ABOVE: Brown University, one of dozens of institutions that have issued hiring freezes
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Heather Ray, a developmental biology postdoc at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who studies the genetics of birth defects, received an email on March 24 from the search committee for a faculty job to which she had applied. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a resulting hiring freeze at the university, Ray says the email read, the search and position had been canceled.
“I hadn’t even thought that this might happen,” she says.
A few minutes later, Ray received an email from a search committee in her own department that had been interviewing applicants for two open positions. Three candidates had completed in-person interviews for those positions, and all three had been invited back to campus for a second round of interviews. The University of Alabama at Birmingham had recently announced that it too ...
