If you have an advanced degree in materials science, are passionate about engineered ceramics, have an entrepreneurial spirit with a talent for building business relationships, and like being at the intersection of industry, government, academia and a professional society, ACerS would like to talk to you!

Job Description
We are seeking a Corporate Program Development Manager to serve as the principal resource for ACerS corporate and industrial members, to grow this segment of membership and develop new information products and services. This position will facilitate channels of communication between Corporate, Academia and Government agency members. Will work with appropriate government agencies to generate funding for expansion of ACerS activities and mission, i.e., promoting the research and development of ceramic and advanced materials in manufacturing and the broader economy. Serve as ‘ombudsman’ for Corporate members so that they are represented in development of ACerS information products and services, e.g., workshops, newsletters and conferences. Create opportunities for building productive relationships between business executives, University technology transfer programs and appropriate government agencies.

The American Ceramic Society is a global leader in supporting scientific research, emerging technologies and current applications in ceramics and advanced materials systems. The Society’s 9000+ members include engineers, scientists, researchers, manufacturers, plant personnel, educators, students, marketing and sales professionals, and others in related materials disciplines from more than 80 countries.

Job Requirements
Minimum of MS (PhD preferred) in ceramics and/or materials science engineering. Five to seven years of experience in roles of escalating responsibility. Candidates must possess exceptional writing, speaking and communication skills with some experience in IP issues, tech transfer and product commercialization, government policy and project funding as it relates to the field of advanced materials. Ability to do grant writing and fundraising, engaging these same organizations, would also be desirable.

Desired personal characteristics: Self-motivated with an entrepreneur’s mindset, healthy self-confidence, and an ability to form strategic relationships with senior level personnel in corporate, government and academic settings.

For consideration, submit resume with cover letter, salary requirements and references via e-mail (preferred) to: jobs@ceramics.org

OR mail to:
The American Ceramic Society
Human Resources Department
600 N. Cleveland Avenue
Suite 210
Westerville, OH 43082

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Sir Alastair Pilkington. Credit: SGT.

The Society of Glass Technology announced that it is beginning an “early career” biennial £1000 award (about $1,600) to promote creativity and excellence in studies related to glass. SGT says the award will be named the Alastair Pilkington Award in honor of the man best known for his invention of the float glass process. The groups notes the award is apt because Sir Pilkington, himself, “was at the early stages of his career when he achieved this stunning innovation,” and “actively encouraged young people to share his enthusiasm for all things to do with glass.”

The general rules and criteria for this award are:

• Applicants may be from any glass field where publication in refereed journals is the norm, including glass science, technology, history, arcahaeometry, conservation, design, museology, etc.;
• There is no age limit, but under normal circumstances it is expected that applicants are under 40 years of age (this allows those who come into the glass field later in life to compete), and applicants must demonstrate that they have been employed in the glass field for no longer than seven years following training;
• Each applicant must provide the names, addresses and contact information of three references;
• Each applicant should submit, in English, his or her three (maximum) best peer-reviewed published papers in terms of quality and of substantial personal contribution, and the applicant should be the sole or first-named author, or be demonstrably the primary author, and each paper must be accompanied by a statement clearly defining the applicant’s contribution;
• The papers submitted must all have been published within a period not exceeding five years;
• Each paper must be submitted electronically as a PDF file corresponding to the final printed version in the journal concerned;
• Applicants will be limited to a maximum of three attempts for the award.
• Deadline for submission of applications is March 1, 2012, and submissions may be made via the website.

SGT says the process of judging the applications shall be under the aegis of the its Board of Fellows, which may form a subcommittee to consider the entries in detail and make recommendations to assist the Board in making this Award.

The group says the first award will be presented at the European Glass Society conference (pdf) to be held in Maastricht, Netherlands, June 3-6, 2012.

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Credit: Wikipedia.

According to Matt Marx, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, many engineers say noncompete agreements cause major disruptions in their careers and often force them to abandon their original vocation altogether.

In a study of 1,029 randomly selected engineers from the membership rolls of the IEEE, Marx found that nearly one-third who sign noncompete agreements shifted to jobs and industries that had little or nothing to do with their advanced degrees and skills. In an MIT news release, Marx says, ”When people take a career detour, they sometimes earn less money, lose touch with their colleagues, and their skills atrophy.”

Although many consider such agreements to be a standard practice in their field, Marx says his research shows that many engineers aren’t confronted with such agreements until after they are on the job. ”Seventy percent of people said they were informed only after they accepted the offer. Half the time it was after they showed up for work. On the first day, they enroll in a 401(k), set up direct deposit, and, oh yeah, are given this noncompete thing to sign. People get savvy as they get older, but a lot of people are blindsided by it,” he comments in the same release.

