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Industrial Labs that Still Do Fundamental Research
An anonymous reader asks: "I am a graduate student of Mechanical Engineering at a reputed University in the United States. I have had a lot of fun working towards my PhD. I have published papers and done exciting research. I should be finishing up in the next few months or so, but I would like to continue doing the same kind of work that I am doing now. One option would be to take up a post-doctoral research appointment and find myself a faculty position. I am somehow not attracted to this option because of the tenure and grant pressure. My ideal job would be in something like the Bell Labs of yester-years. Do you know of labs that have that kind of environment? National labs are supposed to have such an atmosphere, but my stint in one of them makes me think otherwise. Google does seem to have such an environment but I am not a CS person. Does Slashdot know of labs where basic research in applied engineering is still done in the US, without the pressure of money and immediate results?"
I would not necessarily give up on academia. Granted, the last five years has been particularly hard on basic science research (especially in biosciences), but there are still good options for the best and brightest. In academia, you really need to have the PhD if you want the flexibility that you are looking for. That said, I've found academia to be a tremendously rewarding experience that does not preclude you from work in industry either. For instance, we've been exploring the commercialization of some of our technologies and I am pleased to say that you *can* have it all with academic environments and industrial aspirations. The trick is that you have to create your own company to do this or find an academic environment that will support independent commercialization.
With respect to industrial labs that do basic research, the pressure from any federally funded labs from the Bush administration has been away from basic research and towards applied research that has mirrored the trend in industry for the few years preceding this administration. Years ago there were more far thinking companies like Xerox, HP, SGI and Bell Labs, but they got lazy and were under more pressure from shareholders to focus more on short term profits and less on long term viability of the company. This effect has been reflected in the long term performance of each of these companies as their influence has withered away. There are some current companies that are starting to invest more of their dollars in true R&D which is being reflected in their performance, but i worry that the trend in this country is going to hurt our international viability in a variety of the sciences both commercial and academic.
P.S. The other thing that you should be aware of is that many industrial labs require some post-doctoral training period as well to obtain positions....... Of course it will depend upon the appointment, but a post doc is viewed as a useful thing not just in pure academia.
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My computer engineering group works rather extensively with IBM's T.J Watson research lab in New York (off the top of my head, we're working with them on two new architectures they are designing, and they used us as guinea pigs to test a new multi-threaded programming language they are developing). I can say first-hand that they do some really great work.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Your university is only believed to be or assumed to be a university? I'd say get out now.
my pet machine
Navy Research Labs (NRL) and/or Army Research Labs (ARL) might be what you're looking for.
Regarding your desire to avoid sponsors: anywhere that you're going for DoD money, whether your at a university or in a lab, you're going to have to suck it up and try to get funding. On the bright side, once you have good relationships with sponsors, I'm told that getting money each year takes less time than the last year did.
NSF and DARPA money are reliably low-pressure. Sometimes money from MITRE is also low-pressure. NRL money can often be low pressure, depending on the program and sponsor in question.
Long story short, I think DoD labs can maybe offer the low-pressure you're looking for, if you can hook up with the right sponsors. Also, working as a civil servant, you'll have job security, vacation, and even pay levels that are better than most corporate research positions offer.
I don't know, of course, but you shouldn't be surprised at all if there are absolutely no privately-owned (like Bell Labs was. Not talking about private universities here) pure research labs in the U.S. anymore.
The U.S. is run almost entirely by bureaucrats, lawyers, and accountants now. Such people have no interest in anything beyond next quarter's profits and their own stock options. Why would they care about something so "unprofitable" as pure, undirected research?
Worse, I think the rest of the world is following suit. But I could be wrong about that, too.
Either way, it's quite depressing. Actually, most of the current trends are quite depressing. I should probably stop thinking about them, and probably would if it weren't so useful to have some idea of what to expect...
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... can be an interesting place to work. Very much depends what you would get to work on, though. I guess presure on results out is almost always there in industral labs. But still, an interesting problem to pursue for few years can grant you the illusion you seek.
http://ge.com/research/
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
You mention that you would like to work for the Bell-labs of old. What makes you think you need a CS degree?
In my limited experience, research labs for technology companies (like IBM, HP and Sun) employ a very diverse group of people from multiple disciplines. The common trait of these people is that they are interested in researching computers, without necessarily having a CS degree. In some ways having a CS degree might not help if you want to do radically innovative stuff (one never knows). I cannot comment on the likes of Google, Ebay or Amazon, but I am sure they have a lot of smart people working on their computing problems that do not have CS degrees. Consider this, if you work for Amazon and research interface design to guide customer decision making, I would *hope* you don't have a CS degree...
If your engineering degree will give you access to any of the research labs, I don't know. Part of it is luck of the draw - having some skills they want. The other part is pure brain power, e.g. are you smart enough to cope and flexible enough to adapt.
If you want to work at a research lab, be prepared to present yourself as a capable candidate.
To be honest, if you want to do "useless"/interesting research, your best bet may be a government lab. There's plenty of pie-in-the-sky research at places like JPL. I met a ton of interesting people there, and a lot of the challenges of exploring other planets actually bring about some rather abstract problems to be solved.
Research Triangle Institute, in the Raleigh / Durham NC area is a research organization founded by Duke, UNC, and NC State 40+ years ago. They are tied closely to academia which seems to be important to you, and are involved in research & development in just about any field you can imagine. They were even mentioned recently on slashdot.
:)
Disclaimer: I work for them
Really, a lot of advisors do consulting with their associated industry, or were once in such a research lab you are looking for. If that doesn't pan out, e-mail some other professors in the department whom you know. You'll find someone who knows the scene. Another option is to use CiteSeer or Google Scholar to search for papers in areas that you are interested in, and skim them for any that are published by private company labs, and apply there.
