7 ms·

My career goal is to be a staff scientist (in biology/bioinformatics). I hate writing grants and the related political bullshit. All I want is to do actual scie

by xaa 9y ago

My career goal is to be a staff scientist (in biology/bioinformatics). I hate writing grants and the related political bullshit. All I want is to do actual science, even if it means a marginal pay cut and some degree of decrease in autonomy -- although in practice, I'm not sure how much autonomy there actually in being a PI, where you are "autonomous" in that small portion of your time that doesn't involve raising money. I made a simple proposition to my PI: I'm skilled. I'm at least 3x as productive as a grad student (and I could make 10x in industry). You pay me 3x, and I'll work on your projects some of the time and mine some of the time. Give me (a realistic and workable level of) freedom, a living wage, and treat me right, and I'll stay here as long as I can. He agreed. It takes an experienced PI to understand just how much more value a staff scientist gives over a early-stage postdoc or grad student, which are cheaper. You get stability, expertise, and experience for what is ultimately not that high a price tag. I myself have watched my PI undergo this evolution. I have been with him 10 years, and in the early days, he was all about summer students etc. Now he knows that you simply cannot get real work done with cheap, temporary labor. I could get higher-paying or more prestigious jobs elsewhere. And I do believe I could cut it as a PI if I wanted. But I really, really value this arrangement.