According to Marx, this blindsiding is not accidental. He says, “[F]irms strategically manage the process of getting workers to sign such contracts, waiting for workers’ bargaining position to weaken.”

One of Marx’s colleagues argues that noncompete agreements also create inefficiencies in the labor marketplace. ”It’s not a zero-sum game if you’re getting a good match between employees and firms,” says Olave Sorenson, who teaches at the Yale School of Management. “And, one of the difficulties with the noncompete agreements is that it makes it more difficult for employees to find the right firm for them.” Conversely, he notes, engineers and other high-skilled employees “are locked up in firms where they’re not creating as much value as they could elsewhere.”

Another problem Marx identifies is the patchwork quilt of state regulations and varying levels of legal enforcement and protections, which encourages out-of-state career changes.

Marx has authored a paper, “The Firm Strikes Back,” on this topic in the American Sociological Review (doi:10.1177/0003122411414822).

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Credit: P. Wray; ACerS

Last Monday the White House and National Science Foundation announced a new 10-year plan to increase workplace flexibilities to support American scientists and their families. One of the benefits discussed in this announcement is being able to delay or suspend grants for up to one year after a birth or adoption of a child. More details about this announcement can be found on the White House website.

Among the statistics quoted in the press announcement:

Women today currently earn 41 percent of PhD’s in STEM fields, but make up only 28 percent of tenure-track faculty in those fields. Reducing the dropout rate of women in STEM careers is especially important in the quest for gender equality because women in STEM jobs earn 33 percent more than those in non-STEM occupations and the wage gap between men and women in STEM jobs is smaller than in other fields.

Perhaps we will hear more details from NSF Director Subra Suresh at his plenary talk at MS&T’11 later this month.

The plan sounds like a step in the right direction because any woman in a STEM career can attest that sometimes we have trouble navigating our careers while balancing work and family needs. When I read The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering and Technology (published by the Harvard Business Review in 2008) I realized I was not alone. I was also shocked at the statistics for how many women leave STEM careers mid-career (52 percent!).

I think it is great that the NSF is addressing these issues and hopefully more funding agencies/universities will follow trend to help retain more women in science. For more on this topic, check out my recent blog post on “Navigating the Glass Maze.”

Brosnan is a writer and an editor of the Edison’s Desk blog, and a material scientist at GE Global Research.

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DOE Recovery Act Funds status, 9/30/11. Credit: recovery.gov

Two things out of the box: First, remember, permissum lector caveo (translation: What the hell does Peter know, anyway?). Second, the opinions expressed below are totally my own and should be blamed on no one else.

Thus forewarned … Nature has what strikes me as a very disturbing article out regarding the interesting ways funds from the American Recovery Reinvestment Act—you know, the ones earmarked to provide a sharp stimulus to direct and indirect hiring and spending in the science–technology sector—are being used for obviously non-stimulus purposes.

The story, “Stimulus-Response,” carries this summary one-liner: ”The United States’ 2009 financial stimulus bill has provided research with breathing space, rather than the sharp shot in the arm that many anticipated.”

(FYI, just so readers know where I am coming from, my personal point of view is that these types of stimulus programs can be excellent tools to quickly strengthen aggregate demand in the economy, especially during periods when borrowing rates are nearly zero, as long as the funding 1) is substantial in total size; 2) gets into the private economy; and 3) gets into economy quickly.)

Story author Colin Macilwain, seems like he is playing it overly safe or is unable to be able to make up his mind about what’s going on. On one hand, he correctly acknowledges that “the stimulus package as a whole was designed to create jobs and ease the pain of the recession, and at first the administration pledged to get this money distributed and spent as quickly as possible.” [emphasis added]

But from there onwards, the piece is a series of vignettes – focused on ARRA monies available at NIH, NSF and DOE’s Office of Science (collectively $15.1 billion) – about how interesting it is that researchers and institutions have unexpectedly used much of the money to buy “breathing space” for what already exists. For example, there’s this,

From the beginning, however, the funding pulse didn’t have quite the anticipated effects. Duke University in Durham, N.C., for example, expected a hiring rush after it attracted $210 million in ARRA funds, making it one of the ten most successful universities in the country in this regard, says Jim Siedow, Duke’s vice-provost for research. But staffing barely budged. “We gave a party that nobody came to,” he says. “A lot of people used the money to keep the people they already had.”

In the next paragraph, Macilwain reports

[D]espite the early political pressure to get the money out of the door quickly, agencies have allowed funds to be released gradually, to avoid waste.

Macilwain does suggest that whatever claims of job creation reported under ARRA funding are suspect because they rely on self-reported data and may reflect the continuation of previously existing jobs.

