Hannah Hoag

Tag: funding

  • Cold cash for cold science

    Cold cash for cold science

    The recent funding wrap-up from the international polar year (IPY) has left many Canadian researchers scratching their heads, trying to find a way to continue their arctic science projects. A new grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada may help close that research-funding gap.

    In its announcement yesterday, NSERC opened a competition to fund large-scale research with a focus—for this round of funding—on northern earth systems. The Discovery Frontiers initiative will heft Can$4 million over five years on the successful research team to study the physical, chemical, biological and social factors that affect the North and its inhabitants—and to come up with solutions. Fresh water, sea level, permafrost, weather patterns, biodiversity or climate change adaptation could be part of the successful pitch. The northern community will help define the projects and their goals.

    The story continues at Nature’s blog The Great Beyond.

  • Taxing times for Canadian postdocs

    Trainee researchers struggle to make ends meet after the government clarifies tax rules for grants.

    Staff, student or employee? The employment status of Canadian postdoctoral researchers remains unclear — and many are struggling with the tax issues that arise from the ambiguity.

    Some of Canada’s postdocs are categorized as associates with benefits, others are fellows with no employee status and, until recently, some had a tax-exempt status on a par with students. “We fall into this no-man’s land,” says Marianne Stanford, chair of the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Ontario.

    Earlier this year, the federal government put an end to the tax-free wages that some postdocs had been enjoying since 2006. “Now there’s a two-tier system in labs where some of the people earning the degrees are getting more than those who already have them,” says Stanford. The move was a blow to postdocs, some of whom were recruited with the promise of tax-free earnings, and who put up with the wages because they were tax-free — although many feel they’re underpaid relative to their level of education.

    The tax-free wage came about in 2006 when the federal government introduced tax exemption for fellowships and awards. But as the government made clear in March, the exemption was only intended to apply to students enrolled in an educational programme. In a 2009 CAPS survey of 1,200 postdocs, 23% were not paying taxes on their fellowships. Many of those were in Quebec, where the provincial government considers postdocs to be stagières, or trainees, lumping them in with students.

    → Keep on reading the story in Nature