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Tag Archives: NSERC

MENSERC continues: men still dominate NSERC’s prestigious prizes

13 Sunday May 2018

Posted by Alex Bond in opinion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

NSERC, Women in Science

NSERC (the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) is Canada’s funding council for, well, natural sciences and engineering. And each year they recognize the crème de la crème of Canadian scientific & engineering research. Sort of.

It really helps to be a guy.

I first got riled up about this issue in 2013 (which, shockingly, is 5 years ago), at a time when no woman had ever been awarded the Herzberg Medal, colloquially known as the prize for ’Canada’s Top Scientist’. This changed in 2015, but has since resumed it’s male pattern blindness.

In fact, in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, women were recognizes with 0% (!!!), 13%, 17%, and 19% of the prizes awarded. Hey, a positive trend! </scarcasm>

And I want to highlight that these are not competitive grants for which there is an application, but a nomination process meant to recognize excellence in Canadian scientific & engineering research.

After the first year, NSERC reached out in the comments to highlight that they took diversity seriously, and pointed to several initiatives. But this has not yet manifested in the upper echelons, clearly. So much so that one could easily refer to the organization as MENSERC.

So where do we stand with the 2017 awards announced recently?

  • Herzberg Medal (“Canada’s top scientist”): man (only one woman has ever won this award, and it was in 2015)
  • Polyani Award: man
  • Brockhouse Canada Prize: 6 men
  • Synergy Award for Innovation: 4 men
  • E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowships: 3 men, 3 women
  • Gilles Brassard Doctoral Prize for Interdisciplinary Research: 1 man, 1 woman

For those keeping track at home, that’s 4/20 women winners, or 20%. The positive trend continues! </more sarcasm>

As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. I have no idea what goes in behind the shrouded curtain of NSERC deliberations when it comes to these awards, but something is clearly not working.

Meg Duffy has kept tabs on the US NSFs Waterman Award, with similar results. The comments on that post are particularly good, including the response from NSF.

There is also this article in Nature on the under-representation of women in the world’s national science academies.

So while NSERC is by no means an outlier, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t do better.

Another year of male-dominated NSERC prizes

07 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by Alex Bond in opinion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

NSERC, Women in Science

Once again, NSERC (the national science and engineering funding council in Canada) has announced the winners of its prestigious prizes, which highlight the crème de la crème of Canadian science. And once again, the list of winners has an overabundance of Y chromosomes.

  • Herzberg Medal (“Canada’s top scientist”): man (only one woman has ever won this award, and it was last year)
  • Polyani Award: man
  • Brockhouse Canada Prize: 2 men
  • Synergy Award for Innovation: 4 men
  • E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowships: 4 men, 2 women
  • Gilles Brassard Doctoral Prize for Interdisciplinary Research: 1 man, 1 woman

If you’re keeping score, that’s 3 women and 13 men, or 19% women awardees.

Sadly, this is an improvement (yes, you read that right) over previous years (17% in 2015, 13% in 2014, and an eye-rolling 0% in 2013).

This year brings the overall total to 42 women and 252 men, or a maddeningly low total of 14% women awardees.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different outcome. When will NSERC act to improve the gender representation of women in the highest accolades of Canadian science and engineering?

 

Update: here’s a great graphical representation courtesy of Jeff Clements.

menserc

First woman wins Herzberg medal as “Canada’s top scientist”

16 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by Alex Bond in opinion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Herzberg Medal, NSERC, Women in Science

It’s become somewhat of a tradition these last few years for me to look at the gender (im)balance of the major prizes and awards dished out by NSERC in Canada, because they don’t have a great track record of recognizing women (see my original post here, and update on the 2014 awards here).

It is therefore with mixed feelings that I present below the 2015 results.

For the FIRST TIME in 25 years, a woman was awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Medal (colloquially known as the prize for “Canada’s top scientist”) – Dr Victoria Kaspi from McGill.

And for only the second time, a woman was awarded the John Polyani Award – Dr Barbara Sherwood Lollar from the University of Toronto. A hearty congratulations to both!

But, sadly, the exuberant news ends there…

  • Brockhouse Canada Prize: 1 of 2 recipients a woman
  • Steacie Fellowships: 1/6
  • Brassard Prize: 0/1
  • Synergy Awards: 0/12

That gives an overall total of 4/23 recipients being women (or 17%). The long-term average is now 39 women of 239 recipients, or 17% (which I will sadly point out is still higher than last year’s 13%), and unchanged from where it was when I did the original analysis in 2013.

So while this is a huge day for Canadian science (regardless of gender), we still have work to do.

