u/misterballerdontlie

Engineering + physics undergrad considering different careers, one of which is becoming a professor in biophysics. Though I did some undergraduate research last year and really enjoyed it, I’m very concerned about the difficulty of pursuing an academic career. Thus, if anybody could answer the following questions concerning the competitiveness of biophysics academic positions, would really appreciate it.

1. What are qualified applicant to position ratios like? Is 50:1+ common, even at R2 universities?

2. Do most successful applicants must have postdocs at prestigious institutions & CNS publications, even those applying to R2 universities?

3. Has the difficulty of obtaining a PI position in biophysics changed substantially over the last 10 years? Likewise, has biophysics funding stagnated or drastically declined over the past decade?

I’m not particularly attached to the idea of becoming an biophysics professor, so if the reality is that this is an exceptionally difficult career path, wouldn’t be heartbroken or anything (can simply consider another career). Thus, if becoming a biophysics professor really is extremely challenging, would appreciating knowing that now rather than realizing this after wasting many years.

Engineering + physics undergrad considering different careers, one of which is becoming a professor in biophysics. Though I did some undergraduate research last year and really enjoyed it, I’m very concerned about the difficulty of pursuing an academic career. Thus, if anybody could answer the following questions concerning the competitiveness of biophysics academic positions, would really appreciate it.

1. What are qualified applicant to position ratios like? Is 50:1+ common, even at R2 universities?

2. Do most successful applicants must have postdocs at prestigious institutions & CNS publications, even those applying to R2 universities?

3. Has the difficulty of obtaining a PI position in biophysics changed substantially over the last 10 years? Likewise, has biophysics funding stagnated or drastically declined over the past decade?

I’m not particularly attached to the idea of becoming an biophysics professor, so if the reality is that this is an exceptionally difficult career path, wouldn’t be heartbroken or anything (can simply consider another career). Thus, if becoming a biophysics professor really is extremely challenging, would appreciating knowing that now rather than realizing this after wasting many years.

I’m an engineering undergraduate considering different career paths, one of which is becoming an environmental engineering professor. I’m still undecided on a specific research area (some that currently interest me are industrial decarbonization, PFAS destruction, and recycling incentives, but I’m open to any area).

Though I did some undergraduate research last year and really enjoyed it, I’m very concerned about the difficulty of pursuing an academic career. Indeed, I have heard from academics that becoming a professor in environmental engineering is near impossible and the hardest out of all engineering disciplines. If anybody could answer the following questions to help assess whether that characterization is accurate, would be grateful.

1. What are qualified applicant to position ratios like? Is 50:1+ common, even at R2 universities?
2. Have heard that funding is absymal in general for EnvE and is the worse out of all engineering disciplines: what are the systematic reasons? Some reasons I’ve heard are that EnvE has fewer large-scale funding programs than fields such as EE or biomedical engineering and has the lowest grant acceptance rates in engineering (like 17% for NSF), but what are other reasons?
3. Has EnvE funding stagnated or drastically declined over the past decade (setting aside the [hopefully] anomalous 2025 federal cuts)? Also, does EnvE being housed within CEE departments affect faculty hiring opportunities?
4. What other major reasons are there not to become a professor? For example, difficulty maintaining funding through tenure, etc.?

TL;DR: If you were trying to convince a student not to pursue a career as an environmental engineering professor, what would your strongest arguments be?

I’m not particularly attached to the idea of becoming an EnvE professor, so if the reality is that this is an exceptionally difficult career path, wouldn’t be heartbroken or anything (can simply consider another career). Thus, if becoming an EnvE professor really is near-impossible, would appreciating knowing that now rather than realizing this after wasting many years.

I’m an engineering undergraduate considering different career paths, one of which is becoming an environmental engineering professor. I’m still undecided on a specific research area (some that currently interest me are industrial decarbonization, PFAS destruction, and recycling incentives, but I’m open to any area).

Though I did some undergraduate research last year and really enjoyed it, I’m very concerned about the difficulty of pursuing an academic career. Indeed, I have heard from academics that becoming a professor in environmental engineering is near impossible and the hardest out of all engineering disciplines. If anybody could answer the following questions to help assess whether that characterization is accurate, would be grateful.

