​’Young scientists are under extreme pressure’

How much did you know about The Young Academy, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) platform for promising scientists, before you were appointed?

Iosup: “A little. The Young Academy produces rather long reports on the state of science in the Netherlands and the biggest threats.”

Taebi: “I was familiar with The Young Academy because our colleague Peter Paul Verbeek was the former chairman. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that internationalisation is one of their four priorities.”

What are you concerned with as a young scientist? What do you worry about?

Taebi: “What I’m concerned with is interdisciplinarity, one of the new buzzwords. You have to be interdisciplinary if you want to attract funding for your research. This creates extra work for scientists and brings about interesting challenges in terms of how you approach things. The word ‘value’ means something different to an economist than it does to a philosopher. Another concern is: public-private cooperation. This is something we are increasingly expected to do, but is associated with potential conflicts.”

What pitfalls do you see in public-private cooperation?

Taebi: “What could happen is a form of self-censorship; that you do not say or do certain things when they concern your partners. Mechanisms against this are currently lacking, but need to be developed. We must be vigilant.”

Iosup: “The typical timelines for research and business do not match up. Scientists work with five to ten-year plans, while businesses look at the benefits after six to twelve months. This can create huge tensions. The worst-case scenario for me would be half-baked science that is published because the company wants to show results. An example from my field of work: around 2005, we developed techniques referred to as grid computing. The industry thought it would never work, yet today we talk about cloud computing. Had we stuck with the industry’s deadline of six months, we would have destroyed what currently makes up 15 percent of the industry. That’s the difference.”

Taebi: “The current tendency is: the more money you get from the industry, the better. Are there limits? What is the ideal image? We have to think about limits.”

Iosup: “The rule of thumb I hear from my ICT networks in Europe is that you should never have more than half of your research funded by the industry. Then half of your research can be fundamental in nature, and the other half can be applied research.”

Taebi: “It is also a question for university administrations: how much of our research would we like to have funded? It is about giving up control with regard to directing subjects.”

Iosup: “In the United States, education has been funded by businesses in the surrounding area for over ten years. In the area around Silicon Valley, the type of technology you learn at universities is related to Silicon Valley. For example, the industry co-sponsors the University of California, Berkeley. Here in Delft I sometimes have a hard time hearing the voice of the industry. I think the government is pushing this in the right direction, and so are we.”

Taebi: “Top sectors are trying to answer part of this, but the problem in segmenting science is that it might be at the expense of fields that are not mentioned.”

Are there obstacles that you encounter in your work as scientists?

Taebi: “Personally, I have no complaints. However, I am annoyed about the changes to labour legislation. The number of extensions of temporary contracts has been reduced, and you may not remain in the same job as long as before. The aim of this legislation is to enable people to move on to permanent employment more quickly, but it is falling short in this respect. An important side effect is that talented individuals are lost, because they have had too many temporary contracts, or because they have had temporary contracts for too long.”

Iosup: “Sometimes universities do this to themselves. TU Delft has a project to attract top female scientists. That’s great, except for the fact that it is aimed only at female scientists who are not already at TU Delft. So, as well as giving female scientists at TU Delft the message that they are not sufficiently qualified to apply, you also ensure that they leave temporarily in order to be able to apply later. Or they don’t come back at all, because they have found a good position somewhere else.”

Women left TU Delft to be eligible for these grants?

Iosup: “The rules state that they are not allowed to apply. I know female scientists who have received Veni grants and left immediately before the introduction of the Work and Security Act, precisely for this reason. If they are here and are not allowed to apply: does that mean they are not good enough? Those rules are all well and good, but not realistic on the shop floor.”

What problems do encounter yourselves?

Iosup: “The biggest problem we all face is time management. We have at least twice as many students as we did five years ago, while the number of staff hasn’t changed. Twenty years ago, there were just a few experts in the world for each field. Today there are more. Now you have to go for the more risky projects. This means that you will fail more often, but there is no room for that. In particular young scientists who do not yet have a tenure track are under extreme pressure.”

If it were up to you, what would you change about academic policy in the Netherlands?

