NERD NATION

WHERE HAVE
ALL THE
POSTDOCS
GONE?

The acute blockage

in our science
talent pipeline.
In rugby, Pacific Island nations some-

times lose their best to the All Blacks.

Science [in New Zealand] is worse. It
would be like sending all our top players
overseas, while trying to field a national
team made up of a youth development
squad. University of Canterbury geneticist Associate Professor Anthony Poole is
one of our brightest young scientists and
his frustrations are shared by a roll call of
influential New Zealand researchers.
Labs everywhere in the world are powered by postdocs, young scientists on
short contracts with everything to prove.
Most scientists kick off their careers this
way after finishing their doctoral studies.
New Zealander Geoffrey Nicholls
heads Oxford Universitys Department
of Statistics. At Oxford stats, we average
one postdoc per staff member, he says.
This is key to our productivity and research environment.
Oxfords online jobs website is bristling with postdoc opportunities. The
University of California, Berkeley, offers
1400 postdoc positions (not all in science, of course) so many that postdocs
have their own association.
Our government, in contrast, has dedicated funding for just five two-year postdocs each year. There are more postdocs
in New Zealand than this, but numbers
are pitiful by international standards, as
few teams can afford them. This, in the
world of science funding, is simply weird.
The US National Postdoctoral Association estimates that there are up to 91,000
postdocs in the United States. In Australia, around 600 postdocs are funded at
any one time by the National Health and
Medical Research Council; another government scheme funds hundreds more.
Here, after years of dwindling numbers, the rot really set in after the 2010
Budget. It slashed a scheme that funded
90 postdocs (30 each year), which the
government said cost too much.
94 | NORTH & SOUTH | SEPTEMBER 2015

As Professor Russell Gray who left

the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland last year for a plumb
directorship at Germanys Max Planck
Institute told Kim Hill: In the career
timeline for scientists, thats like chopping them off at the kneecaps.
Many suspect the old postdoc funding
was diverted to finance 10 annual Rutherford Discovery Fellowships. While these
last five years, they can go to tenured
professors who have secure jobs. They
do nothing to keep even a tiny minority
of our top doctorates in the country.
It must have been an embarrassing
moment for the government when, last
year, close to 100 per cent of existing
Rutherford Fellows (39 of
New Zealands leading
scientists) signed a plea
for changes in science
funding. This included a
reasonable request for
urgent, dedicated funding
for at least 100 more postdocs per year.
The effect of the severe bottleneck at the
postdoctorate stage in the
careers of young scientists is that we are inadvertently creating a place where talent
has to leave. The italics are theirs. The
submission includes a graph showing our
lonely outlier status in the world of
science funding and in our number of
scientists and engineers. There we are,
in a little bubble well to the left of everyone else. There is one other country next
to us. It is Greece.
But is this really having an impact on
New Zealand research and our allure to
international students?
The answer appears to be yes, to both
questions. New Zealand pumps out research papers, but the Ministry of
Business, Innovation and Employment
quotes statistics showing they are seldom
cited by other researchers in leading publications. Journals like Nature, Science,
and The Lancet give a research teams
work the most impact. New Zealands
system, said a government paper on science funding circulated at the end of last
year, produces a high level of outputs
relative to investment, but those outputs
are possibly of a lower academic impact
relative to global counterparts.
In other words, we play a lot of games,

but we dont win many. And we may be

putting some of our brightest off playing
the game at all.
Im worried that the sense of futility
and hopelessness is rapidly trickling
down to our postgraduate students, says
Otago biochemist and Rutherford Fellow
Wayne Patrick. PhD students see their
friends struggling to find jobs after they
finish their doctorates. Our top honours
and masters students are looking at other
options, instead of even starting a PhD.
And international student applications
to NZ universities are down, because
they are slipping down ranking tables.
The blockage in the talent pipeline is
a big worry for teams with older scientists, too. [In 2010] the
supply of talent for
research teams like mine
was cut off, says principal scientist Chris Hollis
of GNS Science, whose
team investigates the
geological dimension of
climate and environmental change. We really
struggle with succession
planning now because
we have several staff
close to retirement who
still need funding, but we have no way
to team them up with younger talent.
Like rugby, science is pitilessly, thrillingly international: our research teams
must foot it against the Oxfords, the
MITs, Berkeleys and Max Plancks in the
scramble for talent, papers with impact,
reputation. But we are outsourcing our
research work to students and then
kicking them out of the country at the
very point in their lives they want to marry, have children and settle down.
The lack of postdoc funding is a massive hole in our science system that has
a negative influence across all levels of
New Zealand science, says Rutherford
Fellow Quentin Atkinson, fresh from an
Oxford postdoc, his name on a dazzling
study published in PNAS (the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the USA) and quoted in the
New York Times. Our research labs are
training up PhDs, who we lose to overseas labs.
Perhaps, if we had as many postdocs
as Super 15 rugby players, our science
might win more often.
JENNY NICHOLLS