Working Scientist: Recent Episodes
Nature Careers
Working Scientist is the Nature Careers podcast. It is produced by Nature Portfolio, publishers of the international science journal Nature. Working Scientist is a regular free audio show featuring advice and information from global industry experts with a strong focus on supporting early career researchers working in academia and other sectors.
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In many parts of the world these days garments are bought purely as fashion items, and discarded after just a few months or years. But as the global population grows and personal wealth levels increase, solutions are urgently needed to process increasing volumes of textile waste as consumption rises. This waste includes synthetic fibres, which do not degrade in nature.
Sonja Salmon describes advances in enzymatic processes to deconstruct and then recycle mixed fibre garments made from both polyester and cotton, alongside the environmental costs of producing and transporting clothes in the first place. “Technically, there are going to be some challenges in it. But that’s why we’re scientists, right? That's what we do,” says Salmon, who is based at Wilson College of Textiles in Raleigh, North Carolina.
How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 7–12 are produced in partnership with Nature Water, and introduced by Fabio Pulizzi, its chief editor.
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Draw a Scientist is a test developed in 1983 to explore children’s perspectives of scientists and how stereotypical views can emerge at an early age, influenced both by popular culture and how STEM subjects are taught in schools.
In April, 50 images from Nature’s weekly Where I Work section, a photo essay which depicts an individual researcher at work, went on display in London’s Kings Cross district.
The photographs were chosen to reflect the diversity of scientific careers, and in the words of senior careers editor Jack Leeming, to demonstrate that “scientists aren’t all wacky lab-coated, round-goggled people from the science fiction film Back to the Future.”
In this Working Scientist podcast, Julie Gould visits the exhibition with a group of 12-13 year-old female pupils from London’s Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, where she repeats the Draw a Scientist test, based on their perceptions of scientists. The children draw two pictures, one before and one after viewing the 50 photographs. Gould then asks them how their perceptions have changed, based on what they have seen.
As one pupil put it after seeing the exhibition, which closes later this month: “You can be a scientist in almost any part of the world. You could be involved with flowers, with the ocean, with weather, with space. You can do anything.”
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Lynette Cheah’s research group collaborates with psychologists, computer scientists and urban designers to develop smarter and more sustainable ways of city transportation. “We can’t have sustainable cities without transforming the way people move and how goods are moved around,” says Cheah, an engineering systems researcher who is based at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia.
Cheah outlines some challenges to meeting targets in the eleventh of 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015 (making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable) by 2030. In part these rely on more cities using the data-driven and centrally-planned approach taken by Singapore, the south Asian city state in which she grew up and worked until recently, she argues.
Informal transport options such as tuktuk rikshaws in Thailand and shared taxi matatus in Kenya, for example, can present a barrier to delivering smarter cities, but they also have advantages. She explains why.
“I am very optimistic that good science and knowledge does exist to help us, you know, track the path towards sustainable urban development,” she says. “It’ll take lots of work. It’ll take public-private partnerships. It’ll take some credible financing, lots of capacity building.”
How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 7–12 are produced in partnership with Nature Water, and introduced by Fabio Pulizzi, its chief editor.
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Francisco Ferreira’s first exposure to inequality of opportunity was during his daily ride to school in São Paulo, Brazil, and seeing children his age selling chewing gum on the streets. Ferreira, a former World Bank economist who now researches inequality at the London School of Economics, speculates on the wasted human talent caused by such hardships, and how many more scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and writers there would be if inequalities could be tackled at an early stage in children’s lives. “I think it deserves even more attention than it already gets,” he says, before going on to describe progress toward delivering Sustainable Development Goal 10: to reduce inequality in and among countries, and how best to measure it. Ferreira outlines how machine learning tools are helping to identify the most powerful predictors of societal divisions and how income is distributed.
How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 7-12 are produced in partnership with Nature Water, and introduced by Fabio Pulizzi, its chief editor.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Power networks are humankind’s biggest engineering achievement to date, says Sinan Küfeoğlu. But ageing infrastructure in advanced industrialised economies, coupled with the fact that around one billion people in the world lack continuous power access, particularly in Global South countries, could threaten the delivery of Sustainable Development Goal 9 by 2030, he warns. The goal promotes resilient infrastructure, inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and innovation.