 

Footnote: see the 2013 post for more background and discussion on the issue

2014 Major NSERC Prizes continue to under-represent women

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by Alex Bond in opinion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

NSERC, Women in Science

I’ve written before about the massive gender imbalance in NSERC’s “Big Prizes”.  Well, the 2014 awardees have been announced, so let’s see how things look:

  • Hamer Prize: 0/1 recipients women
  • Brockhouse Prize: 1/6 recipients women
  • Steacie Fellowship: 1/6 recipients women
  • Polyani Award: 0/1 recipients women
  • Synergy Award: 2/16 recipients women
  • Herzberg Medal (“Canada’s Top Scientist”): 0/1 recipients women

 

So that’s 4/31 women recipients in 2014, or 13% (which, believe it or not, is below the long-term average of 17%).  And yet again, we see that a woman has NEVER been named Canada’s top scientist (0/24 since 1991).

NSERC was great at responding to my last post, and highlighted the work they do for women in science and engineering.  But do we have to wait 10, 15, 20, 30 years for that to be reflected in the top tier of science?

We also don’t know anything about who was nominated, the gender balance of the review committees, or whether women nominees were specifically solicited.

We still have work to do …

Future of Visiting Fellowship postdoc program in doubt

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

NSERC, postdoc, visiting fellowships

I was slightly alarmed to see this post indicating that NSERC’s Visiting Fellowship in Government Labs (VF) program had come to an end.  This is (was?) a program administered by NSERC whereby postdocs were placed in Canadian federal research labs for up to 3 years.  The government department (so, Environment Canada, for example) ponied up the money, and NSERC acted as the middleman.

I was a VF from 2013-2014, and had I not found work, I’d still be there.  In an era when finding postdoc funding is particularly challenging in Canada, the VF program was very valuable – applicants just had to find a supervisor in government with the cash.

So when I heard about the supposed demise, I got in touch with a few of my contacts from my days in government to see what the deal was.  At one department, supervisors were effectively told that the program was over without any context.  But at another federal science department, there was a bit more information presented.

According to my anonymous government contacts, the whole issue began when a VF challenged their employment status.  Because VFs are paid directly from NSERC, this person argued, they should be receiving benefits as well, and treated as fully fledged employees.  They took their case to the Canada Revenue Agency, who arbitrates on such matters, and the CRA ruled that VFs are employees of NSERC.  As result, NSERC pulled the plug.

It’s unclear right now how this affects current VFs who are part-way through their position. At present, the application, and program information are still posted on the NSERC site.

 

But what I think is important to note is that according to my contacts in three federal science departments, this caught everyone off guard.  The researchers in these departments, and yes, even some of their managers, see the importance of the VF program, and are actively looking for solution; it’s just unclear what that solution will be.

 

It’s very easy to decry this as another example of the current government’s general attitude towards science, but it’s better to look at the evidence presented.  The decision to stop the VF program was made by NSERC for employment/labour reasons.

 

The NSERC post-doctoral fellowship (PDF) program remains in place and unchanged.  And for now, it’s one of a dwindling number of postdoctoral research opportunities in Canada.

Women are underrepresented in big NSERC awards

29 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by Alex Bond in opinion, science, Uncategorized

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

funding, gender, NSERC, Women in Science

Back in April, as I was knee-deep in a trans-Atlantic move, Meg Duffy wrote a post at Dynamic Ecology on the US National Science Foundation’s Waterman Award (a prize for an under-35 scientist/engineer of $1 million), and lamented that the last 11 recipients were men.  The comments on that piece were particularly excellent, and included a response from NSF highlighting some of the broader issues of why women tend to be underrepresented in such awards.

Women are also underrepresented at conferences, on editorial boards, face biases when submitting to journals (PDF) and receive smaller grants.  In terms of “big awards”, one hurdle is that fewer women tend to be nominated (PDF – $$).  So it is with a heavy heart that I add to this mounting evidence the following:

Women have been awarded only 17% of major NSERC awards since 2004.

NSERC, Canada’s national granting body for natural sciences engineering, has six prizes that I would include as “big awards” (which includes both large-value, and low-number/high-exclusivity prizes). Let’s break them down.

 

André Hamer Postgraduate Prizes

From 2004-2010, there were two awards annually, and from 2011-2013, this was increased to five. They’re relatively low at $10,000 each, and “are awarded to the most outstanding candidates in NSERC’s master’s and doctoral scholarship competitions“.  Of the 29 prizes awarded since 2004, women received 13 (45%), which isn’t that bad. Until we realize that this accounts for nearly half the women award winners that I’ll cover in this post.  Since the number of prizes was increased in 2011 (n = 15 prizes at 5/year), only 3 women received them (including none in 2013, the last year for which data are available).

 

Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research

This is usually one award made to multiple people (anywhere from 2-11 in a given year), and there was no 2007 award.  The Brockhouse Prize “recognizes outstanding Canadian teams of researchers from different disciplines who came together to engage in research drawing on their combined knowledge and skills, and produced a record of excellent achievements in the natural sciences and engineering in the last six years.”.  We can look at these data in two ways: based on the number of awards (1/year), and based on the number of recipients, but as we’ll see it doesn’t make any difference.  Of the 9 years from 2004-2013 with an award, women received awards in 2006 and 2012 (2/9 = 11%).  Over the same period, 39 people were part of the award-winning teams, 4 of which were women (10%).

