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A recent report issued by the US Department of Commerce reported that job opportunities in science technology, engineering and math fields (STEM) are increasing in America. The report contends that over the past decade the number of people employed in STEM jobs has increased three times as much as the growth rate for non-STEM jobs growing by approximately 7.6 million workers. Further, the report predicts that between 2008 and 2018 that STEM jobs will grow by about 17 percent as compared with roughly 10 percent for non-STEM jobs. On average, in 2010 STEM employees earned about $25 per hour almost $9 more per hour than non-STEM workers.

While this may appear to be good news, a report published last year by the President’s Council on Science and Technology indicated that less than one-third of US eighth graders are considered proficient in math and science. Further, the report also found that there is a lack of qualified STEM teachers at most schools even those that are otherwise successful. Consequently, this has resulted in a student population that is not only unprepared to fill those predicted 1.3 million STEM jobs but also uninterested in STEM subjects. In other words, unless something changes, there won’t be enough trained American workers to meet future US STEM needs; thereby reducing US global competitiveness in STEM fields like biotechnology, computing and engineering.

However, it is important to note that previous reports predicting future shortages of science and technology employees have been flat-out wrong! Nevertheless, there is no doubt that America is lagging in STEM competitiveness. However, this is likely because of the way in which STEM subjects are taught in primary and secondary schools. There is more emphasis placed on memorizing STEM concepts rather than teaching and honing problem solving skills which is the most important factor when participating in real-life STEM endeavors.

The same conclusion was reached by an 18-member National Research Council committee that recently issued a report outlining a new framework to improve science curriculums in the US. The head of the committee that issued the report, a retired physicist said “kids are expected to learn a lot of things but not expected to be able to use them.” The last time the National Research Council—the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering—weighed in on STEM preparedness was 1996.

One way to improve STEM education in the US is to hire more PhDs as middle and high school science, math and engineering teachers. After all, problem solving skills are what the PhD degree is all about and most PhDs ought to be content area experts in the subjects that they teach. Unfortunately, in most PhD and postdoctoral programs the mere mention of possibly becoming a high school teacher is invariably “the kiss of death” and may result in a student or postdoc being thrown out of a laboratory. The irony of the US STEM conundrum is stark; there is a need for more problem solvers in the class room but the people who train the problem solvers refuse to empower them to become teachers! Go figure!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting (try teaching)

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The recent article published in the NY Times about the decline of high school student participation in science fairs resulted in many letters to the editor. Many of them were from concerned citizens and a few were from university researchers decrying the lack of government funding for research and the funding of sports over science programs. Another railed against the Bush’s Administration’s poorly crafted and ill-advised No Child Left Behind Act. However, there was one letter that surprised me. It was written by John P. Holdren, President Obama’s science and technology adviser (see below)

To the Editor:

Your article points to deep budget challenges that many school districts are facing and problems with the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law.

But it does not mention much of the Obama administration’s extraordinary agenda for improving science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in this country: for example, the commitment to prepare 100,000 new math and science teachers over the next 10 years, the $4 billion Race to the Top program’s support for innovation in teaching these important subjects, and the administration’s blueprint for updating the Elementary and Secondary Education Act this year.

Recognizing that government alone cannot be the answer, moreover, the president has also called upon the business community, foundations, professional societies and others to do more. Already, the president’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign has attracted more than $700 million in nongovernmental financial and in-kind support for science and math programs.

And more than 100 chief executives have responded to the president’s “all hands on deck” call to action by launching “Change the Equation,” an unprecedented program to scale up effective models for improving STEM education.

John P. Holdren
Washington, Feb. 7, 2011

The writer is President Obama’s science and technology adviser.

What surprised me about the letter is that it took an article critical of the Obama Administration’s commitment to science education to provide the American public (at least part of it) with some insight into the government’s recognition of the problem and steps that it is taking to help to correct it. Perhaps the Obama administration needs to be a bit more proactive and publicly-vocal about its plans to improve American STEM education. This would go a long way to assuage some of the concerns about America's waning global competitiveness in science and technology.

Like Dr. Holdren, I believe that government alone cannot be the answer and American corporations must get actively involved by providing ideas on how to improve American science education and the financial support to implement them. While the CEO-endorsed program “Change the Equation” sounds great on paper, it is time for those CEOs to actually step up and do something about the problem. Many of these same CEOs have been complaining for decades about the lack of STEM preparedness of the American workforce. As somebody once said “Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words!”

