19 ms·

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab,

• IshKebab 3y ago
  Definitely the case. A Nobel prize comes from one great discovery. An academic career comes from ongoing successful grant applications.
• Kye 3y ago
  Was it always like this or headed here? I'm curious if flat government funding for research against rising costs creates or amplifies counterproductive incentives.
  • godelski 3y ago
    A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of acknowledging the noise we've embraced poor metrics and encouraged the hacking of those metrics. I call this Goodhart's Hell. People forget, metrics are models and all models are wrong. You have to constantly be questioning your metrics and determine how well aligned they are with your goals or else you'll drift (the environment moves, so your metric must move too). I think actually the better way to solve this, which may seem paradoxical, is to actually increase funding. Not in size of single prizes for grants (well... we need that too, but that's another discussion), but in the availability. The reason being that the hacking is partially encouraged by the competition for a very scarce resource. A resource that compounds. Due to this (and some nuances, see other post) we're not actually rewarding those who perform the best work (we may actually be discouraging that) but those who become lucky. A "good work" is simply one with high citation counts, which is heavily weighted on the publicity around that work. Which is why top universities have big media departments, pay news publishers to advertise their works, and why survey papers generate huge counts. The problem is that the system is rather complex and there are no simple or "obvious" solutions. "Good enough" is also not clear because too low order of an approximation can actually take you away from your intended goals, not a small step towards as one might think.
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      Any source of funding will spawn an industry designed around extracting every dollar from it.
      • godelski 3y ago
        Exactly. Or equally: money can only exchange hands by means of a leaky bucket. But I'd say that it's not a big problem that the bucket is leaky. Goodhart's Hell is when that extraction industry dominates or that bucket isn't so much leaky as it is missing the bottom which differentiates it from a tube. Some people call this peak capitalism and it's right to complain, but I think this happens in whatever system you use, just exhibits itself in whatever metric dominates (in our case capital/dollars. Also typically capital/dollars in communism too because both systems are explicitly about capital ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
      • MrRolleyes 3y ago
        [dead]
    • blululu 3y ago
      We have been increasing funding for 50 years and the problem has not been fixed. America currently sets the record in science funding (in raw amount and percentage of gdp) for any society in History and it seems to have these issues. Even if increasing funding would solve the problem, it is, at best, a short term fix. So long as there is growth in the system you can hide a lot of blight and rot. There is enough to go around so the zero sum bad actors don’t take the full pie. But the long problem with such a solution is that you cannot increase funding indefinitely. At somepoint there is a limit to how much money society can allocate to these projects. We need to make our spending work properly.
      • caddemon 3y ago
        Yeah any increase in funding needs to go to meaningfully different grant processes. Giving more money to the existing funding structures will not fix a damn thing. Because the present system is just woefully unscaleable. More money to current NIH -> more PhD students -> tenure track competition remains fucking ridiculous.
• raincom 3y ago
  Your wife is on tenure-track and Kariko was on a lower track designed for postdocs, researchers, leading to research assistant/associate professor, etc. Kariko was treated badly on the track she was on——a track that doesn’t require stringent filtering. So your comment is not that relevant.
• exmadscientist 3y ago
  > the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the money for you through a kickback from its overhead cut, at the tiny tiny price of keeping most of it. You may then spend the kickbacks without restriction. The whole system is insane. Even having lived it for years I barely believe some of my own stories.
  • mjburgess 3y ago
    What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive. Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible). Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.
    • quacked 3y ago
      I don't know if I'd agree that Reason and Merit are always applied by the market, unless the market is referring to "whatever VCs can be convinced to give money to". However, the crux of what you're saying, which is that in academia Reason and Merit are thrown directly out of the window is completely true. My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation with the right person and be at work the following Monday, even that afternoon in some cases. This is especially true if your previous work is already known to the person doing the hiring. In academia (and to a lesser extent government work) they're conducting 6-month searches and stringing along candidates for months at a time for $65k jobs with a fraction of the responsibility of the equivalent in the private industry.
