Why don’t we have more “Principal Scientists” in academia?
This weekend, Mrs. PA and I went out to dinner in town (where, coincidentally, I had one of the best beers I’ve ever tasted). During the meal, we had a wide-ranging conversation on the difficulties of running a successful lab group. The training you get as an undergraduate, graduate students, and post-doc does little to prepare you for many of the duties you undertake as a professor. Teaching, grant-writing, and personnel management are areas that you spend a lot of time working in as a professor but likely have little to no exposure to prior to this position. Indeed, the level of multitasking it takes in order to be effective as a Principal Investigator at a major research institution is rather astounding. What tends to happen, in many cases, is that some facet of the position is left to its own devices. Often this is the personnel management side of things.
We realized that there is already a position, prevalent in industry, which could help ease the burden on professors - the “Principal/Senior Scientist” job. I did an internship at GiantPharm one summer, and worked in a small group. There was a leader of the group, but his office was actually in another building on a hallway with other group leaders. My interaction with him was sort of minimal. I did, however, spend a lot of time talking to my immediate supervisor. He was a long-time employee, Ph.D., and incredibly intelligent. If I was stuck on a task or needed further direction, his office was always open. Since he was doing research of his own, it was easy to chat with him informally about the work and hash out new ideas. If I were a professor, I’d love to have someone like this in the lab.
In academia, there are sometimes “Research Scientists” working in a group. In my experience these tend to be glorified (more or less permanent) post-docs. They are focused on their own project, and could often not care less about mentoring graduate students or ensuring that the lab is running smoothly (as long as it doesn’t significantly impede their work they are ambivalent). It’s worth noting that post-docs themselves frequently have a similar attitude.
I think that there is some room here. Why not delegate some of the roles typically shouldered by a single P.I.? For instance, the P.I. can focus on “the big picture” (where is the research going, what are our major findings, what is going on in the community), getting money, and their teaching duties. In the meantime, you can bring in a scientist to be the “research lead”. By this I mean the person who is in the lab working on a project, but who also oversees the day-to-day activities. If a graduate student is having trouble getting their affinity column to work, they can go to the Scientist. This person could be responsible for some of the management of the lab as well - if a student isn’t showing up to work, they can talk to them and/or elevate the situation to the P.I.
Now, I’m not a professor. I’m sure there are some issues with this plan (or else why wouldn’t it be implemented). Some that come to mind:
- Funding - you are going to have to pay this Scientist more than you pay a post-doc. $50,000/yr? Somewhere in that ballpark is my guess. It’s roughly equivalent to one post-doc plus an additional graduate student. I don’t think that this is too onerous.
- Appearance of laziness - Will other faculty members think that you are unable to “handle” being a professor if you have to hire someone else to share the workload? I’m not really sure about the answer here, but I’d hope this could be minimized.
- What about the Scientist’s career? Won’t they get unhappy and leave? In my perfect world, the candidate would be someone who has completed their Ph.D. but is uninterested in some of the aspects of joining a faculty. Perhaps they just don’t like writing grants and want to work at the bench, but aren’t fond of industrial work either. There are people out there like this, trust me. They would be thrilled to have a position like the one I’m talking about here.
I’m sure there are other problems, and I hope you’ll bring them up in the comments. If you are in a faculty-like position, I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this. Do you see the utility of hiring such a researcher? Why is it not done?