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Teaching!!!!

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In his State of the Union Address last week, President Obama acknowledged that US global competitiveness in science, technology engineering and math is at an all time low and that now may be America’s “sputnik moment” to turn this trend around. While I was pleased to hear the President say that we have a problem, neither political rhetoric nor turning the lack of science literacy into a challenge that resembles an arms race is going to solve the problem. What is needed are better trained science teachers who can engage science-minded students and a repeal of the No Child Left Behind Act that forces schools to focus limited financial resources on bolstering math and reading scores to maintain public funding. Sadly, neither of these things is going to happen any time soon. But I digress...

Historically, an option for science-minded students who wanted to be “engaged” was local, regional and national science fairs where students competed with one another for recognition of innovative scientific achievement. According to an article in the NY Times, science fairs grew in popularity after World War II and were intended for those who may not have considered themselves science fanatics but were interested in general science. Michele Glidden, director at the Society for Science & public, a nonprofit organization that administers 350 regional fairs contends that “Science fairs develop skills that reach down to everybody’s lives, whether you want to be a scientist or not. The point is to breed science-minded citizens.” Unfortunately, the number of high school students and high school participating in science fairs is waning. For example, in Indiana participation in the state’s science fairs plummeted 15 per cent in the last three years.

Experts contend that declining participation may be linked to competing demands placed on high school students for other extracurricular options like sports, music, and volunteering. Yet many science educators contend that meeting mandated state standards that usually require teaching fact-based knowledge rather than the scientific method leaves little time for them to stimulate students who may be interested in participating in science fairs. Further, many high school teachers lack the training or subject matter expertise to help students who want to enter science fear. Some have reached out to scientists in industry or local colleges and universities to help interested students but these types of connections are frequently difficult to make. 

Yet, despite these challenges, several hundred thousand American high school students will participate in over 350 science fairs during the next three months or so. If now is truly a “sputnik moment” for America, than President Obama and perhaps more importantly Congress ought to “put its money where its mouth is” and provide support to improve US science literacy.

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!

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William Shakespeare wrote: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." While Shakespeare apparently believed that names aren’t important, David Anderegg, a professor of psychology at Bennington College in Vermont feels otherwise. He contends that the mere mention of the words geek or nerd tend to perpetuate a stereotype. “The words are damaging, much like racial epithets and should be avoided” he said in a recent New York Times interview. He suggests that while the words are often used interchangeably, the connotations are a bit different. In today’s lexicon, the word geek usually suggests a person with special expertise, e.g., a computer geek, whereas the word nerd suggests social ineptness. Nevertheless, he contends that neither is perceived as a “cool” moniker.

Anderegg further asserts that in the US, math, science and computer science are courses that younger people too often associates with nerds and geeks. He adds that the negative connotations of these words are taking a toll on the US workforce. And, he may be right! Fewer college-aged Americans are majoring in science and engineering and US competitiveness in math and science has been steadily declining for the past 20 years or more. According to Dr. Anderegg the best way to combat these trends is to attempt to eliminate the words geeks and nerds from the American lexicon and “banish them to the linguistic dustbin.” To that end his most recent book, “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We need More of Them” may be a step in the right direction to convince young Americans that more engineers and scientists will be required for the US to remain competitive in today’s rapidly changing global economy. 

Not surprisingly, I think that science, engineering and technology are pretty cool and mistakenly get a bad rap because of the way in which science and math are taught at the primary and secondary educational levels. Put simply, many of the teachers’ currently teaching math and science don’t have sufficient breadth or depth to teach the subjects that they are asked to teach! One way to begin to change this is to convince some very hip, newly minted PhDs (you know who you are) that pursuing careers as high school biology and biotechnology teachers is—despite assertions to the contrary—a pretty cool thing to do! Call me crazy but I think this is what it is going to take to reinvigorate America’s competitiveness in science and technology! After all, nerds will be nerds, geeks will be geeks and scientists will be scientists....not that there is anything wrong with that!

Hat tip to David Anderegg!

Until next time....

Good Luck and Good Teaching!!!!!!!!!!!!

