<p>As the parent of a student applying to graduate schools in life sciences, I'm curious what happens to graduate students if the PI in a lab loses a job and moves to another university. My son is applying to some schools with hiring freezes, and I believe that affects the difficulty of obtaining tenure. What happens to the lab? What happens to the students in the lab if the school is cutting back and not rehiring in the same area or not rehiring at all?</p>
<p>That has always been the risk of studying under non-tenured faculty, although the risk is there for everyone at least a little - an older professor can retire, and anyone get hit by a bus. If the PI leaves (for whatever reason) you have three issues, research, financing, and resources. </p>
<p>The department will generally help you to identify another professor in a similar specialty to serve as your advisor. If this transition occurs early in your studies you will probably need to shift your research towards what the new advisor is doing, but if it occurs later you may be able to retain your original focus. </p>
<p>If you had funding under the original advisor the department will try to ensure that your remain funded. If your research is close enough to your new advisor (or can become close enough - see earlier) you may be able to get an RA. Otherwise the department will generally put a priority on getting you a TA spot, or a fellowship if you qualify.</p>
<p>As to the lab (and other resources) it depends largely on the source of its funding. Some equipment is tied to donors, and can be pulled back by them. Most of the time the equipment is owned by the department - so all the student will need to do is fight off other faculty who will try to claim it. Again, the new advisor and generally the department will help with this, so if you have a new advisor and funding the lab will generally remain available, although it may be moved to another location and/or be shared with different people.</p>
<p>The important part of all of this is remaining ahead of the problem - know if and when the professor is leaving, and have them help you to identify a new advisor and arrange for funding and equipment.</p>
<p>One last thought to consider - it may be possible to follow the professor to the new school. There are certainly some issues with this, but if you are dead set on that particular advisor, it can be done.</p>
<p>Everything cosmicfish said is correct. It is quite common to follow a PI to a new school if they move, but fortunately changing universities is rare for professors.</p>
<p>Hiring freezes suck but they don’t affect the funding for biomedical sciences. Our system is based on grants obtained from the NIH, so while the hiring freezes affect everyone else, it doesn’t affect us. In fact, the NIH was just given an extra 10 billion (a third of its annual budget) in stimulus funds that have resulted in a substantial cash infusion in the sciences.</p>
<p>if your PI moves/doesn’t get tenure there are usually three options, and which one you take depends on where in your studies you are, and also how mobile you are.</p>
<p>the options are:
- switch labs-- this tends to happen if you’ve just gotten started in your research, you can move to a related (or not related) lab at your university. Usually you tend to have to start over mostly if you switch labs, so it’s a pain, but if its early enough in your career then its okay.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Move with the professor-- if youre pretty far into your research, but not going to be done within the year, you tend to move. You still get your degree from your original university, you just do some of the work at the new university. </p></li>
<li><p>Stay at your university and finish-- if you are very close to finishing when the PI moves, you can usually stay and finish your work. Either you work in the old lab space of the PI, or another PI will let you stay for a couple of months and finish up. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>It is unlikely that the PI will lose a job completely- part of tenure decisions are finding competing job offers. Thus you will probably move down a tier in schools (one reason to think about going to a top tier school in the first place), but you get your degree from the university where you took the classes. Tenure rates are one thing that I looked at pretty carefully at the schools I was considering, because most of the professors that I was interested in are relatively young</p>
<p>dalmatiansrock -</p>
<p>You are good to think of this, and you should encourage your child to keep the potential loss of his/her PI in mind. One of my friends arrived at grad school to learn that her expected PI had died a week or so before her arrival. The department kept her on TA funding until she located a new PI, but she suffered from a delay of almost two years in beginning her research. Another friend who lost her advisor under similar circumstances ended up shifting from a life science to Science Education because of lack of appropriate support in her original department.</p>
<p>Bad things do happen, and we need to have at least the outlines of a back-up plan.</p>
<p>Wishing you and your child all the best.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to derail, but is there an easy way to tell if a professor is tenured or if a professor is going to soon be reviewed for tenure (or whatever it is that happens)? How long does a new professor usually have to get tenure?</p>
<p>ec1234: Is there a single place that has information about tenure rates, or was that just a lot of googling?</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>isn’t it something like within 5-7 years of becoming an assistant professor?</p>
<p>At my undergrad, tenure track faculty had a fixed 6-year term of employment, after which the temure committee made the decision: tenured, or looking for a new job.</p>
<p>[In</a> Person: Eggheads and Cheeseheads - Science Careers - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers](<a href=“http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_01_02/caredit.a0900002]In”>http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_01_02/caredit.a0900002)</p>
<p>This article discusses institutional feelings about tenure. At most places, tenure is a given as long as the faculty member has funding. However there are places where the odds against getting tenured are pretty high.</p>
<p>Dalmatiansrock,
Hiring freezes do NOT in any way affect the awarding of tenure. Hiring freezes simply mean that new positions are not being created. My university is under a “soft” hiring freeze, which means hiring still goes on – but only to fill vacated positions. “Hard” hiring freezes mean that some vacated positions will go unfilled.</p>
<p>This has nothing to do with tenure cases. A strong tenure case is made over a period of years, and economic concerns do not and cannot impact the earning of tenure. If tenure decisions were made on the basis of mere monetary concerns, there would be a spate of lawsuits that would cost the university even more.</p>
<p>Finally, in the sciences, most professors bring in much more money than they are paid. Just a point of fact.</p>