 

EWR Steacie Memorial Fellowships

The Steacie Fellowships are “awarded annually to enhance the career development of outstanding and highly promising scientists and engineers who are faculty members of Canadian universities“, and up to 6 are awarded annually.  From 2004-2013, there were 59 recipients, 9 of which were women (15%).  Parity occurred only in 2009 (3 women, 3 men), and no women received a Steacie Fellowship in 2004, 2007, or 2012.

 

Gerhard Herzberg Canada Medal

This is NSERC’s premiere award, often touted in the media as Canada’s “top science prize“, and is for “both the sustained excellence and overall influence of research work conducted in Canada in the natural sciences or engineering“.  Of the 10 recipients from 2004-2013, there were no women recipients.  In fact, since the award was established in 1991, it has never been awarded to a woman.

 

John C. Polyani Award

The Polyani Award is a bit trickier, since it can be awarded to groups or consortia for “an individual or team whose Canadian-based research has led to a recent outstanding advance in the natural sciences or engineering“.  It’s also only been around since 2006, and in that time, two groups have won the award (with no indication of the gender make-up of the teams), so the analysis is restricted to the 6 years where I could find details on the actual recipients.  In that time, there have been 9 recipients, 1 of which was a woman (in 2010).

 

Synergy Awards for Innovation

Lastly, these prizes are for “examples of collaboration that stand as a model of effective partnership between industry and colleges or universities“, and began in 2009.  Between 3-14 people have received this prize annually, and out of 33 recipients from 2009-2013, there have been 3 women, and none since 2010.

 

Of NSERC’s 185 “big award/prize” recipients from 2004-2013, only 31 (17%) were women.

 

Year Hamer Brockhouse Steacie Herzberg Polyani Synergy
2013 0/5 0/2 0/6 0/1 Group award 0/3
2012 2/5 3/11 1/5 0/1 0/1 0/7
2011 1/5 0/5 1/6 0/1 0/1 0/4
2010 2/2 0/2 3/6 0/1 1/1 1/5
2009 2/2 0/4 1/6 0/1 0/3 2/14
2008 1/2 0/2 0/6 0/1 0/1
2007 1/2 No award 1/6 0/1 0/2
2006 2/2 1/8 1/6 0/1 Group award
2005 0/2 0/3 0/6 0/1
2004 2/2 0/2 1/6 0/1
Total 13/29 4/39 10/65 0/10 1/9 3/33
Percent 44.83% 10.26% 15.38% 0.00% 11.11% 9.09%

 

And as you can see from the table, no women were recognized in any of these categories by NSERC in 2013. W.T.F.

 

I. like others, think the solutions to rectifying this ridiculousness must come from the scientific community, and from NSERC.  Community members need to nominate more women, as the comments in Meg’s post point out.  But in turn, the groups that receive the nominations should scrutinize the list of nominees and ask why there are fewer women, and what can be done to change that. When underrepresented groups see themselves in those selected for these awards, it increases the visibility of the group as a whole, gives others role models with whom they can identify, and neither of these should be discounted as not important for science.

Does the fact that no women have been awarded Canada’s top science prize, ever, mean there are no deserving women recipients for such a prestigious award? Heck no. It just means they’ve not been recognized because of systemic biases (whether those biases are recognized or not).  I highly recommend you scroll through the “Women in Science” category at Dynamic Ecology, as Meg Duffy has written extensively on stereotype threat, and was to improve the current gender imbalance.

But whether it’s major scientific prizes, or your own local seminar series, make the effort to balance the recognition of men and women in science. It shouldn’t be hard to do given how many fantastic women scientists there are.

 

How do I find a postdoc? A practical guide for biology & sustainability science

09 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by Alex Bond in how to

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, postdoc

Finding a postdoc isn’t easy.  In fact, it’s probably the number 2 or 3 search term that brings people to The Lab and Field.  As much as I might lament the postdoc experience, it can also be a very rewarding part of an academic career (or a career destined for industry, government, the private sector, NGOs, or any other organization that does or uses scientific research).

But as a PhD students, I had no idea what a postdoc was, or where to find one.  I just knew that I needed to have one.

Fast forward three years, and two postdocs later, and I, along with a couple of other local postdocs, presented a workshop to graduate students today on how to find a postdoc, focusing mainly on ecology/biology, but also sustainability & social science.

We put together a resource of current programs, mostly in Canada, but also covering the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and some overseas programs.

The presentation is on figshare for all to see!

This is a workshop we’ll likely give again in the years to come, so additions, corrections, and any other input is welcome.

A postdoc isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t for every career path.  But for those going down the postdoc road, we hope our collective years and experiences can be beneficial.

