Simons says hire

“It was out of the blue, and a wonderful surprise,” says Mark Srednicki, of the 6 November news that the University of California, Santa Barbara, physics department, which he chairs, would receive funding for two postdocs. The money comes from the Simons Foundation, which is paying out $19 million for 68 three-year postdoctoral positions in math, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer science.

The positions, open to candidates of any nationality, are with some 46 institutions in the US and at Cambridge and Oxford universities in the UK. The postdocs will earn $65 000–$70 000 a year.

“Because postdocs are a very important first step in one’s career, and a number of such positions have been eliminated at universities due to financial concerns, we moved to plug a gap,” says Jim Simons, a mathematician-turned-investment-manager who 15 years ago created the foundation, now worth more than $1 billion. “If we continue this program, it won’t be with a group of anointed universities as it is now, but rather as direct grants to individuals. We did this quickly. Otherwise we could never have had this in place for this fall.”

In the physical sciences and mathematics, the foundation has funded isolated projects, including the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University and a bailout of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (see Physics Today, March 2006, page 26 ). But unlike the foundation’s life sciences focus on quantitative biology and the study of autism, “we are just beginning to solicit advice on the most effective ways to support math and the physical sciences,” says David Eisenbud, a mathematician at University of California, Berkeley, who recently joined the foundation.