Postdoctoral meeting Agenda, August 2011

AGENDA

1. Salary

Issue: The last postdoc salary revision was put into effect in 2006 at Rockefeller. Current Rockefeller salaries leave us with “lesser” purchasing power as compared to 2006.

Justification:

  • Postdoc tenures having increased to 5-6 years (up from 4 years in 2006)
  • Increase in housing rents at Rockefeller and removal of all housing subsidies in 2008-2010.
  • Urban inflation since 2006 has been 11.3%
  • Lack of any insurance or retirement benefits during most postdoc tenures. 80% of postdocs polled consider this a serious concern.
  • Rockefeller University’s annual salary increase is minimal ($100-180 p.m. with $20-40 rent increase)

Comparison:

  • Salaries range $46,000-$50,000 for competitive fellowships (Helen Hay, LSRF), $43,000-51,000 + benefits for some universities (Broad, Stanford, Whitehead) and $45000 for NSF for 0-1 year postdocs, as compared for $41,000 for Rockefeller University.
  • Median income (2007) for NYC is$53,500 and $64,200 for Manhattan.
  • Starting salaries for industry postdocs is ~$55,000 and comes with life insurance and 401k options.
  • NIH has increased postdoc stipends for 2011 by 2% to $38,496 with retroactive adjustments.

Requested action:Our salary is just above the new NIH minimum in the most expensive city in the country. We would like you to consider a revision of the postdoc salary structure at Rockefeller. To make up for the inflation loss current salaries would need to be set at approximately $46,000 ($41,000 current) for first years and $56,000 ($50,000 current) for maximum earners,

2. Child and Family Center

Issue: Based on online surveys, the two major concerns among postdocs are long wait-lists (6-18 months for >60% postdocs) and non-transparent wait list regulations. We met with Virginia Huffman (Vice President, HR) and Karen Booth (Director, CFC) in October 2010. We would like to follow up on this issue. Not having affordable infant care puts serious cost and time burden on postdocs, who fall primarily into the category.

Requested action: We request you to consider lending your weight to helping us resolve this issue.

3. Career planning

Issue: At the last meeting we discussed the option of helping postdocs interested in pursuing non-academia career paths.

Follow up: We conducted a survey of 110 postdocs. The consensus from this is as follows, in order of priority:

  1. Set up an active career office on Rockefeller Campus. Rockefeller is currently not a preferred hiring spot for any consulting, pharma or biotech company, who have hired 19% of postdocs that have left in the last one year.
  2. Develop an alumni outreach network. The current postdoc alumni database is ineffective, and valuable mentorship from postdoc alumni is not being tapped into. This could initially be set up in conjunction with the career office.
  3. Many postdocs (>70%) would like to seek additional mentorship for academic careers. By our survey, ~90% of postdocs at Rockefeller would like to pursue a tenure track position at a primarily research organization. However, only 35% of postdocs that left Rockefeller in the past one year ended up with such a position – which is close to the national average. 20% have gone on to a second postdoc.

The Postdoctoral Association Committee, 2010-2011

AakankshaSinghvi, Isabel Kurth,Ruchi Gupta, Alok Shah, James Miller