Labs Hire As Stimulus Money Pours In

Unemployment just hit a 26-year high, but the health care and education sectors actually added about 52,000 jobs in August.

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Federal funds are boosting research as far away as Guam.

Wikimedia Commons

Federal funds are boosting research as far away as Guam.

If you ever thought about working in a research lab, now might be the time to apply. The Boston Globe reports money being pumped into biomedical research as part of the federal stimulus package is spurring hiring in Massachusetts, second only to California in the number of extra grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The Globe figures about $178 million in extra federal money has flowed into the state so far, a big change from essentially flat funding for most of the decade. Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard neurobiologist who studies the brain's processing of optical illusions, picked up $394,000 in a two-year grant made possible by the stimulus package. Now she's looking to hire two postdocs in a hurry.

The NIH has a nifty interactive map you can use to find the projects funded through the federal stimulus.

The reach is broad, even stretching to the University of Guam, where a $79,000 stimulus grant to the biology department will allow the purchase of a desktop scanning electron microscope.

Correction: The original version of this post said incorrectly the grant money would double the number of research assistants for undergraduates and didn't mention the microscope purchase.