With today's confirmation of Prof. Scott Snyder's move to the University of Chicago, the university caps off a three-year hiring spree bringing a total of 13 new faculty into Chemistry and related departments.
Wow. Can anyone elaborate? Massive private donation? Mortgage breaks? Something in the water?
I can't comment from where the funding is coming from, but I know that the chem dept. has authorization from the Physical Sciences Dept. to grow up to 28 faculty. Recent hires have been heavy on the chem-bio subfield, including Bryan Dickinson, Yamuna Krishnan, Suri Vaikuntanathan (computationally), and now Scott Snyder.
ReplyDeleteSame anon here wanting to contribute more info. The Institute For Molecular Engineering (new department at UChicago) recently finished its new building, and so the IME groups are able to move out of the chem dpt space, thereby freeing up space and allowing the chem dpt to hire more faculty.
DeleteI think they lost both Mrksich and Yamamoto (Yamamoto's last JACS comm was from Japan, I think) so they probably needed to reload.
ReplyDeleteI thought Snyder was at Scripps FL (which didn't necessarily seem like a good idea considering their turbulence, Milkshake's experience, and their dependence on grants, but YMMV). What happened?
He missed teaching and didn't want to have to rely on grants for his salary
DeleteA friend who is still at Scripps FL complains that the overhead is huge and he has to cover 100% of his salary from grants, that means even if he gets a 250k grant money he can afford just one postdoc for it. And between him and the postdoc, it is not as easy to enough synthetic research to keep a reasonable publication rate. And so on. Also, the academic politics are nasty and there is a boss of translational research institute who pretty much turned medicinal chemistry into his fiefdom, because he controls the flows of institute's money - nothing much can happen without him giving his blessing, for which he likes to get a piece of action...
DeleteMrksich has indeed moved up to Northwestern and Yamamoto is now emeritus at UChicago. He is back in Japan now as is currently director of Molecular Catalyst Research Center at Chubu University. It seems that the department website needs to be updated a bit.
DeleteIf he really moved 2 times in less than 5 years, Snyder has joined an impressive level of douche-itude that few have aspired to: off the top of my head, Jonas Peters and John Hartwig.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that Scripps was ever supposed to be a permanent landing as 100% overhead in the post-doubling era is not exactly sustainable (especially for a youngish group). If I were Snyder this would be my thought process: "I'd rather have a job than no job (hence move to Scripps), but I'd rather work anywhere else compared to Scripps Florida."
DeleteI guess if you were upfront with your lab i would not hold it against you. It is the PIs that jump around without giving a crap how much it disrupts their lab and (even more) the lives of the people invested in it. I can't even imagine having that kind of arrogance.
DeleteScripps FL sounded weird in the first place so maybe this explains it.
As milkshake wrote, the overhead at Scripps is like 90%, the salary has to come 100% from grants (or one's own $$), ain't many students to teach there. Makes sense. Poison Ivy League, you are probably spot on about "anywhere but Scripps." The new president is trying hard, but the place is not the same as it was. It is bleeding money and faculty, got a lot of highly paid, aging scientific plankton, and the prima donna Chemistry chair is no crisis manager either. Me thinks Snyder is not going to be the last loss.
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