Finally, a chart accompanying the story says that NIH, NSF and the Office of Science have only spent 55 percent of their ARRA allocations. (In fact, DOE, alone, has left unspent $15 billion of ARRA money.)

Macilwain is overly generous when he describes what’s going on as a “stretching out and morphing.” He and Nature may not want to say it, but this pretty clearly indicates some enormous failures in the ARRA.

Let me be clear here: The criticism isn’t that the monies won’t eventually be helpful to R&D — they will be. My criticism is that the monies, now, can’t be helpful in the ways that would have been the most helpful and with the greatest impact for science and the nation.

The most glaring failure is that the administration and these agencies have not spent the ARRA money fast enough. As I have written before, I think that DOE Secretary Steven Chu was exactly right when in February 2009, just two days after the ARRA legislation was signed, he announced “a sweeping reorganization of the DOE’s dispersal of direct loans, loan guarantees and funding contained in the new recovery legislation. The goal of the restructuring is to expedite disbursement of money to begin investments in a new energy economy that will put Americans back to work and create millions of new jobs.” Chu also went on to promise to disperse 70 percent of the investment by the end of 2010.

But, the DOE didn’t come close to that dispersement goal in 2010 and it looks like it won’t make it by the end of 2011 either. As the chart above indicates, the agency reports this week that it has only spent 56 percent of its ARRA funds. With unemployment around 10 percent, leaving $15 billion on the table is an administrative shame and embarrassment.

A couple of important distinctions and economic points must be made here in regard to the concept of “spending” in this context. ARRA money that is held by a principle investigator or an institution but unspent is far different than DOE, NSF or NIH unspent monies. Dispersed money is in the economy and is arguably stimulating, well, something. Undispersed money is not in the economy and stimulates nothing because it is “funny money” that doesn’t really exist until the checks are sent and cashed. It’s not like DOE has the undispersed $15 billion in a bank account somewhere.

Put even another way, by definition, as soon as either funder or fundee starts to play the game of “stretching out and morphing” nondispersed stimulus funds, the funds cease to be able to stimulate anything.

In its defense, the DOE would probably point to the approximate 45,000 jobs it claims to have created via the ARRA, but as noted above, that number would hold more weight if it was verified and actually represented all new jobs.

What went wrong? My guess is a couple of factors have created failures at the policy level. The first factor is that it appears that the agencies have been overly preoccupied with accountability. Regardless of the Solyndra situation (which still looks to me to be about malfeasance and not accountability), DOE and the others should have figured out a way to issue all ARRA funding shortly after it was allocated. (All of the DOE funding has been allocated for over a year.) Unemployment has been and still is a much bigger problem in theory and in fact than the possible misuse of ARRA money.

The second factor is that long-standing agency habits are really, really hard to break. I spent much of two decades trying to change and redesign/reengineer government operations. Getting a large bureaucracy to implement something like a large novel stimulus funding effort is very difficult, but it can be done.

Along these lines, one mystery is what happened to Matt Rogers? Chu selected Rogers, who had been working on energy issues at the well known McKinsey & Co. consultancy, to be the DOE ramrod for whatever changes were needed in the agency to expedite the grants, loans and loan guarantees, and he was given the title Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy for Recovery Act Implementation.

Rogers, however, was never very visible to those of us on the outside. On occasion, he would be tasked with making some public appearances. But, while other federal agencies were quick to spend their ARRA money, as I have reported on many times, DOE was slow to spend from the start.

I suspect that Rogers was the right man for in the wrong job. I don’t doubt he had expertise in energy market strategic planning, but I don’t think he had any systems management expertise or track record in this field. It didn’t help that Rogers engaged in the allocation-versus-spending word games or criticism of us writers who nagged about the DOE’s sluggish dispersements. Cocky, premature and inaccurate videos about job creation were also a mistake.

Rogers claimed in September 2010 that DOE jobs would peak during that quarter at 45,000 and hold that level for the next six quarters. In fact, as is apparent in the above graph, (self-reported) jobs numbers didn’t reach or surpass 45,000 until the first quarter of 2011 and appear to be heading downwards already. I, for one, am not surprised that Rogers has quietly returned to his post at McKinsey & Co.

For researchers, keeping a steady flow of funds is never easy. Likewise postdocs and post-postdocs are looking for new opportunities, and lab suppliers are struggling to crawl out of the recession. So, I get that people have to resort to “stretching and morphing” when times are particularly tough. But there is still more than $15 billion unspent. Let’s focus on acknowledging and fixing the ARRA funding bottle necks instead of making up terms that paper-over how dysfunctional things are.

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