Scientific Human Capital Research Articles

Going to the Source: Discussions With Early and Mid-Career Faculty From Groups Underrepresented in Biomedical Research to Develop and Enhance CFAR Services.

To include, sustain, and retain HIV-focused early career faculty from groups historically excluded from biomedical research, the Providence/Boston Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) conducted focus groups and individual interviews with early and mid-career faculty to discern their needs. We conducted focus groups and interviews with 15 faculty at institutions affiliated with Providence/Boston CFAR from groups underrepresented in biomedical research. The discussion was guided using the domains of an Asset Bundle Model encompassing scientific human capital, social capital, and financial capital. Participants' identities, including their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and being a parent affected their vision of themselves as scientists. Participants reported confusion or limited training on or access to resources for professional development, hiring staff, meeting NIH reporting requirements, international research, support for working parents, sabbaticals, and addressing workplace conflict or unsupportive work environments. Some described feeling like they were a burden on their mentors who seemed overextended. They identified attributes of effective mentors, such as believing in and investing in the mentee; having the requisite content area expertise and self-confidence; being able to identify mentees needs and meet them where they are; and being consistent, communicative, respectful, and kind. They described a need for additional education and support preresearch and postresearch grant award management. To learn how to equitably serve all interested in HIV research, CFARs should engage and include perspectives from scientists who have historically been excluded from biomedical research. Our future work will test, implement, and disseminate the ideas generated by these focus group discussions.

Comment on “Higher Education in the United States: Laissez‐Faire, Differentiation, and Research”

Comment on “Higher Education in the United States: Laissez‐Faire, Differentiation, and Research”

Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and The Supply of Scientific and Inventor Human Capital

This panel symposium assembles four papers and researchers at the intersection of research on innovation, entrepreneurship and scientific human capital. We first discuss the localization of knowledge and how physical presence and proximity of inventors influence knowledge flows within and across technology classes. Then, the value of scientific human capital, specifically inventors and scientists, is discussed in the aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship. We extend the discussion to where the supply of scientific human capital comes from. Each panelist introduces relevant findings that are based when possible on strong identification, including exploitation of inventor death events, a shift-share instrument based on historic census data for regional mobility of human capital, and field experiment on STEM students. Avenues for future research will be discussed.

R versus D, from knowledge creation to value appropriation: Ownership of patents filed by European biotechnology founders

Biotechnology firms are often created on the premise of commercialising the results of research carried out by scientists with heterogeneous careers and research trajectories. Patents filed by company founders provide accessible information on the appropriation of knowledge through the assignment of intellectual property rights (IPR).In this study, we developed a new database of patents and publications by the founders of European, drug-originating biotech companies that reached IPO between 2013 and 2018. The founders' scientific human capital was analysed. We also developed a regression model to estimate whether the founders’ career trajectories, previous publications and patent characteristics explain the appropriation of knowledge by biotech start-ups.Our findings suggest that founders' scientific human capital and professional experience influence the way in which knowledge is captured for economic use. Compared to patents filed by industrial inventors, those filed by academics and mixed career scientists are more likely to be assigned to an inventor's own start-up company than owned by a scientist's employers. These findings lead to fundamental questions about biopharmaceutical innovation regarding issues such as whether risks and returns are appropriately shared between actors in the public and private sectors.

Birth and Migration of Scientists: Does Religiosity Matter? Evidence from 19th-Century France

Can religiosity affect the emergence and migration patterns of scientists? We focus on 19th-century France, a period in which the Catholic Church had embraced a particularly antiscientific attitude, and we exploit variation in intensity of Catholicism. Using data on the places of birth and death of famous individuals from 1790 to 1880, we show that more religious cantons were less likely to give birth to scientists, but religiosity did not play a role for their migration choices. We shed light on the mechanism and suggest that accumulation of scientific human capital earlier in life was key: religious vs. secular secondary education can partly explain the negative relationship between religiosity and the “birth” of scientists. Finally, placebo regressions show that religiosity is not associated with the birth and migration patterns of famous individuals in nonscientific professions—nor is it associated with the emergence of scientific human capital in the pre-1790 period.