Speaking in a personal capacity, Küfeoğlu, a senior policy manager at the UK government gas and electricity market regulator OFGEM, lists some of the hurdles ahead, based on his work as an energy systems researcher in Finland, UK, US, and Turkey, where he grew up.
Many funding proposals, he says, pack in “buzzwords” such as green, sustainable, holistic, inclusive, and circular economy, but governments and other infrastructure project funders are often poor at measuring impact, and undertaking return-on-investment and cost-benefit analyses.
How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 7-12 are produced in partnership with Nature Water, and introduced by Fabio Pulizzi, its chief editor.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In Kenya, where Moses Ngoze teaches entrepreneurship and management at Masinde Muliro University in Kakamega, micro, small and medium enterprises provide 75% of jobs and more than 80% of the country’s gross domestic product. Typically these organizations employ between one and 100 people and include subsistence farming, hospitality and artisan businesses, mostly operating in a jua kali environment, a Swahili term meaning “hot sun,” he says.
Ngoze's research explores how the enterprises can help achieve full employment and sustained (and sustainable) economic growth by 2030, captured in Sustainable Development Goal 8, one of 17 agreed by the United Nations in 2015.
He tells the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast that African economies and employment ambitions need more than multinational employers moving there. These firms only employ 10% of the world’s workforce, he says.
Infrastructure improvements are also needed, Ngoze adds, alongside more reliable energy, stronger internet connectivity, and tax breaks for business. Government funding for university-based centres of enterprise development are also a priority.
The podcast series profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 7-12 are produced in partnership with Nature Water, and introduced by Fabio Pulizzi, its chief editor.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Julien Harou’s career started in geology in his current role as a water management and infrastructure researcher now straddles economics and engineering, with a particular focus on using artificial intelligence (AI) to measure Ghana’s future energy needs.
Harou is relatively upbeat about progress so far towards achieving sustainable and reliable energy for all by 2030, the seventh of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the United Nations in 2015. He points out that from 2015 to 2021, the portion of the global population with access to electricity increased from 87% to 91%, and last year about 30% came from renewable sources.
Harou’s research at the University of Manchester, UK, incorporates computer modeling and artificial intelligence design algorithms to balance Ghana’s long term renewable energy and infrastructure needs. But AI also helps to address the environmental and human health impacts. For example, Ghana’s Volta River was dammed in the 1960s to create the Akosombo dam. But its arrival depleted fish stocks and increased weed and algae growth, providing habitat for vectors of waterborne diseases. It’s all about compromise, he tells the seventh episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a podcast series that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs.
Episodes 7-12 are produced in partnership with Nature Water, and introduced by Fabio Pullizi, its chief editor.
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María Teresa Dova describes how an early career move to CERN as the first Latin American scientist to join Europe’s organisation for nuclear research ultimately benefited both her but also the researchers she now works with back home in Argentina.
The move to Geneva, Switzerland, where CERN is based, required Dova to pivot from condensed matter physics, the subject of her PhD at the University of La Plata, Argentina, which she gained in 1988.
But any misgivings about the move to Europe and switching to a new field were quickly banished by her excitement at working on the L3 Large Electron Positron Collider project, she tells Julie Gould.
Dova returned to Argentina two-and-a-half years later, launching the experimental high energy group at La Plata and driving other important collaborations, including the inclusion of Argentina in CERN’s ATLAS particle detector collaboration. She describes how it happened.
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A 2021 report by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean revealed that only 18% of public universities in the region had female rectors.
Vanessa Gottifredi, a biologist and president of Argentina’s Leloir Institute Foundation, a research institute based in Buenos Aires, says this paucity of visible role models for female scientists in the region means that damaging stereotypes are perpetuated.
A female, she says, will not be judged harshly for staying at home to handle a family emergency, but will be for being pushy at work, unlike male colleagues. “Women need to hear that they are good, more than men do, because they tend to convince themselves they're not good enough,” she adds.