Iosup: “Don’t adopt the American approach, in which 95 percent of projects consist of immediately applicable science. The Netherlands will never be capable of competing with other countries that do short-term projects. That is the most important warning. I try to do both applied and fundamental research, but the latter is becoming more and more difficult. That is a risk.”

What should be done, then?

Iosup: “Make enough money available, because Dutch researchers do very well in top-level research.”

Taebi: “Following on from this: ensure that more funding comes directly from the government. I would also like to raise the universities to a higher international standard, for example by giving young scientists more scope. You could design the system in such a way as to bring in more people from outside. We really have to go in search of top talent.”

Iosup: “If the money isn’t there, young researchers have zero percent chance of funding through European funds. They don’t have a network yet, so they can’t ask companies for money. Therefore top talents have no prospects for development. This is a serious situation, and many people do not survive in this system.”

Taebi: “This leads to the ‘post-doc nomad’ syndrome: people who go from one university to the next with a six-month contract and an annual contract, stating that they have already completed five post-docs yet still haven’t found a serious academic position.”

One of the priorities of The Young Academy is interdisciplinary research. How can interdisciplinary cooperation between researchers be improved?

Iosup: “Rules never work. I’ll give you an example of an actual interdisciplinary problem: education. In 2014, the European Commission stated that we would have a shortage of almost one million people in ICT by 2020. This would amount to more than fifty thousand people in the Netherlands. We can’t get them from other parts of Europe, because they are facing their own scarcity. That is a serious and costly problem.”

What can we do about it?

Iosup: “My contribution is to look at new techniques for education. To look at gamification. Students should have data about their student profile in order to study in a way that suits them, but we do not collect those data. You could work with psychologists, education specialists, computer and data scientists and mathematicians to identify trends with those data, and say: ‘You have a 90 percent chance of becoming a top-level talent, but if you don’t spend more time on this or that you’ll stay where you are.’ We need interdisciplinary research for those data.”

Taebi: “That won’t solve the shortage of fifty thousand people, nor the problem of one million. Part of the solution will have to be to educate better and differently. Engineering programmes in the Netherlands may have to be made less expensive than other study programmes, because there is a greater demand for engineers. I know that this doesn’t fit in with the current political spirit, but you should really open up Europe to highly educated people.”

Iosup: “That’s an interesting discussion. We currently lose 50 percent of our students after the first six months. Students realise that their degree programme doesn’t suit them, or that they are not good enough for it. If we were able to tackle this, we could double capacity immediately. That’s what we should be focusing on.”

Taebi: “Absolutely, but it needs to be both rather than either/or. The solution can be approached from different angles. One of them is efficiency, something TU Delft currently struggles with: keeping drop-out rates as low as possible. Another part of the solution would be making sure that graduates do not leave the country.”

Iosup: “I have another approach: the Ajax approach. Dutch football club Ajax trains more talent than it loses. That’s what the Netherlands should focus on. That’s more realistic than trying to attract top-level talent. It is very difficult to compete with Switzerland or the United States on salaries.”

Taebi: “That’s a fascinating model, based on constant input.”

Iosup: “No, Ajax has scouts all over the world and brings in talent at a young age.”

Taebi: “That’s it: bring in talent from all over the world. I don’t think we’re talking about such different things. My point is that we don’t have enough human capital. It has to come from outside.”

Iosup: “We have to invest in convincing the local population that having 25 percent of people with a higher level education is not enough to meet the needs of the country and of Europe. The average in European objectives is 45 percent.”

Taebi: “That would be good.”

CV:

Alexandru Iosup (Romania, 1980) focuses on cloud computing and internet solutions such as e-Science and online gaming in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. He uses games to teach students in a way that suits them. Last year, he was named best teacher of the year by both TU Delft and student organisation ISO. He will be satisfied if, after his five-year membership, The Young Academy “has given everyone the same opportunities I had”.

Behnam Taebi (Iran, 1977) has worked as a philosopher of technology in the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management since 2005. He was awarded a Veni grant in 2013, with which he is researching the ethical acceptability of the EU’s intention to store radioactive waste in cooperation with multiple countries. Taebi represented the Socialist Party in the Delft City Council from 2002 to 2006. Within The Young Academy he wants to focus on the subjects of internationalisation and research policy.