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Our teams are innovating at the cutting edge of their fields in order to tackle challenges and build products that impact billions of people every day.

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The research conducted at google has broadened dramatically, becoming more important to our mission than ever before..

We aim to create a research environment rich in opportunities for product impact, to build a product environment that actively benefits from research, and to provide our staff the freedom to work on important research problems that go beyond immediate product needs.

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Offices around the world.

From Accra to Zürich, to our home base in Mountain View and beyond, we’re looking for talented, creative computer scientists to drive our work forward.

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Our teams in Atlanta focus on theoretical and application aspects of computer science with a strong focus on machine learning and the algorithmic foundations and theoretical underpinnings of deep learning, with applications to natural language understanding, machine perception, robotics, and ubiquitous computing and sensing.

Our teams in Cambridge work closely with academics at local universities as well as collaborators at local institutes with a goal to impact both Google’s products and general scientific progress. We accomplish this by releasing open source tools, publishing our work and sharing our findings with the academic community.

More boardshorts than boardroom, high tech meets high tide at Google L.A. Our engineers work on such high-impact products as Ads, Chrome, and YouTube, while our sales teams push the limits of digital advertising for top-tier clients. Take advantage of our picture-perfect SoCal weather by hitting the rock wall and elevate team strategy sessions with a game of oversized chess on the roof deck. In-house coffee and juice bars provide pick-me-ups, and beach breaks double as brainstorm sessions when you borrow one of our 4-seat surrey bikes, beach cruisers, or surfboards and head to the boardwalk.

Google Research in Montreal performs both open-ended and applied research, in numerous areas including reinforcement learning, meta-learning, optimization, program synthesis, generative modeling, machine translation, and more. We also support the local academic community and have several academic collaborations, including with Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Our headquarters has come a long way from its humble roots in a Menlo Park garage, but our innovative Silicon Valley spirit is stronger than ever. On our largest campus, we work on cutting-edge products that are changing the way billions of people use technology. Onsite benefits like fitness and wellness centers embody our philosophy that taking care of Googlers is good for all of us. Build team skills with a group cooking class or coffee tasting, ride a gBike to one of our cafés, or work up a sweat in a group class. Here at the Googleplex, we’re looking for innovators, collaborators, and blue-sky thinkers. We’re looking for you.

We work in close collaboration with academia, with a goal to impact both Google’s products and general scientific progress. We accomplish this in two ways: by releasing software libraries, a way to build research findings into products and services, and through publishing our work and sharing our findings with the academic community.

Our team in Pittsburgh conducts research in natural language processing, machine learning, image and video understanding, and optimization, and our impacts range from academic paper publications to software systems used throughout Google. We collaborate closely with research and applied groups in many areas, and also work closely with Carnegie Mellon University and other organizations in the extremely strong computer science community in Pittsburgh.

As our company headquarters, Mountain View and the surrounding offices in Sunnyvale, San Francisco, and San Bruno are home to many of our world-class research teams and the innovative projects they work on.

Our research teams in Seattle and Kirkland work on a wide range of disciplines — from quantum computing to applied science to federated learning and health. In doing the above, and more, a large focus of our work also focuses on advancing the state of the art in machine learning.

Nestled between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the San Francisco Bay, with San Jose to the south, San Francisco to the north, and NASA right next door, you’ll find one of Google’s largest and newest global campuses in Sunnyvale. Here in the heart of the original Silicon Valley innovation is happening everywhere—from our Cloud team developing exciting new products and services, to moving into our latest office spaces which include interconnected building projects, the creation of green spaces connecting campuses with the community, and the creative restoration of local habitats. We love growing in Sunnyvale—and you will too.

We develop novel neural network architectures and learning algorithms, with applications to computer vision, natural language and speech processing, medical image analysis, and computer architecture and software.

Europe, Middle East, and Africa

Google Research teams in Accra collaborate with global research teams to lead many sustainability initiatives of particular interest to Africa. We implement theoretical and applied artificial intelligence with a strong focus on machine learning and algorithmic foundations to tackle some global challenges, such as food security, disaster management, remote sensing, among others.

Researchers in our Amsterdam office push the boundaries of what is possible in many domains, including natural language understanding, computer vision and audio, reinforcement learning and machine learning for the natural sciences.

In Berlin, our teams work on a range of topics from foundational to more applied and involve data comprised of text, images, video, audio and more. We are engaging and collaborating closely with Berlin’s vibrant academic and startup communities.

We work on machine learning, natural language understanding and machine perception, from foundational research to AI innovations, in search, healthcare, and crisis response.

We work on natural language understanding and conversational dialog, text-to-speech, (on-device) machine learning, human-centered AI research and user research as well as healthcare.

We work on problems in quantum computing as well as speech and language processing, and collaborate closely with Google’s product teams across the world.

We tackle big challenges across several fields at the intersection of computer science, statistics and applied mathematics while collaborating closely with a strong academic community.

We solve big challenges in computer science, with a focus on machine learning, natural language understanding, machine perception, algorithms and data compression.

Asia-Pacific

Google Research Australia aims to advance the state-of-the-art in machine learning, in areas such as Fundamental Machine Learning, Natural Language Understanding, and Systems Programming. We aim to apply our research in ways that benefit Australia, Google and global society.

We are interested in advancing the state of the art and applications in areas like Machine Learning, Natural Language Understanding, Computer Vision, Software Engineering and Multi-agent Systems.

We are interested in advancing the state of the art and applications in areas like machine learning, speech, and natural language processing.

Meet the teams driving innovation

Our teams advance the state of the art through research, systems engineering, and collaboration across Google.

Our impact reaches billions

Google Research tackles challenges that define the technology of today and tomorrow.

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Find your research career at Google

Our researchers are embedded in teams across computer science, to discover, invent, and build at the largest scale.

Our research-focused software engineers are embedded throughout the company, allowing them to setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly.

Work across data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilation techniques for mobile platforms, core search, and much more.

Internships take place throughout the year, and we encourage students from a range of disciplines, including CS, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics to apply to work with us.

Collaboration is essential for progress

We’re proud to work with academic and research institutions that push the boundaries of AI and computer science.

Measuring and improving the accuracy, safety, speed, and efficiency of AI technologies.

Working to advance fire modeling tools and fire spread prediction algorithms.

Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are launching the Frontier Model Forum, an industry body focused on ensuring safe and responsible development of frontier AI models.

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The link between social work research and practice

When thinking about social work, some may consider the field to solely focus on clinical interventions with individuals or groups.

There may be a mistaken impression that research is not a part of the social work profession. This is completely false. Rather, the two have been and will continue to need to be intertwined.

This guide covers why social workers should care about research, how both social work practice and social work research influence and guide each other, how to build research skills both as a student and as a professional working in the field, and the benefits of being a social worker with strong research skills. 

A selection of social work research jobs are also discussed.  

• Social workers and research
• Evidence-based practice
• Practice and research
• Research and practice
• Build research skills
• Social worker as researcher
• Benefits of research skills
• Research jobs

Why should social workers care about research?

