Krystyna Isaacs, Ph.D.
The Markey Trust funded seven classes of scholars. This paper presents a description of the first five classes of Markey Scholars, those who received their initial funding between 1985 and 1989.
Over three-fourths of the scholars from classes 1 to 5 are employed at academic institutions, 12 percent are at non-profit research facilities such as Scripps, 8 percent are at for-profit research facilities such as Merck, and 3 percent are in professions not directly involved in research or medicine.
Of those in academia, roughly one-third are now full professors, two-thirds are associate professors, and one is a senior member. And of those in the private or non-profit sector, 13 hold positions such as president, or director, or senior member.
We calculated publication rates as the total number of articles published over the entire life of the scholar. Productivity ranged from a low of 10 to a high of 180, with an average of 53 peer-reviewed articles published.
The National Research Council generates ranking tables on science departments at public and private academic institutions. They have identified the top-ten institutions in the fields of cellular and developmental biology, biochemistry and molecular biology, and molecular and general genetics. These top-ranked programs are in a total of 13 universities. Nearly 60 percent of the scholars in academia are employed at one of those 13 universities.
As part of the overall evaluation of the Markey Scholars conducted by the National Research Council, we are conducting ethnographic inter-