In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about female scientists in Latin America, Gottifredi, who worked abroad for 11 years before returning to Argentina, tells Julie Gould how she aims to empower female colleagues, based on what she witnessed elsewhere.
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Fernanda Staniscuaski earned her PhD aged 27. Five years later she had a child. But in common with many scientist mothers, Staniscuaski, a biologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, saw funding and other career opportunities diminish as she combined motherhood with her professional life.
“Of course I did not have as much time as I was used to have. And everything impacted my productivity,” she tells Julie Gould.
The Brazilian biologist founded the Parent in Science advocacy movement after talking with other scientist parents.
In the fourth episode of this six-part podcast series about Latin American women in science, Staniscuaski lists the movement’s achievements so far, and the challenges that lie ahead.
In 2021 Parent in Science won the science outreach category in the Nature Inspiring Women in Science awards, in partnership with the Estée Lauder Companies.
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Paleontologists Ana Valenzuela-Toro and Mariana Viglino outline some of the challenges shared by researchers across Latin America. These include funding, language barriers, journal publication fees and conference travel costs. But the two women then list some of the extra burdens faced by female researchers who live and work there, many of which will resonate with female colleagues based elsewhere.
“When you are in a room sharing a scientific idea or project, nobody listens to you. Then another person, usually a male researcher, says what you said,” says Valenzuela-Toro, who is based in Caldero, Chile.
Mariana Viglino, a Puerto Madryn-based researcher at CONICET, an Argentine government science agency, says the election of far-right governments inevitably results in science funding cuts. “And that means many people having their careers cut. Many research projects that are not going to be able to continue,” she warns.
“It makes me feel really hopeless, and really burnt out, and really sad. I really don’t even know how to put it into words. You want to give back to the government who has invested in you. You want to give back to society. You just feel like they are just pushing you out.”
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In 2013 physicist Carolina Brito co-launched Meninas na Ciência (Girls in Science), a program based at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul.The program exposes girls to university life, including lab visits and meetings with female academics. “There are several girls who have never met someone who has been to university,” says Brita. “It’s beyond a gender problem.”
Jessica Germann was one of them. The 19-year-old is about to start an undergraduate physics degree. She tells Julie Gould how writing a school essay about particle physics and a fascination for YouTube science videos helped in her career choices.
This episode is the second episode in a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about Latin American women in science.
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In her role as Vice Rector for research partnerships and collaboration at the University of the Valley in Guatemala City, Monica Stein works to strengthen science and technology ecosystems in the Central American country and across the wider region.
To mark International Women's Day on 8 March, Stein outlines the steps needed to attract girls into science careers. Access to higher education needs to widen, she argues, alongside more robust legal and regulatory frameworks to make research careers more diverse.
“We need to inspire other women, we need to mentor other women, we need to be available for conversations,” she says. “We need to tell them it’s okay to say no to a project, because you’re pregnant, just giving birth, or your child is young, which is something that is so common here in Guatemala.”
This episode is the first episode in a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about Latin American women in science.
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Laure Sione’s postdoctoral research at Imperial College London addresses the sixth of the 17 United Nations SDGs, but, she argues, sanitation also plays a huge role in gender equality (SDG 5) and good health and well being (SDG 3) targets.
Sione’s PhD research focused on water management challenges in Kathmandu, but she now focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa and the problems caused by open defecation and excrement-filled pit latrines that are sited too close to the water table, risking contamination.
A third option is toilets layered with Tiger Worms. A key advantage is that these take longer to fill up as the worms quickly degrade faeces, but one barrier is getting people to use them in the first place. “It’s like, it’s a gross thing, and they don’t want to think about it. But I think the benefits quickly take over,” she says.
Each episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series from Nature Careers, features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.
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In 2016 the University of Melbourne, Australia, asked for female-only applicants when it advertised three vacancies in its School of Mathematics and Statistics. It repeated the exercise in 2018 and 2019 to fill similar vacancies in physics, chemistry, and engineering and information technology.
Elaine Wong and Georgina Such tell the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast why certain schools wanted only female candidates to apply, and how staff and students reacted to the policy. They also explain what it achieved in terms of addressing the under-representation of female faculty in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects.
