From the inbox, a postdoctoral position at Neurocrine:
Highly motivated Postdoctoral Fellow wanted to play a key role in applying modern synthetic chemistry to synthesize novel chiral building blocks, conduct innovative publishable science, scouting and hands-on experience with both micro- and maco-scale reactions as well as automated synthesis and purification. The fellow will synthesize valuable intermediates amenable for automated synthesis over a two-year period.Full listing here. Best wishes to those interested.
Really who would take this kind of position? I can can doing a PDF at MRK or PFE (though even those seem exploitative), but a 2nd tier btech? I don't get it. No doubt there will be many applicants....
ReplyDeleteMy worry, as with all industrial postdocs, is whether this is really a postdoc or just poorly paid fixed-contract internship masked as such. If it is a real postdoc, they should guarantee the right to publish the research results reasonably soon - so that he could present his results when applying to jobs after the postdoc - and it would make more sense if the postdoc research was done on some kind of more exploratory cutting edge subject (e.g. identification of novel targets or new kinds of assays) rather than the mainstay of what the company does
DeleteI thought part of what one wanted for a postdoc is to gain some sort of training in another area - to learn some skill that you didn't have before so that you have a broader base of knowledge - and to be trained under people who have that skill (so that you can learn it). Does this provide that opportunity?
ReplyDeleteMilkshake's first sentence seems like the worry I would have, too.
I imagine it pays more than a standard postdoc (though I don't know). With a smaller biotech, though, unlike Merck, Pfizer, etc., there is a lower likelihood that the company will be around for the end of the postdoc. It also might not give much status leverage for future employment.