Sometimes it may seem as though social work practice and social work research are two separate tracks running parallel to each other – they both seek to improve the lives of clients, families and communities, but they don’t interact. This is not the way it is supposed to work.

Research and practice should be intertwined, with each affecting the other and improving processes on both ends, so that it leads to better outcomes for the population we’re serving.

Section 5 of the NASW Social Work Code of Ethics is focused on social workers’ ethical responsibilities to the social work profession. There are two areas in which research is mentioned in upholding our ethical obligations: for the integrity of the profession (section 5.01) and for evaluation and research (section 5.02). 

Some of the specific guidance provided around research and social work include:

• 5.01(b): …Social workers should protect, enhance, and improve the integrity of the profession through appropriate study and research, active discussion, and responsible criticism of the profession.
• 5.01(d): Social workers should contribute to the knowledge base of social work and share with colleagues their knowledge related to practice, research, and ethics…
• 5.02(a) Social workers should monitor and evaluate policies, the implementation of programs, and practice interventions.
• 5.02(b) Social workers should promote and facilitate evaluation and research to contribute to the development of knowledge.
• 5.02(c) Social workers should critically examine and keep current with emerging knowledge relevant to social work and fully use evaluation and research evidence in their professional practice.
• 5.02(q) Social workers should educate themselves, their students, and their colleagues about responsible research practices.

Evidence-based practice and evidence-based treatment

In order to strengthen the profession and determine that the interventions we are providing are, in fact, effective, we must conduct research. When research and practice are intertwined, this leads practitioners to develop evidence-based practice (EBP) and evidence-based treatment (EBT).

Evidence-based practice is, according to The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) , a process involving creating an answerable question based on a client or organizational need, locating the best available evidence to answer the question, evaluating the quality of the evidence as well as its applicability, applying the evidence, and evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the solution. 

Evidence-based treatment is any practice that has been established as effective through scientific research according to a set of explicit criteria (Drake et al., 2001). These are interventions that, when applied consistently, routinely produce improved client outcomes. 

For example, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was one of a variety of interventions for those with anxiety disorders. Researchers wondered if CBT was better than other intervention options in producing positive, consistent results for clients.

So research was conducted comparing multiple types of interventions, and the evidence (research results) demonstrated that CBT was the best intervention.

The anecdotal evidence from practice combined with research evidence determined that CBT should become the standard treatment for those diagnosed with anxiety. Now more social workers are getting trained in CBT methods in order to offer this as a treatment option to their clients.

How does social work practice affect research?

Social work practice provides the context and content for research. For example, agency staff was concerned about the lack of nutritional food in their service area, and heard from clients that it was too hard to get to a grocery store with a variety of foods, because they didn’t have transportation, or public transit took too long. 

So the agency applied for and received a grant to start a farmer’s market in their community, an urban area that was considered a food desert. This program accepted their state’s version of food stamps as a payment option for the items sold at the farmer’s market.

The agency used their passenger van to provide free transportation to and from the farmer’s market for those living more than four blocks from the market location.

The local university also had a booth each week at the market with nursing and medical students checking blood pressure and providing referrals to community agencies that could assist with medical needs. The agency was excited to improve the health of its clients by offering this program.

But how does the granting foundation know if this was a good use of their money? This is where research and evaluation comes in. Research could gather data to answer a number of questions. Here is but a small sample:

• How many community members visited each week and purchased fruits and vegetables? 
• How many took advantage of the transportation provided, and how many walked to the market? 
• How many took advantage of the blood pressure checks? Were improvements seen in those numbers for those having repeat blood pressure readings throughout the market season? 
• How much did the self-reported fruit and vegetable intake increase for customers? 
• What barriers did community members report in visiting and buying food from the market (prices too high? Inconvenient hours?)
• Do community members want the program to continue next year?
• Was the program cost-effective, or did it waste money by paying for a driver and for gasoline to offer free transportation that wasn’t utilized? What are areas where money could be saved without compromising the quality of the program?
• What else needs to be included in this program to help improve the health of community members?

How does research affect social work practice?

Research can guide practice to implement proven strategies. It can also ask the ‘what if’ or ‘how about’ questions that can open doors for new, innovative interventions to be developed (and then research the effectiveness of those interventions).

Engel and Schutt (2017) describe four categories of research used in social work:

• Descriptive research is research in which social phenomena are defined and described. A descriptive research question would be ‘How many homeless women with substance use disorder live in the metro area?’
• Exploratory research seeks to find out how people get along in the setting under question, what meanings they give to their actions, and what issues concern them. An example research question would be ‘What are the barriers to homeless women with substance use disorder receiving treatment services?’
• Explanatory research seeks to identify causes and effects of social phenomena. It can be used to rule out other explanations for findings and show how two events are related to each other.  An explanatory research question would be ‘Why do women with substance use disorder become homeless?’
• Evaluation research describes or identifies the impact of social programs and policies. This type of research question could be ‘How effective was XYZ treatment-first program that combined housing and required drug/alcohol abstinence in keeping women with substance use disorder in stable housing 2 years after the program ended?’

Each of the above types of research can answer important questions about the population, setting or intervention being provided. This can help practitioners determine which option is most effective or cost-efficient or that clients are most likely to adhere to. In turn, this data allows social workers to make informed choices on what to keep in their practice, and what needs changing. 

How to build research skills while in school

There are a number of ways to build research skills while a student.  BSW and MSW programs require a research course, but there are other ways to develop these skills beyond a single class:

• Volunteer to help a professor working in an area of interest. Professors are often excited to share their knowledge and receive extra assistance from students with similar interests.
• Participate in student research projects where you’re the subject. These are most often found in psychology departments. You can learn a lot about the informed consent process and how data is collected by volunteering as a research participant.  Many of these studies also pay a small amount, so it’s an easy way to earn a bit of extra money while you’re on campus. 
• Create an independent study research project as an elective and work with a professor who is an expert in an area you’re interested in.  You’d design a research study, collect the data, analyze it, and write a report or possibly even an article you can submit to an academic journal.
• Some practicum programs will have you complete a small evaluation project or assist with a larger research project as part of your field education hours. 
• In MSW programs, some professors hire students to conduct interviews or enter data on their funded research projects. This could be a good part time job while in school.
• Research assistant positions are more common in MSW programs, and these pay for some or all your tuition in exchange for working a set number of hours per week on a funded research project.

How to build research skills while working as a social worker

Social service agencies are often understaffed, with more projects to complete than there are people to complete them.

Taking the initiative to volunteer to survey clients about what they want and need, conduct an evaluation on a program, or seeing if there is data that has been previously collected but not analyzed and review that data and write up a report can help you stand out from your peers, be appreciated by management and other staff, and may even lead to a raise, a promotion, or even new job opportunities because of the skills you’ve developed.

Benefits of being a social worker with strong research skills

Social workers with strong research skills can have the opportunity to work on various projects, and at higher levels of responsibility. 

