Life scientists’ flight to biotech labs stalls important academic research

Nov. 15, 2023

Thumỹ Phan for STAT

Step inside Natasha Sheybani’s office at the University of Virginia, where she runs a bioengineering lab, and you’ll find a kaleidoscopic sea of sticky notes.

She uses purple for ideas sparked by meetings, orange for future grant proposals. But she’s most excited about the yellow stickies, which Sheybani saves for moonshots: projects that are high-risk and high-reward.

For now, those are just thought experiments. “We actually are not doing those projects,” she said.

That’s because Sheybani has been unable to hire a postdoctoral researcher since starting her lab in 2021. She’s come tantalizingly close, twice, making offers that seemed like done deals. But in each case the candidate opted for a job at a biotech company.

She’s not alone. Academia is in the midst of an unprecedented exodus of life science researchers, many of whom are leaving for lucrative jobs in the private sector. STAT has written extensively about this seismic workforce shift over the past year, and new reporting reveals it’s already having a detrimental impact on basic research, slowing the pace of scientific progress. Faculty struggling to recruit and retain researchers spoke openly about promising hypotheses going untested, grant dollars sitting unused, and projects languishing in limbo for months to years.

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