(Some) University of Washington Biomedical Researcher Salaries Plotted by Age*

 

Key:
Professor = Assistant / Associate / or Full Professor titles (with or without tenure / tenure track)
ResProf = Assistant / Associate / (or Full) Research Professor title
ResSci = Research Scientist or Technician (RS/Eng titles 1-4 or “senior”)

Data collection:
1) Salary information from this website:
http://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx

2) BS/PhD conferral years were collected from individual google searches (Where it was oftentimes listed on a lab or departmental website, or LinkedIn profile). I took the BS conferral year and subtracted it by 22 to get a rough estimate of a person’s age.

3) Individuals were sampled pseudo-randomly; I originally searched people based on faculty/ staff listings on departmental websites (eg. Microbiology, Immunology, Biochemistry, etc), and then eventually rounded out the dataset by searching for specific positions in the Fiscals.wa.gov website (eg. “RESEARCH SCIENTIST / ENGINEER #” to get more data on people in research scientists / technician positions).

Plot notes:
1) As noted, I was essentially trying to get a sense of how people are monetarily compensated based on their (assumed / expected) age while in the academic research sphere, grouped by Role / Position (eg. Postdoc, Professors, etc).
2) n-values for each position shown in the graph title.
3) Simple linear regression models applied to each group to get a sense of the relationship present for each position type
4) A black LOESS curve from the full dataset applied to get a sense of a “general / overall” pattern that may be present (For general visual purposes only; obviously skewed by group-wise composition of the data put into the graph, so take it with a big grain of salt).
5) Obviously this is only data on the University of Washington, which is a major state research university. I’m guessing it will be somewhat representative of other universities, albeit with slight shifts in scale. Could be worth a different dedicated analysis.