Both Wong, a photonics researcher who was appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor (People and Equity) at the university in 2023, and Such, a polymer chemist and associate professor there, explain how the university’s “affirmative action” strategy is helping to address the fifth of the 17 United National Sustainable Development Goals: to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
Each episode in this series, from Nature Careers, features researchers whose work addresses one or more of the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.
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As a child Solomon King Benge loved Eric Laithwaite’s 1974 book The Engineer in Wonderland, based on the mechanical engineer’s 1966 Royal Institution Christmas lectures. After reading it he asked his physics teacher if he and his classmates might try some of Laithwaite’s practical experiments, but was told: “Don’t waste your time with this. This is not important, because it’s not in the curriculum.”
The rejection promoted Benge to launch Fundi Bots in 2011. The social education initiative aims to give education a stronger practical focus, a move away from learning by rote in front of a blackboard. Last year it reached 22,000 students, most of them in Uganda, and hopes eventually to cover one million across Africa.
Robotics is a key component of the program. Benge recalls one child in northern Uganda who built a sensor-driven robot and was asked what he might do with it. He said: “I think I can now create something that lets the goats out of the pen in the morning so that I don’t have to wake up early.”
Benge tells the How to save humanity in 17 goals podcast series: “It was hilarious for us, but a very real testament of once you empower children and make learning meaningful, then they actually begin looking at the practical applications of that learning.”
The educator and entrepreneur describes how Fundi Bots addresses SDG 4 and its aim to deliver quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030.
Each episode in the series features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.
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A drive to reduce suicide mortality rates is a key indicator of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Psychiatrist Shekhar Saxena, who led the World Health Organization’s mental health and substance abuse program after working in clinical practice for more than two decades, says that although progress is being made, a worryingly high number of young people are choosing to end their lives.
“They have to struggle through the school education, competitive examinations, then they have to struggle for a job,” says Saxena, who now teaches at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And many young people decide that dying is easier than struggling through for many years, which is very sad. It reflects the society that we live in where a young person does not feel that life is worth living.”
In the third episode How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, Saxena welcomes the inclusion of mental health in SDG 3 and its aim to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. But he points out that countries on average spend less than 2% of their health budget on mental health, when the disease burden is around 10%.
Each episode in the series features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.
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As a nutrition and planetary health researcher, Christopher Golden takes a keen interest in the second of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and its aim to end hunger.
But Golden’s research also focuses on “hidden hunger,” a term he uses to describe the impact of dietary deficiencies in micronutrients such as iron, zinc, fatty acids, and vitamins A and B12.
Hidden hunger, he argues in the second episode of the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, could be better addressed if more people adopted a diet that includes more ‘blue’ or aquatic foods. These include fish, molluscs and plant species.
Golden, who is based at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, says discussions about hunger and food security have tended to focus on terrestrial food production.
As soil nutrient levels deplete and farmland becomes scarcer as human populations rise, more attention needs to be paid to marine and freshwater food sources, he adds.
But rising sea temperatures threaten millions of people in equatorial regions whose diets are rich in blue foods. As aquatic species migrate polewards in search of cooler waters, their livelihoods and food security are at risk.
Each episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series from Nature Careers, features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.
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Poverty is about more than just meeting basic material needs, says Catherine Thomas. Its corrosive effects are also social and psychological, causing people to feel marginalized and helpless.
Thomas’s research into anti-poverty programs has focused on the effects of one aimed at women in the West African country of Niger, which aims to support subsistence farmers whose livelihoods are impacted by climate change.
One branch of the program involved providing an unconditional $300 cash transfer alongside business and life skills training. Thomas, who is based at the Unversity of Michigan in Ann Arbor, describes the impact it had, compared to similar schemes. These include microfinance business loans, but these tend not to reach those most in need, she says.
Thomas’s research is very much focused on the first of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which aims to end poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030. Each episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series, features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.
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In August the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft touched down, making India only the fourth to have successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon. In this special episode of the Working Scientist podcast, Somak Raychaudhuryan astrophysicist and vice-chancellor at Ashoka University, tells Jack Leeming about India’s history of space research, the significance of the lunar landing, and how it might help to stem a “brain drain” of Indian researchers moving abroad permanently to develop their careers.
