2018 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List: 399 positions

The 2018 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (curated by Andrew Spaeth and myself) has 399 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions.

Want to talk anonymously? Have an update on the status of a job search? Try the open thread.

On October 30, 2016, the 2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List had 442 positions.

Otherwise, all discussions are on the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List webforum.

The Academic Staff Jobs List: 40 positions.

The Academic Staff Jobs list has 40 positions.

This list is curated by Sarah Cady. It targets:

• Full-time STAFF positions in a Chem/Biochem/ChemE lab/facility at an academic institution/natl lab
• Lab Coordinator positions for research groups or undergraduate labs 
• and for an institution in Canada or the United States

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions.

Want to chat about staff scientist positions? Try the open thread.

Ahhhh, price fixing

Also in this week's C&EN, the remarkable ways that companies manage to boost their profits (article by Marc Reisch)  

...Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC), which serves 475,000 Maryland customers just outside of Washington, D.C., filed suit on Oct. 19 in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, charging that seven alum makers—including General Chemical, Chemtrade Chemicals, Geo Specialty Chemicals, and Kemira—rigged bids and allocated customers among themselves between 1997 and 2011. 

WSSC says the scheme raised prices it and other U.S. utilities paid for alum through 2016. At least 68 other civil suits based on alum price-rigging allegations have been filed in federal court to recoup costs, WSSC says. Others suing alum makers include the Illinois-American Water Co., which filed its suit in April. In June, the cities of Baltimore and Richmond, Va., which supply water to their residents, also filed suits. 

WSSC is asking the firms named in its suit for $5 million in compensatory damages and additional damage to be determined in a trial. 

The WSSC and other suits follow the U.S. Department of Justice revelation in late 2015 of the price-fixing scheme. At that time, DOJ announced that Frank A. Reichl, a General Chemical sales executive, had pleaded guilty for his role in the scheme. As part of a deal with the government, he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors investigating the conspiracy...

Whenever I think of price fixing cases, I can't help but think about that goofy ADM lysine case. Who knew that the plan to preserve profits extended to alum?  

This week's C&EN

A few of the articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:

• Cover story: "Chemistry is quantum computing’s killer app", by Katherine Bourzac
• What is the fate of Elanco? No one knows. (by Lisa Jarvis)
• Exposure to styrene during sewer pipe maintenance? Sign me up! (by Jyllian Kemsley)
• Interesting write-up by Linda Wang of the Heroes of Chemistry celebration in DC this fall. 
• ACS has a nomenclature committee?!? (column by Michael D. Mosher) 

14 new positions at Organic Chemistry Jobs

Over at Common Organic Chemistry, there's 14 new positions posted for October 29.

Comfortable shoes

A list of small, useful things (links):

• Ash, on the passing of Ron Breslow (among others)
• Pretty cool post by Bruker on the efforts to keep an NMR alive during a hurricane in Puerto Rico
• It's National Chemistry Week! (post by sustainable nano)
• The latest round up from Adam Johns at All Things Metathesis
• The second latest round up
• Casual Science, on the second year as an assistant professor
• The latest from Science Shenanigans
• Shakeup at the Office of Research Integrity?
• "Scientific Conferences Are Filled with Spies"
• No
• or, "yet another misleading headline"
• Th'Gaussling has a bone to pick with SciFinder
• The latest from Stellen für Chemiker.

Have a great weekend! 

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs List: 131 positions

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs list has 131 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions, but if you want to do the traditional "leave a link in the comments", that works, too.

Want to chat about medchem positions? Try the open thread.

Positions I'm not including: positions outside the United States, computational positions (this will likely change), academic positions (likely never.)

23 new positions at Organic Chemistry Jobs

Over at Common Organic Chemistry, there's 23 new positions posted for October 22 and October 24.

The Process Chemistry Jobs List: 82 positions

The Process Chemistry Jobs List has 82 positions.

Want to chat process jobs? Try the open thread. 

How is your economy going?

