postdocs to faculty- yet another point

[Julia Frugoli]

Another point about 2 year post-docs?

how would someone with only a two year post-doc do in the granting pools 
as new faculty?  As my mentor has pointed out, it may be possible to get 
a faculty position on a short post-doc, but it'd be awful hard to get 
tenure, because you'd have a hard time getting funding.

A reviewer of a recent grant of my husband's took points off on the 
"expertise of PI" question (I forget exactly what it's called) because 
although my husband did two post-docs, one in one bacterial system, and 
another in a different bacterial system on iron regulated genes, he had 
not done a post-doc on iron regulated genes in the first system, which 
was the proposal he was fielding.  This kind of mentality seems awfully 
short-sighted on the part of the reviewer to me (can a scientist not 
apply what he/she has learned from 2 different projects to a new one?)   
It also bodes ill for someone trying to get a grant fresh off a two year 
post-doc.  Unless you've already done it and published it, you can't 
clear the high bar to get the almost perfect rating needed in today's  
grant world (by the way, this was a "Research Undergraduate Institution" 
grant-supposedly "easier" for people who don't have PhD programs at 
their university).

The "problem" in science has gotten much bigger than paying post-docs or 
the length of time, as we've disscussed here before, the bubble has 
risen to the level of junior faculty who are now being squeezed out of 
tenure because of the funding situation.  
Julia Frugoli
Dartmouth College

visiting grad student at
Texas A&M University
Department of Biological Sciences
College Station, TX 77843
409-845-0663
FAX 409-847-8805

"Evil is best defined as militant ignorance."
																										Dr. M. Scott Peck