A changing chemistry job market and news from the wider science world

September is here, and so is C&EN’s annual review of the employment market for chemical scientists.

You can turn to page 26 to read stories of job seekers and employers in the academic sector in the US and Canada during the 2020–21 hiring season.

If you are wondering whether the academic job market will bounce back after the pandemic, we unfortunately don’t have a satisfying or categorical answer. Tenure-track jobs are always highly coveted, and during the pandemic they have been more difficult to find. And hiring processes have been longer than usual, according to the people C&EN reporter Bethany Halford spoke to.

By contrast, the pharma job market is superhot right now with, for example, a lab group leader working in government reporting on Twitter that postdoctoral fellows are being snatched up after less than a year into their medicinal chemistry labs. Many of us remember when Big Pharma was downsizing not so long ago and skilled chemists were finding themselves unemployed. C&EN reporter Rick Mullin talked to lab leaders, biotech executives, and postdocs to learn why chemists are in such demand and explore how the role of the postdoc is changing (see page 18).

In other, unrelated news, I have been following the journey of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars and was glad to learn that it has finally collected its first rock sample from the surface of the Red Planet, more than 6 months after it landed.

The rock sample is expected to return to Earth for study and analysis, but it’ll have to wait many years until a future mission travels to Mars, meets with the Perseverance rover, and brings all samples back to Earth—likely by 2031, according to Scientific American. Nonetheless, it’ll be the first rock brought from Mars to Earth, and there are high hopes that it contains information about ancient martian life because it was collected from a site in what was a river delta billions of years ago.Also

in the news last week was the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, which opened Sept. 8. The former CEO of the blood-testing firm Theranos faces allegations that she and Chief Operating Officer Ramesh Balwani defrauded investors and customers with technology that Holmes knew did not work and was nowhere near receiving regulatory approval. Balwani’s separate trial is scheduled to start in January 2022.

Prosecutors began their opening statement accusing Holmes of lying to investors such as Walgreens and Safeway in order to secure funds and save the firm. The defense painted a picture of a young leader who had made mistakes but had successfully attracted many highly qualified employees to the firm and “obtained nearly 200 patents and created 235 specialized tests that could be run on small samples of blood,” according to Law360.

The trial is ongoing and, if convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison.

There’s never a dull moment in the world of science.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.