      • mjburgess 3y ago
• KennyBlanken 3y ago
  I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money. First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can bill a lab for; for example, I worked somewhere that we couldn't charge for storage because that would have violated NIH's rules on double-billing, because the storage cluster was paid for via administrative overhead. Chances are when someone says "I got a $1M grant to study bubblegum's effects on the gall bladder", they actually got $1M plus another $500,000. Second, that money isn't being greedily stolen. That overhead help pays for, directly or indirectly, things like (notice I said "like", because I am not an expert in the exact rules around what can and cannot be paid for via overhead): * the building * the real estate the building sits on * the utilities to keep the building lit and comfortable (which in the case of life/bio/chemistry sciences can be an enormous challenge given how much airflow lab space needs, which is far greater than office airflow...and then there's biosafety / chemical hoods) * security, both equipment and staff (which can be substantial if the university or school does biomedical research in any sensitive areas such as stem cells, animal research, infectious disease, etc). This includes monitoring for equipment failure (for example, sample storage systems often have dry contact alarm hookups so that if they fail, security or facilities finds out ASAP and can alert people) * the utilities to power equipment, such as -80 freezers (just one of which can use more energy than a US household)...most of us would also go pale if we saw the power bill for some physics labs) and other "utilities" like vacuum, purified water, etc. * construction, maintenance, cleaning...both staff and supplies * grounds maintenance, everything from mowing the lawn to leaf and snow removal * technology costs - telephone and networking infrastructure and staff, server admins for everything from websites to email to storage to computational clusters, desktop support staff * business administration, which includes, but is a lot more than just, payroll/benefits/HR. Grant writing/administration is often its own entire department, because you need people who not only know how to submit the paperwork, but frankly, also follow faculty around badgering them to fix or submit paperwork on time - faculty are incredibly lazy about this. * all the services the lab's grad students, staff, postdocs, and faculty use and don't think anything about, like shuttle busses, the library, and so on.
• ilya_m 3y ago
  > I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Rest assured, this is exactly what happened. University administrators have no expertise, interest, or motivation to identify and invest in promising research direction - they outsource this task to funding agencies. The only signal universities are extremely skillful in reading is dollar amounts. I do not necessarily criticize this setup. Think of a research university as a start-up accelerator of sorts. Its main task is to give resources to secure sources of funding, not provide funds themselves.
  • GabeIsko 3y ago
    It's a big picture issue though, right? Where else is scientific research supposed to be conducted? It can't all be profitable. Not that I know how to manage a research department or anything. But it is a bad sign if even prestigious universities have a poor grip on what important scientific research is beyond "what makes us money". In this instance we are talking about UPenn. Wharton is a pretty productive wallstreet pipeline. If they can't use their endowment to fund important scientific research, it is a massive problem.
• godelski 3y ago
  > Quality is an after thought taken care of __by what passes for peer review__. I can feel the strong disdain in these words that can only be expressed by someone close to the academic world. I've honestly decided to just stop using the phrase all together because it's just a misnomer and not meaningful at this point other than a metrics for the bureaucrats.
• bachmeier 3y ago
  > they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets This leads to some very interesting conversations at universities. "Your department doesn't bring in many grants, so we can't grant your budget request." "But grants aren't revenue. They're money used to cover the expense of doing research." "Yes, but they bring in overhead." Then when the granting agencies try to cut overhead: "We can't afford a cut in overhead. That money is used to cover the cost of doing research. We'd be losing money."
  • cvwright 3y ago
    Even more baffling, there are studies showing that most US universities actually manage to lose money on federally funded research. Yes, the overhead rates are obscene, but somehow the compliance costs are even greater.
    • adolph 3y ago
      See also How Hollywood Studios Manage To Officially Lose Money On Movies That Make A Billion Dollars For example, consider the case of Winston Groom who was promised 3% of the net profits of a film based on a little book he wrote called Forrest Gump. As noted, Paramount would later argue that the film, which cleared almost 13 times its production budget, a total of $700 million at the box office or about $1.2 billion today, had actually lost $62 million, all in an attempt to weasel out of paying Groom, among others. https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/06/how-hollywood-studios-manage-to-officially-lose-money-on-movies-that-make-a-billion-dollars/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/06/how-hollywo...