1. What are qualified applicant to position ratios like? Is 50:1+ common, even at R2 universities?
2. Have heard that funding is absymal in general for EnvE and is the worse out of all engineering disciplines: what are the systematic reasons? Some reasons I’ve heard are that EnvE has fewer large-scale funding programs than fields such as EE or biomedical engineering and has the lowest grant acceptance rates in engineering (like 17% for NSF), but what are other reasons?
3. Has EnvE funding stagnated or drastically declined over the past decade (setting aside the [hopefully] anomalous 2025 federal cuts)? Also, does EnvE being housed within CEE departments affect faculty hiring opportunities?
4. What other major reasons are there not to become a professor? For example, difficulty maintaining funding through tenure, etc.?

TL;DR: If you were trying to convince an undergraduate not to pursue a career as an environmental engineering professor, what would your strongest arguments be?

I’m not particularly attached to the idea of becoming an EnvE professor, so if the reality is that this is an exceptionally difficult career path, wouldn’t be heartbroken or anything (can simply consider another career). Thus, if becoming an EnvE professor really is near-impossible, would appreciating knowing that now rather than realizing this after wasting many years.

I'm an engineering undergrad considering pursuing a PhD with the long-term goal of founding a hard-tech startup. I’m undecided about the specific area and have only a vague sense of what interests me (some areas that currently interest me are industrial decarbonization, mining / mineral processing, and advanced materials).

However, I'm unsure which type of PhD lab would be better: a problem-first lab (e.g., like Yet-Ming Chiang's lab at MIT) or a technology-first lab (e.g., a typical academic lab that focuses on novel science without a predetermined application, and where commercialization happens largely by chance -- when a technology happens to have a valuable market application).

I've looked at advice online from successful hard-tech entrepreneurs, but found conflicting answers. Some say to work backwards from a problem, while others argue that problem-first approaches often fail because it is difficult to force a scientific breakthrough around a predetermined problem.. Instead, they argue that most hard-tech companies are only founded because somebody made a scientific breakthrough and realized afterwards that there might be a commercial application.

With that in mind, does anybody have any advice on which type of PhD lab to join?

I’m an engineering undergrad interested in creating low-cost health technologies for developing countries, and I’ve been considering pursuing a PhD in this area (with profs such as Rebecca Richards-Kortum at Rice or Manu Prakash at Stanford). However, I’m wondering whether there are compelling reasons not to pursue a career in low-cost global health technology. For instance, it seems to me that funding is very limited.

With that in mind, I had a few questions:

- Is it especially difficult, or close to impossible, to become a professor specializing in low-cost global health technology (even compared with becoming a professor in another bioengineering subfield)? If so, why? For example, is it harder to bring in grants, are there fewer faculty lines, or do BME departments tend to place less value on global health technology than on other areas of biomedical engineering, etc.?

- Likewise, is it difficult to find engineering roles in industry that focus specifically on global health technology? If so, what are the main reasons? Are there simply very few employers and positions relative to the number of qualified applicants? I know of organizations such as PATH and Gradian Health Systems, but they seem to have relatively small engineering teams (often fewer than 100 people) and frequently do not have any relevant engineering positions open.

- Are there any realistic ways to make global health technology into a career?

I’m an undergrad considering eventually starting a materials science / nanotechnology company after completing a chemistry PhD.

My tentative plan is to first get a well-paying job with decent WLB (e.g., SWE) and use evenings / weekends to develop the company, relying on my day-job salary to pay for startup costs (shared lab access, cost of chemicals and using equipment, etc.). However, I’m concerned this may not be financially feasible, even if I live somewhere with a strong startup ecosystem like Boston.

Has anyone done or seen something similar? Could a high-paying day job realistically cover all early-stage chemistry R&D costs? Tried looking for information online, but could not find much. Also, I’m assuming no grants or outside investment, just so can plan for the worst-case scenario…

Hi all, mechanical + electrical engineering undergraduate who enjoys research and hopes to pursue a career in it. While I’m not especially interested in the main EA cause areas (AI safety, biosecurity, cybersecurity, etc.), I’d still like my research to have as much impact as possible.

Does anyone know of any websites that compile neglected scientific problems beyond those discussed by 80,000 Hours? Not necessarily looking for problems ranked by overall importance, just collections of underexplored problems where additional work could have (somewhat) decent marginal value.

