I have recently (6 months) left academia after a three year postdoc at a high ranking university. During my time there, I became the lab's statistics guru having carried out analysis on a lot of our labs data, both my data, and others.
I was let go due to lack of funds, but my previous supervisor is now asking me to carry out a number of analyses on new data for publication, and to finish one or two papers I did not finish during my employment.
So my questions are:
How do I graciously refuse to touch others data? I wrote the data analysis pipeline, but am not interested in maintaining and rerunning it every time new results appear. It's available on github and well commented, just no one else in the lab knows how to do anything with computers. The actual running is easy for the most part, it is "small" modifications that are causing me trouble. I've offered to train others (and trained an undergrad who has also since left the lab), but the amount of training to teach someone python from scratch is a little daunting.
How to finish up my own papers? I'm currently contracting to industry at rates 3-6 times what I was paid during my postdoc - my supervisor is asking for me to work for free, or maybe my previous rate if he can get the money. This is a significant time sink, but I do feel obligated (and interested) to finish these off. What is a good pay rate to ask for? How do I do this without offending my supervisor?
Location is USA. The postdoc was a yearly contract, where an informal agreement was made to extend it to a 4th year, which had to be cancelled due to a loss of funding 4 months from renewal, thus the somewhat unorganized departure. In my heart of hearts, I'd like to continue in academia, but due to partner issues have to stay in the current location, making academia extremely unlikely. I'm currently undergoing the recruitment process for two different industry positions, as well as my contracting.