The episode is part of the Nature Spotlight on India, an editorially-independent supplement.
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For a three-year period as a postdoctoral researcher, molecular biologist and visual artist Daniel Jay was given both a lab and a sudio to work in. In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist about art and science, Julie Gould asks why, decades later, Jay’s experience is still unusual. Why do scientists with expertise in, say, music, sculpture, pottery or creative writing have to pursue these interests as weekend hobbies, with science “paying the bills?”
Jay, who is Dean of the graduate school of biomedical sciences at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, says today’s early career researchers want what he calls a “post disciplinary society,” offering the freedom to pick and choose different areas and competencies.
Lou Muglia, a medical geneticist who is now president and CEO of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a private foundation located in North Carolina, co-authored a 2023 paper in PloS Biology on art-science collaborations.
Muglia says many early career researchers today don’t see themselves running a traditional lab, but are as excited about communication and the arts as they are about their science. Many funders now recognise this. Academia should too, he argues.
Callie Chappell, Muglia’s co-author and a professional artist who researches biosecurity and innovation at Stanford University, California, says: “I would argue that science is actually a type of art.
“To do science, you have to be creative, you have to blend different ideas, you have to communicate those ideas by creating something. In many ways that's what artists do.”
Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.
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Data form the backbone of the scientific method, but it can be impenetrable. In the penultimate episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art-science collaborations, Julie Gould talks to artists and data visualisation specialists about how they interpret and present data in art forms ranging from music to basket weaving.
Keep things simple wherever possible, agree Duncan Ross, chief data officer at the Times Higher Education publication, and James Bayliss, an interaction and visualisation analyst at Springer Nature. “My go-to tool is a pen and paper or coloured pencils,” says Bayliss. “Start slow and don't get too complicated too fast.”
Akshat Rathi, a senior climate reporter at Bloomberg News, describes how he used data to visualise the devastating impact of a 2015 earthquake in Nepal for an article in the business title Quartz.
And Nathalie Miebach, a basketware artist who created a reed sculpture based on daily weather data she had collected in Provincetown, Massachusetts, says that translating data into artwork brings up all sorts of biases and expectations.
Finally, Rebecca Fiebrink, a classically-trained musician with a PhD in computer science who now works as professor at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts, London, agrees. “Any kind of data analysis itself is creative, right?” she asks.
Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.
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GUI/GOOEY is an international online exhibition that explores digital and technological representations of the biological world.
In the fourth episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Julie Gould talks to some of the artists and scientist whose collaborations created exhibits for the event, which ran from March to June 2023.
Its curator Laura Splan, an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, says GUI/GOOEY reconsidered how technology affects our understanding of nature and our constructions of nature. She is joined by Diana Scarborough, arist-in-residence in bionanotechnologist Ljiljana Fruk’s lab at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Scarborough describes a project involving Anna Melekhova, an inorganic chemist based in Fruk’s lab, which was influenced by an ancient method used in Mayan art to stabilise pigments using clay.
Scarborough says the film she produced to communicate Melekhova’s science depicted a “luminous jelly,” included soundtracks from space, and a conversation generated by ChatGPT to symbolise the new material coming to life.
“I was fascinated by the movement of this nonliving material. It looked really as though it is a living organism. I could very easily imagine alien species looking like this,” says Fruk, who also talks about how she and Scarborough first started working together.
Will Etheridge, a PhD student in Fruk’s lab, also attended the first screening. “It just represented this kind of embryonic substance that was just coming into being and questioning its own existence,” he says.
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In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, artists and illustrators describe examples where accuracy is key, but also ones where they can exert some artistic licence in science-based drawings, sculptures, music and installations.
For Lucy Smith, a botanical artist at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, measurement and accuracy is important, she says.
But accuracy can sometimes take a back seat for illustrator Glendon Mellow, who is also a senior marketing manager a life sciences learning and development company Red Nucleus, based in Toronto, Canada.
“When I put wings on trilobites, I’m not too concerned. It’s not likely that anything I do is going to suddenly nudge opinions into someplace they shouldn’t go on these fossils,” he says.
