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You should also consider whether you need to start another lab.

This is the million dollar question. If you want a long-term career in academic research, you pretty much have to strive towards running your own lab; you can’t string together 2-3 year contracts, scattered all over the globe, for your entire life. Even if you were willing to, there are all sorts of stupid institutional barriers to doing this. In particular, there’s a ridiculous bias towards funding recent PhDs and funding is very hard to find after ~4 years.

I would wager that one experienced researcher at $70k easily trumps 2-3 Masters students at $25k each. However, there are lots of mechanisms for funding studentships, but few for paying for experienced employees. The NCI had experimented with something like this, but there were maybe 100 positions total. This is a shame for many different reasons but seems depressingly unlikely to change any time soon.

You should also consider whether you need to start another lab

The incentives are the same as starting another JS framework

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