National Postdoctoral Association

February 20, 2013

The 2013 Annual Meeting is fast approaching! View and download the agenda here: 2013 Annual Meeting agenda.

Paula Stephan, Ph.D., will deliver the keynote address at the NPA 11th Annual Meeting. The meeting will take place March 15 - 17, 2013, in Charleston, S.C., at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Stephan is professor of economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, a research associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, and a visiting faculty member, Department of Economics S. Cognetti de Martiis, University of Turin, Italy. Her research interests focus on the careers of scientists and engineers and the process by which knowledge moves across institutional boundaries in the economy.

She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors, Science. Her book How Economics Shapes Science was published by Harvard University Press, 2012.

She currently serves on the National Research Council Board on Higher Education and Workforce and on the Committee to Review the State of the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers. She served on the National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council, National Institutes of Health, 2006-2009, and served on the Advisory Committee of the Social, Behavioral, and Economics Program, National Science Foundation, 2001-2008. She was a member of the European Commission High-Level Expert Group that authored the report "Frontier Research: The European Challenge." She has served on a number of National Research Council committees including the committee on Dimensions, Causes, and Implications of Recent Trends in the Careers of Life Scientists, Committee on Methods of Forecasting Demand and Supply of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers, and the Committee on Policy Implications of International Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars in the United States. Her research has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellow Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Stephan has published numerous articles in journals such as The American Economic Review, The Journal of Economic Literature, Management Science, Nature, Organization Science, and Science. She co-wrote, with Sharon Levin, Striking the Mother Lode in Science, Oxford University Press, 1992.

She graduated from Grinnell College (Phi Beta Kappa) with a B.A. in Economics and earned both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan. She has been a visiting scholar at Katholeike Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, a Wertheim Fellow, Harvard University, and an ICER fellow, Turin, Italy.