Academic wellbeing: five actions for societies and institutions

In 2026, the FEBS Education and Training Committee asked scientists and educators a simple question: how are you actually doing? 246 people answered, from PhD students to principal investigators. The results were first presented at the Education Special Session of the FEBS Congress 2026 in Maastricht. They are now available as a brief report, with final figures and practical actions.

Key findings

• 80% often or almost always find their work meaningful, yet 64% have considered leaving academia primarily for wellbeing reasons.
• 86% say work spills into or takes over their personal time, and 44% work more than 50 hours a week.
• 31% feel at least sometimes unsafe voicing concerns or disagreement.
• 61% rate their institution’s response to wellbeing concerns as ineffective, and 70% doubt real improvement within five years.
• 95% chose a structural priority (workload, careers, or culture and leadership) as the most urgent area for improvement.

Five actions to start now

1. Reduce avoidable overload
2. Recognise supervision, teaching and mentoring as real work
3. Make speaking up safe
4. Put careers on the agenda
5. Show evidence of progress

The brief also gives Constituent Societies a 30-minute format to turn the findings into one owned commitment at their next meeting: one change, one lead, one year.

Download the Academic Wellbeing Brief 2026 (PDF)

The Committee welcomes examples of what societies and institutions try, and of the obstacles they meet.

The findings are descriptive and come from a voluntary, self-selected sample connected to FEBS networks (N = 246). They cannot be generalised to European academia as a whole.

Further reading:

• Wellbeing in the academic world: what 246 European biochemists and life scientists told us
• Wellbeing in academia: a conversation worth having at the FEBS Congress 2026 Education Special Session