“It definitely helps to meet employers,” says Sean Grullon.

• 
• 
“This conference is very helpful,” says Fouad Francis.

“It definitely helps to meet employers,” says Sean Grullon.

 

<< Prev

Next >>

More News

Gas prices continue slow descent

State NAACP head: Blacks will remain divided on same-sex marriage

Andrews clips wings on annual air show

No jail time for Florida man who planned to shoot fireworks on National Mall

Husband, wife found dead in possible murder-suicide in Briggs Chaney

Sean Grullon hit a career fair for the highly educated Wednesday in North Bethesda, hoping to land a new job when his postdoctoral position as a bioinformatics research scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda ends in a few months.

Grullon was among the horde of postdocs who flocked to the sixth annual Postdoc Conference and Career Fair, which included recruiters from 31 companies and agencies, plus representatives of 20 other businesses and organizations that aid job-seekers. But Grullon was a little disappointed that there were not more open positions available.

“It definitely helps to meet employers,” said Grullon, who earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But it’s disappointing that more companies were not taking resumes.”

While accurate figures are difficult to come by, as many institutions don’t keep records of postdoctoral scholars, there are as many as 89,000 postdocs people with a doctoral degree and in a temporary period of mentored research or scholarly training in the U.S., according to the National Postdoctoral Association of Washington, D.C. That has increased in recent years: Science and engineering postdocs with temporary visas at U.S. universities alone tripled to 27,000 from 1985 to 2005, according to the National Science Foundation.

Salaries for postdocs are relatively low, although most make considerably more after finishing the training and entering the general job market. A postdoc at Penn State University averages about $49,000, according to salarydom.com. A 2005 study in American Scientist put the national median salary of postdocs at $38,000.

More than 550 postdocs attended the event at the Montgomery County Conference Center, about the same as last year, said Sally Sternbach, executive director of Rockville Economic Development Inc. and head of the conference’s organizing committee. There were five more recruiting companies and two more resource organizations involved this year, with more information technology, high-tech and cybersecurity types and fewer biotechs, she said.

Most employers were still cautious when it comes to hiring.

“We’re still in a slow recovery,” Sternbach said. “People are cautious when it comes to adding staff.”

Federal labs have been trimming postdocs as stimulus money dries up, she said.

The lines of postdocs at the tables of federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration were particularly long. At the table for United BioSource, a Bethesda subsidiary of New Jersey pharmacy benefits manager Medco Health Solutions, the stream of job-seekers was steady, said Valerie Hutchins, research associate for health economics. “We do have a lot of employees with Ph.D.s,” she said.

With its glut of federal labs, the Washington area is more promising for higher-education job-seekers than most areas of the country, said Fouad Francis, a postdoc at NIH. He checked out the FDA and the Army Research and Development Center.

“I want to stay in the Washington area,” Francis said. “This conference is very helpful.”

Last year’s conference organizing committee won an award recognizing its support of science, technology, engineering and mathematics from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer, a network of federal labs. Besides the Rockville economic development group, those on the organizing committee come from NIH, the National Research Council, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and NASA.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Entrepreneurship is a major sponsor.

Some postdocs traveled quite a distance. William Johnson, a postdoc researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, was among those who attended a seminar on careers such as law and government moderated by Mojdeh Bahar, chief of the cancer branch at NIH’s Office of Technology Transfer and a conference committee member.

Panelists offered postdocs advice on how to persevere, distinguish themselves from other candidates and network.

“Network slowly,” advised Yali Friedman, founder of ThinkBiotech and chief editor of the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology. “You can’t just ask someone for a job when you first meet. You have to get to know them and build relationships.”

It’s also important for postdocs to work at something they really like, he said.

“As long as it is not too obscure, you will probably find a way to make money at it,” said Friedman, author of books on biotech education and business development.

kshay@gazette.net