When Covid-19 hit Seattle, Anzela Niraula worried about the bus. Public transportation during a viral pandemic is less than ideal. How, the 32-year-old postdoctoral scholar wondered, would she get to work at the University of Washington, several miles away? She had no car or bike, so she walked, adding an hour to her commute each way.
Next, Niraula worried about her mice. To study how the brain controls feeding and metabolism in people, her research relied on caring for a cohort of 150 mice, which she fed an especially greasy diet for five months before collecting their brain cells and studying them under a microscope. Yet in early March it became clear that in a few days her lab, like most other labs at the university and others like it across the country, would be shut down for weeks, maybe months. Who would maintain the mice? In the rush, Niraula had to sacrifice a fifth of her cohort and flash-freeze their brains, ruining the cells she needed to study. The rest were saved for use in other studies. Five months of research, down the drain.
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That made her worry about her funding. Come to think of it—she wasn’t sure what was going to become of the money that paid her salary and kept her postdoctoral research afloat. A large nonprofit health organization, not the University of Washington, was funding her research on obesity and vascular disease. She’d heard of researchers losing similar funding since Covid-19 struck, but she didn’t know anything about the status of her money for 2021. “Usually the process is a feed-forward loop,” she says. “You get one grant, generate data, then apply for another grant using that data you’ve gathered.” Without grant funding, the dominos can’t fall in the way that young researchers need them to: no funding, no papers, no new grants, no career.
Then she read the news that international students might be forced to leave the country. In June, President Donald Trump temporarily suspended new H-1B visas, blocking hundreds of thousands of international workers, including scholars and researchers, from entering the country until at least the end of the year. (Some postdoctoral scholars use the H-1B visa, which is a work visa, to live and research in the US after they’ve earned their PhD.) In July, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials announced that they would bar international students from the country if they chose to participate only in online courses, which is what many universities are offering during a pandemic that’s now killed over 170,000 people in the US. That directive was withdrawn after a successful court challenge by Harvard and MIT. But the H-1B suspension remains, and Niraula, who was born in Nepal and came to the US for college, worries about the status of her Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa, an extension of the F-1 student visa. Could it be the next type to be suspended? “The main fear comes from all the uncertainty,” she says.
Covid-19 couldn’t have come at a worse time for a generation of young scientists like Niraula. This fall, precisely as tens of thousands of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers enter a narrow, high-stakes window to learn hands-on skills, secure funding, build lasting relationships with their mentors, and establish long-term careers, they instead find themselves quarantining at home without a clue what the future holds. Their situations vary by university, degree, and program, but their concerns are shared. Funding is tenuous. Access to labs where they will be mentored and prove themselves is in short supply. The job market is rough. Postdocs who’ve already found a lab where they’ll continue their research worry about job security. International students and academics, who according to the National Science Board make up about half of the academics and a third of the science and engineering workers across the US, worry about their visa status. Gender gaps yawn wider than ever. Stress and fear run high.
“All of the postdocs and graduate students in my lab are fantastic people and fantastic scientists,” says Anna Mapp, a professor of chemical biology at the University of Michigan and the associate dean of the university’s Rackham Graduate School, which offers more than 180 degree programs. “But, as a mentor, I worry what is in store for them.”
Take, for example, the dilemma faced by Rachel Boyd. The rising second-year PhD student studies human genetics at Johns Hopkins University. When Covid-19 hit, she was in the second of three three-month-long lab rotations, the standard round-robin chance to feel out labs before selecting the one where she’d start her career. Picking her thesis lab amounted to a major career decision: Would she like to focus on barcoding the DNA of mice or developing drugs to fight Parkinson’s Disease for the next five years or so? Since by April many nonessential labs across the country were fully or partly closed, she completed her second and third lab rotations mostly online. It was a hard way to get to know a workplace.
This summer, now that many labs are open and following strict guidelines for occupancy, social distancing and the use of personal protective equipment, university officials allowed some, but not all, of Boyd’s classmates to begin trying a fourth lab—another shot at the right placement. Rather than try a fourth lab, where she might be competing with an incoming class, Boyd chose the lab she’d been able to work at in person, before the pandemic shut things down this spring. “I felt a lot of pressure to pick a lab by the August deadline, because I need to pay my mortgage,” she says. (No thesis lab, no funding.) And though her situation wasn’t ideal, she felt lucky. “A lot of PhD students are not nearly as fortunate,” she said. “The pandemic forced a lot of people to settle in order to get paid.”
Zachary Besich, another first-year PhD candidate studying human genetics at Johns Hopkins, didn’t receive an National Institutes of Health funding grant for the lab he’d been planning on joining for the past six months, where he hoped to study mood disorders and the spatial organization of the brain. “The lab is doing good work, and I do believe in a non-corona world [my] work would have been funded this cycle,” he says. “I don’t blame the lab. That’s a business decision.”
