EDITORIAL family with a successful career in neuroscience

After years of hard work as a student and postdoc, stressful negotia-tions and restless nights of agony regarding your academic future,you managed to secure a Principal Investigator (PI) position andestablish your own laboratory. And just when you thought you couldrelax a bit and enjoy some time with your family, or start a family,you find yourself facing massive levels of responsibility added toyour research, that demand most of your time and energy. The chal-lenge to balance a successful career with a happy family life is not atrivial one.There is no doubt that the work load demands for young PIs aremuch higher than they used to be a generation ago. Young PIs arenowadays faced with increased teaching, administrative, laboratoryorganization, fundraising and publishing duties, not to mention pub-lic relations or outreach actions and, perhaps the most challengingtask of all, that of managing people with very tight agendas of theirown. For example a common administrative issue that may not evenenter the thoughts of a wanna-be PI is the amount of time requiredto deal with animal welfare. With the new European legislation(‘European Union, Animal Welfare’ 2016), Project License holdersare often subjected to scrutiny and need to deal with loads ofadministrative issues pertaining to animal welfare. Teaching, whileemotionally and scholarly rewarding, is another time-consumingobligation. As the number of University students has increased mas-sively over the last decade (U.S. Department of Education 2015;UCAS 2016), faculty staff and especially young PIs, are often askedto assume very high teaching loads, which, combined with studentconsulting and examination duties, can occupy a very large portionof a PI’s time. As a consequence, time devoted to research is neces-sarily decreased (Ziker, 2014), with the exception perhaps of thoseemployed in research institutions, with little or voluntary teachingobligations (Fig. 1).At the other end, the impressive technological advances of the lastfew decades have enabled new knowledge to be rapidly dissemi-nated online [even on mobile devices (Science on the go 2010)],increasing not only the number and speed of new discoveries butalso the competition between research teams around the globe. Anegative consequence is that more and more research laboratories,and especially the ones headed by young PIs, are forced to operateon much higher speeds to publish their discoveries ahead of compet-ing laboratories. The increased pressure stems primarily from thefact that increasingly higher numbers of trained researchers are com-peting for a static number of PI positions (Powell, 2015), therebycreating bottlenecks in the postdoc-to-PI transition phase and/or thetenure-track-to-tenured PI phase. As a result, young PIs are underextreme pressure to achieve excellence to secure one of these fewpositions (Karadottir et al., 2015). Excellence is typically demon-strated by publishing in journals with high impact factors [althoughthis particular criterion is increasingly questioned by many, includ-ing the FKNE (Beware the impact factor, 2013; Bladek, 2014;Brembs et al., 2013)], securing prestigious personal grants, being aninvited speaker at prestigious international scientific meetings, serv-ing on selection committees of prestigious grant agencies or acade-mies, etc. To achieve all the above, young PIs need to work longhours, often so long that for many of them having a family or ahobby seems like a distant dream.To those that already have a family when they become PIs,things are also complicated by increased family demands. These areagain much higher than they used to be a generation ago andinclude primarily increased housekeeping and childcare responsibili-ties. The reasons are numerous. In most families, both partners areemployed to secure a high quality of life in terms of family incomebut also to achieve personal career objectives. As a result, theamount of time devoted to family duties and/or activities by bothpartners is significantly smaller than several decades ago, when mostwomen opted to be stay-home moms. This becomes even moreproblematic in the case of dual careers. If both parents are scientists,the problem of finding a job in the same city is a particularly chal-lenging one (see section on Dual Careers below) and often partnersare forced to live in different cities and spend long hours commut-ing. As a result, childcare demands are even higher for the parentwho assumes the role of the main caregiver, usually the mother.