Many can be promoted into administration level positions after demonstrating they understand how to conduct, interpret and report research findings and apply those findings to improving the agency and their programs.

There’s also a level of confidence knowing you’re implementing proven strategies with your clients. 

Social work research jobs

There are a number of ways in which you can blend interests in social work and research. A quick search on Glassdoor.com and Indeed.com retrieved the following positions related to social work research:

• Research Coordinator on a clinical trial offering psychosocial supportive interventions and non-addictive pain treatments to minimize opioid use for pain.
• Senior Research Associate leading and overseeing research on a suite of projects offered in housing, mental health and corrections.
• Research Fellow in a school of social work
• Project Policy Analyst for large health organization
• Health Educator/Research Specialist to implement and evaluate cancer prevention and screening programs for a health department
• Research Interventionist providing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia patients participating in a clinical trial
• Research Associate for Child Care and Early Education
• Social Services Data Researcher for an organization serving adults with disabilities.
• Director of Community Health Equity Research Programs evaluating health disparities.

No matter your population or area of interest, you’d likely be able to find a position that integrated research and social work. 

Social work practice and research are and should remain intertwined. This is the only way we can know what questions to ask about the programs and services we are providing, and ensure our interventions are effective. 

There are many opportunities to develop research skills while in school and while working in the field, and these skills can lead to some interesting positions that can make a real difference to clients, families and communities. 

Drake, R. E., Goldman, H., Leff, H. S., Lehman, A. F., Dixon, L., Mueser, K. T., et al. (2001). Implementing evidence-based practices in routine mental health service settings. Psychiatric Services, 52(2), 179-182. 

Engel, R.J., & Schutt, R.K. (2017). The Practice of Research in Social Work. Sage.

National Association of Social Workers. (n.d). Evidence Based Practice. Retrieved from: https://www.socialworkers.org/News/Research-Data/Social-Work-Policy-Research/Evidence-Based-Practice

AI and the New Future of Work CFP | Spring 2024

Region: Global

Call for Proposals, Spring 2024

About the program

Language models are fundamentally changing how work gets done, and high-quality academic research is needed to ensure that the new future of work that they will help create is bright. Microsoft is soliciting proposals to fund research that will help shape the landscape of work for years to come. Rather than focusing on research related to language models in general, this Call for Proposals (CFP) targets work that specifically explores the use of language models – small and large – in productivity scenarios. The plan is to fund truly creative research that redefines what work is in various contexts.

There are a number of potential topics that successful proposals may address. They may study approaches to augment human capabilities, identify and support new ways of getting things done with language models (versus just accelerating known work practices), explore how the benefits from productivity gains might be widely shared, create flywheels in which language models get better the more they are used, or address any other of the plethora of questions that lie before us as researchers interested in work. Proposed projects should target a budget of 50,000 USD or less.

• May 7, 2024 : Proposal period opens
• June 3, 2024 : Proposal period closes
• June 12, 2024 : Recipients announced

Areas of particular interest include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• Leveraging interaction histories for model improvement in specific, real-world tasks
• SLMs for enterprise applications
• Creative or unexpected uses of language models
• Over/under-reliance interventions
• AI technologies for teams and organizations rather than just individuals
• Productivity effects of language models in specific industries/roles/functions
• Productivity effects at the team or organization level
• Language model technologies that demonstrably augment human labor (vs. substitute for it)
• Technologies and techniques that encourage adoption and learning of AI tools
• Proactive (vs. reactive) AI technologies for productivity scenarios
• Prompt optimization and recommendation technologies
• Agentic technologies for productivity scenarios
• Techniques and tools that support meta-cognition when using AI tools
• Technologies that foster trust between data producers and model builders / users.
• Provenance attribution in enterprises/organizations 

Researchers are encouraged to review the 2023 New Future of Work Report (opens in new tab) for additional areas of interest.

Proposal requirements

Proposals should be for no more than 50,000 USD, although smaller proposals are encouraged as well. We are aiming for a lightweight application process and proposals should be no more than 500 words plus references. Please include budget information in your 500 words. Consider using Bing Chat or similar to help summarize your content if your proposal is running long!

Proposals must be submitted from individuals from academic institutions.

• Monday, May 7, 2024, at 8:00 AM PT: submission portal opens
• Monday, June 3, 2024, at 11:59 PM PT: proposals due
• Wednesday, June 12, 2024: decisions announced

Eligibility

To be eligible for this RFP, your institution and proposal must meet the following requirements: 

• Institutions must have access to the knowledge, resources, and skills necessary to carry out the proposed research. 
• Institutions must be either an accredited or otherwise degree-granting university with non-profit status, or a research organization with non-profit status. 
• Proposals that are incomplete or request funds more than the maximum award will be excluded from the selection process. 
• The proposal budget must reflect your university’s policies toward receiving unrestricted gifts and should emphasize allocation of funds toward completing the research proposed.

Microsoft will use the information submitted in response to this Call for Proposals (CFP) at its discretion and has no obligation to provide responses or comments to any responder’s submission. No proprietary, classified, confidential, or sensitive information should be included in your response .

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The Innovator’s Quarterly The latest innovations and industry collaborations coming out of BU — plus support for researchers moving their work into the world

April 2024 | news from bu industry engagement and technology development.

In this issue…

• A product from DermaSensor Inc., based on technology for skin cancer detection developed by BU spectroscopy researcher Irving Bigio, recently received FDA clearance .
• BU engineers Ji-Xin Cheng and Selim Ünlü are developing breakthrough microscopy technologies to help scientists visualize their samples more accurately, with two provisional patents filed and two companies interested in commercialization to date.
• Speaking of microscopes, BU engineer Lei Tian is attracting funding from foundations and industry partners to develop petite, lightweight microscope designs empowered by special miniaturized lenses that enable powerful imaging despite their compact size.
• The Amazon Research Awards program seeks to fund machine learning research related to information security. Applications are due by Tuesday, May 7.
• On Tuesday, May 7, the BU community is invited to the presentation of the BU Innovator of the Year Award to Dr. Thomas Bifano, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the BU Photonics Center.

Handheld Skin Cancer Evaluation Tool Based on BU Research Receives FDA Clearance

Photo courtesy of DermaSensor

BU Inventor Lei Tian Combines Cutting-Edge Microscopes with Deep Learning Algorithms

Photo by Kelly Pena

BU Engineers Make Significant Advancements in the Field of Vibrational Imaging

Photo by Logan Moreno Gutierrez on Unsplash

Boston University Ignition Awards Accelerate Promising, Commercially Viable Research

Photo by Adele Bertschy

Funding Opportunity

Ai for information security call for proposals.

