Academic hiring

Two distinct patterns are evident in the US-based hiring of medicinal chemists. The major pharmaceutical companies hire the best synthetic chemists they can find and then teach them the medicinal chemistry part on the job. A second medicinal chemistry hiring pattern is for a smaller organization to hire a person with an academic medicinal chemistry background. For the very best people after about 15 years the overall skills profile from both hiring patterns may be very similar. 

Adams hired Carothers to stay on as an instructor, the lowest rung on the academic ladder, for 1800 a year. Carothers class lectures were low-key and conversational, like his written articles, but his students worked overtime. When one climbed through a laboratory window on Thanksgiving Day, he found the rest of his classmates already there. Carothers, Carl Marvel, Jack Johnson, and several graduate students formed an informal seminar group to talk chemistry over bootleg beer. 

Kaptchuk returned from China a proponent of acupuncture and wrote The Web That Has No Weaver, the classic explanation of Chinese medicine for Western readers.3 But over time he came to wonder whether the effects of acupuncture might be at least partly due to the placebo effect. To answer that question, he taught himself how to design research studies, and he did so well enough to obtain funding from the National Institutes of Health and publish more than ioo articles in leading medical journals. No wonder Harvard saw fit to hire and promote him, despite his rather unusual academic credentials. 

Part of the reason for the lack of natural product-based antifouhng alternatives is the necessity for expertise that historically is only found in an academic-industry research collaboration. The cross purposes of academia and business make it difficult to collaborate. Both academia and industry usually frown upon such research collaborations. The coatings industry usually does its research in-house and shies away from joint research and development programs. At the 10th International Congress, there was one report on isolation of natural products for prevention of larval settlement from an industrial source.140 This report was from scientists trained in academia and hired by a coatings company to do in-house studies of natural products. 

Employment opportunities for Ph.D. scientists have only recently become healthy again, so until now women who wanted to go into academia had a very tight job market in which to try to make their way into that workforce. Today, all the people hired in the 1960s, during the boom years for expanding the scientific enterprise in this country, are nearing retirement or emeriti status. For the first time, there is room in the academic pool. 

Now, how would that kind of training influence employment practices Let s start by taking a look at employment practices from an academic perspective, and then we ll look at industry and other sectors. One of the employment practices is the old-boy network. What happens typically in the hiring practice is, We have a chemistry position, let me call so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so. This is an employment practice now in use. In this audience, I am now looking at what I hope will become the old-or young-girl network or the women s network. The other employment practice we discussed is the manila envelope, as often used by formal search committees in academia. They get the envelopes in and then they sort them into desirable and undesirable. ... 

In other institutions such as the national labs, our group noted the excellent employment practice of screening postdocs for their suitability as future staff. I know this is difficult in academia, because you typically have one slot, and you may not want to hire someone from an academic postdoctoral position to do the same organic chemistry as the mentor. But screening is something that might be useful. 

If I have one summarizing statement, it is the word accountability. I think that is the bottom line in all of this. Universities basically are not held accountable for hiring, and they are not held accountable for the atmosphere but very often industrial organizations are. Companies talk about the atmosphere very seldom do people talk about atmosphere in an academic environment. They talk about the department s reputation rather than the atmosphere in the department—but atmosphere should be taken more seriously. 

We also talked about the trickle-down effect. That is, if companies perceive that a university is not as diverse as they would like, they don t go there to hire and they don t give donations. So academic institutions do need to keep these things in mind, because this is the reality. 

It was suggested that the reward system at academic institutions is much more tenuous. Louisiana State University has just graduated 12 African-American women with Ph.D.s, and this has made companies take notice. They are sending interviewers there, because there are people they want to hire. So there is a positive pull. 

George Stephanopoulos I d like to make one observation and one comment. Starting with the remarks made by Wilson and Luss, I ask myself where we find someone to hire in an area like microelectronics processing with strong education preparation in physics, chemistry, materials, electronic devices, and processing systems, when in fact most of the academic Ph.D. programs, pressed by funding considerations, prepare students with focused... 

P G averages hiring about 60 Ph.D. scientists each year. Approximately a third are chemists another third are life scientists and the latter third are a broad mix of specialties including medicine, statistics, pharmacy, engineering, etc. Thus, this represents P G s demand for advanced-degree candidates. The academic supply of such candidates should also be considered. Because the theme of... 

As highlighted earlier in my talk, P G is committed to building a diverse workforce, and our R D community is no exception. However, our ability to attract and hire the best minority scientists is directly impacted by the fact that the number of minority candidates with advanced science degrees is woefully small. P G cannot immediately or directly fill this academic pipeline, but we can help by providing a demand for such candidates, and thus indirectly attract more minority students to pursue science careers. Because all aspects of our education system are potential feeders into this pipeline, we take the opportunity to interact with all phases of education and, in the end, hopefully make a positive difference. 

The results in Figure 9.6 show that, with the exception of fiscal 1996-1997, at least 10 percent of the doctoral candidates hired by P G were either black or Hispanic, with an average annual underrepresented minority hiring rate of 15 percent over the six years measured. To put these numbers into perspective, we need to consider both the academic supply of advanced-degreed minorities as well as the average hiring rate of our industrial competitors. 

D. Ronald Webb I am not sure I understand the question. P G hires postdocs in two different ways. First, we hire individuals at an entry-level position who are completing an academic postdoctoral position at a college or university. Second, we offer freshly minted doctoral students the opportunity to get postdoctoral training with us rather than with a university. Which of these two postdoctoral individuals are you talking about ... 

---