If anybody has any insights, would really appreciate it.

Didn’t find much discussion of this online, so was hoping to start some here.

For people who have founded hard-tech startups in particular: what were the worst experiences you faced? What parts of the hard-tech startup reality would make you tell someone to get as far away as possible?

Didn’t find much discussion of this online, so was hoping to start some here.

For people who have founded hard-tech startups in particular: what were the worst experiences you faced? What parts of the hard-tech startup reality would make you tell someone to get as far away as possible?

Engineering + math graduate whose goal is to maximize impact. I am currently deciding between two career paths, but have been struggling a lot to determine which would be more impactful:

1. Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m not primarily thinking about robotics safety or AI safety, but rather general robotics capabilities research.)
2. Try to found “low-sophistication” hard-tech startups — i.e. products that are not extremely technically sophisticated and could easily be prototyped in a local makerspace, meaning any wannabe hard-tech founder could easily make it.

Note: For personal and practical reasons, it is unlikely that I would found a highly sophisticated hard-tech company, i.e. one that requires advanced fabrication / other specialized technologies.

TLDR: Has anyone here faced or thought seriously about a similar decision? If so, how did you decide where you had more counterfactual impact?

One way I’ve tried is through estimating the number of “counterfactual days saved.” Here’s my crude analysis:

- If a robotics bottleneck takes 600 researcher-years to solve and 400 researchers are already working on it, adding me would move the solution from 600/400 = 1.5 years to 600/401 ≈ 1.496 years, or about 1.37 days earlier. If 50 startups benefit, and I work on three such bottlenecks over my career, that gives roughly 3 × 50 × 1.37 ≈ 205 startup-days saved.

- In contrast, if I found five successful simple hard-tech startups, and each brings a useful idea to market one year earlier, that is 5 progress-years saved.

This crude analysis is missing many important factors, but on first glance, it seems that the startup path is more impactful, assuming I am unlikely to be an exceptional researcher in robotics (which I think is probable).

If anybody has a better way of comparing impact between academic and startup paths, though, would deeply appreciate it — I have been stuck at a crossroads for quite a bit…

Specifically, for many hard-tech startups that do not require extremely sophisticated technology, if the first inventor had not existed, how much later would someone else likely have done something similar?

By “hard tech that does not require extremely sophisticated technology,” I mean physical products that could be created in a typical local makerspace (i.e. without specialized nanotechnology, advanced fabrication methods, etc.). For example, smart thermostats and basic robotics would fall into this category.

I would like to believe the answer is often “years later,” but I can also imagine the delay being only a few days to a month, because i) many hard-tech founders are actively looking for startup ideas; ii) many of the underlying problems are already well known; and iii) if the technology is relatively accessible, it seems especially likely that multiple people would try to solve the same problem around the same time.

Is this intuition correct? I'm looking specifically for rigorous quantitative analyses that try to estimate the “delay” for accessible hard-tech startups, not one-and-off anecdotes. If anybody knows of any rigorous analyses, it would be deeply appreciated.

Specifically, for many hard-tech startups that do not require extremely sophisticated technology, if the first inventor had not existed, how much later would someone else likely have done something similar?

By “hard tech that does not require extremely sophisticated technology,” I mean physical products that could be created in a typical local makerspace (i.e. without specialized nanotechnology, advanced fabrication methods, etc.). For example, smart thermostats and basic robotics would fall into this category.

I would like to believe the answer is often “years later,” but I can also imagine the delay being only a few days to a month, because i) many hard-tech founders are actively looking for startup ideas; ii) many of the underlying problems are already well known; and iii) if the technology is relatively accessible, it seems especially likely that multiple people would try to solve the same problem around the same time.

Is this intuition correct? I'm looking specifically for rigorous quantitative analyses that try to estimate the “delay” for accessible hard-tech startups, not one-and-off anecdotes. If anybody knows of any rigorous analyses, it would be deeply appreciated.

Note: I am referring only to technical biosecurity in this post, i.e. wetlab / comp bio, not policy roles.

I recently learned about the field of biosecurity, and it sounds very interesting! That being said, I’ve heard that the ratio of qualified applicants to available roles in biosecurity is extremely high, sometimes 50:1 or more, both for entry-level and more senior technical positions. Is that generally true?