Convergent technologies in science and innovations in Kazakhstan

AbstractAs soon as the economy of Kazakhstan is highly resource‐oriented despite numerous efforts to change the structure of the national economy, constant assessment of the scientific and innovation sphere of the country is actual and important. By way of qualitative, quantitative, comparative, and descriptive analysis 13 indicators related to science and innovations were investigated to define the level of scientific and innovative development in Kazakhstan. Science and innovation in Kazakhstan are under‐financed and state‐based financing of innovative activities seems to be ineffective, and the innovations are still unprofitable. The scientific human capital is affected by “brain drain,” when best graduates go into business or leave the country to build careers in better financial conditions. Eight indicators are found to be universal and comparable for various countries, and can be applied with the purpose of defining the level of scientific and innovative development of a country or countries. The results of the study can be applied by governmental officials for developing policies related to science and innovations. The methods, set of indicators, and findings of the study can be used by other researchers for investigating and comparing the level(s) of scientific and innovative development in other country or countries.

Hiring for Knowledge or Skills: How Do Firms Use Scientific Human Capital Acquired from Academia?

Academic scientists develop deep topic knowledge in highly specialized niches. However, they also develop extensive skills used to carry out advanced research in their fields. The literature has typically focused on a generalist-specialist distinction in topic knowledge when seeking to understand how firms benefit from hiring scientists from academia. In this paper, I propose an alternative distinction between two dimensions of scientific human capital: topic knowledge and scientific research skills. I build on prior literature on scientific careers and the logic of scientific inquiry to analyze how each dimension can provide value to firms in corporate research. I argue that, relative to academia, firms will value flexibility in applying scientists’ human capital and eschew projects with greater potential divergence in commercial and scientific value. This, in turn, will shape the relative returns to topic knowledge and scientific research skills in firms’ human capital strategies. I test my arguments empirically using longitudinal data on U.S. scientists working in stem cell research. I show that academic scientists transitioning to industry employment have more conceptually diverse subsequent research output. This is consistent with industry placing a higher value on the scientific research skills of academic hires in their human capital strategies. It contrasts with a view in which firms hire experienced scientists with the primary intention of exploiting their highly specialized, but narrow, topic knowledge for commercial purposes. I also use my findings to draw implications on how the division of scientific labor between industry and academia affects knowledge accumulation in ‘Pasteur’s Quadrant’ where basic science and use-inspired research overlap.

The dynamics of social capital in scientific collaboration networks

ABSTRACTScientific collaboration is considered a cornerstone of 21st Century Science and a springboard for economic prosperity. At a more basic level, it is also considered to be a fundamental part of the development of scientific human capital. From that perspective, scientific collaboration is facilitated through social capital, which is acquired through an investment cycle. Through a series of collaborative interactions, scientists move to positions within collaboration networks, which in turn creates future opportunities for collaboration.Prior research has either focused on the positioning of scientists within their respective networks, or scientists’ network activity and career stage, but few studies have looked at the dynamics of positioning due to the presence, timing, and sequencing of collaborative interactions on future opportunities. The reason for this gap was the intractability of the problem. In this paper, a research proposal is outlined that will attempt to address this deficiency by employing machine learning to identify patterns in the career trajectories of scientists in a research community.

