Abstract
Editor’s Note
For this article, New Labor Forum contributor Peter Lucas interviewed Matthew Brown, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Brown, a neuroscientist, has worked within the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland for two years, where he uses flies’ olfaction to study how neurons communicate.
I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Intramural Research Program (IRP) at the NIH. I am a member of United Auto Workers 2750, NIH Fellows United, and the recording secretary of our executive board, where I spend a significant amount of time doing field organizing work. I’ve been in my role at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, or NICHD, in Bethesda, Maryland for two years.
I work in the subfield of neuroscience called sensory coding, which is the study of how neurons talk to each other, figuring out what that language looks like, and determining what it means when individual neurons or ensembles of neurons communicate with each other. I do that by studying olfaction, our sense of smell. I use an animal model, specifically fruit flies, to better understand potential human therapeutic uses in the future. All of human behavior and all of human mental illness originates in the brain. If we’re to understand how to improve those illnesses or those behaviors, then we’re going to have to understand the language that neurons are using to talk to each other.
Most of the day, I go into the lab and study neural activity, specifically figuring out how the brain takes signals from the outside environment and translates them into electrical signals that the rest of the nervous system can use to process information. I often get asked by people, even other scientists, “How do you work on a fly’s brain? They’re so small!” And the answer is: I use my hands. Whether it’s performing microsurgery to expose the brains of these flies that I work on, keeping the flies alive, or recording their brain’s electrical activity when doing experiments, it is me and my hands with the help of a microscope.
Matthew Brown
When I first performed surgery on a fly’s brain, I was surprised by the number of details that are part of this straightforward process. When you actually get the fly under your microscope, you go through the process step by step like anything else: make a cut here, make a cut there, and make another there. I sit with my sharpened tungsten probe, which is essentially a scalpel, and guide it from point A to point B. The amount of focus and concentration and the level of detail that your brain can really handle when you’re instructing your arm and wrist and fingers to move along that path are immense.
I have a couple of collaborators in different universities around the world, one in St. Louis and another in Brussels, that provide me with genetically engineered flies. Flies are the most genetically amenable organism on the planet. For decades, we’ve had exquisite control over what happens in the genome of a fruit fly. We can take advantage of that genetic knowledge and apply it to fields like neuroscience to make these science fiction-esque, genetically modified flies. That allows us to gain deep insight into what’s going on inside their brains and nervous systems.
My work is quite siloed. It varies from person to person and project to project, but in general, I think most people’s projects end up being highly individualized and specified. Working with other people is maybe 5 percent of what I do. The nature of earning a PhD in the biomedical sciences necessitates that you are working on something incredibly specific that you then become the world’s expert in.
The NIH is broken up into institutes and centers, each with their own research specialty—for example, the National Cancer Institute or the National Institute of Mental Health. In the IRP, where scientists work on NIH campuses (rather than reviewing funding for outside universities and such), these institutes and centers are broken up into labs that have even more focused specialties. These sections are led by principal investigators. In these sections, it is mostly fellows and staff scientists who perform the bulk of the actual research being done.
We get funding from the United States Congress, which then gets separated into “intramural” research that happens on NIH campuses, and “extramural” research that happens at universities and hospitals. For intramural, that money is then distributed among the different institutes and centers, of which there are twenty-seven that vary by research specificity: the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Mental Health, and so on. From there, that money gets split up between extramural funding. The overwhelming majority of funding for scientific researchers at institutes, universities, or hospitals across the country is probably coming from NIH through grants. The other split of that money gets put into intramural research where there are NIH campuses—Baltimore, Frederick, Rockville, North Carolina, Montana, Arizona, and Bethesda—where research is actively being done. For those of us working at the NIH itself, we’re very fortunate that we don’t have to rely on this extramural program where we’re constantly writing grants to maintain funding. But we still have to be accountable to the American public—we have to be doing work that advances the mission of NIH (which is “to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health”).
