Advocacy

Major Policy Initiatives

In 2022-2023, the PPA Advocacy Committee carried out three major initiatives concerning university policies on postdoc health insurance and benefits, postdoc salaries, and challenges faced by international postdocs. Each survey was followed by a postdoc-led town hall to share survey results and to collect feedback through points raised during discussion.

Postdoc Association Partnerships and Name Change

The committee also worked to build relationships with advocacy leadership in Penn’s Graduate and Professional Student Association and postdoc associations of universities across the Ivy League and regionally across cities in the Northeast. Conversations with these groups led to a strong consensus that creating an organization representative of all postdocs across the university would put postdocs in the strongest position to advocate for improvements to university postdoc policies. While the Biomedical Postdoc Council had de facto served this representative role since 2001 and was in its policies welcoming to all postdocs, its name led to membership heavily favoring the biomedical sciences. To address this, the advocacy committee introduced a motion to change the name of the Biomedical Postdoc Council to a more inclusive one in September 2022, which passed unanimously, and in October 2022, Penn Postdoc Association was selected as the organization’s new name by popular vote of active members.

Collaboration with University Offices and University Council Representation

The committee also regularly met with the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) and the Office of Biomedical Postdoctoral Programs to share policy priorities identified from survey results and postdoc feedback from PPA town halls and open meetings. PPA leadership also joined President Magill’s Red and Blue Advisory Committee to advocate for improvements to policies affecting postdocs.

Following these meetings, OVPR introduced a resolution to the University Council to add a postdoc representative to the council, which passed. The university council has had representation for graduate students for three decades and currently has 16 representatives, one for every 1,000 master’s and PhD students. The addition of the council’s first ever postdoc member represents a major step forward in advancing visibility of postdoc priorities on campus.

Salary and Benefits Changes, and Initiatives Moving Forward

In April 2023, OVPR announced long anticipated updates to postdoc salary and benefits at the university with starting salaries raised from NIH minimum levels of $56,484 for fiscal year 2023 to $65,000, and open enrollment for new health insurance plans starting at the end of April. Postdocs were shifted from postdoc-specific Aetna HMO and PPO health insurance plans to the same health insurance plans (Keystone HMO, Aetna POS, PennCare PPO) available to full-time staff and faculty. In January 2024, the committee initiated a new survey to collect postdoc feedback on their experiences with these new plans.

The committee has also been working to share postdoc input on the development of the university’s first ever university-wide Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, an initiative underway in OVPR since April 2023.

New NIH Recommendations on Postdoctoral Training

In December 2023, an NIH advisory committee released a highly anticipated report detailing new recommendations on “Re-envisioning NIH-Supported Postdoctoral Training.” This followed an NIH Request for Information in February to April 2023 in which interested members of the research community were invited to provide public comment on the topic. The PPA Advocacy Committee will work to identify priorities amongst these recommendations for Penn postdocs and advocate for their implementation.