Can I become a tenure-track prof in one dept (biology) and teach in a different dept (math) with only one PhD?

Question

I recently defended my PhD in Neuroscience and am starting a postdoc soon. Like a lot of people who take this track, I hope to one day have my own research lab at a university. I would also like to teach, but here's the thing — I don't want to teach neuroscience or biology. I taught lower-division math at my undergrad university as an adjunct before leaving for my PhD (when I had just a BS in Bio, Math) and I loved it. I would ideally like to have a research career in neuroscience and teach lower-division math courses.

My question is: is it possible to span fields like this if you can demonstrate capability or have subject-specific teaching on your CV even without PhD-level training in both fields? I don't have math-specific training beyond my BS. Many adjunct/lower-division math professors have a Master's in Math and no PhD in any field. Do I also need a Master's if I have a PhD in a different field (neuroscience is more quantitative than other life sciences, but it's not math)?

Answer 1

Can I become a tenure-track prof in one dept (biology) and teach in a different dept (math) with only one PhD?

TL;DR: no.

Long answer:

I was for several years the chair of a mathematics department and during that time oversaw teaching assignments for the 200-odd courses offered yearly by my department. I can recall only one case in which my department allowed a faculty member from a biology-related department who did not have an advanced degree in math or a closely related area (eg physics) to teach a math class (I believe it was calculus for biology students). Even this arrangement raised some eyebrows — mine, and possibly other people’s — but the circumstances were a bit unusual so it was allowed to happen, for reasons I won’t go into.

With this background, I can say with reasonable confidence that what you are proposing is impossible. Perhaps you can reasonably expect to be allowed to teach a math class once or twice in your career if that’s something you have your mind set on doing, but as a regular part of your job, at a normal university? No way. Even setting aside your lack of qualifications to teach math (an objection which one can imagine you overcoming under some hypothetical, if rare, circumstances), the fact remains that departments hire faculty among other important reasons to fulfill their own teaching needs. If you are in department X, you will be teaching the classes that department X offers - that’s why they are hiring you; so it simply doesn’t make sense for a neuroscience department to allow you to regularly teach classes of another department, except under some extremely rare and unusual circumstances.

Now, if you get a second PhD in math, or publish several years’ worth of postdoctoral research work in neuroscience that can be plausibly described as serious applied math so that you can credibly start calling yourself a mathematician, then your plan might start making a bit more sense. In that case you would probably want to look for positions that involve a joint appointment between a neuroscience department and a mathematics department — such things are not common, but they exist. Your teaching load will then be split between the two departments, likely in roughly the same proportion as the proportions of your position that are assigned to each of the departments. It’s still not likely that you will be allowed to teach only math classes, but it may be not too far from what you have in mind.

Edit: you also wrote:

I would ideally like to have a research career in neuroscience and teach lower-division math courses.

Another thought that occurs to me is that your expectation that you will only teach lower-division classes is also unreasonable, independently of the discipline. Professors are expected to teach at all levels: lower division, upper division, and (where applicable) graduate; again, that’s sort of why you’re hired in the first place, and that’s what sets you apart from an adjunct or lecturer. You seem to want to do the high-level parts of a professor’s job - doing research, running a lab etc - when it comes to research, but only the most low-level parts of the job - teaching the sort of beginning math classes that your former university allowed you to teach with only a BS degree - when it comes to teaching. That’s simply not how it works: no university will waste a professor’s position on job duties that can be performed by someone with much lower qualifications than a professor. That would very obviously not be an efficient arrangement for the university, either economically or pedagogically.

If you don’t want to teach anything more challenging than the least challenging thing that there is to teach, you may want to ask yourself if you actually want to be a professor at all.

Answer 2

What are your research interests within neuroscience?

Dan Romnik's answer presupposes that you want to keep the two fields completely separate: you'll run a neuroscience wet lab as your day job and moonlight as a calculus instructor at night. For the reasons he outlines, this would be very difficult indeed, verging on impossible.

However, neuroscience is a giant, sprawling field and the edge between theoretical/computational neuroscience, physics, and math is nebulous (if that). People study Ising models and manifolds and dynamical systems for many different reasons and from many different directions. If you were interested (and successful) in the more mathematical parts of biology, a joint--or even primary appointment--in a math department would not be out of the question. For example:

• Nancy Kopell at BU
• Bard Ermentrout and the rest of the Mathematical Biology group at Pitt
• Sue Ann Campbell at Western's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
• Andrey Shilnikov at Georgia State's Computational and Dynamical Systems Unit
• Konrad Kording at UPenn
• Larry Abbott, Liam Paninski, Ken Miller, and other at NeuroNex Columbia.
• the late David MacKay, whose book you should read if going down this road.