I got my bachelors in 2015, and I spent two years as a lab technician, during which time I was getting more used to what doing research would look like and trying to decide if I actually wanted to pursue a PhD. I finished my PhD at Johns Hopkins after six years, starting in 2017. I started my postdoc at NIH in January 2024. Fellowships at NIH are time-limited. I have a maximum of five years at this position, after which I can transition to being a research fellow, where I’ll be doing basically the exact same job for three years after that. Around eight years is a normal timeline for a lot of postdocs to consider matriculating on to other positions, either in science or higher education. The hope is that by the time I’m done here at the NIH, I’ll be applying to faculty positions to lead my own research lab at a university or research hospital somewhere in the United States.
I currently make about $70,000 a year, and compensation progresses year-to-year with experience. It will continue to increase until about my fifth year as a postdoc, at which time I’ll transition to a research fellow position. Pay can vary wildly there, but the general idea is that we’ll get small pay increases, about 5 percent, each year, within this phase of your career.
My weekly work demands are anywhere between forty and sixty hours on a normal week. A lot of academic research is what you make of it, and there’s a lot of freedom and flexibility that comes with that. I value that freedom and flexibility, but it has two sides.There’s weeks where things can be a little bit lighter, there’s weeks where things are a little bit heavier. I try to be very intentional about keeping myself between about forty-five and fifty hours a week, but occasionally I do sixty-plus.
I have always had an affinity for the biological sciences. When it came time to actually think about what to do with myself, what struck me was how little we actually know about how the brain works despite how important it is in our daily life considering it is the root of all human experience. But it’s remarkable that this organ that lives inside of us—a part of our body like our pancreas, our liver, or our kidneys—acts as the source of every emotion you’ve ever felt, of every memory you’ve ever stored, of every skill you’ve ever learned. Yet, we really don’t have a great way of understanding it at a mechanistic level to reasonably treat or cure things when they go wrong.
Working in academic science means that I’m trusted to be a world expert on what I do, and that comes with pressure. If I run into a problem, there’s nobody that I can ask. But that comes with the day-to-day excitement of working on something that nobody else has ever done before, on an intellectual product that has never existed before, on questions that nobody has tried to answer before. This work still comes with guidance, oversight, and expectations from my principal investigator, but as long as my work is advancing the overall mission of the NIH, I have full license to do what I believe is the best and most important science that I can produce. That’s a really cool feeling. It is what makes academic biomedical research worth pursuing.
The answers to these questions come from experience and creativity—experience reading other people’s work and doing your own work. The creativity that flows from that is thinking deeply about the limitations of that work, finding the best balance of knowledge that doesn’t exist yet, and experimental feasibility. My number one frustration is that there’re only twenty-four hours in a day. If I had it in me and the people in my life would allow it, I would love to sit at my rig and do experiments for eight more hours a day. The frustration of a lot of scientists is that often our imagination, our hypotheses, and our questions outpace our personal abilities to test those hypotheses or answer those questions. That is what makes it ultra-satisfying when you actually come out on the other side of a project, when you’ve tested your hypotheses and got satisfying answers to your questions. But there’s no shortcuts to getting there. Every day when I get home, I’m never even halfway through my to-do list.
When I started my postdoc, the fellows at NIH had just recently won their Federal Labor Relations Authority election. I was coming from Johns Hopkins, where we had recently won our union election for the graduate students, which I was very involved in. I left Hopkins four or five months into bargaining a first contract. By the time I reached out to organizers at NIH, we were about four or five months into bargaining our first contract there. I got to witness the whole thing firsthand, from election to contract ratification, through two different locals.
The biggest difference in being a fellow at NIH, as opposed to being an academic at a university, has been the calamity of being a federal worker under the Trump administration. The IRP at NIH has worked very hard to model itself on the experience that scientists might get if they were doing these fellowships in a more academic environment, so a lot of the day-to-day wouldn’t be all that different. But a lot of the underlying structures that we rely on to do our jobs have been completely turned on their head this past year. For example, purchasing departments have been significantly diminished or completely eliminated in some cases, which has led to many scientists taking time away from their actual jobs to navigate the purchasing process themselves. It seems trivial, but at times, this was taking multiple hours per week away from highly trained scientists. Educational, administrative, and other research support staff—who we rely on to do our best research—were also targeted in the reductions in force (RIFs) of the past year. We rely on many of those people to do our best research.
