NOVARTIS—Postdoc play money

Another newcomer to the Best Places to Work survey—Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research’s campus in Horsham, United Kingdom—takes top honors among international institutions this year. With only nine postdocs, Horsham is the smallest group on the list, but the postdocs say they prefer it that way. “Being a postdoc is incidental most of the time,” says Ian Craig, a computational chemist who has been with Novartis for 2 years. “We’re not treated like postdocs, but integrated members of the community and research.”

The Horsham campus is the global headquarters of Novartis’s Respiratory Research Center, as well as the home to its gastrointestinal work, and postdocs play lead roles in both focus areas. “We are actually doing research, not just screening compounds,” says postdoc Vikki Burton, who has been at Novartis for just over a year.

Perhaps its biggest draw, however, is having access to Novartis’s international resources, says Craig. “In academia, you hear the term multidisciplinary all the time, but nowhere is that more true that at Novartis,” he says. “You have an amazing array of talented scientists with different specialties all working toward the same goal.”

Horsham’s nine postdocs have a group budget that they are free to spend any way they want, such as funding events and trips that allow them to explore Novartis’s resources. In the past, the group arranged a seminar series with invited scientists and traveled to other Novartis campuses scattered throughout Europe and the United States.