The Ethnic Composition of Science and Engineering Research Laboratories in the United States

AbstractThe United States has been a top destination country for science and engineering (S&E) graduate education for foreign talent for many years. Despite the clear existence of foreign students in the USA, relatively little is known about the factors influencing the flow of foreign students. In this study, we examine foreign doctoral students in science and engineering, and test whether “ethnic affinity” plays a role in the ethnic composition of research laboratories (in what follows, “labs”) in US universities. In order to test this hypothesis, we conduct a web search, and select 164 science and engineering laboratory web pages for analysis. Among these 164 labs, 82 are directed by foreign‐born faculty (Korean, Chinese, Indian or Turkish). These 82 are matched with labs that are in the same department of the same university, but directed by a native (US origin) faculty member. We find strong evidence that labs directed by foreign‐born faculty are more likely to be populated by students from the same country of origin than are labs directed by native faculty. The percentage of students working in a lab from a nationality (foreign or native) is higher when they share nativity with the director. We seek to draw attention to the effect of affinity on the ethnic composition of research labs at the micro level that translates into the ethnic composition of the scientific community at the macro level. Further, these results emphasize the role of lab directors in future enrolments, creating scientific human capital, and contributing to the “brain circulation” phenomenon in the global context.

When birds of a feather don’t flock together: Different scientists and the roles they play in biotech R&D alliances

A firm's ability to produce high-impact innovations depends upon the nature of its R&D alliances as well as its composition of scientific human capital. The firm's scientific human capital is made up of its scientists, who produce valuable research outputs and who engage with the broader scientific community, thus helping the firm to integrate new knowledge from universities and other firms. In this paper, we examine heterogeneity within the firm's scientific human capital, emphasizing the distinct role of ‘bridging scientists’ who engage in two related but dissimilar scientific activities: patenting and publishing. Using a panel dataset of 222 firms in biotechnology between 1990 and 2000, we show that bridging scientists have a positive and significant impact on patent performance relative to other scientists within the firm. Looking closer at bridging scientists, we draw a distinction between Pasteur bridging scientists and Edison bridging scientists, with the latter having less of an orientation towards fundamental research. We show that both types of bridging scientists complement the focal firm's R&D alliances with other firms. However, Pasteur bridging scientists are substitutive with university R&D alliances while Edison bridging scientists are complementary. Our findings suggest that the composition of a firm's scientific human capital and its R&D alliances interact in subtle ways to impact patent performance.

HUMAN CAPITAL, SOCIAL CAPITAL AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IN EUROPE: AN APPLICATION OF LINEAR HIERARCHICAL MODELS*

The theory of human capital, even if it reckons the importance of time in science, is too short for explaining the existing diversity of scientific output. The paper introduces social capital as a necessary complement to explain the creation of scientific human capital. It connects these two concepts by means of a hierarchical econometric model. Bibliographical databases contain much information which is exploited to figure out collaboration, mobility, publishing habits and institutional characteristics. The two level hierarchical model is estimated on 14 European countries using bibliometric data in the fields of economics.

Nursing Professionalism in Slovenia

The purpose of this column is to conceptualize nursing professionalism in Slovenia as a mutual process between social change and the education of professional nurses. The process of educating professional nurses in Slovenia occurs in a changing social and organizational context. As the complexity and speed of change increases it is becoming increasingly essential for all nurses to have expert knowledge, skills, and competencies. The author also aims to present the autonomy of new healthcare and the new theoretical concept of nursing as scientific human capital in Slovenia.

Scientific (Wo)Manpower? Gender and the Composition and Earnings of PhDs in Sweden

Although the share of female PhDs has increased explosively since the 1980s, little research has focused on the utilisation and remuneration of female versus male scientific human capital. Using rich Swedish cross-sectional register data on the stock of PhDs in 2004, this paper analyses to what extent men and women choose academic versus non-academic employment, and to what earnings differences these choices lead. Results show that women are significantly less likely than men to be academically employed in the natural sciences and medicine, whereas no significant gender differences prevail for the social sciences and the humanities. On average, women earn 15 per cent less than men, and the academically employed earn 24 per cent less than PhDs outside academia. Gender earnings differences are larger in the academic than in the non-academic labour market in the humanities and the natural sciences, whereas the opposite holds in the social sciences and medicine.