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Salaries in The Balance
Salaries in The Balance
Salaries in The Balance
Postdoc salaries vary widely at every level, from countries down to individual teams. Paul Smaglik looks at where the problems lie.
benefits, pensions and supplements can all combine to make calculating the take-home pay for potential fellowships a complex prospect. Foundations, funding agencies and individual institutions are all working to create a fairer compensation scheme for postdocs. But even if the base stipends seem the same, prospective postdocs should investigate the variables before signing on, otherwise they might be unpleasantly surprised by their take-home pay.
Solid guidelines
Domanov credits the European Commissions research charter for improving postdoc benefits in Europe. Detlev Arendt, head of postdoctoral training at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, says that a growing number of European postdocs are getting European Commission grants, which include provisions for mobility and benefits such as health care. Even though EMBLs postdocs arent funded through the commission, the institution has tried to stay competitive by adopting many of the recommendations set out by the charter, which EMBL signed last year (see Nature 455, 426428; 2008). For example, EMBL offers supplements of 300 a month for each dependent including children and unemployed spouses. It is also now preparing a pension scheme that will allow fellows to contribute towards their retirement. The institution looks to a host of European funders such as the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; Germanys main research funding agency, the DFG; and Britains Wellcome Trust
to set its starting base salary of 2,500 a month. Around the world, various groups are trying to push the base higher. This is especially important because a major benchmark, the National Research Service Award provided by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), has remained flat for the past three years at about $3,083 (2,300) per month for new postdocs (see Follow the leader). The scale increases incrementally for those with more experience, topping out at $4,250 a month for postdocs with seven or more years of experience. Foundations have a history of offering better salaries and benefits to postdocs than government funding agencies. And in doing so, they aim to prod the government to up their contributions accordingly. The Wellcome Trust, for example, offers supplements to top up stipends, thus making these positions more desirable than those funded, say, by the UK Medical Research Council. The trust adds 2,500 (US$3,510) a year to recipients of training and junior fellowships, 7,500 a year for intermediate fellowships and 12,500 a year for senior fellowships. Anthony Woods, head of medicine, society and history grants at the Wellcome Trust, says that these enhancements are necessary to keep top people in science and in Britain. We do not want these people being lost from science because of low salaries, Woods says. We want to make science an attractive career. Foundations such as the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, have conventionally tried to pay higher salaries and prompt the government to match them. We were trying to force the government agencies to pay higher, Woods says. At Howard Hughes, that means paying attention to baseline levels such as the National Research Service Award amount, then consistently topping them. Even though the principal investigators at Howard Hughes set the salaries for their fellows, only about 10% of the fellows receive the baseline rate; the remainder are paid at higher levels, says Phil Perlman, a grants officer at the institute. Howard Hughes stipends are taxable,
be receiving higher stipends and spending less time in their role. In other fields, stipends for postdocs have been higher, she explains. Phil Perlman, a grants officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, says that using the NRSA as a benchmark is a relatively new phenomenon. There was a time when the NIH was not the benchmark, Perlman says. The NRSA stipends were well below the market. If you got an NRSA, you took a salary cut. Perlman says that he isnt sure that now is the right time to boost the NRSA level. At present, the stipends include mandatory raises that are quite large and dont have any evaluation of performance. He thinks that before it revisits the baseline stipend level, the NIH should implement some performance standards and stop handing out automatic raises. And other funders around the world should look to market forces, not to the NRSA, to establish their own stipend levels, he says. Right now, I dont know how much of an economic case they can make for increasing their baseline, Perlman says. P.S.
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and the institute doesnt allow fellows to supplement their salaries with other grants, but it does provide additional money to pay for health care if the fellows host organization doesnt provide it, he says.