From the American Chemistry Council (the trade association for the big chemical companies), this update on their outlook for 2018:

Credit: the American ChemistryCouncil

The Chemical Activity Barometer (CAB), a leading economic indicator created by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), notched an increase over September’s reading both on a three-month moving average (3MMA) basis and an unadjusted basis. The CAB was up 0.2 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively. The increases reflected a bounce back from the effects of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Compared to a year earlier, the CAB is up 3.0 percent on a 3MMA basis, a slower pace than the previous nine months, but one that continues to suggest further gains in U.S. business activity into 2018.

The Chemical Activity Barometer has four primary components, each consisting of a variety of indicators: 1) production; 2) equity prices; 3) product prices; and 4) inventories and other indicators.

So looks like things are kinda going vaguely okay. It's not clear to me that US GDP will break out of its 2-3% range any time soon.

So here's my question for you? How is your economy going? Mine is going all right - we are (my family is) keeping our heads above water, and 2018 looks to be fine.

So, readers, are you getting hired? Decent pay? How about your friends? Are they finding positions? How is your organization (academic institution, company, etc) doing? Any layoffs in the present/future?

How is your economy going, readers? 

BLS projects 6% job growth for chemists for 2016-26; all job growth remains at 7%.

Date from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

I'm traveling at the moment, so I haven't had a chance to fully absorb these new numbers, but it looks like that BLS is revising its estimate of chemist job growth up from 3% in the 2014-24 decade to 6% in the 2016-26 decade. I think that's good news, but not really particularly exciting (~260 new jobs a year for a decade.) I guess that's better than a kick in the shins, but not much.

I think the worse news is that BLS doesn't really see any major job growth (in the double-digit range, say) during the next decade. 2 years later, and their best guess at job growth for the decade is 7%.

2018 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List: 374 positions

The 2018 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (curated by Andrew Spaeth and myself) has 374 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions.

Want to talk anonymously? Have an update on the status of a job search? Try the open thread.

On October 23, 2016, the 2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List had 415 positions.

Otherwise, all discussions are on the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List webforum.

The Academic Staff Jobs List: 40 positions.

The Academic Staff Jobs list has 40 positions.

This list is curated by Sarah Cady. It targets:

• Full-time STAFF positions in a Chem/Biochem/ChemE lab/facility at an academic institution/natl lab
• Lab Coordinator positions for research groups or undergraduate labs 
• and for an institution in Canada or the United States

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions.

Want to chat about staff scientist positions? Try the open thread.

RIP Gilbert Stork

Jonathan Owen (a professor at Columbia) tweets: 

Gilbert Stork (1921-10/21/2017) His last manuscript published in September, 2017 @JOC_OL: tinyurl.com/y8ph6l4u  tinyurl.com/yagycwtb

Condolences to his family, friends and coworkers.  

Chemours employee caught stealing trade secrets

Also in this week's C&EN, another employee going rogue and getting caught: 

A federal grand jury has charged a former Chemours employee with stealing trade secrets related to sodium cyanide and trying to sell them to Chinese investors. 

The indictment charges that marketing professional Jerry Jindong Xu, who worked for Chemours and its former parent DuPont between 2004 and 2016, intended to use the stolen information to convince Chinese investors to export sodium cyanide and later build a competing plant in North America. 

Sodium cyanide is widely used to extract gold from ore. Demand for the potentially deadly chemical has been on the rise as consumption of the precious metal increases.
Earlier this year, Evonik Industries and Grupo Idesa opened a 40,000-metric-ton-per-year sodium cyanide facility in Mexico. Chemours announced plans for a $150 million plant in the Mexican state of Durango. 

The indictment charges Xu with conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets. If convicted, he faces 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. “We are committed to prosecuting anyone—be they rogue actors or foreign nations—who tries to line their pockets” by stealing trade information, says David Weiss, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware. Xu’s lawyer tells C&EN he has no comment. 

According to the indictment, Xu told one Chinese correspondent that he launched the sodium cyanide project as “a long-term investment for himself and not to slave away at this only to benefit someone else.”

In the ol' Money Ideology Compromise Ego explanation for espionage, I've noted how often money is a primary explanation (although surely ego plays into it.) 