The never-ending search for an academic job does end… eventually

30 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by Alex Bond in opinion

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, postdoc

A while back, I asked for readers to contribute data on the number of applications and interviews they put in for faculty jobs (or equivalent, e.g., government scientist, full-time scientist at an NGO, etc), and now the long-awaited results.  Hang on to your seats, job-seekers (and hiring committees), here we go (and pardon my hastily-created figures).

Basic demographics

There were 63 respondents, and I didn’t collect data on age or gender.  Most respondents were biologists (54%) or ecologists (21%), and nearly all were in some field of science (hello, dear Science Policy reader!).

AppInt Field

Of those, 27 (43%) were my fellow postdocs, 22 (35%) were tenured faculty, 5 were non-tenured faculty, and there were 6 graduate students (5 MSc, 1 PhD), 1 research associate, and 2 folks that have left academia (Post-Ac).  That said, my further analyses were restricted to postdocs and tenured faculty (which were the career stages I was most interested in to begin with), and I didn’t look at differences among fields.

AppInt CareerStage

Applications

First, off, the ever-present question looming over postdocs is “how many applications do I have to prepare?”.  Looking at tenured faculty responses, the median answer is about 8.5 (1st quartile: 4; 3rd quartile: 30), but there was obviously a huge range.

AppInt Applications tenured

And how do postdoc respondents compare?  Well, by all accounts, we’re almost there! (median: 6.5 applications; 1st quartile: 3; 3rd quartile: 22).

AppInt Applications PDF

If we (incorrectly, I might add) use the mean ± SD to compare with my NSERC postdoc exit survey, there are some interesting similarities.  The NSERC survey found respondents submitted 15 ± 20 applications.  Tenured faculty responding to my survey had 20 ± 24, and postdocs 16 ± 19.

It’s important to note that the number of applications isn’t really a good metric of the job market.  Some people are more selective in their applications.  The advice I got as a grad student was to apply for everything (I don’t necessarily think that’s a good strategy).  And as I’ve discussed before, job search strategies between Canadians and USians differ quite significantly, and likely owing to the sheer number of institutions in the US (>4000) compared with Canada (~100).

But let’s soldier on, shall we?

Interviews

Ah, the academic interview.  That glorious 1-3-day excruciating event during which your every move is critiqued silently (wait, you put butter on the scones before jam? Tsk tsk), and you over-analyze every decision (“Should I get the soup for lunch? What if I spill it on my one set of dress pants? Is it too expensive? Are we even having appetizers? Oh god!” was an actual thought I had at my first on-site interview.  Tell me that’s a healthy reaction).

But nearly-overpowering anxiety aside, how many times did tenured faculty have to go through this arduous process?  The median response was 3 times (1st quartile: 1, 3rd quartile: 5), and no more than 8.

AppInt Interviews tenured

And just like the job applications, postdocs are following close behind – median: 2 (1st quartile: 1, 3rd quartile: 4; max: 7).  So as a population, we seem to be “almost there”.

AppInt Interviews PDF

In the NSERC postdoc exit survey, respondents had 3 ± 7 interviews.  Converting my survey numbers shows faculty with 3 ± 2, and postdocs with 2 ± 2.  So it seems the NSERC respondents were considerably more variable (but then again, their range was 1-99, and I find 99 interviews to be a bit suspect).

What’s evident is that while a bunch of people are successful at landing a job on their first interview, most aren’t.  And again, this doesn’t account for job offers that candidates decline (for various reasons).

The Application:Interview ratio

This brings us to the main point of my original post – how many applications must one complete per interview?  If you recall, the NSERC group showed ~5 (which I thought was low).  Survey says …

Tenured faculty (who, let’s remember, started their jobs between 1 and ∞ years ago) submitted a median of 5 applications for every interview (1st quartile: 3, 3rd quartile: 7).  For comparative purposes, that’s a mean of 7 ± 7.  But also quite obvious is the long tail to the data.

AppInt ratio tenured

And what about postdocs (75% of which were currently looking for work in this survey)?  We’ve submitted a median of 5 applications for every interview (1st quartile: 2, 3rd quartile: 9).

AppInt ratio PDF

So it turns out that while 5 applications/interview is “average”, there’s a lot of variation.  The big question, though, is whether this is different between tenured faculty and postdocs.  A basic two-sample t-test says it isn’t (p = 0.96), and ditto for the less powerful non-parametric Wilcoxon ranked sum test (p = 0.70).  But insert the usual caveats of low sample size, and lots of confounding variables (age, gender, field, country, …) here.

The bottom line

A significant chunk of postdocs’ time is spent applying for jobs, and this process could be streamlined considerably.  And while some seem to land a faculty job with relative ease, it’s a slog for many others (submitting up to 80 applications in total, and >15 for every interview).   At the same time, though, the number of PhD job seekers is rising at a much faster rate than faculty jobs have been created.  My survey didn’t account for what kinds of jobs folks applied for, and there’s an increased awareness of “Alt-Ac” or “Post-Ac” jobs.  And it also includes applications for postdoc positions.