That left him two options: one lab with a postdoc in Iceland and a principal investigator in New York, one with a principal investigator living in Denmark. Even in the age of Zoom, time differences and plain old distance can make communicating and working in a lab from halfway around the world difficult. But Besich needs a lab to continue his degree—and to receive his university stipend to pay his bills, including a new lease he signed just before the pandemic hit. “If for some reason I couldn’t stay in the program, I would be underwater,” he says. “I have a masters to fall back on. I paid out of pocket for that. If I have to, I can go get a job to pay off my student debt.”
Like Niraula, thousands of other international scholars across the country are worried about the government suspending their visas, forcing them out of the country, derailing their career paths and scattering their opportunities. When ICE announced the July directive requiring international students take in-person classes, or else, Nayon Park, a rising fourth-year chemistry PhD candidate at the University of Washington, thought she might have to return to her native South Korea and be banned from re-entering the US for an unknown period of time. Park is a member of the university’s Union of Academic Student Employees and Postdocs, which she says protects her against losing her university appointment—but likely wouldn’t be able to overturn a suspension of her F-1 student visa, should the Trump administration try to expand their restrictions. Leaving the US would severely limit her research career opportunities and significantly set back her graduation timeline. “To weather this pandemic with that added pressure of whether or not we can legally stay in this country, in order to continue the work we’re doing, often to advance our knowledge to fight this very pandemic—it’s incredibly frustrating,” Park says.
PhD students who are also the parents of young children face an additional set of burdens. Katie Kuhl, a 35-year-old PhD candidate at the University of Washington studying education and policy research, collected the data for her dissertation in 2018 and 2019. Shortly after she finished collecting it, she and her husband had a baby. Now that the pandemic has cancelled their daycare plans, Kuhl has taken on primary childcare duties, by choice. “While I anticipated returning to my data around March or April,” she says, “I effectively didn’t.”
Providing childcare at home, while also teaching an online program that is part of her PhD, has pushed Kuhl’s dissertation’s completion back at least six months. “The concern is adding more time to something that took a lot of time to begin with—and, of course, potentially impacting the ability to finish at all,” she says.
She’s not the only young female scientist facing a publication problem: multiple studies show the pandemic has affected them more than their male counterparts when it comes to publishing papers, perhaps because male academics are more likely to have a partner who does not work outside the home, and can therefore take on increased childcare and housework duties while they work. An analysis of preprint papers in the early months of the pandemic by Megan Frederickson at the University of Toronto found that women were contributing a smaller proportion of all research papers than before Covid-19. The inequity was more pronounced among first authors, who are usually earlier in their careers. That’s important, because early papers can be the springboard for a scientist’s career. “Once you’re an established scientist, your job doesn’t depend on every paper you publish,” says Andrew Pawlowski, a postdoctoral fellow working on DNA sequencing methods for the microbiome at Harvard’s Wyss Institute. “But earlier in your career, if you don’t publish, you don’t get a job.”
Some universities and programs guarantee their students full tuition and a living stipend during their PhD research, often in return for research or teaching assistant duties, and many of the PhDs WIRED contacted credit their schools and programs for working hard to protect them and their education during the pandemic. Like many university deans across the country, Mike Solomon has managed to keep most PhD students at the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School on their grants, whether they’re private, government-funded, or funded by the university itself. He’s also seen the university’s labs at least partially reopened. Some lab research, and even some international travel, are back. But the current phase of the pandemic, he says, “holds a lot of uncertainty” for graduate students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. “The longer-term question now,” Solomon says, “is what does career development look like for graduate students? What are the opportunities? It’s an ongoing question for us.”
Just like he did before the pandemic, Solomon is urging PhD students to consider planning around “expanded career paths,” including jobs in public policy, public engagement, and industry. “You can get lab training and become a PI [principal investigator]. But a STEM PhD is also great training for a host of other careers,” he says. Given the hundreds of universities that have frozen academic hiring throughout 2020—“the new normal” according to Nature—it’s something many PhD students may have to consider.
Niraula has always imagined becoming an academic at a liberal arts college in the US. But now, everything is up in the air. Her visa runs out in May, and she has no idea if she’ll be able to renew it. As far as funding—no news is good news. “They still haven’t said anything to me about it, and I want to take that to mean that I still do have funding,” she says.
Most researchers score their long-term jobs by applying for fellowships—bigger and bigger dominos falling—until they land a big enough grant to start their own lab. To earn the large grant she wants from the National Institutes of Health, Niraula must apply within four years of earning her PhD. The NIH recently announced an 8-month pause to the clock, but the pandemic and its disruptions aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Tick tock.