Postdoctoral education plays an important role in the research enterprise of the United States.
Postdoctoral appointments provide recent Ph.D. recipients with an opportunity to develop further the research skills acquired in their doctoral programs or to learn new research techniques. In the process of developing their own research skills, postdoctoral appointees perform a significant portion of the nation's research and augment the role of graduate faculty in providing research instruction to graduate students. Postdoctoral education has been a part of American higher education for over 100 years. The Johns Hopkins University began to support postdoctoral fellows shortly after the institution was founded in 1876. In the 1920s the Rockefeller Foundation established a formal program of postdoctoral fellowships for recent Ph.D. graduates in the physical sciences.