The Amazon Research Awards program seeks to fund machine learning research related to information security on the following topics:

• Threat, intrusion, and anomaly detection for cloud security
• Generative AI and foundation models for information security
• Graph modeling and anomaly detection on graphs
• Learning with limited/noisy labels and weakly supervised learning
• ML for malware analysis and detection
• Finding security vulnerabilities using ML
• Causal inference for information security
• Zero/one-shot learning for information security
• Reinforcement learning for information security
• Protecting and preserving data privacy in the cloud
• Securing generative AI and foundation models

Mark Your Calendar

On tuesday, may 7, join us for talks from bu innovators and presentation of the 2023 innovator of the year award.

Take Action

Expert advice, programs, and resources to support research collaboration and commercialization at bu.

Patents, Licensing, and Starting a Company

The BU Technology Development website is your portal for one-on-one support, resources, and mentorship to help launch your commercialization efforts, from guidance on pitching your idea to investors to applying for a Small Business Innovation Research grant.

Support for Engaging with Industry

Industry Engagement offers individualized consultation and assistance to BU researchers interested in partnering with industry to advance their research and deepen their impact, as well as dynamic, curated lists of external industry funding opportunities , powered by Pivot-RP.

Meet the Team

We can help advance your goals. get to know a few of our experts below or contact us to get started..

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What I do: I help faculty identify what aspects of their ideas are patentable so they can advance their research to market.

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What I do: I work closely with researchers in the life sciences, across all campuses, to help identify and develop collaborative relationships with industry partners in their mutual areas of interest.

Ask me about: Skiing, the Boston dining scene, and opportunities for collaborating with industry in the life sciences.

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The future of real estate in a hybrid world

Hybrid work has roiled the real estate market—and it’s here to stay, according to new research from the McKinsey Global Institute . On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast , McKinsey senior partners Aditya Sanghvi and Jonathan Woetzel chat with global editorial director Lucia Rahilly about how the persistence of the pivot to working from home has transformed the places we work, live, shop, and socialize—and about the unique opportunity hybrid presents to rethink real estate for our changing future.

Also on this edition, demographer Jennifer Sciubba talks about our misconceptions around migration and population trends, from our Author Talks series.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The McKinsey Podcast is hosted by Roberta Fusaro and Lucia Rahilly.

Hybrid is here to stay

Lucia Rahilly: Let’s start with some context. The COVID-19 pandemic upended lives in myriad ways. And perhaps one of the most lasting has been hybrid work. Will hybrid persist?

Aditya Sanghvi: What’s clear to us is that hybrid is here to stay. There are three reasons for that confidence.  First, the attendance rate we’ve seen has really stabilized, and it has stabilized for over a year now. Second, actual attendance aligns quite closely with what workers want and expect from their employers. Third, there’s a substantial number of knowledge workers who would rather resign or accept a pay cut than come in more often, and many of those folks are the executives in charge of making those decisions.

Lucia Rahilly: So practically speaking, what does protracted work from home mean for downtown districts or other areas with a high density of office buildings? Has hybrid work had ripple effects on those neighborhoods?

Jonathan Woetzel: Yes, it definitely has. If we look at neighborhoods which were very office-dominated, the first main impact is simply fewer people in those offices. That, in turn, means fewer people on those streets, fewer people in the shops or just anywhere in the neighborhood. That, combined with the rise of online commerce, is creating a big challenge for those downtown retail spaces and public spaces in those office-intensive areas.

The other obvious impact is on residential usage. As people are closer to home, we’re seeing demand for those homes rise. And then around those homes there’s a minor resurgence of retail. So we see the shopping and commerce patterns shifting as the people shift.

Lucia Rahilly: What does the data say on the flight to the suburbs that was so visible during the early stages of the pandemic? Has that persisted as well?

Aditya Sanghvi: Yes, during the pandemic there was an out-migration from urban cores. And in the nine cities we studied, some lost up to 7 percent of their people , which is really significant. Those people have not come back. And while the rate of out-migration in those urban cores has been lower, it has continued to be negative. This means that people are moving more to the suburbs than the urban core. Basically, people left during the pandemic, they’re not coming back, and the urban cores continue to see relative out-migration versus the suburbs around them.

Where’s worst hit—and why

Lucia Rahilly: Is this a global phenomenon? Which cities have been hardest hit by protracted hybrid work?

Jonathan Woetzel: Of the cities we studied, San Francisco is clearly the hardest-hit city. First of all, it has a relatively densely built urban core. Second, it’s office-oriented to a much greater degree than many other urban cores. Third, the access to public transport relative to some cities is not as strong.

Aditya Sanghvi: San Francisco actually had a double whammy because in terms of business mix, it has a higher share of technology jobs, and it has talent that had the power to assert what they would accept. In an urban structure, San Francisco is office-dense, with 30 percent of space dedicated to offices. Home prices are five times the national average. And they have a very high share of inbound commuters relative to other cities. So on both of those impacts they were worse off, and that’s why you saw the drop-off that San Francisco did see.

Jonathan Woetzel: On the other hand, Tokyo has pretty much the opposite of all of that. It has suffered relatively less impact because of the great public transport and mixed-use areas.

Lucia Rahilly: Tell us more about the constellation of factors that allow hybrid trends to affect one city more than another.

Aditya Sanghvi: In our research we simplified it down to two things. One is business mix: What is the industry mix of the city? What share of workers in the city are employed at large firms? Employees at those large firms tend to come into the office a little bit less than those at smaller firms. There are also differences in the cultural acceptance of remote work.

The second focus was urban structure. One of the most important factors concerns how often people commute to work by coming into the city, versus actually living in the city itself. Another factor is whether the urban center is office-dense or has a lot of green space and residential housing. And also whether housing is expensive. So those two factors, business mix and urban structure, are really what seem to drive the differences.

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Diminishing demand.

Lucia Rahilly: You modeled a range of future scenarios as part of this research. What do we expect demand for office space to look like in the years to come, based on the nine cities you studied?

Aditya Sanghvi: In a moderate scenario, we found that office demand in 2030 could be 13 percent lower in the median city that we studied. What’s fascinating is that values could be 26 percent lower in our moderate scenario and up to 42 percent lower in our severe scenario. In just these nine cities, that’s $800 billion of potential office real estate value disappearing.

Lucia Rahilly: Remarkable. If demand for office space is falling, does quality become a higher priority?

Aditya Sanghvi: Yes, in many ways, quality becomes everything . For many people, the offices that they experienced prepandemic weren’t more compelling or interesting than working from home. And once childcare was restored and kids could go back to school, people could take care of the elderly. So flexibility remained, even though some of the restrictions of the pandemic went away.

People ask themselves, “Is the office experience I’m going to have today worth the commute that I need to take?” For large portions of our knowledge-worker population, the answer has been “no.” The commute is not worth it, and that’s why people are not coming in to the office.

So, quality becomes everything, but the definition of quality is now more focused on the employee, not the employer. That is a significant change in office real estate, because it’s about, can I get people to want to spend time in the office? That’s what employers care about as well. That’s what drives quality.

Jonathan Woetzel: This shift from supply-centric to demand-centric is going to reshape the environment. Every meeting that you used to have would be either a phone meeting or in person. Now, every meeting has a video conference option. It creates choice for everybody. And that’s going to be reflected in everything, from choices of location to the design of the buildings themselves. It introduces a lot more flexibility, and for the supplier, employer, or developer, it is imperative to use that flexibility.