But what if the science changes? You need 10 to 20 years to be able to look back on data to see whether something’s accurate or not, says artist Luke Jerram, who describes a 2004 project to produce a glass models of the hepatitis C virus. ”You ask the scientists if it actually look like that?” And they say, 'Well, we don’t really know.'”
Sculptor and ceramicist Nadav Drukker outlines the challenges of capturing string theory in art, plus other concepts that form the basis of his theoretical physics research at King's College London.
Kelly Krause, creative director at Springer Nature, explains how the art displayed on a Nature front cover comes about, and how she and her team aim to strike the right balance between accuracy, creativity and clarity to draw readers in.
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Artist and illustrator Lucy Smith helps botanists to identify new species. Usually they request a set of drawings, she says, with a detailed set of requirements.
But Smith, who joined London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, more than 20 years ago, says: “We also feed back to the scientists and say, 'I’ve seen what you’ve asked me to see. But do you know what, I’ve also seen this? Did you know that this flower has this structure.'”
In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Smith is joined by other artists with experience of science collaborations. David Ibbett, resident composer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says:
“By trying to synthesize these different perspectives on what the science means, we arrive at something new.”
Diana Scarborough, artist-in-residence in bionanotechnolost Ljiljana Fruk’s lab at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that the best collaborations are long term ones, requiring also curiosity and passion. “Looking at their research from a different angle opens up opportunities. If I can make a difference at that point, that will be superb.”
Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.
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In the first episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series, Julie Gould explores the history of science and art and asks researchers and artists to define what the two terms mean to them.
Like science, art is a way of asking questions about the world, says Jessica Bradford, head of collections and principal curator at the Science Museum in London. But unlike art, science about interrogating the world in a way that is hopefully repeatable, adds UK-based artist Luke Jerram, who creates sculptures, installations and live artworks around the world.
Ljiljana Fruk, a bionanotechnology researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, says artists can be more playful and work faster, whereas scientists need to repeatedly back up their work by data, a more time-consuming exercise. They are joined by Arthur I. Miller, a physicist who launched the UK’s first undergraduate degree in history and philosophy of science in 1993, and Nadav Drukker, a ceramic artist and theoretical physicist at King’s College London.
Future episodes in this series will focus on how scientists collaborate with artists and why their partnerships are so important. It will also feature researchers who, like Drukker, juggle research careers alongside creating art.
Each episode concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Narrative CVs are increasingly being used by funders to capture how a successful grant application will positively impact society and promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Crucially, the narrative format also acknowledges contributions from citizen scientists, local communities and administrator colleagues.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the largest public funder of UK science, is one adopter. In September 2021 it announced that its new approach would “enable people to better demonstrate their contributions to research, teams, and wider society”.
In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about team science, Hilary Noone, research culture lead for the UK Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), says that to push the boundaries of knowledge, we need to hear from more than just people with a long list of publications to their name. Narrative CVs, she argues, make these other, hidden contributions more visible, and more funders globally should start using them.
Nik Claesen, managing director of the Brussels-based European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA), says his organisation is keen to see greater awareness of the role of research managers and how they support the scientific enterprise. Confusingly, the profession is called different things around the world, he adds.
This is the final episode of Team Science, a six-part podcast series that showcases the roles of research managers, administrators and technicians, and their often hidden contributions to the scientific enterprise. It is a collaboration between Nature Careers and Nature Index. The series is sponsored by Western Sydney University. This episode, and others in the series, concludes with a section looking at how it is helping to champion team science.
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In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about team science, Richard Holliman describes a project involving indigenous researchers in Guyana who wanted to limit insecticide spraying without jeopardising the South American country’s efforts to tackle malaria.
The early warning system they developed with Andrea Beradi, an environmental systems researcher and a colleague of Holliman’s at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, involved satellite technology, drones and ground monitoring systems.
Holliman, who studies engaged research, says members of the wider project team were all paid and listed as co-authors. “That was a really straightforward example of just recognizing contributions from some fabulous people,” he adds. But sometimes, he argues, payment and authorship on a peer-reviewed paper may not be what co-producers are seeking. Instead they may want to co-write a report that would better serve their community’s needs in discussions with policymakers.