The postdoc career stage seems to be the pinch-point for academics in Canada.  And it’s very easy to get discouraged when so many applications (that take considerable effort) don’t pan out.  Part of the solution would be increased support for postdocs through NSERC and similar programs, and a reduction in the insane amount of duplication that goes into job applications.  Faculty search committees can also help, by not requiring letters of reference until the long/short-listing process, for example, which would save everyone time.

But lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it’s important for postdocs to have a good support network.  The job application process is fraught with giddy highs and depressive lows, all in a short period of time.  Whether this is a faculty member, other postdocs, labmates, friends, and/or family, having a group of people with whom you can share the exciting news about interview requests, or the crushing news that you weren’t short-listed will only help. The adage that “something will come up eventually” will start to grate on your nerves, but those who speak it mean well.  And what “comes up” might not be a tenure-track faculty job, though it can still be fulfilling.

So once more unto the breach, dear postdocs, once more.

 

UPDATE (1 Dec. 13) – check out this post, and the figures that show the career trajectories in science, and the significant amount of attrition.  <1% of those who start in science end up in the professorial route (though 30% might consider themselves “early-career researchers”). It also has considerable resources for non-academic jobs (ht Grant Jacobs)

How likely are you to get NSERC funding in ecology & evolution? (updated)

25 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by Alex Bond in opinion, Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, post graduate scholarships, postdoc, tenure track position

Spoiler alert: not very.

Research costs money.  Whether it’s lab analyses, field work, or just paying people, research costs money.  It’s a lesson that every nascent B.Sc. graduate learns when they start asking potential supervisors.  “Do you have any funding?” the supervisors ask, “No”, the student replies. The chances that they’ll be able to join the lab are therefore severely reduced.

If we assume a 2-year MSc, and 4-year PhD, funded at minimum NSERC rates, that’s about $119,000 over 6 years.  Now, some of that could come from a variety of sources, including NSERC post-graduate scholarships (PGS).

Then the search for post-doc funding begins, and as I’ve pointed out, the odds aren’t good.  And most folks will do 2, 3, or more postdocs before they land that most fabled of academic jobs: the tenure track position.

But the struggle doesn’t end there – research groups rarely fund themselves (unless you run analyses for others, but that’s another story).  In Canada, the main funding mechanism in ecology & evolution is the NSERC Discovery Grant (which run ~5 years, and average just under $30,000/year).

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations

So what are the chances that a MSc student will go on to land a Discovery Grant & get their first renewal?  And is there a bottleneck in the system somewhere?

First, some assumptions:

  • Grad students, and to a lesser extent, postdocs, are funded by a variety of sources, not just NSERC.  But there aren’t any data for those sources.
  • NSERC only funds 1 year of a MSc, and 2-3 of a PhD so that any single grad student receives no more than 3 years of NSERC support (which is odd, when the minimum time is 6 years for a MSc + PhD, but that’s a tale for another day)
  • NSERC also operates industry-  and government-funded postdoc programs for which there are no numbers (update: see comments for discussion of the industrial postdoc), and which are largely (if not entirely) funded by the industrial or governmental partners.
  • For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume that postdocs that receive an NSERC PDF are either able to find another postdoc, or move into a faculty job.
  • We have no idea what proportion of PDFs move into faculty jobs.  It’s probably > 50% (PDF, see table 7.1), so let’s be generous and assume that half of the postdocs get faculty jobs where they could apply for Discovery Grants.
  • Yes, funding rates vary from year to year, but I’m going to use the most recent (2012 or 2013 depending on the program).
  • Lastly, NSERC funding rates for the PGS-M (post-graduate scholarship – masters), and PGS-D (post-graduate scholarship – doctoral) are overestimates because it only reports on those applications that are sent to NSERC by universities. Unless someone from university admin cares to chime in with actual numbers, we’ll work with what we’ve got.

Ready? Hold on to those mortar boards, boys and girls – it’s going to get rocky from here on out.

We’ll start with a class of 1000 B.Sc. graduates who are all admitted to a MSc program to keep things simple (the transition probability is more likely ~25%, but higher for those who do a research-based honours thesis).

The success rate of the combined CGS-M and PGS-M programs is 53%.  Right there, that takes us down to 530.  We’ll assume that all of these funded students love research so much that they’ll go on to do a PhD.

These 530 prospective PhD students face a slightly tougher field, and only 44% of applicants are awarded a PGS-D.  That takes our theoretical group down to 233 people, or only 23% of our starting population.

Now, these remaining 233 newly-minted doctors all need to do a post-doc, and not surprisingly, this is the major choke-point.  The success rate of NSERCs PDF program was 7.8% last year, which translates to just 18 fellowships.  We’re left with under 2% of our starting budding professors.