Retail as a bellwether

Lucia Rahilly: If the demand for office space remains lower than historic norms, how does that affect the future of the retail ecosystem? As you said, retail was arguably faltering prepandemic. How will retail fare in the years to come, according to your scenarios?

Jonathan Woetzel: Retail will become a lot more experiential, which includes community experiences as well as mixed-use. That means a lot of healthcare and a lot of education. If you go look at shopping malls these days, a good 20 percent, 25 percent of it is in those formats, because those are things you really want to do in person. Whereas commodity buys are going to go online. You’re also going to see a lot of interesting developments, particularly around areas which have both residential and retail, around thinking about retail as delivery points.

Aditya Sanghvi: I would add that retail is a really interesting analogy for what might happen in offices. Ten to 15 years ago, shopping happened largely in person. You had to go to a store to get what you wanted. What e-commerce did is create an option to do that from home. What you then saw was a huge separation in quality between the shopping mall centers that attracted people, where families wanted to go on the weekend to spend time with one another, versus the other ones that just allowed people to buy. People stopped going to the places they didn’t need to go to anymore. They bought online, and continued to go to the high-quality places that were actually a great experience.

That’s exactly what’s happening in office spaces now. Now, if I have a low-quality office, I can do the same version of my work at home. I want to go to the places I want to be in. That’s why we think the quality office will continue to do really well, and the low-quality office will do poorly, just like low-quality shopping malls did poorly over the past ten years.

Ripple effects on residential neighborhoods

Lucia Rahilly: Selfishly, I’m interested in what the research yielded on what might happen in the residential markets in these urban cores. As Jonathan knows, I live in New York City, where the cost of real estate is one of three topics on regular rotation at every dinner table. What did the scenarios show?

Jonathan Woetzel: You’re fine if you are a property owner. If you’re a renter, not so much. The demand for residences will increase in every city except for maybe a few of the hardest hit. It’s based somewhat on population growth. In a lot of these megacities or more advanced economies, we are just so far behind in terms of meeting the demand for residential space, including in the urban core, and we’re not going to catch up.

But we do see an ongoing longer-term trend toward rising residential prices. There are changes in the mix. For example, larger homes in the suburbs, and the prices for two- to four-bedroom homes rising a lot more quickly than prices for one-bedroom homes.

That reflects that move outward to say, “OK, I’m going to spend more time at home. I want a bigger home.” But at the same time, we don’t see this as having a dramatic impact on the values of residential housing in any place that we’re talking about. This is largely because of the broader picture around residential: we simply are way behind on building places for people to live.

Aditya Sanghvi: Adding on to what Jonathan said, there’s a huge dispersion across different cities, due in large part to urban structure. A lot of urban cores are downtowns that mostly have office buildings. The value proposition of those downtowns is very challenged right now. Conversely, places that have a great combination of retail experiences, restaurants, residential living, and offices are actually seeing demand potentially go up, because people want to be there.

Lucia Rahilly: I live in a primarily residential neighborhood, and at the beginning of the pandemic we were all terrified that our favorite mom-and-pop stores would go under. But in fact, many of them seemed not just to survive but in some cases thrive, in part because so many of us were working from home and patronizing these neighborhood shops more frequently. Is that what you are talking about?

Jonathan Woetzel: Yes, absolutely. The residential mixed-use neighborhood is alive and thriving. Taking back the sidewalks for outdoor dining, for example, was a response there. And cities supported that. People have, by and large, kept innovations from the pandemic that proved successful. That’s a tribute to what people want: this notion of a walkable, livable environment.

Now, not every place is like that. I would caution that if you were living in South Los Angeles, this was not a good thing for you, because you don’t have those amenities in your neighborhood. And it is a food desert.

So, if anything, the pandemic has accentuated the differences at a neighborhood level, and the work-from-home paradigm is going to do the same. We’ll have some people clustered in very nice neighborhoods, and then they will periodically commute to their offices. Service personnel will cluster around the “estates” in these farther-off communities. That’s a caricature of what this looks like, but it does show what people want: they want this mixed-use, livable environment.

Aditya Sanghvi: The neighborhoods that are performing better are the ones that are pedestrian-friendly, that have great green spaces, and have a mix of office, retail, and experiences. They’re sort of an ecosystem of everything that one might want in their life all sort of in one place.

Jonathan Woetzel: I would just add that transit connection is an important aspect of where you will see the possibility for demand. Great transit connections create great flexibility.

Rethinking the office

Lucia Rahilly: It sounds like there’s some risk that these megacities or superstar cities may lose a little bit of their luster. Is that correct in certain neighborhoods? Is that a real risk?

Jonathan Woetzel: Definitely. Let’s not beat around the bush. There’s clearly going to be a reconsideration of the development model. There’ll be a real slowdown in transactions, coupled, of course, with the interest rate environment. We’ve seen a pause, particularly in commercial real estate activity, as people try to rethink what actually is going to be the market rate environment going forward, and how should they reimagine the purpose of these buildings. So you have it at the market level, a district or neighborhood level, and at the building level. Finally, within the building, in an environment where you have to appeal to the employee, there are some spaces that are simply not fit for purpose.

Aditya Sanghvi: Just to add on to the fit-for-purpose part: if the office wants to thrive, there’s a world where it absolutely can. It just has to be completely reimagined. I mean, the office that we have is really designed around the concept of being a place where I have to be. Many offices are cube farms that are just not enjoyable.

These products could also be better designed for employers. Most office leases—and it depends on each country—can be between five and ten years. Most companies have no idea how much space they need in two years, let alone ten years. Why do they need to sign a lease for ten years? That’s really just about how the real estate industry works and how valuations are done, and that has to change.

Jonathan Woetzel: Just to give one example: I’m looking at a bunch of recently built office buildings. It’s questionable what you do with them because of the downgrading of office demand. As a use case, we’ve asked ourselves whether we can convert them to residential. If you look at a recently built office building, it’s got a huge floor plate. If you did residential in this thing, everything inside the first three meters is going to be darkness. So, it’s very difficult and expensive to convert these big blocks.

So you start thinking about what else could you do with that interior space, if not a cube farm. There are some options. First of all: gyms. But then you have to reckon with whether you can have a 28-story interior gym. That’s quite a lot of gym space. Maybe healthcare is an option, because it requires privacy. Those interior spaces could accommodate private experiences. Maybe education, or musical experiences. So there are lots of interesting innovations to be thought of for these buildings, which are built for 50-year life spans. That’s also where I think those long-term leases came from. But now they have to be repurposed for a different customer set and different use.

Aditya Sanghvi: Even in the office buildings themselves, we have to reimagine the product that we’re giving to the tenant . Imagine that I went to go buy a car, and basically what they sold me was the shell of the car, but the car didn’t drive. That’s basically what office space is today. People will say, “Here’s a canvas of space that you can use however you want,” but the problem is that most companies and organizations don’t know how to use the space in a hybrid work environment.

