This PhD student helped to win a major pay hike for Canadian researchers
Kaitlin Kharas is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024
On 16 April 2024, Kaitlin Kharas was one of a select few people ushered into an office across the street from the Canadian Parliament and given a sneak peek at the latest budget.
It was, perhaps, an unusual source of excitement for a PhD student. But Kharas had waited a long time to see the contents of those stuffy, bureaucratic pages: the biggest pay rise in 20 years for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers across Canada. The budget included huge boosts to both the number and value of government scholarships. “There was absolute excitement and giddiness when I saw those numbers,” she says.
It was the culmination of a years-long campaign; Kharas had been leading the project for the past six months.
The Support Our Science (SOS) campaign began in 2022. From the start, organizers knew it needed to be led by graduate students speaking in their own voice, says Marc Johnson, a biologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who helped to launch the campaign.
SOS’s first executive director was Sarah Laframboise, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa. When she stepped down in November 2023, Johnson and the board chose Kharas, who was doing a PhD in paediatric brain cancer at the University of Toronto, as her replacement. “Kaitlin had distinguished herself as professional, well spoken and up to date on the issues,” says Johnson. “She and Sarah have been our face and voice, and the people who put our vision into action.”
The campaign involved rallies, meetings with cabinet ministers and e-mail campaigns. In the months leading up to the budget, the campaign held a press conference and encouraged supporters to write to the prime minister and finance minister. But Kharas says one of the most effective events was the nationwide walkout in May 2023. After the government failed to increase scholarship amounts in the 2023 budget, some 10,000 researchers at 46 institutions across the country stopped working in protest.
Kharas helped to organize the walkouts at local institutions, and met with finance minister Chrystia Freeland, outside whose office the Toronto protest had gathered. “It was my favourite moment of the campaign,” says Kharas.
Stagnating investment in basic research and increases in the cost of living have provoked a crisis for early-career researchers, who are finding their work perilous for both their finances and their mental health.
The nationwide salary boost that Kharas and SOS achieved is rare, but other actions by researchers have been successful at local levels. In the United States, for instance, union action helped postdoc researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City to get a pay rise this year. Widespread strikes helped to bring about a pay increase for researchers at the University of California in 2022. At the national level, the US National Institutes of Health raised salaries for graduate students and postdocs across the board in April, following recommendations from a working group.
Kharas thinks the SOS campaign succeeded because it aligned its arguments with the priorities of Canada’s present government — highlighting the economic contributions of research and the diversity of the graduate-student community.
Although Kharas was the face of the campaign, she pays tribute to the many supporters, volunteers and organizers who worked to pull it off, especially Laframboise and deputy director Courtney Robichaud. “It would not have happened without their time and energy,” she says.
And although she, and many of the students and postdocs she worked with, will not personally benefit from the pay increases (Kharas completed her studies in September), she is proud to have left Canadian research in a better place.
“This money isn’t going to directly impact us, but we felt passionate about making sure the Canadian science-research ecosystem was viable, sustainable and inclusive for everyone coming next,” she says.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03892-3
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Brian Owens