AlexCoventry 9y ago
What problems are you working on?
- xaa 9y ago
  My interest is in applying bioinformatics methods to understand aging. His is bioinformatics in general. So most of the time there is actually no conflict between "my" projects and "his" projects, my interests just being a subset of his. It doesn't hurt that my interests have introduced him to new people and funding mechanisms that he would not have otherwise had access to. I'm not sure how much detail you want. That was the short version. The slightly longer version is that there are huge datasets out there, and I want to understand aging by building tools and workflows for the many datasets which were not necessarily originally gathered to understand aging, but which still contain information about it. And also to work with and complement wet-lab aging researchers by giving them context or leads for experiments.
  - markkat 9y ago
    That's fascinating. I started a company that cryopreserves adult stem cells. Would you mind sharing what kinds of datasets you are mining? Here or email (in my bio).
    - xaa 9y ago
      Sure. The most mature part of this is analysis of expression data from GEO. We had to take the raw expression data and textual metadata, extract attributes from the semi-structured metadata into something statistically useful, and devise methods to do automated meta-analysis between experiments and platforms on the expression data. We are talking about >1M samples here by 20K-50K transcripts. Now we are basically extending the same idea to new data types and sources, like methylation and sequencing-based data. When we ask "what should we do next", we look for basically what archives are biggest, and if they conceivably have something useful to say about aging, we put it on the queue. The big-picture goal is to take this approach and apply it to all these different levels of organization (DNA, epigenetics, RNA, and ultimately hopefully protein) and put it all together in a cogent picture, using way more data than anyone has done before. We ask questions like "how does the aging process differ between tissues?". We also want to go "wide" by comparing species, as the whole "intervention X works in mice but not humans" is an important thing to address. Then on the smaller scale, the system is also of use and interest to individual investigators who want to know "what's happening with my gene X with age in tissue Y?". They like to include figures from us for example if they have some findings from mice and want to give evidence that the pattern may also hold in humans. Finally, we built the platform to be a pretty generic meta-analysis tool, so we have occasionally used it to answer questions completely unrelated to aging. Once you do all the background legwork, asking many different questions is largely a matter of changing the meta-analytic model.
  - jinto36 9y ago
    When I read your first sentence my brain was briefly trying to figure out if I had sleep-posted to HN somehow because it sounded so similar to my interests (and there aren't a whole lot of people in the aging+bioinformatics area). I think I might have replied to some of your comments on other articles before but I seem to have lost access to the account I used to use. Are you working on just Human data right now? I have thought about trying to propose something very close to what you're talking about, but in the environment I'm in right now there's a pretty strong bias against non-hypothesis-driven work, and unfortunately the really big picture multi-omic approach is considered to be too vaguely defined. I wish I could just say "let's collaborate!" and then make it happen so I don't end up trying to duplicate what you're doing but if only the funding model actually supported that sort of cooperation (assuming you're in the US). If you don't mind, what institution/lab are you at now? I'm at University of Rochester, trying to make a co-mentorship arrangement work between a lab that works with C elegans as a model for aging (where the PI has no informatics experience) and a lab that works on computational modeling of biological networks (where the PI has no experience in aging/C elegans) because we don't have a real "bioinformatics" program. Also if you have any advice on bridging the gap between biologists and computationalists, that's something I have yet to master in my now more than half-decade of experience of trying...
chrisamiller 9y ago
I am likewise a staff scientist by choice. I'm confident that I have abilities and track record that would allow me to start my own lab if I wanted to, but I value being able to do science instead of writing grants full time. Our current system excels at taking bright scientific minds and turning them into middle managers.
- xaa 9y ago
  Yeah. Although it is annoying that we both have to clarify "well, I could be a PI if I wanted to", because of this social norm that if you aren't a PI by the appropriate age, it means you weren't good enough. Because, obviously, everyone wants to be a middle manager. And we aren't talking to an academic crowd here, but a lot of academics would be skeptical when we say that. If enough people in our generation take this approach, I think it will be very good for science. It is a happy medium between the old system of "everyone gets tenure eventually" and "no-job-security eternal postdoc" of the last few decades. Science is inherently risky enough without also forcing everyone to essentially become an entrepreneur. That phenomenon is likely behind so much of the exaggerated findings that are getting published.
- Fomite 9y ago
  I think it's also important to recognize that hiring a staff scientist means that that the PI is further entrenching themselves in middle management. You need to write more grants in order to fund a staff scientist and give them the job security they expect. Most PIs I know would prefer to spend more time in their lab. "Hire me to do the things you wish you were doing, and in the process damn yourself not to be able to do them" is a steep ask for a lot of labs, especially small ones.
  - hyperbovine 9y ago
    I thought the same thing -- given the choice, most PIs would just as soon hire a full-time "staff grant writer" and return to science themselves. Of course, you can't actually pay for such a position using government grants, and therein lies the rub.
leemailll 9y ago
I bet most PIs also would love to accept a pay cut if they don't need to keep writing funding application to keep the lab afloat. A perfect example of such a position is so-called "biologist" title in NIH. However, what I heard is that it is harder and harder to get it. Nowadays funding in biology is not secure enough for many PIs to offer anyone a stable staff scientist position unless your institute is willing to offer such one. What I heard is that even in NIH, a staff scientist without "biologist" title would possible be/have been cut because of the budget or retired PI. The later case is more devastated because nobody would be willing to hire considering the salary.
entee 9y ago
It takes a smart PI, but it also takes a well funded PI. I actually know relatively few PIs who wouldn't trade a postdocs/grad student or three for a good senior scientist. Thing is, because of the way things like training grants are structured (higher tier universities), and because in the worst case a grad student can support themselves by teaching (poorer disciplines/lower tier universities), senior scientists are far more expensive than the grad student or the postdoc (who is often expected to get his/her own grants). You can't get more of them without reforming how science is funded.
- Chathamization 9y ago
  > You can't get more of them without reforming how science is funded. Which really demonstrates how important it is to reform the way science is funded.
- Fomite 9y ago
  This. Having worked in a lab with a strong staff science presence, I know their value and what they bring to the table. I'd absolutely love one. In the meantime, I'm shaking the couch cushions to be able to support more than one student. You want 3X what a grad student makes makes? That makes you almost as expensive as me, and I'm the PI. I don't say that out of arrogance - I say that because that means I now have to pay for both of us while you go do science. In a grant, you're actually more expensive, because some of my salary is covered by the state/teaching/etc. while you're a pure soft money hire. That's also ~45% of a non-modular NIH R01's yearly budget once you include benefits. Which means I'd be frantically writing grants with ~10% pay lines (being optimistic - the effective pay line for a PI under 40 is laughable) just to keep your paycheck coming. Because I can't fund you via a training grant, or an RA/TA line. Keeping you employed for three years would consume my entire startup package. No travel, no data acquisition, no lab equipment...just you. I'd like to be able to do all that. I'd also like a unicorn.
  - xaa 9y ago
    The reason this was easily possible in my case is because of the peculiarities of bioinformatics. Namely, equipment costs are low, so there is more money for staff per grant dollar. We also have had much more luck with center and collaborative grants than R01-style individual grants. On collaborative grants, our sections are almost always the highest scored, on top of the fact that the pay lines are inherently higher. On individual grants, it is hit-or-miss to say the least, because reviewers seem to think, somewhat rightly, "why do you need $1M to play on computers?". People come to us and say, "hey, I want to put you in as a small section for $75K, $100K, or whatever". Over the course of time it has meant we have a diverse and relatively stable revenue stream and low overhead, and there is less risk (because less time spent) on each individual grant. Although amusingly, my PI is still associate despite pulling in way more money overall than many fulls, because of this idea that only PI grants count for promotion. > I say that because that means I now have to pay for both of us while you go do science. Yeah, although I said in my OP that "I just want to do science", in reality I write parts of grants, mostly the technical parts, all the time, and I go to grant strategy meetings, where I feel my input is valued as I can often give a better idea of what's feasible than the PIs can. I guess more precisely, I don't want the responsibility and pressure of being in charge of the whole package, and I don't like dealing with all the paperwork. So in our case the funding is a team effort as well. > way things like training grants are structured I have been with him since grad school. In the early days, the way we got around this was titling me as a postdoc and paying me like a staff scientist, which was fine by me.
dasmoth 9y ago
Give me (a realistic and workable level of) freedom, a living wage, and treat me right, and I'll stay here as long as I can. He agreed. Good on him. But I believe a fair number of institutions now have up-or-out type rules which explicitly forbid this kind of arrangement. Certainly wouldn't have flown where I did my postdoc.