So, one of the really interesting changes that needs to happen is that real estate companies need to become experts and provide solutions for the tenants . They need to give them a “car” that works really well, where they know from experience with other tenants that they’ll want that product. That’s a radical shift in the industry that could allow a lot of the current office space to still be used as office space.

The science of successful space

Lucia Rahilly: What’s the thinking around what should happen at that floor level to make a really hospitable, attractive office space for employees?

Aditya Sanghvi: These office products need to have hospitality. There need to be people on the floors who are well trained in providing delightful food and beverage experiences, helping people find things, and making it more joyful and more convenient for the people who come in.

And then, probably most disruptive, we have to take the office and make it not just art, but bring a science to it. There have been so many designs over time in ways that people run their office space, and no one really has any idea if that’s leading to better outcomes for employees or for employers.

One of the ways that we’re working with clients these days is to actually measure and say, “Here is the productivity, the engagement, of all the employees, and here are their work patterns.” And then you can start to say things like, “The people who join in this type of role and with this type of frequency actually are getting better engagement and better productivity than people who are not.” It’s far better to actually make it a science, and then to continue to get better and better productivity and employee experience from the space over time.

Jonathan Woetzel: Most business cases for developing hospitality and retail spaces in buildings have not accounted for people’s needs. I don’t think anybody in most hospitality industries actually knows where the customer is coming from, for one thing. Nor do they know what is the customer’s relative need for community, sustainability, or what kinds of things boost their productivity.

There’s a need to turn on the lights and understand what influences people. Not on the factory floor but in a communal work environment. When do they need privacy? When do they need sharing? What kinds of information do they exchange? What kinds of information do they not want to exchange? These are things that we are now basically live-testing in buildings. I think that providers and operators that use those data can be much more efficient. That’ll give them a cost advantage, because they will avoid providing the things that nobody cares about.

Lucia Rahilly: Jonathan, you mentioned the challenge of converting some of these buildings. Can you give an example of successful mixed-use development that might be in play?

Jonathan Woetzel: In LA we’ve seen quite a lot of redevelopment in areas that were historically less vibrant. Koreatown comes to mind, and large mixed-use developments like The Grove or even Marina del Rey. Pieces of the city have shown this kind of revitalization.

The challenge is to do it at scale. That’s always a challenge in a place like Los Angeles, which is quite spread out and fragmented. But it is about taking a block-by-block-level view, and then coming up with a model that allows us to efficiently and effectively transfer a whole area, which requires finance but also, more importantly, requires permitting and zoning. This is a moment of renewal where hopefully people see that this is possible and necessary.

An opportunity for renewal

Lucia Rahilly: What about the importance of affordable housing in cities? We’ve talked about neighborhood by neighborhood. Some neighborhoods will remain expensive. There will be neighborhoods on the periphery that may be less expensive. What role does affordable housing play in this discussion?

Aditya Sanghvi: A shortage of affordable housing has long been one of the biggest challenges that many cities have faced. Postpandemic, policy makers can think very differently, because one of the issues they had is that there was often a lack of space that they could think about using for affordable housing. But now there’s space available in many parts of the urban core. Getting the zoning and incentives right would unlock affordable housing and benefit so many across the globe. Jonathan, as one of the world’s foremost thinkers on affordable housing, what would you add to that?

Jonathan Woetzel: This is the crisis of our times. For the vast majority of people in a city, rent is the single biggest piece of their household expenditure. That’s because rent is pretty high.

As Aditya was saying, this is because we’ve had a slowdown in adding to the supply, relative to the demand for this space. This is basic economics 101. So just converting the office to affordable housing is probably not going to make much of a difference, based on the numbers we’ve looked at. But neighborhood reinvention, neighborhood reimagination, and the idea that work can move allows us to think, why isn’t Compton an office center? Why aren’t there employers in Pacoima? What’s holding them back?

That’s the opportunity. Work from home doesn’t create the opportunity by itself. But it does create the moment where you can reconsider the neighborhood. By reconsidering the neighborhood, we can bring a lot more affordability to it, which would be unquestionably a huge source of dynamism for our economies, and, needless to say, for our societies.

Lucia Rahilly: Aditya, Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us today.

Aditya Sanghvi: Thank you.

Jonathan Woetzel: My pleasure.

Roberta Fusaro: Next, from our Author Talks series, demographer Jennifer Sciubba talks about confronting migration and population trends.

Jennifer Sciubba: My book 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World is an overview of global demographic trends. A lot of what’s written about population is alarmist in tone, and it really politicizes population issues, which is a real problem because it can prevent us from meaningful reform on important issues. One example of that would be migration to the US. The fear around migration has really infected politics to the point where it’s impossible for Congress to do any reforms to migration that are really needed.

Population trends sound like this really large-scale thing, but at the end of the day, it’s about individual people, just aggregated. What I try to do in the book is take that alarmism out and really give a well-informed social-science view on population trends to hopefully help us move past that.

A lot of people will be surprised to learn how rare migration is these days. The pop quiz that I give when I’m speaking to different audiences is, “What proportion of the world’s population do you think lives outside the country in which they were born?” And answers always overestimate it. Even among expert audiences, they’ll say 50 percent or 20 percent.

But the right answer is just 2 to 4 percent for the past 50 or 60 years. Migrating is rare, and most people stay where they’re born. Recognizing that is really important for several reasons: the message out there that waves of migrants are coming in the future can lead to inaction in the present, because people think, if this is a certainty and there’ll be lots of migrants coming, we don’t have to do a lot.

Here’s an example of that: business leaders who might be hoping to rely on immigrants to fill their workforce in countries where populations are aging and workforces are shrinking might be really surprised and disappointed to see that those waves of migrants aren’t coming. That means that they need to take some action now to shape the workforce that they want in the future. That’s an overestimation of migration, which can be really dangerous.

We know that there are all kinds of forces—climate change would be an example of this—that push people out of rural areas in countries that are not yet highly urbanized. But in the past, urbanization often took place because people were pulled into urban areas because of jobs. Those are two very different things, because when hundreds of thousands or even millions of young men in particular are pushed out of rural areas and into urban areas and they don’t find jobs, a lot of times what that leads to is instability.

One of the coolest things about demography is that any snapshot of a population today tells us a little bit about the future. Trends do change, of course, and I describe a lot of the ways that they change in the book, but they generally follow predictable patterns. Demographics can be really useful for long-term business planning, and also underscore the idea that we have to invest today to shape the future that we want tomorrow.

Roberta Fusaro is an editorial director in the Waltham, Massachusetts, office; and Lucia Rahilly is the global editorial director and deputy publisher of McKinsey Global Publishing and is based in the New York office.

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Research: When Employees Identify with Their Company, They’re Less Likely to Recognize Gender Discrimination

• Jamie L. Gloor,
• Tyler Okimoto,
• Brooke Gazdag,
• Michelle Ryan

Beware the “not here” bias.

