The Lisa Feldman Barrett lab

Science:

Each year, Lisa Feldman Barrett sends a fresh crop of newly minted Ph.D.s and postdocs out into the scientific job market. She is a professor of social psychology and neuroscience at Northeastern University in Boston, and like many scientists with large, active research labs, she watches with dismay as some Ph.D.s and postdocs struggle to find a secure job, as she did 2 decades ago. “In some ways the job market has gotten better,” she says, at least for women. The bias against female scientists is far from gone, “but the situation has definitely improved.” At the very least, overt exclusion of women in science is frowned upon. But on the whole, Barrett says, finding a secure job in academia is “much, much harder” than it used to be. When it comes to hiring tenure track researchers, “I’ve seen hiring committees judge candidates by how many Science and Nature papers they’ve published,” she says. “That’s crazy.”

Barrett didn’t even have to do a postdoc. The ink was still wet on her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Waterloo when, in 1992, she landed a job as an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University. “In my first year I was getting settled, getting projects started, recruiting undergrads,” she says. A year later she had graduate students, and she has been running her research lab ever since.

Read the whole story: Science