If you first do a year or two or real work in real industry, then go back to academia or fundamental research, you're more likely to have a far better appreciation of the industry and more likely to make valuable contributions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you are looking for the kind of place that Xerox used to be, especially as a way to avoid the mindnumbing grind of chasing grants and spending your life in what amounts to temp job, forget it.
First, even at the "golden years" of blue-sky research, the only ones that had a permanent position were people that had already proven themselves by a long grind in the post-doc mill and found to be exceptional. Going from your thesis to a steady research job in a place like that didn't happen even then.
There are places like that today - around here we have NICT and ATR in southern Kyoto, for example. But there too, much of the research is implicitly or explicitly aimed at resulting in something useful, and you are no more free of the grant process than at a university. The people with a permanent position are again few and far between; the head researchers overseeing the groups of post-docs and visiting researchers having some temporary grant.
Really, the difference between university research and research institute or large-company research is in my experience mainly in the need to teach (and the opportunity for a semi-steady income) at a university on one hand; and the greater financial resources for equipment and travel at institutes on the other.
I know of only two ways to get to do free research without the teeth-grinding pain of grant-chasing and temporary job upon temporary job:
* Get a steady part-time job you can live on, and do research in your spare time. Teaching is not a bad option if you're reasonably good at it; you have access to the university, with seminars, labs and people, and teaching your subject forces you to pay attention to areas you perhaps would tend to ignore if left to your own devices.
* Make a fortune, retire and do research as a hobby, perhaps form and finance a small group with a couple of colleagues you like and work well with. Hey, we can all dream, right?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
To Further elaborate on SwRI:
It is the 2nd largest independent, nonprofit applied research and development organization. The staff of 3,000 specialize in the creation and transfer of technology in engineering and the physical sciences. The Institute occupies more than 1,200 acres in San Antonio, Texas, and provides nearly two million square feet of laboratories, test facilities, workshops and offices. SwRI's total revenue for fiscal year 2005 was $435 million.
Research Areas include:
Applied Physics
Automation and DATA systems
Ballistics and Explosives Engineering
Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Engine, Emissions, and Vehicle Research
Fuels and Lubricants Research
Geosciences and Engineering
Materials Engineering
Signal Exploitation and Geolocation
Space Science and Engineering
The parent is absolutely correct. Much of the top level R&D work, even "6.1" work (DoD jargon for basic research) is contracted out. There are some DoD labs that still do cutting edge work. The NRL is one. The alternative is to work for one of the contractors. You don't need to work for a juggernaut like Raytheon or Northrup Grumman. There are plenty of small companies that do advanced research. You should take a look for companies that are winning SBIR awards in research areas that interest you. The great thing about looking for SBIR winners is that you aren't limited to DOD work. There's also money from NIH, NASA, etc.
Of course, there are pressures for project management and some of these programs need to turn into products. It's hard to get away from the fact that it's hard to get research funding unless you have an ultimate application and the money won't keep coming unless you have some success in your work. Even in the glory days of Bell Labs when there was some time and money avaiable for curiosity driven research, most of the work had an application. Academic research faces similar hassles. Your advisor might have shielded you from some of that, but a professer needs to pull in research grants, and if your proposals don't have an ultimate application, it's hard to get funding, especially when you're starting out. If you don't get funding as an assistant professor, you will find that once your start-up money runs out you can't recruit students. Furthermore, the speed of research will grind to a halt since your existing students must teach all the time and you can't afford new equipment. Professors in this situation don't get tenure. For the most part, the professors who get money for pure unapplied science have already established themselves as brilliant researchers who are leaders in their fields at top universities.
what you want is a CERN like facility, with sufficient funding and excellent oppurtunities.
"National labs are supposed to have such an atmosphere, but my stint in one of them makes me think otherwise. " ...labs where basic research in applied engineering is still done in the US, without the pressure of money and immediate results?"
If the national lab environment wasn't for you... the corporate environment may be even worse. As a PhD in chemical engineering working at an R&D lab in one of the biggest 'tech companies' in the US that still does physical sciences reseach... I can say this from first hand experience. And, by the way, we employ a LOT of PhD mechanical engineers (mostly with materials science expertise).
At one of the conferences I've attended, I talked with one of the pioneers in my area of research (organic electronics) that works at TJ Watson Lab. Even he complains at how 'managed' the research is at Watson. Actually - his particular project got shelved. All my friends (other PhDs) at Watson do seem to have this cloud of doubt looming over their head regarding the longevity of their positions.
"
As you know - physical sciences research (of which I suspect you are a part of) is extremely expensive. (~$4000 barely gets me an electronic weighing balance that allows me to weigh out the chemicals that I use, much less do anything with it) Someone's got to pay for this. The return on investment for research has gained huge scrutiny in the past several years since it's typically so bad. Many company's don't have such efforts (e.g. Apple, Dell) and are still successful as they concentrate on industrial design and business execution. They simply BUY this technology from smaller companies (or acquire them). And as far as working for those 'smaller companies'... this is even more stressful since it is really sink or swim.. so the 'pressure of money and immediate results' is even greater.
My best advice is this... on your interviews - ask as many questions as possible to learn about how serious the company is in making the appropriate investments for whatever project they are hiring you for. Talk to your would-be peers and ask them frank questions about the work environment.
Lastly - one of my close collegues at work left a senior scientist position at a national lab to work where we do now and he regrets it deeply. If you are really, truly into research and learning the nature of things, and have low tolerance for corporate bullshit - then stay in academina/national lab. If you can stomach it - as I can - there are definitely perks to working for a big company's reseach lab (e.g. the pockets are deep).