The systemic attacks on federal workers and publicly funded scientific research have added to the already immense challenge of organizing the biggest new bargaining unit in the federal government in over a decade. The incoming administration announced they were not going to accept any new collective bargaining agreements starting on January 31, 2025; our contract made the cutoff by one day. If we hadn’t gotten out on the ground and organized to make sure that fellows knew that they had to vote to ratify their first contract, we might not have the protections that we currently enjoy.
Before our contract, the majority of the roughly 5,000 fellows at the NIH were at-will employees. Securing the right to just-cause termination in our first contract was a massive win. While being in academic science tends to mean that people are quite motivated and don’t often think about how important it is to have protections for termination, not being an at-will employee anymore has felt extremely comforting lately. Despite all the chaos at NIH and across the federal government, no fellows have lost their job as a result of any of the Trump-DOGE cuts over the last year.
As we were bargaining our first contract, the NIH looked at our health insurance, which is something that the NIH has done well by us with, and decided the way that they have been giving us all health insurance for thirty-plus years is illegal. They threatened to withhold our health insurance, which is classic management bargaining tactics. We got organized. We started with a couple of different letter-signing campaigns and eventually escalated to a picket in front of the main entrance to the NIH campus in Bethesda, where we got hundreds of fellows out with picket signs and bullhorns to demonstrate for our right to health insurance in our contract. Fortunately, we won that right back.
But it is not uncommon to encounter a resistance to or skepticism of collective action in our industry. It comes up multiple times a week during my organizing conversations with other scientists. Given our highly individualized training and approach to work, scientists can tend to try to take the same approach to labor disputes—the idea that things are easier done if you just handle them yourself. And that can lend itself to that behavior being rewarded because it does feel very satisfying when you take on a big problem by yourself and end up on the other side of it. But when it doesn’t work, it can lead to workers internalizing these issues. People start to believe that it is something that is either directly or indirectly their fault, and so they alone should be the ones to worry about resolving or fixing it. I see this constantly with pay. Being an academic scientist is not a very lucrative career. We’re certainly not destitute, but it is not always easy for scientists to make ends meet, particularly in areas with high cost of living and for early career researchers like me. A lot of scientists will look at that problem and say, “well, I’m the one that chose to go to grad school,” or “I’m the one that chose to be a postdoc, and so I should just have to deal with it.” While that amount of responsibility can be noble sometimes, it leads to a situation where the people who are in charge of and benefiting from the work that we do can continually make conditions less and less tenable. It’s a constant organizational struggle to push people toward collective action because it’s not most people’s first instinct.
One week before Christmas and after open season for health insurance enrollment closed, the NIH announced they were going to start treating our health insurance premiums, which they currently pay for, as taxable income on our annual tax forms. We don’t know precisely what effect this will have on the amount of taxes that fellows have to pay, but the concern is that it would increase tax burden by thousands of dollars for thousands of people in our bargaining unit. Right after it happened, I had a conversation with a fellow who was opposed to the original unionization effort. I refocused the conversation on the health insurance issue, which seemed to spark in him the logical thought process of: I didn’t do anything to deserve this; I, as an individual, am being punished by management by this decision; thousands of my coworkers are as well; so what do we actually do about this? I’m not sure that I necessarily won his heart and his mind in that one conversation, but he did agree that collective action was necessary. He signed our campaign letter and even collected signatures from his coworkers right after that. Moving members is possible, but it takes that one-to-one process.
The industry is certainly in flux right now. Public funding of biomedical research is something that has historically been widely thought to be a good thing in America. We always say, “everyone has a family member who’s died from cancer, and everyone wants to get rid of that, so why would you be against this?” But the reliance on that logic has gotten shoddier with the Trump administration cuts to NIH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and the various arms across the federal government that either directly do biomedical research or fund biomedical research. But sense of discovery is still something that most people really value, even if right now the people who are wielding power don’t. I think that Americans value scientific progress and discovery more than what the Trump administration’s actions reflect, and long term, people are always going to want to learn more things, cure diseases, and find new treatments. It feels less stable than it was a year or two ago. But long term, we’ll get through it.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