Let’s assume that half of these are able to navigate the cut-throat academic job search, and land a tenure-track job – that’s 9 wide-eyed (and likely exhausted) faculty applying for their first Discovery Grant (DG).

Early-career researchers (ECRs) are judged a little more leniently in their DG applications, and the ecology/evolution evaluation committee (committee 1503 if you’re keeping track) funded 52% of ECRs (PDF, Table 7). That translates to 5 Discovery Grants in our population.

If you get a DG, you’re more likely to get it renewed in 5 years’ time, and Committee 1503 renews about 82% of applicants (PDF, Table 7).  So after 15-20 years, from the start of a MSc to submitting a tenure dossier, there’s a 0.39% chance of being funded successfully the whole way through.  That’s basically 4/1000.

Program Success Rate Number
Starting population 1000
PGS-M 0.53 530
PGS-D 0.44 233
PDF 0.078 18
Tenure Track 0.5 9
DG-ECR 0.52 5
DG-Renewal 0.82 4

As I said above, these are very rough numbers, but they’re based on what’s available.  There are other sources of funding (provincial government, federal government departments, private foundations, etc), but when one thinks of research funding in Canada, one thinks of the TriCouncil (the collective noun for NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR).

At my only in-person academic job interview, I was asked by the department head and faculty dean what sources of funding I would use to support my research.  My default answer was NSERC.

What’s more, these numbers are generally going down.  NSERC-wide, the proportion of Discovery Grants to ECRs dropped from 77% in 2002 to 62% in 2012.  Renewals are down from 95% in 2002 (!!!) to 77% in 2012 (summary here; Table 2, PDF)

But what’s most important, I think, is that it’s obvious where the bottleneck is: postdoc funding.  NSERC rewards the training of “highly-qualified personnel” (HQP; grad students, postdocs, and technicians) in the Discovery Grant application process. But the postdoc funding available is in high demand and low supply.  I suspect another bottleneck occurs at the hiring stage, but there aren’t many data for that transition.

What we need is a mark-recapture study to generate a population viability analysis (PVA) where we can estimate the “survival” of each “age class” (career stage), and estimate the “transition probability” (success rates) between career stages.

But until that happens, we can at least be honest with the young researchers we interact with.  As a grad student, I always assumed that it would be tough, but not impossible to land a faculty job, and get my own research group off the ground.  Now, I’m not so sure.

UPDATE: as others have pointed out on Twitter, Discovery Grants aren’t the be-all and end-all.  There are other sources out there, and we need to make grad students and postdocs aware of them.  But NSERC is often used to leverage funds from other granting agencies, and is more likely to be unfettered (i.e., not tied to a specific project).

The value of the Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) program

06 Monday May 2013

Posted by Alex Bond in opinion

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

cerc program, NSERC, patrik rorsman

The CERC program currently hosts 19 chairs across Canada, bringing “big-name talent” with a $10 million research grant for 7 years.  Researchers have argued that the CERC program is bad for science (and scientific output) when compared with an alternate approach of increasing everyone’s NSERC Discovery Grant, and is part of a broader trend in funding fewer people at (much) higher amounts. It’s also part of a trend toward creating new, prestigious positions, while decreasing funding of ongoing research by existing researchers (similar to the Canada Research Chairs program).

A post at Watershed Moments (and another at Piece of Mind) about the CERC program and its various shortcomings reminded me of an article  in the National Post last fall by Margaret Munro.  She wrote about Patrik Rorsman, who was appointed to a CERC position at the University of Alberta, but left after 7 months saying:

It is quite a nice place, they have ambitions for their city and the university is also ambitious, but they suffer from the climate.

 Some comments made by CAUT President Jim Turk in Munro’s piece caught my eye:

The money “going down the drain” with Rorsman’s chair could have helped save PEARL, the Canadian Arctic research station used by dozens of scientists to study the atmosphere and changing climate, says Turk. The lab stopped year-round operation when its federal money dried up earlier this year.

And, he says, the government has cut funding for the Experimental Lakes Area, a unique and internationally acclaimed aquatic research station in northwest Ontario, to save $2 million a year. The facility could be kept alive for five years with the money going to just one of the $10-million chairholders, says Turk.

PEARL is the Polar Environmental Atmospheric Research Laboratory, which was closed last year when it could no longer come up with the $1.5 million annual budget.

In the interests of maximizing scientific bang for the taxpayers’ buck, I decided to make a quantitative comparison of PEARL and Dr. Rorsman’s research record from 2005 (when PEARL was opened) to the present.

To do this, I used Scopus to look up Dr. Rorsman’s papers, and calculate his h-index.  This is a number that tells us n papers have been cited n times.  My h-index, according to Scopus, is 7.  That means at least 7 of my papers have been cited at least 7 times.  Yes, there are all sorts of problems with using this as a metric of “research impact”, but it will have to do for now.