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There has been a growing reliance on the use of online tools to teach science to primary, secondary and college students. This makes sense because anybody who has pursued a science career will tell you that using web-based programs, applications and searches is absolutely essential when conducting scientific research. To that end, Amber Johnson at onlinecourses.org sent me an article that details some really cool educational add-on tools that are available for the Firefox browser.

I highly recommend that science educators at all levels check out the post and evaluate some of these interesting tools!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Teaching!!!!!!!!

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Over the past ten years or so, pundits have been warning that the US is losing its competitive edge and that it is no longer the world’s leading nation when it comes to innovation in science and technology. Measuring national competitiveness and innovation is very tricky business and until now, most of evidence to support these claims has been anecdotal. According to an article in today’s New York Times, a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation suggests that the US ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions based on 16 indicators that measure innovation and competitiveness including venture capital investment, numbers of per capita researchers, research spending and educational achievement. 

While the results of Foundation study may be troubling (if you are a US citizen), another recent study conducted by the World Economic Forum found that America ranked first in innovation and global competition. However the forum’s report was based entirely on opinion survey data.  Like the forum report, a study conducted by the Rand Corporation last year, also found that “the US was not in any imminent danger of losing its competitive advantage in science and technology.” The use of the word “imminent” is perhaps the most telling aspect of the Rand Corporation’s conclusion about American competitiveness.

The US lost ground to much smaller countries like Sweden, Finland, Taiwan, Singapore and also to one of it's main competitors, China.  Unlike the US, all of these countries are pursuing government-sponsored initiatives designed to promote innovation and global competitiveness. Some of the elements of these initiatives include education, workforce development training, intellectual property protection and immigration. Surprisingly, results from the foundation report (adjusted for population and size of each economy) showed that the US ranked sixth in venture capital investment (Sweden was first); fifth in corporate research and development spending (Japan was number one) and fourth in the number of science and technology researchers (again Sweden was first). Over all, Singapore ranked first in innovation and competitiveness. As some of you may know, Singapore--for the past 10 years--has heavily invested in the life sciences and has managed to induce some of world’s leading bioscientists to immigrate.

One of the main recommendations of the report suggests that the federal government ought to follow the lead of the individual states, many of which developed state government-sponsored programs designed to attract investment, talent and improve the work force skills of  local would be employees. Further, the report specifically recommends that the federal government offers tax breaks and incentives to induce American companies to innovate at home rather than outsource R&D activities abroad. Some of these incentives could include tax research tax credits  and increased federal funding or corporate tax breaks for workforce development programs.

Finally, one of the most shocking statistics that I heard in President Obama’s speech to Congress last evening was that 50% of American students drop out of high school and over 50% of college students never complete their education. This begs the question: How can America expect to remain competitive when a majority of its population is less educated than the rest of the developed world? 

A past commitment to education is what propelled the US to become a world leader in innovation and competitiveness.  To regain its past status as an innovator, the US must overhaul and vastly improve is primary, secondary and post secondary education system. This is something that cannot wait—the future of American depends on it!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting ( give teaching a shot)

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Convincing students and adults that science can be fun and even cool at times can be a very challenging proposition. This is mostly because science is perceived as “being hard” and in many cases, the people who teach science are not appropriately trained. Consequently sciences classes are frequently boring and unimaginative. Nevertheless, creative scientists can sometimes figure out ways to overcome these negative perceptions of science. One of the best examples of this is the use of the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) in some so-called consumer products.  While this application of GFP may pose ethical dilemmas for some, I haven’t met many children or adults who don’t think that transgenic mice, fish or flowers that glow green, red, blue or yellow (or a combination of these colors) in dark aren’t cool! While this wasn’t GFP’s intended use—the scientists who first demonstrated GFP’s utility as a genetic engineering application won a Noble prize last year—it certainly exposed the lay public to wonders and powers of modern day scientists.

With this in mind, researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) announced that they had created a 5-millimeter tall doll composed of living cells to demonstrate a new method for fabricating three-dimensional living biological structures. The researchers created the tiny figurine by cultivating 100,000 cell capsules — 0.1-millimeter balls of collagen, each coated with dozens of skin cells — together inside a doll-shaped mold for one day. After the cells had fused to form the doll-shaped structure, it was placed in a culture solution and survived for more than 24 hours. The researchers hope to use the method to create tissues and organs with complex cellular structures, which may prove useful in the fields of regenerative medicine and drug development.

