“I was dead sure I’d end up as a university professor. I surprised myself by taking this position,” says Archana Raja, who in 2018 turned down tenure-track offers from prestigious universities to join the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a staff scientist.
Raja’s time is split 50-50 between running her own research group and working with outside users. Her research centers on tuning bandgap, charge, energy transport, and other electronic properties of two-dimensional materials by modulating the local electromagnetic environment through substrate engineering. “I manage three labs,” she says, “with optics, lasers, and cryogenics. We do sample fabrication and characterization.” In working with outside users, Raja looks for projects that are “scientifically adjacent” to her own research. “That’s how I can best support them,” she says. Typically, users come to the Molecular Foundry, one of five Department of Energy nanoscale research centers, for stays of up to several months. “I’ve been exposed to other fields through the users,” she says.
Clinching her decision to accept the job, Raja says, were the Molecular Foundry’s wide range of facilities, its emphasis on teamwork, and its mission to democratize science. “We foster collaborations with researchers from 30 states and 27 countries,” she says.
Elizabeth Green (left) is a staff scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. Here she virtually assists Ingrid Stolt, at the time a PhD student at Northwestern University, with NMR measurements on a single crystal of a cuprate superconductor using the lab’s 32-tesla superconducting magnet. When she is not working with external users, Green conducts her own research on exotic spin states of frustrated magnetic compounds.
Elizabeth Green (left) is a staff scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. Here she virtually assists Ingrid Stolt, at the time a PhD student at Northwestern University, with NMR measurements on a single crystal of a cuprate superconductor using the lab’s 32-tesla superconducting magnet. When she is not working with external users, Green conducts her own research on exotic spin states of frustrated magnetic compounds.
At the Molecular Foundry, staff scientists receive startup funds, raise money to support students and postdocs, and pursue career tracks that culminate in permanent positions. They are also evaluated on their research records and may be paid more than their university faculty counterparts.
More generally, though, staff-scientist positions come with myriad titles and responsibilities. Jobs might involve running a lab for an individual faculty member, writing code, or overseeing the budget for a user facility. With the notable exception of government laboratory positions, the pay tends to be lower and more precarious than for either faculty or industry jobs.
Despite their variety, the roles of many staff scientists share some broad-brush similarities. For the most part, staff-scientist positions involve helping other scientists either directly by working alongside them or indirectly through maintaining or developing equipment. They are key to the functioning of a facility but often have low visibility. Staff scientists stay closely connected to the nitty-gritty of research throughout their careers, and many of them have their hand in a wide spectrum of research topics. Few teach courses, but many serve as mentors. Competing for grant money is seldom required—and it can be tricky on account of staff scientists’ status or agency restrictions.
Skill sets and job security
Kris Hagel became a staff scientist through chance and circumstance. In the early 1990s, while he was a postdoc in nuclear physics at Texas A&M University’s Cyclotron Institute, he applied for faculty positions. After two years, his adviser offered to keep him on as a staff scientist. “We had a gentleman’s agreement,” says Hagel. “I would split my time 50-50 between taking care of the computing facility at the cyclotron and doing research.”
A large portion of his job is being the help desk, Hagel says. On the research side, he helps graduate students with their experiments and analysis, but he doesn’t serve on thesis committees. He publishes original research and attends conferences; the research directions are set by his group leader.
As an undergraduate in the 1970s, Ron Fox worked at Michigan State University’s cyclotron laboratory. He then headed to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign intending to do a PhD. Instead, because he missed developing software, he completed his master’s in experimental nuclear physics and then returned to Michigan State as a staff scientist. He’s still there.
Fox writes and maintains code for the facility and for individual users. “I interact with users to iterate so they get what they need. I like being able to develop something useful from nothing and making it well structured.” His day-to-day activities vary. “It can be immersive development. It can be chatting with people about what they need me to do. It can be running around responding to requests.” The least enjoyable part of his job? “The high interruption rate. There are days when responding to requests is all I do.”
Fox says he’s respected for what he delivers. He and his colleagues support more than three-quarters of a million lines of code. But, he adds, the experimental science staff and administrators “for the most part don’t comprehend what it takes to produce this stuff.” That lack of understanding, he says, “has made it difficult to adequately staff” the programming group.
A purposeful trajectory
As an undergraduate at Caltech in the 2000s, Anamaria Effler knew that a career in academia wasn’t for her. She saw professors dealing with bureaucracy, serving on committees, and applying for grants. “A lot of them don’t actually do research—they guide their students and postdocs,” she says. “To me, it seemed like a headache. It didn’t seem like a fun way to live.”
Anamaria Effler (left), a staff scientist at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s site in Livingston, Louisiana, and a colleague conduct measurements on one of the detector’s many vacuum-system chambers.
Anamaria Effler (left), a staff scientist at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s site in Livingston, Louisiana, and a colleague conduct measurements on one of the detector’s many vacuum-system chambers.
After graduating with her bachelor’s, Effler took a job as a technician at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facility in Hanford, Washington. “I fell in love with the detector. I really liked the project, the science, and the people,” she says. “But without a PhD, I didn’t have the background to do a lot of the cool stuff.” At LIGO, she saw firsthand the role played by staff scientists, and she went to Louisiana State University for her doctorate with the goal of landing such a position. She succeeded.
Since 2018 Effler has been a staff scientist at LIGO’s site in Livingston, Louisiana. “I work on mechanics, optics, lasers and quantum noise, magnetic coupling,” she says. Her main responsibility is to identify and reduce ambient noise in the interferometer. “We try to predict and characterize the different noise contributions, and to see which ones we can squash.” LIGO employs roughly 60 staff scientists in total; for an early career scientist with a PhD the starting salary is $70 000–$90 000.
