Fast‑Facts Dashboard
*Salary and employment data: BLS OEWS May 2024; outlook: BLS Employment Projections 2023‑33.
A Day in the Life: Lab, Lecture Hall & Greenhouse
- 6 a.m. - Glance at overnight Illumina run; 85 % Q30 score on coral‑microbiome samples.
- 8 a.m. - Teach “Principles of Genetics” (180 sophomores); live‑demo CRISPR base‑editing via cloud virtual lab.
- 9:30 a.m. - Office hours: pre‑med asks about MCAT prep; grad student needs advice on R linear‑mixed models for honeysuckle invasion dataset.
- 11 a.m. - Department meeting: finalize cluster‑hire ad for computational biology line, review greenhouse expansion budget.
- 12 p.m. - Bang out NIH R01 grant aims over sushi; Slack postdoc about missing reagent lot numbers in ELN.
- 1 p.m. - Lead lab meeting: undergrad presents flow‑cytometry plots on T‑cell exhaustion; critique statistics and figure design.
- 3 p.m. - Supervise students installing soil‑moisture sensors in campus prairie restoration; show them how to push data to ThingSpeak API.
- 5 p.m. - Grade take‑home problems on population genetics while waiting for HPLC chromatograms.
- 7 p.m. - Record 10‑minute TikTok explainer on antifreeze proteins for departmental outreach; schedule posts via Buffer.
Field seasons swap the lecture hall for Amazon canopy cranes, NOAA research vessels, or Antarctic microbe huts. Sabbaticals pivot to biotech start‑up collaborations or Fulbright fellowships in Nairobi.
Tool‑Kit & Tech Stack
Emerging must‑knows: AlphaFold‑driven protein‑modeling pipelines, spatial transcriptomics platforms, AI lab‑assistants that auto‑annotate Western blots, and open‑source LLMs fine‑tuned on PubMed for rapid literature scans.
Core Competencies & Personality Match
If your MAPP Assessment lights up Investigative (problem‑solving), Social (mentorship), and Enterprising (grant hustle) motivators, you’ll likely thrive here.
Work Environment & Lifestyle
- Schedule: Mix of fixed lectures, flexible lab blocks, and unpredictable grant deadlines; evenings/weekends for field sampling and manuscript revisions.
- Contract: Nine‑month base; summer salary (up to 3/9ths) from grants, plus consulting or textbook royalties. Adjunct and visiting lines exist, but tenure‑track demand rising as boomers retire.
- Union presence: Strong in many public systems (AFT, UUP); weaker in private R1s.
- Physical setting: Climate‑controlled labs, steaming greenhouses, icy research stations. Eye protection and gloves swap with mosquito head‑nets, depending on the week.
Education & Credential Pathway
Community‑college instructors need an MS + teaching experience; R1 research universities want postdocs with robust funding track records.
Career Ladder & Earnings
*Summer salary, patents, consulting for biotech/pharma, textbook royalties, and speaking fees can add $15k – $100k annually.
National Wage Percentiles (OEWS May 2024)
Sector & Research Trends Shaping the Next Decade
- AI‑Accelerated Discovery: AlphaFold models, large‑language search agents, and automated lab robots cut experiment cycles; faculty fluent in computational biology are cluster‑hire magnets.
- Climate & One‑Health Funding: NSF Convergence Accelerators and NIH Climate‑Health initiatives prioritize projects linking ecosystems, pathogens, and human well‑being.
- Undergraduate Research Mandates: ABET‑style recommendations push CUREs; teachers who can scaffold publishable undergrad projects are hot hires.
- Data‑sharing & Open‑Science: NIH 2026 data‑management mandates, FAIR repositories, preprint culture; faculty must budget for curation staff.
- DEI & Community Engagement: Grant panels demand broader impacts: citizen‑science coral surveys, bilingual lab manuals, Indigenous knowledge co‑creation.
- Biotech‑Industry Partnerships: CRISPR start‑ups, biofoundries, and cell‑ag companies offer sponsored‑research chairs; professors navigate IP contracts plus pedagogy.
- Retirement Surge: ughly 35 % of tenured biology faculty hit retirement age by 2032; new PhDs with interdisciplinary chops well positioned.
Pros & Cons: Straight Talk
Are You Ready to Teach Biology and Advance It?
- Does coding R pipelines and pipetting CRISPR reactions feel equally thrilling?
- Can you pivot from writing NSF broader‑impact statements to calibrating drone NDVI sensors before lunch?
- Will you celebrate a freshman’s first successful gel as much as your own Cell paper?
- Are you prepared to revise a rejected NIH grant three times without losing steam?
If that sounds like you, and your MAPP Career Assessment highlights Investigative, Social, and Enterprising drives, postsecondary biological‑science teaching might be your perfect habitat.
Is this career path right for you? Find out Free.
- Take the MAPP Career Assessment (100% free).
- See your top career matches, including five free custom matches revealing whether a life of teaching and bench science aligns with your strengths.
- Receive a personalized compatibility score plus next‑step guidance toward PhD programs, postdocs, and coveted tenure‑track searches.
Start the FREE MAPP Career Assessment today and begin evolving your future.
