By SHANNON O. WELLS
At a recent Senate Research Committee meeting, Penny Morel, professor in the Department of Immunology, shared her frustration about, when putting out a call for a lab technician, she heard from a relatively meager 15 applicants.
“Only one of which actually had experience in the lab. The rest were, like, literature majors or working in shops … or film majors,” she said with a chuckle.
Melanie Scott, vice chair for research and associate professor of surgery, could top even that. “We’ve had positions for technicians up and we haven’t had any applicants — and they’ve been up for, like, six-to-eight months without anybody, or we might get one who is not particularly well qualified for the position.
“You can probably train them into the position,” she added, “but it’s not somebody who can sort of just come in and (do the job). I think it’s very difficult to hire people for anything right now. No matter what industry you’re in, there’s not that many people who are looking to move jobs right now, or not been employed who need a job.”
The Research committee discussed challenges in hiring, turnover, retention at its May 19 meeting, along with topics including research security developments, and voting for departmental co-chairs.
Zonqui Xia, associate professor in the Department of Neurology, called high turnover in his department’s research finance team “highly disruptive. … It’s been a struggle to attract and retain these very important colleagues of ours.”
“(I was) speaking to the head of our finance department, and she’s been struggling for as long as she remembers,” Xia said.
“So I don’t know if it’s something we can discuss as a group, ideas that we can help retain and attract? I think there are a lot of moving pieces,” he added, suggesting looking at other seemingly well-operated institutions for inspiration and ideas. “I think it’s something worth discussing.”
Scott agreed, noting that some turnover problems have become endemic to the environment and process. “Most of the time they’re moving. They spent two or three years in one position, and they learned this or that position and then moving onwards and upwards — usually with another department, because that’s just the way it works. And it can be disruptive,” she said. “I think it’s definitely worth talking about, especially in the larger context.”
Scott said she hopes one of the first Research committee meetings she sets up in the fall will include an HR representative to discuss “changes that are going on” with the compensation modernization program.
“It’s not going to be immediate, but hopefully that will move things in the right direction for the technicians as well and for other members of staff. But yeah, the turnover is an issue for sure. And that might be a good time to give them some feedback from our point of view about, sort of what we’re seeing.”
Salary differences
A notable part of the hiring problem is rooted in the salary differential between the private sector and academic world, Scott observed. “Traditionally, places like universities are a little slower to pick up on the increases in salary that are going on within a market. And they’re just not able to adapt and be flexible as quickly, and I think that’s part of what these changes (Human Resources) making is supposed to help with.
“I mean, we’re never going to be able to compete with industry-level salaries,” Scott added. “But it’s a question of making sure that jobs are fulfilling and not leading to burnout. I think that’s also a really big issue.”
Noting that the turnover rate for technical staff is somewhere around 45 percent, which Scott called “horrendous,” Dana Tudorascu, associate professor of psychiatry and biostatistics, said she thinks “that’s in line also with the graduate students.”
“It’s probably because we keep lowering the academic criteria for them to take a certain quantity (of courses) to have certain quantitative skills. We have problems getting students in departments such as biostatistics, environmental engineering, intelligent systems, just in the ones that come, the skills that they have are on parallel with the ones that we’ve had five years ago,” she said. “So I think if you’re keeping lowering standards for some reason, and then we don’t have people to hire because … we don’t have any standards anymore.”
Scott said while that may be specific to Tudorascu’s area, “from what I’ve seen, the graduate students that we’re taking as part of the IBGP (Interdisciplinary Biomedical Graduate School), which is what I’m part of, they’ve actually been getting stronger. And the applications have been from really strong candidates, the ones that I’ve interviewed and talking to people,” she added. “So I think it may vary across departments. (It’s) sort of specific-skill based, which is not being maybe taught as well at undergraduate level and that sort of thing. So they’re not able to get that experience, the ones that go straight to industry or data science.”
Zonqui Xia said instead of focusing on postdocs to run his lab, he’s worked toward developing and training research scientists and staff scientists, “these people who don’t want to go on to have an independent career but are still competent,” he said. “And so it goes back to … these are staff (and) we need to have meaningful career paths with them. It’s not just, go from research center to senior research center. Besides titles, there are other things that we — the University as a whole — can do to encourage, and then that helps all of us in terms of retention.
“Again, it’s hard to recruit people, but once you have people, you have to keep them,” Xia said. “That is proving to be harder. So again, I think the HR (visit) is a good idea, and hopefully there’s some other ideas.”
Penny Morel noted that an examination of postdoc salaries at Pitt found most of them below National Institutes of Health rates, something confirmed through a survey shared at a recent postdoc presentation at Senate Council. “I think the reason for that is, for example, we start them off on their appropriate (level), but NIH increases the stipend every year. And we don’t do that.”
Rob Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor of Pitt Research, said there is a “national conversation” taking place regarding postdoc retention and salaries. “Amanda Godley in the provost’s office is leading that conversation … trying to understand the scope of the problem and maybe bring some order,” he said.
Research security update
In other Senate Research news, Rutenbar said active conversations continue with federal government officials and research sponsors about the upcoming implementation of new research security and rules “that are basically flow downs from the CHIPS and Science Act.
Rutenbar had been at an earlier meeting with Rebecca Keiser, National Science Foundation chief of research security strategy, “who’s kind of on the front line of this,” and Kelvin Droegenmeier, former director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, “a very famous climate scientist, and he’s been sort of retained by NSF as an advisor.”
Discussed at the meeting was a new organization that “the CHIPS and Science Act says NSF needs to stand up, that’s kind of a central clearinghouse for research security stuff,” Rutenbar explained. “They’re supposed to connect with the research-university landscape on best practices and guidance, and we’re supposed to report stuff to them when we have problems.
“Like all things in the federal government,” he added, “it has an appalling and lengthy name and acronym — everybody take a deep breath — the Research Security and Integrity Information Sharing and Analysis Organization, the euphonious RSI-ISAO. Everybody say that three times fast,” he joked.
“We had a really good meeting this morning just talking about: ‘What are you guys thinking? What are your problems?’ So, stay tuned. The good news is that I’m kind of like right there on the front lines,” Rutenbar said. “We’re having good conversations. They have smart people working on this.”
He asked the NSF group to ponder what it will be like this fall, properly filling in new hires, such as assistant professors, about the cascade of research security requirements, “like everything else we tell them in that fire hose the first couple of weeks. What would that look like?”
“When you start getting people into the mode of like, ‘Oh, I have to worry about research security. What is that absolute minimum set of stuff that we need to do, and then, as that stuff gets more sophisticated, how do we do that?’” Rutenbar said. “And people went, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea. How do you tell the newbies?’ It’s ‘Oh, good, let’s talk about that. So I thought it was a good conversation.”
Scott said while the intent of the requirements is a good thing, “the tracking of it and the reporting requirements, I think, are onerous, and that’s going to be the problem.”
While agreeing that “the devil is in the details,” Rutenbar said “one bit of good news here is the legislative language is not very prescriptive. It’s kind of a high level, ‘Thou shalt do stuff,’ and then there’s sort of a high-level conversation.”
That language gets delegated to people like Keiser at NSF to “operationalize, and because they’re smart people and they’re people who used to be us, they reach out,” Rutenbar said. “So this was literally like a meeting with APLU (Association of Public Land Grant University) stakeholders, and we have conversations.”
Rutenbar assured the committee he’d keep them informed, but added “it’s still super early, and (government officials are) kind of on the big listening tour, like, ‘What are you folks worrying about? When you read the regulations, when you read the documents and things we’re putting out … It’s that kind of that kind of conversation. It’s good. We’re in a pretty good place.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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