by xaa 9y ago

AlexCoventry 9y ago

What problems are you working on?

xaa 9y ago
My interest is in applying bioinformatics methods to understand aging. His is bioinformatics in general. So most of the time there is actually no conflict between "my" projects and "his" projects, my interests just being a subset of his. It doesn't hurt that my interests have introduced him to new people and funding mechanisms that he would not have otherwise had access to. I'm not sure how much detail you want. That was the short version. The slightly longer version is that there are huge datasets out there, and I want to understand aging by building tools and workflows for the many datasets which were not necessarily originally gathered to understand aging, but which still contain information about it. And also to work with and complement wet-lab aging researchers by giving them context or leads for experiments.
- markkat 9y ago
  That's fascinating. I started a company that cryopreserves adult stem cells. Would you mind sharing what kinds of datasets you are mining? Here or email (in my bio).
  - xaa 9y ago
    Sure. The most mature part of this is analysis of expression data from GEO. We had to take the raw expression data and textual metadata, extract attributes from the semi-structured metadata into something statistically useful, and devise methods to do automated meta-analysis between experiments and platforms on the expression data. We are talking about >1M samples here by 20K-50K transcripts. Now we are basically extending the same idea to new data types and sources, like methylation and sequencing-based data. When we ask "what should we do next", we look for basically what archives are biggest, and if they conceivably have something useful to say about aging, we put it on the queue. The big-picture goal is to take this approach and apply it to all these different levels of organization (DNA, epigenetics, RNA, and ultimately hopefully protein) and put it all together in a cogent picture, using way more data than anyone has done before. We ask questions like "how does the aging process differ between tissues?". We also want to go "wide" by comparing species, as the whole "intervention X works in mice but not humans" is an important thing to address. Then on the smaller scale, the system is also of use and interest to individual investigators who want to know "what's happening with my gene X with age in tissue Y?". They like to include figures from us for example if they have some findings from mice and want to give evidence that the pattern may also hold in humans. Finally, we built the platform to be a pretty generic meta-analysis tool, so we have occasionally used it to answer questions completely unrelated to aging. Once you do all the background legwork, asking many different questions is largely a matter of changing the meta-analytic model.
- jinto36 9y ago
  When I read your first sentence my brain was briefly trying to figure out if I had sleep-posted to HN somehow because it sounded so similar to my interests (and there aren't a whole lot of people in the aging+bioinformatics area). I think I might have replied to some of your comments on other articles before but I seem to have lost access to the account I used to use. Are you working on just Human data right now? I have thought about trying to propose something very close to what you're talking about, but in the environment I'm in right now there's a pretty strong bias against non-hypothesis-driven work, and unfortunately the really big picture multi-omic approach is considered to be too vaguely defined. I wish I could just say "let's collaborate!" and then make it happen so I don't end up trying to duplicate what you're doing but if only the funding model actually supported that sort of cooperation (assuming you're in the US). If you don't mind, what institution/lab are you at now? I'm at University of Rochester, trying to make a co-mentorship arrangement work between a lab that works with C elegans as a model for aging (where the PI has no informatics experience) and a lab that works on computational modeling of biological networks (where the PI has no experience in aging/C elegans) because we don't have a real "bioinformatics" program. Also if you have any advice on bridging the gap between biologists and computationalists, that's something I have yet to master in my now more than half-decade of experience of trying...

chrisamiller 9y ago

I am likewise a staff scientist by choice. I'm confident that I have abilities and track record that would allow me to start my own lab if I wanted to, but I value being able to do science instead of writing grants full time. Our current system excels at taking bright scientific minds and turning them into middle managers.