<p>Sarbruis,
Simply ask the DGS of the program in which you are interested if the professor in question is tenured. One can usually tell if the professor is listed on the department website as either “Associate Professor” or “Professor.” “Assistant Professor” = Tenure Track, but not yet tenured.</p>
<p>Sarbruis:</p>
<p>Associate Professor and Professor = tenured
Assistant Professor = untenured, with ~6 years from accepting the job to become tenured.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=Casual20]
Associate Professor and Professor = tenured
Assistant Professor = untenured, with ~6 years from accepting the job to become tenured.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that’s not always true. Some schools promote one to Associate Professor based on factors not explicitly related to tenure; though there is a good chance an Associate Professor is tenured.</p>
<p>^^^This isn’t true. My current supervisor is an associate professor (in fact is in the application process for full professor) but isn’t and never will be tenured. For professors on tenure track, it is a good bet that all assistant professors are untenured and all full professors are tenured. But not all professors are on tenure track. There are research specialist tracks (non tenure track), there are clinical professor tracks and there is tenure track. You wouldn’t be able to tell just from a website which is which.</p>
<p>To follow-up on the recent posts, associate prof at many top-tier institutes such Yale are not tenured.</p>
<p>So to amend the list:
assist prof = pre=tenure, associate prof can be with or without tenure.<br>
Any individuals with the titles of research assist, research associate or research full professor are usually not tenured.</p>
<p>The easiest way to find out is to ask the graduate advisor which faculty are tenured. I am the director of a graduate program in biomedical research. I openly discuss this issue with each student as they meet with me to discuss their likely thesis or rotation mentors. </p>
<p>Finally, students are usually admitted to a graduate program not to a lab. Nearly all programs will support a student for a short timeframe if they need to find a new dissertation mentor if the mentor fails to get tenure. And to second Prof X’s comments, tenure is a merit decision and has nothing to do with hiring freezes-the faculty in question are already on site and being paid!!</p>
<p>@ Professor X: The following selection from the Williams College Faculty Handbook stands in opposition to your assertion that economic concerns cannot impact tenure decisions. Williams states explicitly, for all the world to see, that they may (albeit “rarely”): </p>
<p>“Quite apart from the merits of individual candidates, decisions affecting tenure are subject to such structural considerations as the College’s future curricular needs, including the requirements of special strengths within a field and shifts in student interests, the number and age of tenured professors already in the department, the overall demand for staff in the College’s total program, and budgetary considerations. The College does not, however, have a tenure quota, and structural considerations are rarely the overriding factor in a negative tenure decision. Still, the standard of evaluation for teaching, scholarship, and service does become stricter when structural factors do not favor appointment to tenure. Should it become clear at any point in the career of a non-tenured faculty member that a stricter standard will most likely need to be applied, the faculty member’s yearly letter of evaluation will include a statement to that effect. For these reasons, as well as those noted in the paragraph above, a decision not to make an appointment to tenure in a particular case should not necessarily be taken to reflect a negative judgment of an individual’s performance.”</p>
<p>the williams disclaimer does not contradict Professor X’s comments. Instead, they speak to the college not giving tenure to faculty doing research that is not in alignment with the college’s goals. This is a standard university/college disclaimer to prevent lawsuits from faculty who do not receive tenure when their field of research field is deemed not worthy of tenure. Part of doing research is learning to identify and solve significant questions of impact. This is always a part of tenure merit review. </p>
<p>Lastly, the disclaimer by Williams does allow the college to remove an entire dept if in the future it is deemed not relevant.</p>
<p>ParAlum is correct.</p>
<p>That language, coase, is indeed a disclaimer. In practice, if tenure was actually denied “for budgetary reasons,” it would be a clear sign that a department was being dismantled, or that the entire institution was in financial disarray.</p>
<p>Williams is a College and is not really relevant when discussing tenure impact on graduate school.</p>
<p>I guess we will have to disagree on what is meant by “budgetary considerations” in the passage from Williams. Regardless of that, there is no way to know–unless someone is unwise enough to put it on the record–whether a Department, Dean, Provost or University President opposed tenure because of budgetary considerations. (The effect sometimes goes the oither way. If a department is worried that it will lose a line if the candidate is denied, this may cause them to vote in favor of tenure just to save the line.) Of course, some universities have hard-and-fast quantitative criteria based on publications and grants, in which case there is little discretion. But for the rest of us, there is discretion. Whether one gets tenure can even depend on who is on leave that year (as some departments do not allow absentee ballots), who is on the departmental or University committee that year, etc. I am even aware of a case where two candidates came up the same day, and someopne opined afterwards that at least one of the decisions would have been different if the cases had come up in the opposite order. These latter points are not about budgets, but they do point to the unpredictability of tenure cases.</p>
<p>I stand by my original statement (or agree to disagree with the previous post). </p>
<p>Tenure is a serious decision and most reviewing faculty (and administration) make this decision seriously and with integrity. In clear cases of acheivement (or clear cases of lack of achievment) the decisions and discussions are incredibly straightforward. However, when an individual is on the border-in sufficient achievement and international recognition in their field (those outside referee letters analyzing the candidate’s achievements are always so telling!), there is always some room for interpretation after the fact of the decision. Especially when trying to offer face-saving reasons for getting denied tenured. </p>
<p>The obvious answer…
Don’t be a case so near the border of mediocre achievement and recognition in your field. Individuals in this situation are very well aware of their tenuous situation when they come up for review. Tenure is an honor and should not be given lightly or for insufficient ability and achievement (no “A” merely for effort).</p>