This Derek Lowe post says a lot of things that I feel about the Midwest and its flagship research universities, but it is this comment from "Flyover country" that I want to highlight:
(At the same time, I can point out a very small countervailing trend. Specifically, the state of Texas has seemed to manage to be able to pull away from top-tier older professors away from the coasts. That said, I don't think K.C. Nicolaou or John Wood represent a trend, and for some reason, it seems that Texas seems to have access to different funding structures than Ohio, Wisconsin or Illinois. I don't think it's really germane to FC's overall point.)
If I were to come up with a program to try to reverse this trend, here's what I would do:
Disclaimer – I went to University of Minnesota for chemistry graduate school.
This trend will only accelerate in the future. In older days, say – the 1970’s, there was more parity in chemistry. Funding was easier to get and students from second & third tier graduate schools might not become professors at R1 universities, but they were likely to find a industry job somewhere – even without a postdoc. With the contraction of pharma in the United States, one essentially needs a PhD/postdoc from an top-tier, elite institution to find an industry job, let alone even consider a tenure track job. When funding at second and third tier universities dries up, the New York Yankees (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Scripps) of the academic world can use their deep pockets to poach away the top tier professors. Top tier professors will want groups the size of Phil Baran or Barry Trost – they don’t want to be limited to 3-10 graduate students at a Midwestern university.
Assume for a moment that academic funding was stable or even growing to support Midwestern schools. Disregard being a tenure-track professor at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern, or University of Kansas (if you’re an assistant TT professor there, you came from Harvard/Stanford/Scripps). Where are you going to work? Pfizer destroyed the pharma employment scene in the Midwest. Essentially all that remains is Eli Lilly in Indy & AbbVie in Chicago. Eli Lilly isn’t doing too well & while AbbVie isn’t tanking – it can’t absorb all of the chemistry grads in the Midwest. The top tier & even the second & third tier students will flee for the coasts because that is where the jobs are and the best schools. There are some places to work in the Midwest for chemists, but not nearly as many as the coasts.
The Midwest (sadly) is a second tier place for chemists work and go to graduate school in chemistry. This just exacerbates & accelerates the trend.This is mostly a cri-de-coeur about pharma (i.e. the fate of industrial medicinal/process chemistry in the Midwest), which I mostly agree with and have been emphasizing on this blog for a while.
(At the same time, I can point out a very small countervailing trend. Specifically, the state of Texas has seemed to manage to be able to pull away from top-tier older professors away from the coasts. That said, I don't think K.C. Nicolaou or John Wood represent a trend, and for some reason, it seems that Texas seems to have access to different funding structures than Ohio, Wisconsin or Illinois. I don't think it's really germane to FC's overall point.)
If I were to come up with a program to try to reverse this trend, here's what I would do:
- I'd begin funding life science research (both biology and chemistry) towards antibiotics to the tune of $30 billion a year, for 20 years
- Yes, yes, only some of it would be oriented towards graduate students, and it would be mostly portable training grants (i.e. giving the money to the student, not the PI)
- All of this money would be for institutions outside the coasts.
- The development of clinical compounds, etc. would be required to also be done in the Midwest, including all manufacturing.
This doesn't have a snowball's chance of happening, but if I were the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, this is what I would be designing.
Yes, Texas does have different funding structures that allowed the hiring of Nicolaou especially, not sure if Wood came with the same situation...although, is John Wood really a huge hire? I mean, he does decent (key word decent) work, but I wouldn't say he is a major force.
ReplyDeleteI know there are many items in Congress that get funded in strange and untransparent ways and this is a hypothetical situation. But since it's hypothetical, I'll ask a hypothetical question: in today's environment, how do you get any member of the Senate or the House from a non-midwestern state to vote for something like that? I would say the money that would (hypothetically) be appropriated for this initiative would go much farther than if it was granted to the coasts (cost-of-living, etc.).
If we are speaking in hypotheticals, why not make all students that are applying to Ivy League schools first have to apply to said Midwestern schools and make then go there if accepted? Seems about as realistic.
"Seems about as realistic."
DeleteGuilty as charged.
I think it's also worth asking if KCN is a major force right now. He has of course done terrific work in the past, but in the last few years I have read mostly negative comments about his research (at least on blogs). It would probably be a real statement if Rice or UT can entice someone like Baran, Sanford, Reisman or any of the rising stars.
DeleteThere are a lot of pharma / biotech jobs outside of the traditional process / medchem career paths that chemists (either trained in top-5 schools or midwest schools) can access. Surely it is much easier to get those jobs if you come from a top-5 school and big name lab, but I work with plenty of folks in (pre)formulation, analytical, DMPK, tox, etc etc, who are formally trained as chemists but didn't come from the top-5 schools. In fact, all these other functional areas can use people who have strong organic chemistry / physical organic chemistry background, and you learn how to do drug development on the job. Disclaimer: I myself was trained as a synthetic organic chemist / chemical biologist but have evolved to be an analytical chemist in pharma. It is fair to say though, there are a lot more jobs (big or small companies) in the hub areas on the coasts compared to the midwest.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting point, and one that I don't think I have enough visibility on. What would you estimate to be the headcount for pre-formulation, analytical development, DMPK, etc (combined) versus medicinal chemists?
