A Model for Postdoctoral Education That Promotes Minority and Majority Success in the Biomedical Sciences

Abstract

How does the United States maintain the highest-quality research and teaching in its professional science workforce and ensure that those in this workforce are effectively trained and representative of national demographics? In the pathway to science careers, the postdoctoral stage is formative, providing the experiences that define the independent work of one's first faculty position. It is also a stage in which underrepresented minorities (URMs) disproportionately lose interest in pursuing academic careers in science and, models suggest, a point at which interventions to increase proportions of URMs in such careers could be most effective. We present a mixed-methods, case study analysis from 17 years of the Fellowships in Research and Science Teaching (FIRST) postdoctoral program, to our knowledge the largest and longest continuously running science postdoctoral program in the United States. We demonstrate that FIRST fellows, in sharp contrast to postdocs overall, are inclusive of URMs (50% African American; 70% women) and as or more successful in their fellowships and beyond as a comparison group (measured by publication rate, attainment of employment in academic science careers, and eventual research grant support). Analysis of alumni surveys and focus group discussions reveals that FIRST fellows place highest value on the cohort-driven community and the developmental teaching and research training the program provides.

FIGURE 1.

Rate of publishing by FIRST fellows. The frequency of postdoctoral publishing is described by a Poisson (exponential) distribution with excess zero events (postdocs who do not publish). For a Poisson distribution, the population mean and variance are equal. Most traditional parametric statistics cannot be used to test hypotheses (but specialized tests to compare means can be used; see Methods).

FIGURE 2.

(A) Employment outcomes for FIRST fellows and national T32 fellows. The employment outcomes of 145 FIRST alumni and 644 former T32 fellows are divided into business/industry (black), university/academic (red), and other (green), including self-employed; primary or secondary school instructors; U.S., state, or local government. (B) Divides the university/academic category and the other category of A into component elements, showing an almost equal division of FIRST faculty into research-intensive, liberal arts, and minority-serving institutions. “Other” includes self-employed and primary or secondary school instructors.

FIGURE 3.

FIRST alumni grants. (A) Numerical data available from NIH about the mean time from completing a T32 postdoctoral fellowship until grant awards of various types. (B) Mean times from A are superimposed on the distribution of the number of FIRST fellows who have graduated from the program and remained in academic environments. (C) Based on the mean times and the times after leaving the FIRST program, it is possible to make conservative estimates of the number of grants FIRST fellows are likely to have been awarded to compare with the actual grants awarded. Although the numbers are small, FIRST fellows appear to have met expectations for acquiring grants. R01 equivalents include NSF awards that pay faculty salary and an indirect cost rate the same as a R01.