If so, what is the best way for someone to currently contribute to the field? Is waiting for more opportunities to open up really the only reasonable response?

Also, do people think there are good reasons to believe that many more opportunities will open up soon? For example, are major philanthropists or funders beginning to pivot more seriously toward supporting biosecurity work?

Note: I am referring only to technical biosecurity in this post, i.e. wetlab / comp bio, not policy roles.

I’ve heard that the ratio of qualified applicants to available roles in biosecurity is extremely high, sometimes 50:1 or more, both for entry-level and more senior technical positions. Is that generally true?

If so, what is the best way for someone to currently contribute to the field? Is waiting for more opportunities to open up really the only reasonable response?

Also, do people think there are good reasons to believe that many more opportunities will open up soon? For example, are major philanthropists or funders beginning to pivot more seriously toward supporting biosecurity work?

A friend in a chemistry PhD program described research as sometimes reaching a point where, after you’ve tried the obvious fixes, it starts to feel like you’re just guessing. I’m curious whether this is a common experience among researchers, though.

I.e., encountering situations where you’ve already checked the protocol, reviewed the relevant theory, applied heuristics, tried all the promising approaches you can think of, and talked through the problem with others — but nothing seems to fix the issue, forcing you to make speculative guesses.

How often does this happen in your experience? For example, what percent of projects does this occur in? When it does happen, how long might you spend in that “guessing” phase before finding a solution (i.e. is a couple months not uncommon)?

I.e. situations where you’ve already checked the protocol, reviewed the relevant theory, applied heuristics, tried all the promising approaches you can think of, and talked through the problem with others — but nothing seems to fix the issue, forcing you to make speculative guesses.

How often does this happen in your experience? For example, what percent of projects does this occur in? When it does happen, how long might you spend in that “guessing” phase before finding a solution (i.e. is a couple months not uncommon)?

I'm a mechanical engineering undergraduate considering a career as a research scientist at a national lab and had a few questions:

1. For research scientists, what percentage of your research time is split between:

• pursuing their own research ideas (assuming can obtain funding and work fits the lab's mission), versus
• working on problems that are handed down by management / industry partners?

How does this percentage breakdown change as one moves from research scientist → senior research scientist → principal research scientist?

2. Do "research scientists" typically get to pursue their own projects, or are they mostly contributing to projects led by "senior" / "principal" research scientists? At what level do scientists typically start leading their own research programs?

3. How difficult is promotion from research → senior → principal scientist?

4. Do national labs still hire people to work on relatively fundamental, curiosity-driven topics that may not have an obvious near-term application (e.g., soft robotics, novel materials concepts, etc.)? Or is this very rare, i.e. most hiring is for work that is tied to specific needs?

5. How competitive is it to become a research scientist? What academic benchmark is most comparable (top R1 faculty, strong public R1 faculty, etc.)?

6. For principal scientists, what fraction of funding typically comes from base lab funding vs. external grants? How much pressure is there to continually bring in funding at each career stage?

Insights into any of these questions would be appreciated.

I'm a mechanical engineering undergraduate considering a career as a research scientist at a national lab and had a few questions:

1. For research scientists, what percentage of your research time is split between:

• pursuing their own research ideas (assuming can obtain funding and work fits the lab's mission), versus
• working on problems that are handed down by management / industry partners?

How does this percentage breakdown change as one moves from research scientist → senior research scientist → principal research scientist?

2. Do "research scientists" typically get to pursue their own projects, or are they mostly contributing to projects led by "senior" / "principal" research scientists? At what level do scientists typically start leading their own research programs?

3. How difficult is promotion from research → senior → principal scientist?

4. Do national labs still hire people to work on relatively fundamental, curiosity-driven topics that may not have an obvious near-term application (e.g., soft robotics, novel materials concepts, etc.)? Or is this very rare, i.e. most hiring is for work that is tied to specific needs?

5. How competitive is it to become a research scientist? What academic benchmark is most comparable (top R1 faculty, strong public R1 faculty, etc.)?

6. For principal scientists, what fraction of funding typically comes from base lab funding vs. external grants? How much pressure is there to continually bring in funding at each career stage?

Insights into any of these questions would be appreciated.