‘High risk, high reward’: How early-career neuroscientists view their future

Graphs and data provided by Francisco Rivera Rosario and Viviana Greco.

Neuroscience students at all levels are still interested in pursuing academic careers, according to a survey conducted by The Transmitter and Neuromatch, a nonprofit organization focused on computational neuroscience education. 

The survey was inspired in part by an earlier survey that revealed trainees often felt adrift after completing one of Neuromatch’s annual summer courses. That survey also revealed a clear appetite for career-oriented follow-up support: mentorship, real-world research placements and help securing competitive Ph.D. and postdoctoral positions. 

“We know firsthand that researchers need stronger support across the career pipeline, especially in lower-resourced regions,” says Bradley Roberts, CEO of Neuromatch. 

Undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and principal investigators (PIs) who had opened their labs within the past five years were eligible to participate in the new joint survey. A little more than half of respondents were postdoctoral researchers or graduate students—30 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Given Neuromatch’s focus, respondents tended to be early-career researchers in computational, cognitive and systems neuroscience. Explore the full dataset.

Overall, nearly half of all respondents reported that their long-term goal was to build their own lab as a PI.

However, analyzing results by career stage revealed different priorities. Undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students all reported being more open to considering a broader spectrum of career paths than were postdoctoral researchers and PIs. About 16 percent said they wanted to move into industry, compared with 12 percent of postdocs and 4 percent of PIs. Many students stated a need for graduate programs to provide “a structured path to career options outside of academia.”

Top industry positions of interest included data science and computational roles at technology companies (35 percent), followed by biotech (16 percent) and clinical research (11 percent).

Researchers at all stages cited access to funding as their greatest concern (36 percent). Among PIs, a whopping 92 percent said they were most concerned about funding. The trend was different among undergraduates and masters students; 67 percent of undergraduates and masters students combined ranked “mentorship” and “access to training or resources” as their top two concerns.

Eighty percent of postdocs named “job security” as the top challenge. Postdocs may especially feel pressure to secure professorships amid stagnant salaries and dwindling positions.  

When asked what changes might ameliorate the job security and retention challenges, researchers consistently pointed to salary raises.

Other respondents called for putting a renewed emphasis on the training aspect of graduate and postdoctoral work. 

A need for higher-quality mentorship opportunities echoed across responses to multiple survey questions. In open-answer responses, early-career researchers voiced a need for guidance tailored to their particular career stage, emphasizing a desire for mentorship tied to specific scientific questions rather than simply learning new methods. They also wanted more direct action from mentors.

“Oftentimes mentors are great supporters but not great advocates,” wrote one responder. “And mentors need to learn that being an advocate is critical for their mentees. However, I do think that we select for people in science that do not have the perfect personalities to act as advocates, so this is a tough problem to solve.”

Among respondents who had participated in summer courses such as Neuromatch’s, a quarter noted that having continued mentorship after the course would be most helpful to their careers, as would follow-up workshops and seminars to help them flex their new skills. Ninety-one percent of respondents said they would be interested in attending a post-course meetup at an in-person conference or in a virtual setting.

Survey respondents also weighed in the recent policy changes and funding cuts implemented by the current U.S. administration. Many labs will receive less funding than in previous years, and numerous established mentorship programs and funding opportunities have been axed, leaving many young researchers scrambling to find support. 

Survey responses indicated that, so far, the impact of U.S. federal funding cuts is concentrated among U.S.-based researchers. Respondents outside the United States said that they are less directly affected or perceive these changes as less relevant to their career trajectories.

More than half of respondents (56.6 percent) said they expect that artificial-intelligence (AI) and machine-learning tools will enhance their careers by increasing the speed and efficiency of their research. But almost 30 percent self-identified as computational and AI neuroscientists, which may explain their openness to AI in research.  

Both Neuromatch and The Transmitter aim to apply lessons from the survey to developing future resources for early-career scientists. 

“[This survey is] the starting point for a new career-development strategy we’re building at Neuromatch,” Roberts says.