21ST CENT. BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH JOB MARKET: CENSUS DATA TO INFORM POLICY & CAREER DECISIONS

The U.S. biomedical scientific enterprise has a long, deep history of innovation, global leadership, and scientific advancements that have improved the health and wellbeing of humankind. Biomedical scientific careers ebb and flow with funding availability, and funding drives this workforce in terms of size and structure. The stakes are high for becoming a scientist because large amounts of time and capital investments are required to be competitive in this profession and because the labor market is heavily dependent on the availability of external funding. Ideally, students and postdocs will make career decisions based on market data regarding the potential for future advancement and career expectations. Young scientists are struggling today more than they ever have in finding productive tenure-track academic employment. The landscape has drastically changed as numerous young scientists take alternative jobs in industry and government, some of them even choosing these jobs over academia. Here we use historical census data to analyze the size and shape of the U.S. biomedical workforce. We plan to use this data to empower early career scientists and the senior investigators who mentor them with information about today’s labor market that they can use to help young scientists make informed decisions about their career paths. Poster Objectives: a) use of U.S. Census data to analyze the growth of the biomedical workforce 1950-2014; b) focused analysis on the number of biomedical PhDs, by age and industry, 1983-2014; and, c) analysis of workforce demographics by race, gender, international status and marital status over time.