[unmei]

NIH trainee pay scale: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-12-03...

Depending on the institution, you may make slightly more than the minimum (starting at $39K), but postdocs in the sciences do not 'typically' make $50-$60K. As a monetary investment, academia is about as poor a bet as you can make: spend 5-6 years making ~$25K then another 3-5 years below $50K. Then you might be able to start making professor money if you're in hot field and willing to sell your soul to your work.

[_delirium]

Interesting, that's lower than the people I know. They lean more towards the machine-learning side of bioinformatics (plus people in straight AI, not bio-related), and generally make around $50k, some $55k, at research institutions in the US.

Sounds like recent American graduates may want to start reading the job listings in Europe, though. A postdoc where I teach in Denmark has a minimum civil-service salary of ~$55k, and in Switzerland the going rate is well above that: a friend works in Lugano, fresh out of grad school, for somewhere in the neighborhood of $80k, although that's a bit above the norm. Postdoc candidates with strong tech skills have good demand at institutions with large EU projects, so they're not lottery-win positions either.