Senior research associates usually find employment in medical research organizations, scientific laboratories, major universities, and pharmaceutical companies. As a senior research associate, you will perform several duties to support different scientific and business objectives.
Your daily responsibilities will include performing clinical testing and research while complying with strict quality control standards. You will work closely with other researchers and scientists to devise new scientific systems and create quality assurance measures while reporting any crucial findings. You will also represent the company as an expert in specialized research.
As an aspiring senior scientific associate, the education you need is a degree in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, or biophysics. A master's degree is always beneficial and is often a prerequisite for most employers. As an entry-level Senior Research Associate with less than a year of experience, you will earn an average of $63,847 salary. The more experienced associate earns about $67,829 a year.
How to Become a Senior Scientific Associate
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a senior scientific associate. For example, did you know that they make an average of $41.72 an hour? That's $86,774 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 4% and produce 3,500 job opportunities across the U.S.
What Does a Senior Scientific Associate Do
There are certain skills that many senior scientific associates have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed analytical skills, math skills and organizational skills.
How To Become a Senior Scientific Associate
If you're interested in becoming a senior scientific associate, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 64.3% of senior scientific associates have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 24.3% of senior scientific associates have master's degrees. Even though most senior scientific associates have a college degree, it's impossible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a senior scientific associate. When we researched the most common majors for a senior scientific associate, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or master's degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on senior scientific associate resumes include doctoral degree degrees or associate degree degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a senior scientific associate. In fact, many senior scientific associate jobs require experience in a role such as research assistant. Meanwhile, many senior scientific associates also have previous career experience in roles such as research associate or teaching assistant.
Senior Scientific Associate Career Paths
In addition to switching up your job search, it might prove helpful to look at a career path for your specific job. Now, what's a career path you ask? Well, it's practically a map that shows how you might advance from one job title to another. Our career paths are especially detailed with salary changes. So, for example, if you started out with the role of senior scientist you might progress to a role such as principal scientist eventually. Later on in your career, you could end up with the title principal scientist.
Average Salary for a Senior Scientific Associate
What Am I Worth?
Top Colleges for Senior Scientific Associates
1. University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA • Private
2. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor, MI • Private
3. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC • Private
4. University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA • Private
5. Columbia University in the City of New York
New York, NY • Private
6. Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN • Private
7. University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA • Private
8. Northeastern University
Boston, MA • Private
9. Cornell University
Ithaca, NY • Private
10. University of California - Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA • Private
Top Skills For a Senior Scientific Associate
The skills section on your resume can be almost as important as the experience section, so you want it to be an accurate portrayal of what you can do. Luckily, we've found all of the skills you'll need so even if you don't have these skills yet, you know what you need to work on. Out of all the resumes we looked through, 11.4% of senior scientific associates listed protocols on their resume, but soft skills such as analytical skills and math skills are important as well.
Choose From 10+ Customizable Senior Scientific Associate Resume templates
Zippia allows you to choose from different easy-to-use Senior Scientific Associate templates, and provides you with expert advice. Using the templates, you can rest assured that the structure and format of your Senior Scientific Associate resume is top notch. Choose a template with the colors, fonts & text sizes that are appropriate for your industry.
Senior Scientific Associate Demographics
Senior Scientific Associate Gender Distribution
After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that:
- Among senior scientific associates, 49.0% of them are women, while 51.0% are men.
- The most common race/ethnicity among senior scientific associates is White, which makes up 59.1% of all senior scientific associates.
- The most common foreign language among senior scientific associates is Spanish at 22.2%.
Online Courses For Senior Scientific Associate That You May Like
Drug discovery is a challenging field, but the pathway most drugs navigate from concept to market is predictable and based upon repeated experimentation. The process requires scientists with expertise in chemistry, biology, and medicine. This course focuses on four aspects of drug development. regulation - approval protocols for government regulatory agencies pharmacodynamics - how a drug affects the body pharmacokinetics - how a drug flows through the body lead discovery/optimization - the...
What does it mean to conduct research? What are the distinct stages of the research process? What are the requirements of modern scientific research? How do you analyze a scientific article? This course will teach you to conduct research in accordance with scientific methodology. You'll learn to analyze scientific articles in engineering and science subjects, and how to conduct scientific experiments. The course will help to develop the core skill of a scientist, giving you the research tools...
The University of California San Diego, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Drug Development course brings you lectures from both faculty and industry experts. With this course, recorded on campus at UCSD, we seek to share our access to top people in the field who bring an unprecedented range of expertise on drug development. In this course you will learn the different stages of clinical development as well as the regulatory including but not limited to, an Investigational New...
Best States For a Senior Scientific Associate
Some places are better than others when it comes to starting a career as a senior scientific associate. The best states for people in this position are Delaware, Virginia, Vermont, and Rhode Island. Senior scientific associates make the most in Delaware with an average salary of $115,428. Whereas in Virginia and Vermont, they would average $114,334 and $111,688, respectively. While senior scientific associates would only make an average of $106,445 in Rhode Island, you would still make more there than in the rest of the country. We determined these as the best states based on job availability and pay. By finding the median salary, cost of living, and using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Location Quotient, we narrowed down our list of states to these four.
1. Delaware
$115,428
Avg. Salary
2. Virginia
$114,334
Avg. Salary
3. Massachusetts
$101,859
Avg. Salary
How Do Senior Scientific Associate Rate Their Jobs?
Top Senior Scientific Associate Employers
Most Common Employers For Senior Scientific Associate
| Rank | Company | Average Salary | Hourly Rate | Job Openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chevron | $132,966 | $63.93 | 3 |
| 2 | Brookhaven National Laboratory | $119,560 | $57.48 | 55 |
| 3 | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | $118,151 | $56.80 | 4 |
| 4 | Oak Ridge National Laboratory | $117,727 | $56.60 | 3 |
| 5 | BioMarin | $110,863 | $53.30 | 4 |
| 6 | Eli Lilly and Company | $104,552 | $50.27 | 7 |
| 7 | Novartis | $101,408 | $48.75 | 270 |
| 8 | U.S. Pharmacopeia | $100,814 | $48.47 | 7 |
| 9 | Massachusetts Eye and Ear | $99,884 | $48.02 | 5 |
| 10 | Glaxosmithkline | $99,108 | $47.65 | 3 |