Dear Hiro,

Since your posting, I have wondered if something like this may lead to problems for me as well and checked some facts with my attorney's office.

In general, its best to know ahead of time if you expect collaborations whether you will physically be performing research at any other location besides your PI's lab. If such is the case, LCAs need to be filed in your favor by all the locations where you will be working. With a current H1B having an LCA filed only by your PI, you are allowed to work physically at other locations for a maximum of 60 days a year and not more than 10 days continuously and the expenses for such a trip need to be paid by your employer.

If you recently received a grant and need to collaborate and travel extensively as a result of this, you are right that your visa needs to be amended. Every time a new location files an LCA for you, it costs them either $130 if they are non-profit or $1130 for private companies and also ends up costing us (personally or the PI) the visa application fee.

To answer your question, I get the impression that if you know you will be teaching for a quarter and also doing work with a collaborator for an extended period at a different location, these can be put in your work description as long as LCAs are filed by the respective locations for each of these job descriptions in your name. (I am told this is done to normalize cost of living between different places for example if you are a postdoc from a small town in the midwest who needs to do experiments in new york city for a month, the LCA in newyork is meant to provide you with a higher salary commensurate with the cost of living there for extended periods.)

Kindly let me know if you find out more details.

Regards,

Ajay

Hi Dragaon,

Welcome to UCLA!

The departmental variations in salary standards are quite high and I shall forward your question to Graham who seems better suited to give you the details since he is from the UK and in the Biomedical sciences. Meanwhile, here are some general features of the two visas that go into most decisions:
J1
+ Cheaper for you and the boss
+ Fast processing time
- Some countries have a mandatory home-return required for people in the fields they are deficient in (this may or not be true for you)
+ Your spouse *can* work when on a dependent J visa
- Its an non-immigrant visa - so not preferred by people who plan to apply for a green card in the US.
H1
mostly the converse of the above, in addition:
- some competitive funding opportunities like Fellowships in the biomed sciences specifically allow only J visas and not H visas for eligibility. Check the typical granting agencies carefully since in my case it was just the opposite which is rare. If you are sure to be funded by your PI's grant it should not matter as much.
- far more sensitive to job description... if you start lengthy collaborations or decide to teach intermittently, it involves amending the visa each time there is a significant change. This can get expensive and annoying as Hiro outlines above.
Salary
In general the biological sciences go by the NIH guidelines in salary with some normalization with the cost of living. It will also depend on your seniority. At UCLA, as things stand, you need to make more than $33864 a year to be eligible for an H-visa (yes some departments pay less than that) and there is no such limit for J-visas. See the NIH minimums and what Stanford pays here as a guideline: http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html and dont be shocked if UCLA pays a bit less than what that page shows since its neither a private school with deep pockets nor doesit officially recognize the NIH minimums since they are technically only "guidelines".

Hope these help atleast a bit in your decision.

Cheers and best wishes,

Ajay