Janelia Farm staffing up

The Janelia Farm Research Campus, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's new $500 million research facility in Ashburn, Virginia, officially opens its doors this week with a parade of receptions, dinners, and a public open house set for October 7. By 2010, the facility aims to have a permanent research staff of about 250 scientists, including group leaders, fellows and post-docs, as well as graduate students who will receive their PhD training through a partnership between Janelia, the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge. The campus will also have lab space for a rotation of 100 visiting scientists. Gerald Rubin, HHMI vice president and Janelia Farm director, told The Scientist he expects to hire about four group leaders and four fellows each year over the next three or four years. According to James Keeley, HHMI's associate director of communications, scientists at any career stage are invited to apply for lab head positions, but competition is stiff. During the first phase of recruitment, Keeley said, seven group leaders were selected from more than 300 applicants. In total, 11 of 24 group leader positions have been filled to date, as have seven of 20 fellow positions. Applications for fellows and postdocs are considered year-round. Group leaders, however, are hired only during fixed recruitment cycles; the current cycle will close on December 15. Group leaders will receive an initial appointment of six years and oversee a team of up to six lab members. Fellows sign on for a five-year appointment and supervise up to two lab members. Both group leaders and fellows may recruit postdocs to their labs for appointments that will be reviewed annually. Scientists who want to pursue a position as a group leader or fellow at Janelia Farm can apply online by submitting a CV, a list of representative publications, a research statement, a collaboration plan, and three letters of reference. Scientists interested in postdoctoral positions should apply directly to the group leader or fellow whose work interests them.HHMI declined to provide specific information on salary ranges, but according to both Keeley and Alla Karpova, a Janelia Farm group leader who was previously at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the pay is competitive with university salaries in the biomedical fields. Janelia Farm also provides health insurance and benefits such as on-site child care.For many scientists, the biggest benefit may be the freedom from having to teach, publish, apply for grants, or worry about tenure. According to Rubin, that freedom allows investigators to pursue long-term, high-risk research that wouldn't be easily addressed in academia. "It's not the scientific problems we picked that are so different, but the way we're going about [solving them]," Rubin said. "With typical grants, you have to produce something in three to five years or you're in bad shape. Here, it might take five years to know if you're going in the right direction and 10 to know if you really accomplished something."Based partly on the Bell Labs model, Janelia was designed around the ideas of collaboration and flexibility, according to Rubin. Biologists, chemists, engineers, mathematicians and physicists will work together to tackle Janelia Farm's two primary research goals: identifying the basic rules and mechanisms of the brain's neural circuits, and developing new technologies and methods for creating and interpreting biological images. "We're interested in people who want to collaborate and work together," Rubin said. "If [that] resonates with you, we want you."Kirsten Weir mail@the-scientist.comLinks within this article:Janelia Farm Research Campus http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/24961/Howard Hughes Medical Institute http://www.hhmi.orgJanelia Farm public open house http://www.hhmi.org/janelia/openhouse.htmlUniversity of Chicago http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/05/051003.hhmi.shtmlUniversity of Cambridge http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/gsprospectus/subjects/physiology/physiology2.htmlGerald Rubin http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/rubin_bio.htmlApplication information http://www.hhmi.org/janelia/positions.htmlAlla Karpova http://www.hhmi.org/research/groupleaders/karpova_bio.htmlCold Spring Harbor Laboratory http://www.cshl.edu

Janelia Farm staffing up

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