      • mistrial9 3y ago
        wikipedia EN does not make that so clear, but they do also mention that the book itself by Winston Groom sold a million+ more copies after the movie came out.. there are remarkable stories of swindling of all kinds out of Hollywood, of course! great movie too
    • araes 3y ago
• WalterBright 3y ago
  This is hilarious. I've been lectured by several PhD's that insist the NSF is an unbiased organization, doling out grants based purely on scientific merit. Of course, it is nothing of the sort.
• tombert 3y ago
  My dad used to be a full time professor of aerospace engineering. He liked the research, and he didn't mind teaching, but he quit after a few years because he absolutely hated having to play "salesman" all the time. He found himself seeing everyone as "potential funding", and he personally found it kind of hard to turn that mentality off. He went back to industry after that, which has its share of legitimate problems, but at least they don't typically expect their engineers to also be sales people. Also universities pay shit.
  • fritzo 3y ago
    Is that true that aerospace engineers are not expected to act as sales people? I've certainly found that in software, engineers who don't sell their work get reassigned or laid off.
    • BeetleB 3y ago
      Professors - particularly newly hired ones, need to spend almost all their time selling. Between that and teaching courses, they have little time for research. That's off loaded to their grad students. When I was in grad school, the refrain of "I'm not going to become a professor because I actually want to do research" is common. They usually try to go to national labs, etc instead.
    • tombert 3y ago
      I can't speak for most engineers (and I really can't speak for my dad either), but I think my dad is in a more researchey position at a BigCo. I think he does do proposals but I think a majority of his time is research now.
    • tnecniv 3y ago
      It’s really all a professor does. You’re the boss of 5-10 people that are researching your half baked ideas Turing them into quarter baked ideas. Managing them + other obligations take up all their time. Very little is spent getting their hands dirty.
      • 3y ago
• ChuckMcM 3y ago
  And this is also why I think the single biggest innovation starter billionaires could do would be to apply grant funds to new Professors for interesting research.
  • golem14 3y ago
    Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ? I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff. Are there existing nonprofits who do this ? Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ? Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can donate to the FSF, but if I want more people improving/maintaining emacs or vim and those people get paid for it, that's probably not the way, as the FSF does not do this sort of thing, I believe.
    • ChuckMcM 3y ago
      Setting up a non-profit is not that difficult[1], especially if you're doing educational work vs say politics or NGO type work. You start with a "regular" LLC company, and then ask the IRS to certify it as a non-profit. An attorney that has done this before can probably set it up for $10 - $15K, less if they give you the friends and family rate. You could make it an S-corp which is a bit more complicated and might cost more, and for this purpose would be overkill. Generating a grant is harder. I went through that process when I was working with IBM to fund some research at CU Boulder on machine learning work that was aligned with IBM's Watson research at the time. As the comment lower down in this thread indicates the University sets its own rules and takes its own share of any monies "donated" for research. The person you want to talk to is the University President and then probably the Provost. The President can point you to the right person and see that they are willing to take a meeting with you about your proposed grant. My experience is that professors will be very enthusiastic the University somewhat more reserved. My experience with CU Boulder was that the politics were pretty intense/petty[2] My take was that the net amounts end up needing like 3x that is base grant to get what you want to give the professor something. Numbers that are still in the noise for very high net worth individuals but a barrier for less endowed individuals. The good news is that your non-profit can run fundraisers and bring in donations that you then funnel to research. This was something suggested to me as a way some people want to fund something but want to put a bit of space publicly between them and the funding. The non-profit has to report who donated (over say $5000) and how they spent their money, but it doesn't have to "connect the dots" directly so to speak. [1] I happen to be the Treasurer of one which gave me an opportunity to see how they work in California and what's involved in doing the taxes :-) [2] Silly example, the Department Chair was blocking any grant for an Associate Professor in the department unless it included a separate grant for a different professor in the department.
• robwwilliams 3y ago
  > Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review. Cynical and generally wrong. Peer review of papers and grant applications is obviously far from perfect—-just like humanity and our messy cultures—-but it often works well nonetheless. We read the horror stories but read less about shining successes.
