The future labour market for R&D Manpower in The Netherlands

Abstract

An adequate supply of qualified research and development (R&D) personnel is an important precondition for a government policy that aims for a strongly knowledge‐intensive economic growth. As in many other OECD countries, there is great concern in The Netherlands about meeting this crucial condition in the next decades. This article tries to show to what extent this current concern is justified. For that purpose, forecasts of future supply and demand for research manpower in the science and engineering fields (including agriculture and health) have been produced, extending to the year 2010. Sensitivity analyses show that the fore‐casts are not very sensitive to alternative assumptions on economic growth, investments, replacement demand and labour supply. From a methodological point of view the forecasting approach differs from the more traditional manpower forecasting. Firstly, the demand for R&D personnel is split up into an increase in total employment for R&D manpower (expansion demand) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the need for replacements for researchers who retire, die or switch to other occupations (replacement demand). Expansion and replacement demand are considered in three sectors of R&D work: universities, research institutes and private enterprises. Expansion demand and replacement demand together determine the job openings for newcomers. These job openings are confronted with the supply of new R&D manpower, which is largely determined by the output of the educational system. The confrontation of demand and supply forecasts shows that, in general, severe shortages of R & D manpower will result if there are not adequate manpower policy adjustment. The article closes with a discussion of the policy implications of the expected disequilibria in the market for R & D manpower.

Picosecond dynamics of a membrane protein revealed by 2D IR

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Time-resolved Mechanism of Extracellular Gate Opening and Substrate Binding in a Glutamate Transporter

“…The van der Waals interactions were calculated using a cutoff distance of 10 Å, and long range electrostatic interactions were calculated using the particle mesh Ewald method. The single point charge model was adopted for water molecules as a plausible model for lipid simulations (21,22) along with the lipid parameters used in our previous MD simulations of other membrane proteins (23,24). The membrane consisted of 353 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoylphosphatidyl ethanolamine molecules, and the system was solvated with ϳ23,000 water molecules.…”

Comparative study of generalized Born models: Protein dynamics

“…The HCT, modified analytical generalized Born (mAGB), and Still models were implemented in the GROMACS 3.0 package (11)(12)(13). The precision of the implementation was examined by evaluating both energies and forces.…”

“…The three models are those of Still and coworkers (7), the HCT model from the Cramer͞Truhlar group (8), and a modified AGB (mAGB) model of Levy and coworkers (9) developed in our laboratory (10). The three models have been implemented in the GROMACS 3.0 package (11)(12)(13). Five-nanosecond simulations using each of the three models were carried out on 10 different proteins (Table 1), and the structural properties averaged over the last 1 ns of each simulation were compared with the corresponding properties obtained from the experimentally determined structures.…”