Identifying as an organizational member — or feeling a strong sense of attachment to the organization — is generally a positive thing for employees and employers. But our research on workplace incivility and mistreatment shows that it can also shape when — and if — employees recognize and respond to subtle forms of discrimination against women at work. Evidence shows that leaders, as well as employees, play a key role in identifying and remedying gender discrimination in all its forms. If the goal is to proactively address gender discrimination in the workplace and encourage leaders and workers to remove their rose-colored glasses, this article offers a few suggestions.

You’re in the elevator of your office building. The doors open and two coworkers — one male and one female — enter the elevator in a heated debate. The female employee is trying to explain an issue on a project she’s leading, but the male employee interrupts her: “ Geez, I’ve heard enough of you and your opinions!” The woman falls silent, clearly upset and shaken by the comment.

• JG Jamie L. Gloor is a Swiss National Science Foundation professor of Leadership & Diversity Science at the University of St.Gallen in Switzerland. Her research, teaching, and speaking focus on diversity and inclusion, leadership, humor, and sustainability to craft more equitable, enjoyable, and productive workplaces with positive impact.
• TO Tyler Okimoto is a professor of management and academic dean within the faculty of Business, Economics, and Law at the University of Queensland. His research aims to understand the factors that bias employee judgments and lead to discrimination at work, and how organizations can work through biased viewpoints to promote consensus and a greater sense of fairness.

Xinxin Li is an associate professor of management at the Antai College of Economics and Management at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research focuses on DEI, business ethics, and emotions at work.

• BG Brooke Gazdag is an associate professor and academic director of executive education at the Kühne Logistics University in Hamburg, Germany. Through her research and teaching, she seeks to improve employees’ experience at work through leadership, negotiations, and diversity and inclusion.

Michelle Ryan is a professor of social and organizational psychology and the director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at The Australian National University. Her work centers on understanding the psychological processes underlying workplace gender inequality, and designing and implementing innovative and evidence-based interventions to increase gender equality.

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Standout grad eyes career at nexus of biomedical, preclinical research

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College’s outstanding undergraduate of spring 2024 focused his honors thesis on sex-based differences in sleep

As an undergraduate researcher, Grant Mannino has helped advance scientific understanding of sleep, perhaps to the detriment of his own volume of sleep.

Mannino is graduating this week with a double major in psychology and neuroscience , summa cum laude . He has been designated as the spring 2024 outstanding undergraduate of the College of Arts and Sciences.

While pursuing his degree, he has contributed more than 1,500 hours of undergraduate research, co-authored two peer-reviewed manuscripts, is first author of a manuscript under review, and has contributed to four other manuscripts and a book chapter.

Mannino, who went to high school in the Denver metro area, recently answered five questions from this magazine. Those queries and his responses appear below:

Question: If you were to briefly summarize the results of your honors thesis to a lay audience, what would you say?

College of Arts and Sciences Dean Glen Krutz (left) talks with Grant Mannino, the college's spring 2024 outstanding graduate, about his research and future plans. (Photo: Kylie Clarke)

Mannino : Essentially, sleep is being increasingly recognized as an important mediator of disease and has thus gained more attention as an outcome measure in studies of various subdisciplines of biomedical research (e.g., neuroscience). In my thesis, I found significant biological sex differences in the sleep of male and female mice (267 total) commonly used in research.

Specifically, female mice slept less than their male counterparts. Historically, however, female animals are underrepresented in biomedical research and underlying sex differences—as previously described—are rarely taken into account in data analyses.

In accordance with the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) initiative to improve rigor and reproducibility in biomedical research, I used these data to demonstrate that investigators should account for underlying sex differences when interpreting sleep in the context of disease models.

Question: When did you realize that you wanted to pursue a career in science?

Mannino : I’ve always had some natural interest in medicine but didn’t realize that I wanted to pursue a career in science until I joined a laboratory here at CU. Biomedical research provides this unique intersection between medicine and preclinical research that I really enjoy.

Simply spending as much time as I have in my lab has just solidified my desire to pursue a career in science.

Question: I understand that you mentor other undergraduate students; what motivates you to do this, and how do you find the time?

Mannino : I’ve had the opportunity to work in a big lab that often hosts students from summer programs and internships from various institutions/backgrounds. Once I had established proficiency in certain research techniques, I sought to serve as a peer mentor for newer/rotating students with the goal of helping them with their projects while building relationships and enriching their experience in the lab.

Question: You are hoping to pursue an MD/PhD; what is your hope for your career beyond that?

Mannino : Up to this point, I’ve largely been on the discovery side of research, where I’ve been interpreting results and disseminating findings. Whether I end up going the MD/PhD route or just doing a PhD, I’d definitely love to end up more on the implementation side of research. This way, I could potentially see some of the novel interventions/strategies that I’m familiar with actually improve the life of patients.

Question: Is there anything about your time at CU Boulder that was especially meaningful to you?

Mannino : The relationships I’ve been able to develop at CU have been (by far) the most meaningful to me. I feel extremely lucky to have spent the past few years working for two professors (Dr. Rachel Rowe and Dr. Mark Opp) who are both amazing people, mentors and scientists.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to build relationships across different areas of the same community with my friends, classmates, research colleagues and professors. I think that the culmination of all these relationships has shaped my undergraduate experience in the most meaningful way.

Top image: College of Arts and Sciences Dean Glen Krutz and Grant Mannino (Photo: Kylie Clarke)

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U.S. Tightens Rules on Risky Virus Research

A long-awaited new policy broadens the type of regulated viruses, bacteria, fungi and toxins, including those that could threaten crops and livestock.

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By Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller

The White House has unveiled tighter rules for research on potentially dangerous microbes and toxins, in an effort to stave off laboratory accidents that could unleash a pandemic.

The new policy, published Monday evening, arrives after years of deliberations by an expert panel and a charged public debate over whether Covid arose from an animal market or a laboratory in China.

A number of researchers worried that the government had been too lax about lab safety in the past, with some even calling for the creation of an independent agency to make decisions about risky experiments that could allow viruses, bacteria or fungi to spread quickly between people or become more deadly. But others warned against creating restrictive rules that would stifle valuable research without making people safer.

The debate grew sharper during the pandemic, as politicians raised questions about the origin of Covid. Those who suggested it came from a lab raised concerns about studies that tweaked pathogens to make them more dangerous — sometimes known as “gain of function” research.

The new policy, which applies to research funded by the federal government, strengthens the government’s oversight by replacing a short list of dangerous pathogens with broad categories into which more pathogens might fall. The policy pays attention not only to human pathogens, but also those that could threaten crops and livestock. And it provides more details about the kinds of experiments that would draw the attention of government regulators.

The rules will take effect in a year, giving government agencies and departments time to update their guidance to meet the new requirements.

“It’s a big and important step forward,” said Dr. Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a longtime proponent of stricter safety regulations. “I think this policy is what any reasonable member of the public would expect is in place in terms of oversight of the world’s most transmissible and lethal organisms.”

