Nashville Ascends as Emerging Market for Life Sciences Research Talent

A new analysis conducted by CBRE identifying the 25 top U.S. life sciences labor markets ranks Nashville 23rd for life sciences research talent based on its growth of researchers in the past five years, number of PhDs per graduates, venture capital funding and income relative to the cost of living.

Nationally, job growth in life sciences professions—from bioengineers and biochemists to microbiologists and data scientists—expanded by 79 percent since 2001 to roughly 500,000. In comparison, the overall U.S. job growth rate in that span was 8 percent.

Nashville added the most life sciences researchers among the report’s top 25 U.S. markets between 2016 and 2021. Research jobs in the metro rose from 2,596 to 4,596, or 77 percent, in that timeframe.

CBRE assessed each market against multiple criteria, including the number of life sciences jobs and graduates, share of overall job and graduate pool, number of life sciences doctorate degree holders, and concentration of jobs in the broader professional, scientific and technical services professions. The analysis produced CBRE’s inaugural ranking of the leading markets for U.S. life sciences talent.

CBRE analyzed a pool of 74 U.S. cities in selecting the top 25.

Rank	Market	Score
1	Boston/Cambridge	138
2	Washington, D.C./Baltimore	129.8
3	San Francisco Bay Area	126.2
4	New York/New Jersey	124.3
5	San Diego	120.3
6	Raleigh-Durham	114.8
7	Los Angeles/Orange County	113.8
8	Philadelphia	113.5
9	Seattle	109.4
10	Chicago	107.6
11	Denver/Boulder	106.9
12	Minneapolis/St. Paul	106.4
13	Houston	104.1
14	Atlanta	103.5
15	Worcester, MA	102.6
16	Dallas/Fort Worth	102
17	Sacramento	101.8
18	Austin	101.5
19	Salt Lake City	101.4
20	New Haven, CT	100.8
21	Portland, OR	100.7
22	Miami	100.7
23	Nashville	100.6
24	Albany, NY	100.3
25	Pittsburgh	100

“Historically, the managed care industry has driven Nashville’s health-care labor pool and real estate. However, Vanderbilt University’s investment in research and lab space has nurtured our growing life sciences sector into the emerging labor market it is today,” said CBRE’s J.T. Martin. “Public and venture capital research funding have also driven the sector in the past couple of years, letting Nashville take its first steps toward creating a self-sustaining life sciences cluster apart from the East Coast. As this continues, the metro will attract more life sciences companies and researchers and, in turn, fuel the development of purpose-built lab spaces.”

Nashville’s world-class research institutions, like Vanderbilt University Medical Center, are responsible for the cluster’s growth in life sciences researchers, as well as the graduation rates in life sciences-related academic disciplines at the doctoral level.

While the Nashville cluster conferred 793 of the nearly 164,000 biological and biomedical sciences degrees issued nationally in 2020, 15 percent of those degrees were PhDs. This is the third-highest percentage of PhDs per graduates in the metro in the country—Houston and Salt Lake City are ranked one and two, respectively.

Research funding is also driving Nashville’s position as an emerging life sciences talent cluster. National Institutes of Health funding for Nashville companies grew by more than 50 percent between 2016 and 2021. In the private sphere, Nashville hit a new record in VC funding with $13.7 million in 2021 compared to no funding in 2016.

Another unexpected finding likely is relevant for expanding companies; Life sciences wages don’t vary geographically as much as those of other industries. Yet the market-to-market variance of cost of living means some markets are more affordable for life sciences workers than others.

In Nashville, the average annual salary of biochemists, biomedical engineers, chemists and biophysicists is $80,263 while the annual cost of living is just above $48,000, making it more beneficial from a financial standpoint for scientists and researchers to live there.

Largest Gaps Between Average Life Sciences Wages and Cost of Living

Market	Ratio of life sciences wages to cost of living
Houston	2.04
Raleigh-Durham	1.99
Atlanta	1.90
Dallas/Fort Worth	1.86
Philadelphia	1.79
Minneapolis/St. Paul	1.79
Nashville	1.78
Chicago	1.76
Austin	1.76
Sacramento	1.76

“Quality and availability of labor are key considerations for any expanding industry, and that’s certainly the case for life sciences,” said Ian Anderson, CBRE’s Americas Head of Life Science and Healthcare Research. “Lab vacancy rates are tight in most markets, even amid strong construction activity. Expanding life sciences companies can choose from dozens of U.S. markets depending on their labor and real estate needs.”

To read the full report, click here.