While this new technology may never rival GFP and its multitude of applications, it shows that scientists like to have fun from time-to-time and can introduce complex scientific ideas to the lay public.  In my opinion, many kids get turned off to science at an early age because we scientists take ourselves too seriously and rarely explore ways to inject fun into sometimes tedious and boring material. After all, nobody made it fun for us and we became scientists anyway! We live in a different world now and I can see from watching my own children grow, that today’s  kids today are inquisitive, creative, comfortable with sophisticated technologies and open to new ideas—requisite traits for all scientists!

Unlike the past eight years, a new window of opportunity exists to challenge and convince young people that science is fun and can be very cool at times. To accomplish this, we science educators must step outside of our comfort zones and begin to inject some fun and wonderment into science. The kids will love it and I suspect so will we!

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Teaching!!!!!!!!!!

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I had many discussions with undergraduate students at the ABRCMS in Orlando last week who were interested in pursuing PhD degrees in the biomedical sciences. I felt that I had an ethical and moral responsibility as a former academic and career development professional to tell them that the job market for PhDs is not good and that it is likely to get worse over the next few years. These discussions prompted me to revisit the role and contributions of tenure to the lack of academic jobs in the US today.

As I stated in a previous post, systemic changes must be made to the current academic paradigm to increase the likelihood that PhDs will be able to find jobs at the end of their training. In that post, I suggested that abolishing tenure and replacing it with renewable, performance-based five year contracts may help to reduce the glut of jobless PhDs by freeing up a small percentage of new faculty positions every five years. While this approach has been tried at several academic institutions, it has been largely been deemed unsuccessful. That said, I came across a provocative article in today’s New York Times about a bold new tenure proposal put forth by Michelle Rhee, the new, 38-year old Chancellor of the Washington, DC school system.

Ms Rhee’s revolutionary proposal offers tenured teachers salaries raises of up to $40,000 per year to give up tenure. It is important to note she has not proposed to completely abolish tenure. Under her proposal, teachers would choose between two compensation options—the green or red plans. Salaries for teachers in the green plan would rise meteorically, nearly doubling by 2010, but they would have to give up tenure for one year, after which they would need a principal’s recommendation to keep their job or face dismissal. Teachers who choose the red plan would also get big pay raises but would lose seniority rights that allow them to bump more junior teachers if their school closes or is overhauled. Red plan teachers who are not hired by other schools would either have to take early retirement, a buyout or face eventual dismissal. I like her plan because poorly- or under performing teachers can opt to take the cash and then either drastically improve to keep their higher paying jobs or do nothing, get paid well for a year or two and then get fired.

While Ms. Rhee’s proposal may work at the primary and secondary school levels, it likely would not be effective at the college and postgraduate levels, where salaries vary widely and are largely grant driven. Instead, I propose that tenure-for-life should remain intact at these institutions but be replaced with a “for cause” tenure review system. This system is tried and true and similar models have been successfully used for over 100 years by employers and labor unions. In this model, management and its unions agree upon the job responsibilities and performance metrics for individual that must be met each year, e.g. an annual performance review.  If a person is under performing or fails to meet his/her performance metrics, an employer can attempt to dismiss the employee “for cause” reasons.  However, before a dismissal for cause can occur, the employer must convince a judge or arbitrator in a hearing that the employee in question has violated the “dismissal for cause” provisions.  Because an employer must prove that an employee has violated the provisions that constitute for cause dismissal, the “for cause” claims against individual employees must be fastidiously documented and vigorously substantiated. This prevents employers from arbitrarily firing employees who are either outspoken troublesome or disruptive. According to my wife, who has been a union-side labor lawyer and union representative for 20 year, this system works well because the players (management and unions) all understand, abide by and play according to the rules of the game.

So what are some of the performance-based “for cause” metrics that I think ought to be considered for yearly evaluations of tenured professors? They are not much different than those currently used to adjudicate tenure decisions. That said, I propose the following five categories: 1) teaching, 2) publication record, 3) grant support, 4) institutional service and 5) commitment to innovation. In my opinion, adoption of the “for cause” tenure review model would help to do two things: improve the overall performance of tenured faculty members and provide newly minted PhDs and postdoctoral fellows with regularly occurring new job opportunities.

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!

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