Insecurity and intense competition for permanent academic positions appear to be common experiences for early career researchers across the globe. With academic precarity now firmly on the international research and policy agenda, this article looks comparatively at postdoc precarity in three European countries: Ireland, Norway and Switzerland. It…

This report presents an overview of research and development (R&D) in science and engineering (S&E) fields performed at institutions of higher education in the United States, including historical trends and recent patterns. The report first examines the financing and performance of R&D at universities based on patterns in funding and…

This paper argues that the South African postdoctoral fellow system is de-professionalising academic work by constituting postdocs as students who receive training from the university rather than employees who work for it. Ironically, it obscures this de-professionalisation with a discourse of postdoctoral fellowships as 'professional development'…

This autobiographical narrative inquiry re-stories three experiences from my work as a postdoctoral research fellow. In the re-visitation, I found echoings of fear, fellowship, and finding a voice shaping my shifting identity. These themes surface cyclically amidst the shared experiences and reveal my battle with early career Impostor Syndrome.…

Each summer over the past decade, the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Washington has hosted the "Distinguished Young Scholars Seminar" (DYSS) series, bringing outstanding research trainees from top-tier programs around the country for day-long campus visits filled with student discussions, faculty meetings, mock…

Internationally, career prospects for postdocs, whether salaried on a Principal Investigator's (PI) grant or a fellowship, are precarious. Yet, many aspire to permanent research-teaching positions, and to achieve this goal they often strive to gain PI funding to demonstrate their research potential. Like many developers in research-intensive…

Designers of professional development activities and programs within higher education generally believe workshop learning outcomes and learner-created materials are what graduate students and postdoctoral scholars value from participating in these activities. We created a new structure for online synchronous workshops that integrates active…

The project of establishing a European community since World War II has been further advanced by adding - besides the four freedoms of free movement of goods, persons, services and capital - a fifth freedom -- the free circulation of researchers, knowledge and technology -- that intends to promote community building at the level of higher…

Experiential learning is an effective educational tool across many academic disciplines, including career development. Nine different institutions bridged by the National Institutes of Health Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training Consortium compared their experiments in rethinking and expanding training of predoctoral graduate students and…

The science and engineering (S&E) labor force helps to create and advance our scientific and technological knowledge, transform these advances into goods and services, and fuel America's economy, security, and quality of life. This report details several aspects of the U.S. S&E workforce, including growth, demographic makeup, earnings, and…

Dissatisfaction with postdoctoral appointments is associated with demographics, career goals, types of research, postdoc-advisor interaction, and program quality. Rather than a simple inverse relationship to dissatisfaction, the effect of program quality depends on the postdoc's autonomy to shape a research project, interaction with an advisor,…

By the time people earn physics PhDs, they have learned a great deal about physics and how research is conducted. However, physics PhDs also develop skills and knowledge in a number of related areas, such as advanced mathematics, programming, modeling, and technical writing. New physics PhDs draw upon an arsenal of skills and knowledge in their…

This brief presents findings from a 2014 [Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education] CADRE study of early career STEM education researchers and veteran principal investigators and their experiences with early career mentoring, either of themselves or of others. The findings describe successful mentoring strategies, as well as…

Over a decade ago, the National Science Board (NSB) highlighted the importance of international collaboration in its call for increased government commitment to promoting international science and engineering (S&E) research and education. The NSB also identified the National Science Foundation (NSF) as having an important leadership role in…

During its brief twenty-five-year history, and under the close management of the central government, the postdoctoral training system in China has grown rapidly into a permanent element of the Chinese science and technology research system. Although designed to be attractive to elite Chinese Ph.D. talent both living abroad and in China, it turned…