The Early Career Research (ECR) project is a mixed-methods study of student development outcomes and equity among doctoral students in the biological sciences as they complete their graduate programs and transition into their careers. This longitudinal study follows a national sample of 286 biology Ph.D. students through their final stages of graduate school and into their early years in the scientific workforce. The study has several overarching goals:
- To identify the ways in which the development of research skills and professional goals during graduate training may predict postdoctoral career attainment and trajectories
- To examine the capacity of postdoctoral research positions to serve as inflection points in ECR career trajectories
- To explore how race, gender, and other demographic characteristics shape the relationship between graduate student and postdoctoral experiences and subsequent career outcomes
Data from this project has been released and published on the Open Science Framework website. The Open Science Framework (OSF) is an online platform that supports open and transparent scientific research. It serves as a collaborative space for researchers to manage and share their projects, data, and findings with the broader scientific community, fostering a culture of openness, transparency, collaboration, and reproducibility in scientific inquiry.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, grant number 1760894. This project builds on the earlier work funded by the NSF through collaborative grants DGE-1431290 and DGE-1431234. For questions about the research, please contact David Feldon (david.feldon@usu.edu).