Because PEARL isn’t a single researcher, but a group of researchers, I used their publication list and Google Scholar to create PEARL’s h-index, much like the University of Alaska Museum did.

2005-present PEARL Rorsman
Papers published 94 79
h-index 16 31

At first glance, it appears Rorsman wins hands-down.  But, as was pointed out almost immediately after the h-index was conceived in 2005, not all fields are created equal.  So to compare across fields, we need to adjust h-indices to a common baseline.  Following Iglesias and Pecharromán, let’s adjust these values based on the power law equation.  PEARL falls in the “Environment/Ecology” category, and Rorsman in the “Molecular Biology/Genetics” field based on his recent work.

The f for Environment/Ecology is 0.88, while that for Molecular Biology/Genetics is 0.44.  Applying these, we get:

PEARL: 16 * 0.88 = 14.08
Rorsman: 31 * 0.44 = 13.64

So the relative impact from the two groups (PEARL, Rorsman) is virtually identical from 2005-2013.

Now, I’m not going to make predictions about how prolific (and how well-cited) either of them would be over the 7 years of the chairship.  But one thing’s for sure: the U of A spent over $1 million on a researcher who left after 7 months with no output.  That’s about the same cost of running PEARL for the same period of time ($1.5 million).  Needless to say, the case is even stronger when considering the scientific impact of the Experimental Lakes Area (h-index of 113, adjusted h-index of 99.44), which cost only $2 million/year.

The Broader Picture

As I noted above, there’s an increasing trend towards funding fewer researchers, but giving successful applicants LOTS of money.  This has been editorialized in Nature, and observed in brain research, and seems to be increasing in Canada, as the success rate and amount of funding through NSERC’s Discovery Grant program has declined (ditto for SSHRC).

So, with Sarah from Watershed Moments, we set out to tally the funding put into the CERC program by government and universities.  We included ancillary staff and faculty (the costs of which would be borne fully by the universities when the CERC funding runs out after 7 years), students and postdocs, in-kind expenses (like a university renovating a building/wing), and start-up.  Our assumptions:

  • Each CERC chair receives at least $1M in-kind and $1M in start-up, unless otherwise stated.
  • M.Sc., and Ph.D. students are for 2 and 4 years, respectively, and are paid at NSERC rates ($17,500 and $21,000)
  • Postdoctoral Fellows are for 2 years, and are paid at NSERC rates ($40,000)
  • Faculty and staff salaries were taken from the university’s most recent collective agreement, and represent a “middle-of-the-road” step on the appropriate salary scale
  • Some of these costs are likely part of the contributed funds from CERC or the university, but we had no basis to allocate these proportionally, so they are considered as separate expenses.  Some students, staff, and postdocs, for example, are likely funded by CERC money, but there are no doubt others on other fellowships or paid by other grants.

Now for some disclaimers:

  • Not every CERC had available financial information; for example, the CERC at Dalhousie University.
  • Financial information was incomplete for some chairs (e.g., the University of Waterloo’s contribution to its two CERCs )
  • It was next to impossible to determine how many graduate students and/or research staff some chairholders had.

On the whole, this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation and we’re not claiming accuracy to the penny (or nickel, I suppose).  It also doesn’t include the second round of CERC appointments, which is currently underway.

Here’s the overall breakdown:

Source

Amount

CERC Program

$181,000,000.00

Universities

$293,630,000.00

Ancillary Faculty (59 for 7 years)

$42,221,428.50

Ancillary Staff (87 for 7 years)

$25,404,918.00

Postdocs (67 for 2 years)

$5,360,000.00

PhD students (68 for 4 years)

$5,712,000.00

MSc students (71 for 2 years)

$2,769,000.00

In-kind & Startup

$98,700,000.00

Total

$654,797,346.50

Even if our total is only half right, that’s still over $300 million spent on just 18 researchers for 7 years (well, 17.147 if we prorate Dr. Rorsman’s tenure at the University of Alberta).  More likely, if we include only the CERC, university, and in-kind/start-up funds (i.e., we assume that ALL salaries are paid from these sources), we get $573,330,000.

As it becomes harder and harder to find an academic job, and then fund research, we need to consider whether this system of large grants to fewer researchers makes sense. The problem isn’t endemic to Canada, but we can see where we’re headed by looking at what’s happening in the US.

It’s been pointed out (and defended against rebuttal) that it would be cheaper to give all applicants a baseline NSERC Discovery Grant of $30,000 than to invest the $40,000, on average, to review and reject applications from qualified researchers.  If even 25% of the CERC money (about $165M, assuming the rest went to CIHR and SSHRC) were spread out over the ~3500 NSERC applicants on top of the average $30,000 Discovery Grant amount (2007), that would mean an extra $47,000 per applicant, or an average NSERC Discovery Grant of just over $77,000. I could do a lot with a guaranteed $77,000/year grant.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to do unfettered basic research in Canada, according to outgoing University of Toronto president David Naylor.  And it’s clear that other aspects of our current research funding framework need some TLC.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon.