DeleteConversely, the polymer industry is much stronger in the Midwest than just about anywhere outside of Texas. 3M, Dow (Midland), BASF (in Michigan, can't remember the name of the town). Not to mention all the rubber companies in Ohio. There are some small startup-type places on the coasts doing polymer work, but that's mostly geared toward life sciences and drug formulations, so it supports your point I suppose.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the headhunter calls I get (the good industry-expert ones, not the jackasses at Aerotek/Kelly/Yoh/Joule offering me a 3-month temp contract at $12 an hour) are for places in flyover country - Cleveland/Akron, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc. If you're relocatable and don't have a two-body situation, you could probably advance to a high-level position just by being willing to take jobs in unpopular locations.
DeleteI could easily believe that, KT.
DeleteWho are these head hunters calling for Cleveland/Akron, Michigan!??! Please sign my PhD Chemist SO up! I'm in academia, but they're looking there
DeleteIt's usually specialized stuff in coatings and related industries. Unemployed PhD chemists are a dime a dozen, but the pool of people who could fill a job for a tech director at a paint company is a lot smaller. They're looking for industrial experience, not how many papers in JACS you have.
DeleteIt's true. I also get a lot of headhunter calls for CASE (coatings adhesives sealants elastomers) jobs in the midwest. Interestingly, I heard that the ACS is going to require polymer chemistry for degrees to be considered ACS certified (I don't really know that it matters and I wonder why it would take so long for the ACS to discover that polymer science is a viable part of chemistry). I have a polymer background and have tried numerous times to get an academic job, but there seems to be very little interest in polymers. Perhaps polymers are the best kept secret in chemistry. The academics typically haven't spent time in industry so their view of the "real world" is perhaps limited and from my experience they know very little about polymer science. If you are an undergrad, consider looking for internships at formulation companies. You want to get familiar with concepts like viscosity, rheology and mechanical properties (tensile strength, elongation, compression set, etc.). At my company we typically only get chem engineering students (I guess chemistry faculty would rather their students work in their labs in the summer than at a company). I have been able to bring chemistry students into my group. I much prefer chemistry students to chem e students. From my experience "chemists" tend to be more passionate, receptive and eager to contribute to the critical thinking. But in the end I went from a top 10 grad school and two post-docs to a no name company so what do I know.
DeleteTexas has the Welch foundation - the smaller grants are easy to renew for essentially an entire career and the endowed professorships are quite prestigious.
ReplyDeleteThe last thing I would do is increase support for graduate students. The number of doctorates granted yearly in chemistry has increased from about 2000 fifty years ago to about 2700 now. This counterintuitive result is in spite of the horrendous employment for the past twenty-five years. Some factors beyond supply and demand are at work.
ReplyDeleteThe amazing transferrable skills of a Ph.D. in chemistry, of course! It's the new liberal arts degree.
DeleteChem PhDs granted in 1985 were 1836 and in 2015 2675 (https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17306/data.cfm), an increase of 46%. The US population in 1985 was 238 million, which had increased to 321 million by 2015 (http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table), a 35% increase. So that explains some of the increase. Also NIH funding from 1985 to 2015 increased ~70% (I could be way off here, I'm eyeballing from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2014/03/25/86369/erosion-of-funding-for-the-national-institutes-of-health-threatens-u-s-leadership-in-biomedical-research/, I'm also egregiously ignoring inflation), so that juices the trend.
DeleteWhile to a degree I think the point of taking a degree for 'transferrable skills' is silly, there is something to be said for understanding the world at a molecular level (which I imagine impresses physicists not at all).
If only Dan Gilbert would spend his billions on chemical research instead of casinos... (I don't really mind him spending it on basketball though)
ReplyDeleteThere's Lubrizol, PPG, Avery Dennison, Steris, BASF, Swagelok, Lincoln Electric, Sherwin-Williams/Valspar, PolyOne, Goodyear, NOVA Chemicals, Parker Hannifen, 3M that have a market for chemists/instrumentation/engineering expertise in the midwest/rust belt area.
The feeling in the midwest is not that these schools are dying - there's a lot of industrial hiring going on and people who feel passionate about where they are located at. BUT the midwest is feeling the pinch of funding and lack of gov't support that drives certain hires/professors away. I wouldn't say it has reached a point of driving students away. You are making the huge assumption that graduate students know what they are doing.
Finally, in addition to Welch, Texas has CPRIT funding in academia. But in industry, they rely almost entirely on oil which it depends if you are in a lucky year or not to get hired...