that I ran into
were issues based on my institution
not knowing how to handle the fellowship
and not receiving guidance or mandates from the NIH
to treat me as an employee.
So I suddenly lost health insurance
and was forced to go on COBRA, and this
was in the middle of a personal health crisis as well.
It took a grievance hearing and process
that took months through my union
to be able to be considered employed
enough to get my insurance back through UMass.
This was the University of Massachusetts.
However, the university decided to pay us as vendors,
which led to tax confusion.
And about a year and a half later,
led to issues with parental leave for me.
So I know the current F32 has eight paid
weeks of leave for either birth parent or non-birth parent.
However, the state of Massachusetts
offers 12 paid weeks of leave available.
However, I was deemed ineligible for state
paid leave because of the way that UMass
decided to distribute my fellowship
through from the NIH.
And so even though the NIH was willing to pause my fellowship
and allow me to accept 12 paid weeks from the state,
I wasn't able to use that.
So I'd like to commend the NIH for being
willing to adjust to these differences
in paid parental leave that's become available.
There are nine states now in the US that offer a 12 weeks' paid
leave, and so it's great that they
can offer to pause the fellowship,
allow you to take paid leave based on your state,
and then resume your fellowship without losing time
on your time clock.
I'd advocate that also the paid leave of eight weeks that's
offered under the current NRSA cycle
is not sufficient, especially if we have nine states that are
offering 12 weeks' paid leave.
So I'd like to just advocate for that to be longer as well.
For example, if you have an early birth
or if you have any issues with difficult pregnancy
and you need to start your leave early,
you may only get six weeks of leaves after the birth.
So I'd just like to say that in the process of trying
to access these needs that I had as postdoc,
I did a lot of research, I'm happy to share more details
if anyone wants to reach out.
But thank you very much for hearing and listening to this--
issues that I've had.
TOM KIMBIS: Thank you very much for sharing them as well.
Very important, and I'll back over to Emily.
EMILY MILLER: Melissa Oaklam has a comment
on a really-- the importance of postdocs.
And so we welcome you to unmute and give us your thoughts.
I'm going to just read your comment.
If you can come on with audio, we welcome you to join us.
I agree and echo what the participants say.
It is about respecting the postdocs.
We as postdocs are often told by the professors we don't matter.
It is the faculty who is important
and we are temporarily disposable, almost.
Why would anyone stay in a disrespectful environment?
Thank you for sharing that personal reflection.
It will be one that we bring back along
with the other many comments that have come in
and the ones we've heard today to the working group.
TOM KIMBIS: Yes, thank you.
So we have a question or comment regarding
scaling postdoc salaries to the GS scale, which
is something we heard in previous sessions a little bit
and have discussed in some of the working groups.
So I'll invite Kelsey Tyssowski to unmute.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, thanks.
Can you hear me?
TOM KIMBIS: Yes we can.
AUDIENCE: OK, great.
Thanks.
Yeah, again, just echoing what everyone else has said,
it's a part of the reason that the salary scale
is so hard is because it's not scaled for cost of living,
but I just wanted to bring up this idea
that the government already has a scale to pay postdoc--
to pay government employees, I mean, that
is scaled for cost of living.
And I think that this might be appropriate for the NIH
to use because the NIH, like anybody paid by the government,
is using taxpayer money to pay their employees,
and postdocs are employees of universities in most cases.
And so I just think that using this government scale that's
already scaled for taxpayer money,
it's not driven by capitalism like industry
or whatever in the same way.
So it seems like an appropriate scale that the NIH could use.
And in high cost-of-living areas,
the scale at which a postdoc would be hired--
or sorry, the scale at which a new PhD would be hired,
it would be much higher than the current NIH scale.
And I know that we heard before a little bit about the idea
that that might be due to the fact
that postdocs are supposed to be trainees.
But in my experience, postdocs actually
don't receive any more or less training
than somebody starting a new job.
Everybody receives training when they start a new job,
and the postdoc in reality is the first step
to an academic career, and if we wish
to have a diverse academic community
and diverse academic leaders, we need
to make that career path accessible to everybody
and it shouldn't be just lower because we're
receiving training.
And so yeah, thank you.
TOM KIMBIS: Thanks, Kelsey.
And certainly an idea that we've heard
raised by a number of folks and something
that is being discussed in our group and in other institutions
as well, so thank you for that.
Back to Emily for comments from NIH.
EMILY MILLER: Yes.
I invite Gary McDowell to unmute.
He-- there's a statement about policies coming from NIH,
and this would be--
we're coming to our close of time, our last comment
that we'll be hearing from today.
Gary?
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I hope you can hear me.
Thank you so much, and thanks for all the comments
and everything.
Really, there's just an overarching message
I'd like to send to the working group, which is, I have now,
approaching a decade myself of having worked in these issues
and have participated on various working groups
and committees at the National Academies,
a lot of these problems are not new,
but have been discussed almost ad nauseum in the past.
And I just want to highlight, there
was a lot of discussion in 2015 about this issue with benefits,
and NIH signaled that they were looking into it
and they were going to address it,
but as far as I can tell there hasn't been any follow-up.
And so just generally for the working group,
I think there's been a lot of activity and discussion before,
but it would be really great to see some actual concrete things
coming out that really address conversations
that have now been happening for a very long time.
Yeah, thank you so much.
EMILY MILLER: No, thank you for that comment,
and I do honestly believe the working
group wants to have actionable recommendations
that come forward.
I've been advised that we could take maybe one more comment.
So Claire-- I don't know if Claire's
been able to be prompted to come off mute.
Oh, she's no longer with us on the call.
I can share and read out her comment,
and it's one that is a comparison
to medical residency training, and this
was a theme that was earlier stated in our discussion.
But as a postdoc partner to a surgical medical resident
and mother to a young child in a large city,
I disagree with modeling postdoctoral training
on the medical training.
Medical residency training is rife with issues
of abuse and underpay.
I'm strongly appreciative of the pay
raises for postdocs going on around the country
and the improvements to parental leave policies.
Please make more.
Current salaries associated with postdoctoral training
and medical residency force many trainees
to delay major adult decisions into their late 30s.
This, in turn, decreases diversity
in academia and in medicine.
I think we're turning it back over to Tara and Shelley?
TARA SCHWETZ: That's right.
Thank you so much, Emily and Tom.
And thank you all again for your interest in these topics.
We're really grateful for all of the input
and perspectives and ideas that were shared today,
and there were some really great ones.
We got about 150, almost, that came through.
And of course, unfortunately, we didn't have time
to get to all of those, but we have collected them all,
and the input will be shared with the working
group for consideration.
I want to let you guys know that a recording of today's
listening session and accessible materials
are going to be posted to the working group website
next week, and materials from last week's sessions
are now available online.
There are multiple ways to continue to engage with us.
We have a request for information
that is open through April 14, and we
invite you to comment on these issues there as well.
And our final listening session of this set
is going to be on Monday, March 20 at 1:30 PM Eastern Time.
And its focus will be on job security satisfaction
and quality of life, so I encourage you all
to please attend that as well.
We look forward to continuing to engage with all of you
as we develop and consider recommendations.
So with that, Shelley, why don't you have the final word?
SHELLEY BERGER: Yeah.
I think we're very appreciative of all the comments.
Really nice range of comments, really touching
on a lot of the issues with respect
to compensation and benefits, so we really appreciate that.
And I think the session on Monday
is going to continue a lot of these themes,
so please come back and talk to us some more.