Today our faculty is promoting the call for applicants to the Sanger Institute’s Janet Thornton Fellowship.This is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who has taken a 12 month break from scientific research to get back into the field, with a competitive salary and excellent training support. Importantly, the fellowship can be taken on a full-time, part-time or flexible working basis, making it accessible to working parents/carers or individuals with other additional needs.

In an academic climate of fixed-term contracts and job insecurity for early career researchers, it perhaps isn’t surprising that intelligent, ambitious, driven individuals are choosing to seek careers outside of the HE research field. But this means that talent nurtured by investment from Universities is migrating to competitors abroad or outside of the HE sector altogether. Fellowships such as the Janet Thornton are designed to support and encourage scientists back into research, and have understood that the terms need to be desirable.

Of course, temporary or zero hours contracts aren’t an evil for everybody. For some people, the opportunity to travel, build up a varied CV and not be ‘tied into’ a longer-term contract suits their needs perfectly. But there are equally a large number of people who find the instability of year-by-year contracts stressful and impractical: It’s very difficult to get a mortgage or plan for a family when you don’t know if your income will stretch beyond the year-end. Things like maternity pay or carer’s leave are difficult to negotiate if your contract barely runs beyond the 9 months of gestation. Plus job applications are time-consuming and stressful,for anybody; for people with additional commitments or disabilities, the difficulty might be exacerbated further.

Funding and the fast-paced nature of research mean that temporary contracts are likely to be on the rise. So the solution needs to be in providing other incentives for early career researchers to stay in research. Fellowships that address some of their needs and accept that not everybody can do a full-time job with the occasional over-seas conference thrown in are a good starting point for supporting the diverse nature of today’s post-docs. But if we want to retain talent, there’s still a lot more work to be done…