On staff at a National Lab

In terms of day to day, the life of a postdoc at a National Lab (NL) is very similar to that of a postdoc in academia (as far as I can tell from observing postdocs when I was a student), except there are no students. This means that postdocs are at the bottom of the status chain, except for summer students.

Once you change over to staff, though, your day to day experience changes a lot. First of all, now you are required to do service commitments. This can be serving on committees, doing science-related administrative tasks (safety coordinator, internal review organizer, running the seminars, etc), and is kind of similar to academic service. This is supposed to take up 20% of your time, but as always, it varies by whatever the task is. As a new staff member, you are on probation. Your probationary period lasts 3 years, after which you are much harder to get rid of. It is kind of like tenure, but the bar is much lower. Just do your job, and you are pretty sure to make it.

As a staff member, you are now required to have at least 2 publications per year (at least one is supposed to be first author until you reach a managerial level). Furthermore, most staff members work on 2 or more projects. This is by design at my old lab, where we could only pull 50% of salary from any one grant. You also need to raise money. At many labs, you are soft money, and must raise salary + 200-300% to be fully covered. You also need to cover whatever supplies you need (though at the lab, you will likely have access to any equipment you can think of, so you likely won't need to travel unless you need something really specialized). This can be difficult in times of lean budgets (like the past decade in physical science). As a result, I knew people who were paid from 4 different grants. They were supposed to work one day a week on each project, plus one for service (which is just insane!). Once you raise your own salary, any additional money can be used to pay other staff to work on your project, or to hire postdocs. If you are at a hard money lab, you just need to raise money for postdocs and supplies.

You can pretty much work on anything you can get funded, which is great. However, the high overhead means that it is not worth the effort to apply for anything less that $300k/year or so. If you don't have enough funding to work on your own projects, you need to find something else that has funding to work on. In practice, this will be found for you, but it may be something you don't want to do. This is how deadwood gets traded around form project to project.

Where can we get money? Lots of places, but some won't pay federal salaries (even if you are soft money) like the NIH. Staff at NLs compete for lab directed funds (LDR or internal research), which cover 50% or so of salary at my old lab. The rest comes from DoD, DoE, industrial collaborations, DARPA, USDA, NASA, and other similar agencies that will fund NL research. NSF is strictly educational (as so off limits), and many Federal sources are not really large enough to pay anything other than a postdoc in practive (NASA, USDA, FDA). Fortunately DoD and DoE have some "intramural" funds which are designated for NL research. On the whole, the job is a lot like an academic position, only you will still work at the bench for quite a while after becoming a PI. This is what makes it great training for a future academic career!

Life at a National Lab as a young scientist

I took a postdoc at a National Lab (NL) after completing my PhD. I was really tired of academia, and of universities in general, and I thought I wanted to start a career in industrial research. I mostly interviewed for industrial positions--the interview at NL was mostly a "why not?" interview, and not a planned move. However, the research was a fascinating new direction away form the sub-field I worked in as a PhD, and taking the position wouldn't preclude going back to industry when done, so I took the position at NL when it was offered. I was really excited to move my research in a new direction, and the NL postdoc was a great choice for me.

There are a few advantages to doing a postdoc at a NL. First, the pay is excellent. Like $60k+ excellent with full benefits. This is more than some starting assistant profs get! That said, the main benefit is in the resources. At most (all?) NLs, it is much, much easier to buy equipment than to hire people. Budgets are annual, so hiring people means supporting them. Many NLs are soft money only, or soft money for everyone except staff, so hiring can be risky for a PI. Furthermore, there is overhead of 200-300% or more on salaries but no overhead on equipment or supplies. This also means that your supervisor will let you buy things that will save your valuable time, rather than trying to save money by preferring cheaper but labor intensive protocols.

An additional benefit is that most of your colleagues will be PhDs or experienced techs. Many are experts in their technique who have many years of bench experience. Projects have a very fast ramp-up time, and usually only last 2-3 years. Independence and self-motivation are greatly prized. Your colleagues will expect you to contribute your part from day 1. The best part is that even though as a postdoc, you are hired for some specific task, you can pretty much work on whatever you want as long as you are getting your assigned work done. Furthermore, everyone at the lab needs to get 2 papers a year, so people are inclined to help with projects in exchange for authorship. It is much more straightforward to establish a track record as an independent researcher under these conditions if you are talented, independent, and motivated.

Other minor advantages--you can attend lots of conferences. I went to 2 per year as a postdoc, plus grant agency review meetings. We got a decent amount of good seminar speakers (but not as many as at a university). It is fairly easy to get both industrial and academic collaborations going, since you are viewed as less competition for IP as a government employee (the Federal government has an automatic license for patents, so collaborators have right of first refusal to pursue patents). If you do get a patent from your work at a NL, the inventors split 15%, which is quite generous.

That said, there are also significant downsides. First of all, if you intend to go into academia, your postdoc advisor will be of limited help. S/he won't know how to apply, how to help you with your application materials, and may not know the style of an appropriate letter of reference. There is a lot of deadwood in a NL. These people do minimum work to get their 2 papers a year (which don't need to be first author papers) and act as a research drag. Getting them out of your way can be difficult. In addition, many staff scientists prefer a hands off approach to mentoring because they are used to working with peers, not students or mentees. If you are not independent or a self-starter, you can float aimlessly for a while. There are few dedicated techs for instruments, and no students (except for summers, and with some exceptions), so you need to run everything yourself or convince someone else to do it for you. You will be competing with academic groups that can throw much more manpower at a problem, so you have to hope that being smart with fewer, better trained personnel outweighs the brute force approach possible with an army of students.

Where do people go after a postdoc at a NL? From my cohort of postdocs, I'd say ~25% stay at a NL as staff (this varies by lab, but many labs like to try before they buy), ~25% go into industry, ~20% go into academia, 15% go into non-research science positions (working for journals, granting agencies, the patent office, or other government non-research positions), and 15% leave science all together.