I don't know that you would necessarily need a formal mathematical credentials, especially for joint appointments (how would that even work?!). However, you would need to demonstrate your mathematical chops through suitable publications and reference letters. Depending on your current math skills, a postdoc, perhaps with someone like those listed above, might be one way to go about getting those.

Answer 3

Having only one doctorate isn't the problem. But you would find it difficult to find a university that had compatible needs. If you are tenure-track in Biology, that department will want you to do research in Biology (of course), but also to serve the students in that field. If you aren't doing that, you will have problems, and if you ask for such a position, they would most likely say no.

On the other hand, once you are tenured, you might be able to teach the occasional math course and still have everyone happy.

An exception to the above might occur in a small Liberal Arts College (in the US) in which both math and biology are under the same Dean and the teaching requirements were seen as more important than the research. But there will still be few such positions open. And having a neuroscience lab in such a place would be difficult to manage as the funding would be pretty much all on you to arrange. You'd be unlikely to have any time to spend on other things.

Nice to dream, though.

Answer 4

No, almost surely not.

Lower-level math courses are imagined to be easily teachable by soooo many people that the market pressure is that there's a vast labor surplus...

And, as in other answers, your home department will have definite ideas about your allocation of energies there...

And, it would be unwise to promote yourself as a low-end product... who is, in effect, no better than a part-time instructor of low-end math... I'm absolutely not disparaging the teaching job, but am addressing the status thereof in most univ's in the U.S.

Summary: both infeasible and (very) unwise...

As in other answers: better (for many reasons) to try to steer your in-department courses in a more mathematical direction.

Answer 5

I think you should think a bit harder about what it was about the math class you taught that was such a good fit for you, and how you might incorporate that into teaching classes that are closer to your research field. As you discussed in the comments, if it was really the subject matter that you liked, then you might want to try to shift your research in a more mathematical direction and see if you can get a joint appointment of some kind, but I can't help but wonder if you can't find some kind of teaching in a biology department that draws a closer connection between your research and teaching.

Answer 6

I am a tenured prof at a research university (in biology) and can't see a university (and the relevant departments) letting you do this unless there are unusual circumstances like the ones some respondents mention above.

In addition, you won't get tenure unless you teach in your home department.

However, think creatively. Along with some suggestions above, here is another:

Many biology students don't like math for whatever reason. But they have to take some amount of math for requirements. But you are in a field (neuroscience) that has lots of math and lots of biology. Why not design math courses for biology majors using neuroscience examples so you are teaching them neuroscience and math at the same time. Of course you could use other branches of biology too - system biology, ecology, evolution, gene regulation, etc. all of which use a lot of math. But if you reframe your idea in this way, then a biology department might be interested. Many biology departments today want their students to have more quantitative background, but they are shunted off to math departments to learn it and there is a big disconnect in students' minds. How can we expect them to figure out for themselves how some calculus concept should be applied in biology if they have never seen an example of it? So think about making courses that bridge that gap and that show biology majors why they are learning this math and show them that it is actually important for learning biology.

Answer 7

It is possible but unlikely. For one you don’t technically get to choose your teaching assignment (it’s from the Dean or something like this). For another, the university is likely to already have people in math to teach such courses, and will complete your teaching assignments with courses from your own unit rather than from another unit. Finally, if you have a position, you will be expected to teach in your home unit unless the position is explicitly identified as some sort of cross-appointment

Now, if you have specific and strong background in one area of mathematics, or develop a particular expertise - stay you have demonstrated expertise in applications of differential equations to competitive population dynamics, or an expert in Bayesian statistics - it may be possible to teach some courses in another unit, but that is NOT the usual situation.

Finally, if you have expertise in biostatistics, it’s more likely that a department of biology (rather than math) would ask you to develop such a course (and possibly attract math students in the process).

Answer 8

Your university's accrediting body may require that you have some minimal qualification (perhaps master's degree) to teach in an area.

Perhaps you could teach quantitative reasoning in an interdisciplinary general education program.

Answer 9

Just get a part-time job at a community college/junior college. That should let you scratch the teaching itch.