How to obtain a faculty position in an economic downturn?

This question comes up very often in academic circles. Because of the economic downturn, it has become non-trivial to obtain any kind of position, whether it is in academia or industry. It is a good time for employers but not a good one for prospective employees. The applicant pool is gargantuan nowadays and there are a lot of talents out there seeking jobs: With laid-offs all over the U.S., experienced hard-working Americans as well as foreign talents and fresh university grads are now all competing for the few jobs out there.

Just to give you a sense of reality, we placed an ad for a postdoc and we got around 400 applicants, ranging from experience industry laid-offs, university professors, mature postdocs and fresh PhD graduates all-together.

To come back to the question, there are a few basic requirements that an applicant has to meet:

(1) Good publications, preferably in high impact factor journals
(2) Postdoctoral research experience ranging from 3-5 years (or more?!)
(3) Teaching experience(desired)
(4) h-index > 5

These days, as mentioned above, there'll be a lot of people who will satisfy requirements (1)-(4). But the decisive factor to get hired is:

FUNDING. Schools prefer postdocs who wrote or co-wrote grant proposals and managed to obtain funding. If an applicant can bring his/her own research funding, they have statistically much higher chances of becoming a faculty member.

The most effective people have excellent time management skills

Nowadays, especially in the US, people are overburdened with work. Typically, most people are buried underneath paperwork and email. But my boss recently made a good observation: He mentioned that top performers can answer you almost immediately. The most effective people would usually be on top of things and possess excellent time management skills.

We noticed that the very top directors, professors, managers and other top executives would reply to any emails within a few minutes to at most a few hours. While those with poor time management skills have to be literally harassed over a few days to months before responding. Unfortunately, I have often encountered the latter!

But I have also had the chance to interact with top performers, at the top of their field, who managed to respond to my emails and also who gave me their cell number in case I didn't succeed in reaching them fast enough!

These are the kind of people whom you should consider working for and whom you should hire.

Also, this is the kind of professional behavior one should strive to cultivate.

Lecture on lithography

I just gave a 1 hour lecture on "lithography" for the INT G370 course: Nanosystems Design for Biology and Medicine.

As the old saying goes, it turns out that we learn much more by teaching a course. It's kind of refreshing as you have to dig up some of the old concepts locked inside your memory.

The moral of the story is to try to teach something once in a while!