This week's C&EN

A few of the articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News: 

• Cover: the history of National Chemistry Week (by Linda Wang) 
• Interesting article by Deirdre Lockwood on naturally occuring organohalogen compounds.
• Illinois Tech is founding new chemistry B.S. majors, including computational chemistry and bioanalytical chemistry. (by Celia Henry Arnaud)
• Will be interesting to see if the bioanalytical chemistry majors get picked up by pharma employers.
• Lots of comments, unsurprisingly, on the cover story on sexual harassment in academic chemistry.
• Ethanol process technology in China (by Jean-François Tremblay) 
• NIH is going on biomarker hunt. (by Ryan Cross) 

View From Your Hood: smoky skies edition

Credit: Anonymous

From an anonymous reader: "View from UC Berkeley Chemistry building with all the ash in the air from the Napa fires."

(got a View from Your Hood submission? Send it in (with a caption and preference for name/anonymity, please) at chemjobber@gmail.com; will run every other Friday.)

Chinese Ph.D.s not coming to the US?

Also in this week's C&EN, a very interesting article from Jean-François Tremblay:

For the past 30 years or so, postdoctoral researchers from China have played an important role in chemistry research groups at universities in the U.S. Many research groups feature one or more graduates from Chinese universities who are in the U.S. to further their knowledge. But the supply of Chinese researchers is starting to dry up. 

Hao-liang Zhang, a soon-to-be graduate who has focused on glycosylation during his doctoral studies at Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC), offers a perspective typical of graduating Ph.D.s regarding the pursuit of a postdoc in the U.S. 

“I would be older when I return to China, and probably less attractive to potential employers,” says Zhang, who hails from the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan. On the other hand, he can work in China right away and live close to his home too. A pharmaceutical company based in Chengdu, Sichuan, approached him recently. “The talks went well, and they offered me an attractive salary.” Zhang will relocate to Chengdu soon after defending his thesis next month.

The relevant data from the article: 

No one tracks the number of Chinese nationals doing a chemistry postdoc in the U.S. The U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics does, however, count how many Chinese students who obtain a chemistry Ph.D. in the U.S. plan to stay in the country for a postdoc. By 2015, that number had dropped by 30% from 2005.

If you click through to the article, you will see in the graph that the number of Chinese Ph.D. graduates in the US who stay have gone from above 150 to around 110 or so. (That number seems awfully low to me, but maybe I'm wrong.)

I thought the comment from the SIOC professor was interesting:

More importantly, many young Chinese Ph.D. chemists no longer see the point of a foreign postdoc, Yang says. Ten or 15 years ago, “postdocs would go to work in world-class labs far better equipped than the ones in China,” he says. “But now, if they search outside China, they cannot find many labs that are better equipped.”... 

...SIOC, meanwhile, has essentially rebuilt all its buildings and retooled its laboratories over the past decade. Students and faculty now work in new and extremely well-equipped facilities. 

“Of course, we are focused only on organic chemistry,” says Biao Yu, a deputy director at SIOC. “But from what I myself saw, and from the reports of our students who are now in the U.S., we are better equipped than most of the U.S. Ivy League universities,” he says. When he was a student at SIOC in the 1990s, the institute had only two nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers. Today, the institute has 30.

That's a lot of NMRs!

I think it will be interesting to see if the trends shift, and which levels of Chinese industry and academia will be influenced by staff who have spent their time in the United States (and other research-intensive nations) and those who have been solely domestically trained. Which generation will be more influential in driving the course of Chinese chemistry? 

This week's C&EN

A few of the articles in this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:

• Cover: 3-D printing in production, by Alex Tullo
• Fascinating subject - I guess volumes are rising to the point that the polymer companies are beginning to pay attention...
• Beth Halford covers the gram-scale synthesis of bryostatin
• Two new TB molecules advancing in the clinic (by Lisa Jarvis)
• Lots of opinions about whether chemists should be taught coding.
• Some dude yapping about performance reviews.

Proposed: The Midwestern Revival and Antibiotics Research Act

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:

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.