We believe that young scientists and engineers are the future of science and engineering. We believe that their extraordinary potential can be better realized if they are informed and empowered. As young(ish) scientists/engineers ourselves we have direct experience with the system of training for future scientists and engineers. While this system is “the envy of the world” it is far from perfect, especially in how it reforms itself. Today’s graduate students and postdocs will be tomorrow’s principal investigators, professors and lab directors. They will also be tomorrow’s entrepreneurs, teachers and civic leaders.

Our goal is to help early/mid-career scientists and engineers better understand the forces that affect their careers, as well as some of the emerging opportunities that will play a bigger role in their careers in the future. We seek to engage this community directly and informally with content that is timely, topical and lively.

Geoff Davis is a Senior Researcher in the User Experience Group at Google.

Davis earned his PhD in applied mathematics from New York University's Courant Institute in 1994, and has since employed his doctoral education in a variety of capacities.  He has been an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department at Dartmouth College, the Texas Instruments Visiting Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University, a researcher in the Signal Processing Group at Microsoft Research, a developer at San Francisco-based startup company 4charity, a Visiting Scholar at Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, and a Werthheim Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School

Davis's mathematical research centered around representations of information, with a particular focus on wavelets and related transforms. His work on image coding led to an an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship and the 2000 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Prize Paper Award.

Davis has had a longstanding interest in science education and policy issues. In 1997 he created the phds.org web site, which currently receives around 200,000 unique visitors each month. He later ran the National Graduate School Survey with NAPGS and the Sigma Xi Postdoc Survey. He was a recent member of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Science and Engineering Workforce Project. He and co-blogger Peter Fiske have collaborated on a number of interesting science policy projects, this blog being the latest.

Peter S. Fiske is co-founder and VP for Business Development and Finance of RAPT Industries, a technology start-up in Fremont, California and Freeport, Pennsylvania. Prior to starting RAPT, Fiske led a research team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1996 Fiske was awarded a White House Fellowship and served one year in the Clinton Administration as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special Projects. Fiske received his Ph.D. in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University in 1993 and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

As a scientist, Peter led a research group in the Physics and Advanced Technologies Directorate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His group developed new experimental diagnostic techniques in condensed matter physics and materials science and also utilized 2- and 3D hydrodynamic models to simulate shock phenomena in solids and fluids. He is the author of 20 technical articles, most in international peer-reviewed journals including Science. From 1998 to 1999 he served as a member of Laboratory Director Bruce Tarter's Long Range Strategy Project, a group of leaders tasked with identifying critical technology areas for the laboratory's future. In this role he has focused on technology spin-off and start-up strategies for the Laboratory.

Dr. Fiske is also a nationally-recognized author and lecturer on the subject of leadership and career development for young scientists and engineers. He is the author of To Boldly Go: A Practical Career Guide for Scientists (AGU Press, 1996). A new edition, Put Your Science to Work was published in December of 2000. From 1996 to 2000 he wrote the career advice column Tooling Up, read by over 60,000 scientists and engineers monthly and has lectured on the subject of career development for scientists to over 8,000 young scientists and engineers in the US and the UK. Presently, he writes the monthly column Opportunities on AAAS’s website ScienceCareers.org.