• kurthr 3y ago
  I'm sure you'll find lots of people at her school who know the game, but for everyone else who hasn't heard. In order to get good grants you need to run "successful" experiments, which means you need to propose to find something interesting, but that means you want to already know there's something interesting there. That means you really need to bootstrap to have already run enough of the experiment that you know where it's going to go, before you write the grant for the money to run the experiment (and analyze the results, write papers, pay grad students, etc). You also need the money to run enough of the experiments for the new proposals you're going to write next so that they are "successful". Running experiments and not getting interesting results will lead to not getting future grants, because those handing out money have memories. Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built. Of course managing this is such a full time job before even teaching, that you'll be totally overwhelmed and delegating almost all of the research, papers, and grant writing to senior students. Once you get tenure you can slim back down to about 5 students. Also, if you come from a national lab or somewhere that gives you experience writing proposals (and preferably reviewing them) that is a huge advantage since you know exactly what the other reviewers are looking for. Once you write successful proposals and papers, you'll be invited to the committees and review other papers for important journals in your field. Of course a lot of this is again a bootstrap and treadmill problem.
  • godelski 3y ago
    > Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built. There's another factor too. More students means more papers and your h-index goes up. Were we to suppose that all students were equal and that there is a noise associated with the likelihood of publication and another noise with the number of citations then if either of those noise variables are large, you should maximize quantity over quality. Because you're simply increasing the odds that you'll hit a jackpot. In fact, if you pull the data from csrankings.org you'll find that the first 30 (all I pulled because I'm lazy and not a web person) school's rank is practically a function of the number of publishing professors at that university. So the "more workers = more better" tactic actually scales from lab to department. If we look a little harder, I think we can all see the limitation of the metrics being used here and why they're so easy to hack. More importantly, why these metrics result in a dominating momentum force (aka. rich get richer). Maybe we should start reevaluating how we are evaluating systems. After all, it is neither fair nor an efficient usage of resources. If we're going to continue the trend though, the only solution is to allocate more resources... (which to be fair the pool of available resources is increasing year over year, but the allocation isn't)
• deleted 3y ago
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• justinclift 3y ago
  > The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers ... In Australia, it did seem to be that way up until maybe a year or so ago. These days however there seems to be far greater emphasis on hiring people from er... "diverse" backgrounds, over everything else. Strongly preferred to be non-male too. Don't even bother applying if your a Caucasian male, regardless of your qualifications, academic history / publishing record, etc. Note - that's not just a random impression, that's what I've been told by friends working at major Aust Uni's when they want to vent. And yeah, it's as bad as that sounds. :(
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• contrarian1234 3y ago
  I'm not in the same field, nor in the USA, but I've found the incentives usually work but there is a misunderstanding of the role of the professor. All the professors I know have their teams pursuing multiple lines of work. Some are "safe" and some are more out there. A typical "safe" area is usually running some very expensive piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer or something) b/c that automatically generates collaborations and gets your name on lots of papers. You need to mix and match and use the safer work to fund your more experimental ideas. They also basically never do too much research themselves. They will dip in and give suggestions and guidance and help out, but their primary role is to teach and act as a lab manager - directing students and postdocs to different areas of research. So in a way, if you're being a professor and personally deeply involved in the research, then you're "doing it wrong". On a high level, at least from these popsci descriptions of her work, it kinda feels like Katalin Karikó was just not doing the professor role correctly? The fact she was working on this one problem (and seemingly nothing else?) is very surprising for a professor. Professors aren't just tenured post-docs. If you don't want to be a lab manager then I don't think being a professor is the job for you
  • Fomite 3y ago
    There are professors that choose to go this route. It is very risky, but if it pays off, it pays off big.
  • kevinventullo 3y ago
    I guess the question I have is whether this is really the optimal setup. Shouldn’t we be encouraging more tenure-aged faculty to be getting their hands dirty with research?
• lbeltrame 3y ago
  50% for overheads? Is that university serious? Where I live grants that have more than 30% raise many, many eyebrows...