Like Effler, Sandra Bruce knew early that she was uninterested in a traditional academic career. After earning her bachelor’s in physics at Harvey Mudd College in 2008, she took a job in industry working in optics. When she realized that “doors are much harder to open without a PhD,” she went to the University of Texas at Austin to earn her doctorate working on the Texas Petawatt Laser, the flagship facility of the university’s Center for High Energy Density Science. In 2018 she joined a startup company to work on high-power laser design. After being laid off during a rough patch for the startup, she ran her own consulting business for a while but then returned to the center as a staff scientist in 2020.
Bruce started off designing a clean room and additional beamlines for the petawatt laser and managing upgrades to its electrical, chilled-water, and vacuum systems. “There was a lot of creative liberty to decide what the space should look like and how to use the funds. I was given a budget to design the space,” she says. She recently became the center’s associate director.
“I have the best of all worlds,” says Bruce about her role as a university-based staff scientist. “I make sure the machine runs, I interact with academics, and I don’t have to do the publish-or-perish thing.” The pay is less than in the commercial sector, she says, but she “didn’t take a big hit.” Her salary comes out of grants, but she has health insurance and retirement benefits through the university. If the petawatt laser lost its funding, she’d be out of work.
Research, support, service
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, employs 80 staff scientists. In general, they split their time equally among research, user support, and service. But some staff scientists have vibrant research programs, while others focus on supporting users and maintaining equipment or developing experimental techniques, says Scott Hannahs, a staff scientist at the lab since 1993. Many of them appreciate the access to students that comes with the lab’s close connection to Florida State University.
When Hannahs went on the job market in the late 1980s and early 1990s, few faculty positions were available. After a postdoc and a stint as a visiting professor, he took a staff research position at MIT’s Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory. As NSF phased out funding for the lab by 1995, he moved to Tallahassee to help set up the new one. The job aligned with his interests and ability to design experiments, he says. Now the lab’s director of scientific instrumentation, he says he’s “paid higher than most full professors.”
Staff scientists, senior scientists, and students at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Carlos Hernandez-Garcia (front left) is the staff scientist responsible for the facility’s four electron-gun high-voltage systems. The pictured electron-gun test stand generates magnetized electron-beam pulses intended to cool relativistic ion beams in electron–ion collider accelerators.
Staff scientists, senior scientists, and students at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Carlos Hernandez-Garcia (front left) is the staff scientist responsible for the facility’s four electron-gun high-voltage systems. The pictured electron-gun test stand generates magnetized electron-beam pulses intended to cool relativistic ion beams in electron–ion collider accelerators.
Elizabeth Green has been a staff scientist at the magnet lab for about two years. She studies frustrated magnetic compounds with NMR. “I love the exotic spin states,” she says. “They may have applications in quantum computing.” Before she started at the magnet lab, her future boss told her she could choose what type of career to forge. “I like to publish, and I want grants to support postdocs and students,” she says. “Also, in the US, very few people do condensed-matter NMR, so my hope is to teach people the technique and see it grow.”
Research occupies about one-third of Green’s time. The rest is divided between supporting users and developing instruments—all on a 32-tesla superconducting magnet. New users typically start on Mondays and work at the lab—remotely during the pandemic—for a week. “I like getting to know the people and learning about new science,” she says.
Green’s previous position was at the Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Germany, where she spent seven years—first as a postdoc and then as a staff scientist—after she earned her PhD at Florida State in 2012. The work in Germany was similar, but her job was more secure because of that country’s employment laws. Trading a permanent position for one that depends on grants was the main hesitancy she had about returning to Florida. “But as long as the magnet lab is funded by NSF, I’ll get paid. And the lab does great work.”
Theory and practice
Staff-scientist positions are predominantly in experiment because of the user-support component. But theorists also work as staff scientists. One is Sinéad Griffin, who since 2018 has been a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Molecular Foundry and its materials science division. “A big part of my research is designing the next-generation dark-matter detectors,” she says. The condensed-matter theorist works with high-energy physicists. In her computations and simulations, Griffin applies models of dark matter to predict how it might interact with different materials. Her work yields recommendations for what could make good detector media.
As a DOE facility, the Molecular Foundry is mission driven. “What we work on is dictated by the host lab and DOE,” says Griffin. “Built into that is pivoting your research accordingly. That’s great if your interests align.” A plus, she says, is the team-based approach. “There is more emphasis on collaboration at national labs than in most university departments.” A minus, she says, is the confusion among some peers about what a staff scientist does: “There is some outward appearance that we are more like technicians, rather than scientists who forge and lead research projects.”
Agham Posadas is a rarer breed of staff scientist in that he works for an individual professor, Alexander Demkov at the University of Texas at Austin. A theorist, Demkov started a lab where one current focus is electro-optically active oxides on silicon for potential applications in neuromorphic and quantum computing. Posadas joined the lab as a postdoc in 2007, and after a couple of years the job morphed into a staff-scientist position.
Lab management—including equipment maintenance and mandatory safety reports—takes about 60% of his time, Posadas says. The rest goes to conducting his own research and mentoring students. “I don’t have to worry about writing grants to get funding,” he says.
Posadas says his pay falls short of a new professor’s. And he doesn’t know whether he’d keep his job if Demkov moved or retired. All around, though, he appreciates the work–life balance. To physicists on the job market, he says: “If you are not intent on a faculty position, a staff-scientist position is a good option.”