Still, the policy does not embrace the most aggressive proposals made by lab safety proponents, such as creating an independent regulatory agency. It also makes exemptions for certain types of research, including disease surveillance and vaccine development. And some parts of the policy are recommendations rather than government-enforced requirements.

“It’s a moderate shift in policy, with a number of more significant signals about how the White House expects the issue to be treated moving forward,” said Nicholas Evans, an ethicist at University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Experts have been waiting for the policy for more than a year. Still, some said they were surprised that it came out at such a politically fraught moment . “I wasn’t expecting anything, especially in an election year,” Dr. Evans said. “I’m pleasantly surprised.”

Under the new policy, scientists who want to carry out experiments will need to run their proposals past their universities or research institutions, which will to determine if the work poses a risk. Potentially dangerous proposals will then be reviewed by government agencies. The most scrutiny will go to experiments that could result in the most dangerous outcomes, such as those tweaking pathogens that could start a pandemic.

In a guidance document , the White House provided examples of research that would be expected to come under such scrutiny. In one case, they envisioned scientists trying to understand the evolutionary steps a pathogen needed to transmit more easily between humans. The researchers might try to produce a transmissible strain to study, for example, by repeatedly infecting human cells in petri dishes, allowing the pathogens to evolve more efficient ways to enter the cells.

Scientists who do not follow the new policy could become ineligible for federal funding for their work. Their entire institution may have its support for life science research cut off as well.

One of the weaknesses of existing policies is that they only apply to funding given out by the federal government. But for years , the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies have struggled with stagnant funding, leading some researchers to turn instead to private sources. In recent years, for example, crypto titans have poured money into pandemic prevention research.

The new policy does not give the government direct regulation of privately funded research. But it does say that research institutions that receive any federal money for life-science research should apply a similar oversight to scientists doing research with support from outside the government.

“This effectively limits them, as the N.I.H. does a lot of work everywhere in the world,” Dr. Evans said.

The new policy takes into account the advances in biotechnology that could lead to new risks. When pathogens become extinct, for example, they can be resurrected by recreating their genomes. Research on extinct pathogens will draw the highest levels of scrutiny.

Dr. Evans also noted that the new rules emphasize the risk that lab research can have on plants and animals. In the 20th century, the United States and Russia both carried out extensive research on crop-destroying pathogens such as wheat-killing fungi as part of their biological weapons programs. “It’s significant as a signal the White House is sending,” Dr. Evans said.

Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard and a longtime critic of the government’s policy, gave the new one a grade of A minus. “I think it’s a lot clearer and more specific in many ways than the old guidance,” he said. But he was disappointed that the government will not provide detailed information to the public about the risky research it evaluates. “The transparency is far from transparent,” he said.

Scientists who have warned of the dangers of impeding useful virus research were also largely optimistic about the new rules.

Gigi Gronvall, a biosafety specialist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the policy’s success would depend on how federal health officials interpreted it, but applauded the way it recognized the value of research needed during a crisis, such as the current bird flu outbreak .

“I was cautiously optimistic in reading through it,” she said of the policy. “It seems like the orientation is for it to be thoughtfully implemented so it doesn’t have a chilling effect on needed research.”

Anice Lowen, an influenza virologist at Emory University, said the expanded scope of the new policy was “reasonable.” She said, for instance, that the decision not to create an entirely new review body helped to alleviate concerns about how unwieldy the process might become.

Still, she said, ambiguities in the instructions for assessing risks in certain experiments made it difficult to know how different university and health officials would police them.

“I think there will be more reviews carried out, and more research will be slowed down because of it,” she said.

Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column . More about Carl Zimmer

Benjamin Mueller reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a police reporter in New York. More about Benjamin Mueller

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• Americans Remain Critical of China

Many see China as increasingly influential and consider limiting its power a top priority

Table of contents.

• Unfavorable views of China prevail
• China’s role in the world
• China’s territorial disputes
• Americans lack confidence in Xi Jinping
• Americans increasingly see China as an enemy
• Limiting China’s power and influence
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• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ opinions of China, its role in the world and its impact on the U.S. economy. For this analysis, we surveyed 3,600 U.S. adults from April 1 to April 7, 2024. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology .

For the fifth year in a row, about eight-in-ten Americans report an unfavorable view of China, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Today, 81% of U.S. adults see the country unfavorably, including 43% who hold a very unfavorable opinion. Chinese President Xi Jinping receives similarly negative ratings.

Still, many Americans agree that China’s influence in the world has been getting stronger in recent years (71%). This sense is accompanied by concern about how China interacts with other nations: 61% of Americans are at least somewhat concerned about China’s territorial disputes with neighboring countries. (For more U.S. views of China’s role in the world, go to Chapter 1 .)

When it comes to China’s relationship with the United States, few see China as a partner (6%) and most Americans instead label it a competitor (50%) or an enemy (42%) of the U.S. They are likewise critical of China’s impact on the U.S. economy, describing its influence as large and negative. Roughly half of Americans think limiting China’s power and influence should be a top U.S. foreign policy priority, and another 42% think this should be given some priority. (For more assessments of China’s relationship with the U.S., go to Chapter 2 .)

According to the Center survey, which was conducted April 1-7, 2024, among 3,600 U.S. adults, Republicans are more wary of China than Democrats are.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are about twice as likely as Democrats and Democratic leaners to hold a very unfavorable view of China and to consider China an enemy of the U.S. They are also more likely to say that China has recently become more influential.

Republicans also have wider ideological differences within their party, and conservative Republicans stand out on many measures :

• Conservative Republicans are 25 percentage points more likely than moderate and liberal Republicans to express a very unfavorable view of China (68% vs. 43%). There is no difference between liberal Democrats and moderate and conservative Democrats on this question.
• Conservative Republicans are also 31 points more likely than moderate and liberal Republicans to see China as an enemy of the U.S. No ideological difference is present among Democrats.
• While 83% of conservative Republicans say China’s influence in the world has been getting stronger in recent years, 68% of moderate and liberal Republicans say the same. The latter is similar to the shares of moderate and conservative Democrats (67%) and liberal Democrats (69%) who hold this view.

Older Americans are generally more critical of China. A 61% majority of adults ages 65 and older have a very unfavorable view of China, compared with 27% of adults under 30. Adults ages 65 and older are also more than twice as likely as those ages 18 to 29 to see China as an enemy of the U.S. For their part, younger adults are more likely than older ones to label China as a competitor and as a partner.

Older Americans also perceive more growth in China’s international influence. Roughly three-quarters of adults ages 65 and older say China’s influence has been getting stronger in recent years, while about two-thirds of adults under 30 say the same.

Americans with a sour view of the U.S. economy have more critical opinions of China. Those who say the current U.S. economic situation is bad are more likely to hold an unfavorable opinion of China and to say China has a great deal or fair amount of negative influence on the U.S. economy. They are also more likely to see China as an enemy when compared with those who see the economy positively.

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