xaa 9y ago
Yeah. Although it is annoying that we both have to clarify "well, I could be a PI if I wanted to", because of this social norm that if you aren't a PI by the appropriate age, it means you weren't good enough. Because, obviously, everyone wants to be a middle manager. And we aren't talking to an academic crowd here, but a lot of academics would be skeptical when we say that. If enough people in our generation take this approach, I think it will be very good for science. It is a happy medium between the old system of "everyone gets tenure eventually" and "no-job-security eternal postdoc" of the last few decades. Science is inherently risky enough without also forcing everyone to essentially become an entrepreneur. That phenomenon is likely behind so much of the exaggerated findings that are getting published.
Fomite 9y ago
I think it's also important to recognize that hiring a staff scientist means that that the PI is further entrenching themselves in middle management. You need to write more grants in order to fund a staff scientist and give them the job security they expect. Most PIs I know would prefer to spend more time in their lab. "Hire me to do the things you wish you were doing, and in the process damn yourself not to be able to do them" is a steep ask for a lot of labs, especially small ones.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  I thought the same thing -- given the choice, most PIs would just as soon hire a full-time "staff grant writer" and return to science themselves. Of course, you can't actually pay for such a position using government grants, and therein lies the rub.

leemailll 9y ago

I bet most PIs also would love to accept a pay cut if they don't need to keep writing funding application to keep the lab afloat. A perfect example of such a position is so-called "biologist" title in NIH. However, what I heard is that it is harder and harder to get it. Nowadays funding in biology is not secure enough for many PIs to offer anyone a stable staff scientist position unless your institute is willing to offer such one. What I heard is that even in NIH, a staff scientist without "biologist" title would possible be/have been cut because of the budget or retired PI. The later case is more devastated because nobody would be willing to hire considering the salary.

entee 9y ago

It takes a smart PI, but it also takes a well funded PI. I actually know relatively few PIs who wouldn't trade a postdocs/grad student or three for a good senior scientist. Thing is, because of the way things like training grants are structured (higher tier universities), and because in the worst case a grad student can support themselves by teaching (poorer disciplines/lower tier universities), senior scientists are far more expensive than the grad student or the postdoc (who is often expected to get his/her own grants). You can't get more of them without reforming how science is funded.

Chathamization 9y ago
> You can't get more of them without reforming how science is funded. Which really demonstrates how important it is to reform the way science is funded.
Fomite 9y ago
This. Having worked in a lab with a strong staff science presence, I know their value and what they bring to the table. I'd absolutely love one. In the meantime, I'm shaking the couch cushions to be able to support more than one student. You want 3X what a grad student makes makes? That makes you almost as expensive as me, and I'm the PI. I don't say that out of arrogance - I say that because that means I now have to pay for both of us while you go do science. In a grant, you're actually more expensive, because some of my salary is covered by the state/teaching/etc. while you're a pure soft money hire. That's also ~45% of a non-modular NIH R01's yearly budget once you include benefits. Which means I'd be frantically writing grants with ~10% pay lines (being optimistic - the effective pay line for a PI under 40 is laughable) just to keep your paycheck coming. Because I can't fund you via a training grant, or an RA/TA line. Keeping you employed for three years would consume my entire startup package. No travel, no data acquisition, no lab equipment...just you. I'd like to be able to do all that. I'd also like a unicorn.
- xaa 9y ago
  The reason this was easily possible in my case is because of the peculiarities of bioinformatics. Namely, equipment costs are low, so there is more money for staff per grant dollar. We also have had much more luck with center and collaborative grants than R01-style individual grants. On collaborative grants, our sections are almost always the highest scored, on top of the fact that the pay lines are inherently higher. On individual grants, it is hit-or-miss to say the least, because reviewers seem to think, somewhat rightly, "why do you need $1M to play on computers?". People come to us and say, "hey, I want to put you in as a small section for $75K, $100K, or whatever". Over the course of time it has meant we have a diverse and relatively stable revenue stream and low overhead, and there is less risk (because less time spent) on each individual grant. Although amusingly, my PI is still associate despite pulling in way more money overall than many fulls, because of this idea that only PI grants count for promotion. > I say that because that means I now have to pay for both of us while you go do science. Yeah, although I said in my OP that "I just want to do science", in reality I write parts of grants, mostly the technical parts, all the time, and I go to grant strategy meetings, where I feel my input is valued as I can often give a better idea of what's feasible than the PIs can. I guess more precisely, I don't want the responsibility and pressure of being in charge of the whole package, and I don't like dealing with all the paperwork. So in our case the funding is a team effort as well. > way things like training grants are structured I have been with him since grad school. In the early days, the way we got around this was titling me as a postdoc and paying me like a staff scientist, which was fine by me.

dasmoth 9y ago

Give me (a realistic and workable level of) freedom, a living wage, and treat me right, and I'll stay here as long as I can. He agreed. Good on him. But I believe a fair number of institutions now have up-or-out type rules which explicitly forbid this kind of arrangement. Certainly wouldn't have flown where I did my postdoc.