Important Footnote

We have nothing against Dr. Rorsman, the other CERC chairs, their students, postdocs, or staff, nor do we begrudge them for accepting CERC-funded positions.  Our issue is that the program exists at all.

Sources

UBC

  • http://equity.ubc.ca/files/2010/06/salary_analysis.pdf
  • http://www.hr.ubc.ca/compensation/files/tra4.pdf
  • http://www.can.ubc.ca/about-us/people/

Alberta

  • http://www.ualberta.ca/CMENG/nime/
  • http://easweb.eas.ualberta.ca/page/directory/
  • http://www.aasua.ualberta.ca/~/media/aasua/SalaryScales/2013/Full-time_Continuing_Academic_Staff_Salary_Scales_2012-2013.pdf
  • http://www.resourceplanning.ualberta.ca/en/Planning%20Tools/~/media/Office%20of%20Resource%20Planning/Documents/UofAlbertaComprehensiveInstitutionalPlan2012.pdf
  • http://news.ualberta.ca/newsarticles/2010/05/uofaawardedfourcanadaexcellenceresearchchairs
  • http://www.mmi.med.ualberta.ca/staff_students/michael_houghton.php

Saskatchewan

  • http://www.usask.ca/water/
  • http://www.usask.ca/water/news-and-events/news/news7.php
  • http://www.usask.ca/hrd/employees/compensation.php
  • http://www.usask.ca/hrd/docs/USFA_2010_13_CA_FINAL_Mar_10.pdf

Manitoba

  • http://umanitoba.ca/news/blogs/blog/2010/05/17/news-release-university-of-manitoba-home-to-new-climate-change-dream-team/
  • http://umanitoba.ca/admin/human_resources/services/media/CUPE_1482_Collective_Agreement_2010_2014.pdf
  • http://umanitoba.ca/admin/human_resources/collective_agreements.html
  • http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/environment/departments/ceos/people/students.html

Waterloo

  • http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infofin/Policy/2012_13_comprate.pdf
  • https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/sites/ca.secretariat/files/uploads/files/2012-2013_0.pdf

Western

  • http://owenlab.org/?page_id=2
  • http://www.uwofa.ca/@storage/files/documents/377/faca20102014.pdf
  • http://www.uwo.ca/hr/form_doc/employee_agreements/uwosa_main.pdf

Toronto

  • http://www.hrandequity.utoronto.ca/Assets/HR+Digital+Assets/Salary+and+Pay+Scales/wages-sesu-classfied-positions-july-2011-$!5bUSW+Local+1998+Appointed$!5d.pdf
  • http://www.hrandequity.utoronto.ca/Assets/HR+Digital+Assets/Current+Faculty+$!26+Librarians/flsr2012.pdf
  • http://www.research.utoronto.ca/headlines/u-of-t-welcomes-canada-excellence-research-chairs/
  • http://llama.mshri.on.ca/people.html
  • http://bgsu.ca/index.php/the-bgsu/current-students

McMaster

  • http://www.mcmaster.ca/mufa/floors.html
  • http://mech.mcmaster.ca/docs/News/Faculty/Emadi_2012%20Dec%206_Spec__Mac%20charges%20into%20battery%20research.pdf Where they say he has a $150mill budget for next 7-10y

Ottawa

  • http://www.quantumphotonics.uottawa.ca/assets/pdf/Ottawa_Citizen.pdf

Laval

  • https://www.rh.ulaval.ca/files/content/sites/rh/files/files/documents/enseignants/professeurs/remuneration/echelle_personnel_ens_spul_echelle_theorique_1_juin_2011.pdf
  • http://www2.ulaval.ca/fileadmin/ulaval_ca/Images/recherche/Documents/Presentations/annual_report-2009-10.pdf

Sherbrooke

  • http://www.usherbrooke.ca/srhf/fileadmin/sites/srhf/documents/Ressources_humaines/conventions/aipsa.pdf
  • http://www.usherbrooke.ca/srhf/fileadmin/sites/srhf/documents/Ressources_humaines/conventions/apapus_b/apapus_rec.pdf
  • http://www.usherbrooke.ca/medias/communiques/2010/mai/communiques-detail/c/12293/

UPEI

  • http://hr.upei.ca/files/hr/cupe1870__salaryschedule_2012_2016_final.pdf
  • http://discoveryspace.upei.ca/cerc/sites/discoveryspace.upei.ca.cerc/files/UPEI-AVC_CERC_in_Aquatic_Epidemiology_%5Bfor_distribution.pdf

Dalhousie

  • http://www.atlanticuniversities.ca/blog/public-policy-paper-series/university-research-vital-growth-knowledge-economy

 General

  • http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-595-m/81-595-m2011091-eng.pdf
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