Helen Manchester, who researches participatory sociodigital futures at the University of Bristol, UK, adds: “For me, there’s a real politics to knowledge production. We really need to be considering all the time when we’re doing our research, to think about our own position as researchers and our relationship to and with other people.”
And finally, Lorraine van Blerk, whose project about homeless young people in African cities featured in a previous episode, lists key questions to ask when working with young people in a research setting. “How do we make sure that young people are involved in the research design, in the data collection, and the analysis and impact of data?” she asks.
Team Science showcases the roles of research managers, administrators and technicians, and their often hidden contributions to the scientific enterprise, and is a collaboration between Nature Careers and Nature Index. The series is sponsored by Western Sydney University. This episode, and others in the series, concludes with a section looking at how it is helping to champion team science.
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Elaine Fitzcharles, a senior lab manager at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), says the role is sometimes wrongly perceived as someone who “couldn’t cut it as a scientist.”
Fitzcharles and her team oversee five BAS research stations, its main facility in Cambridge, UK, and the research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough. Their responsibilities include advising on health and safety, import licenses, and chemicals and kit can be taken into the field.
Their skillsets are completely different to researcher colleagues’, she argues in the fourth episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about team science. “Recognising that everybody brings different things to the table gives you a much stronger organization, and much better science output,” Fitzcharles adds.
Terri Adams, a scientific glassblower at the University of Oxford, UK, says speaking up at work helps to promote the contributions of lab managers and technicians: “It pays to ask for investment, to tell people what you can do, and to be proactive in seeking things out and publicising yourself rather than sitting back,” she says.
One obvious example of recognition for lab managers and technicians is to acknowledge their contributions in publications. But Devin Lake, a lab manager and PhD student at Michigan State University in East Lansing, has mixed feelings about this. “Some lab managers don’t intend on moving forward in academia, so it doesn’t matter to them whether or not their name is added,” he says.
Team Science showcases the roles of research managers, administrators and technicians, and their often hidden contributions to the scientific enterprise.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Before launching his own consultancy in 2021, Simon Kerridge worked as a research manager in UK academia. “We’re the oil in the cogs,” he says of the role, adding: “Obviously, it’s a service profession, but we have to be careful not to be subservient.”
But how empowered do research managers and administrators based in other countries feel, particularly those working in nations with rigid hierarchies, or where the profession is less established?
Allen Mukhwana leads ReMPro Africa, a research management professional developement programme based in Nairobi. Some professors don't understand why a “lowly research manager” has the audacity to stop their study for ethical or regulatory reasons, she says. “They feel that research managers and administrators are adding extra layers of bureaucracy to their research.”
Tadashi Sugihara, a research manager at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, says a Japanese government scheme to develop the research manager role envisaged that postholders would have a PhD, as he has. Having a doctorate can help build trust between administrators and academic staff as the “customer”, he adds.
Kerridge says the research management career pathway is most established in the US, with perhaps three generations from the same family joining the profession. Meeting a project proposal deadline or collaborating on a successful grant application at a research-intensive institution, he adds, will often result in a bottle of wine or box of chocolates from an appreciative researcher. But the pressure on them to increase their research income often results in huge power dynamics, says Kerridge, who cites instances of bullying and of academics setting unreasonably tight deadlines to submit a project proposal.
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The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) collects research outputs from UK universities and is used by the the country’s government to distribute around £2 billion in research funding. But its focus on publications to measure outputs has drawn criticism.
The Hidden REF, set up in 2020, looks at alternative measures. Simon Hettrick, its chair and director of the Software Susaintability Institute at the University of Southampton, UK, explains what can be submitted, and why publications are excluded.
Gemma Derrick, a former member of the Hidden REF advisory committee who studies research policy and culture at the University of Bristol, UK, talks about its “hidden roles” category, and why some entries moved judges to tears.
Kevin Atkins, who has worked as a site engineer at the University of Plymouth’s Marine Biological Association for 32 years, was highly commended in the category. He describes a typical day, and how his work contributes to the wider research enterprise.
Another highly commended entry was Growing up on the Streets, an international co-produced research project led by the University of Dundee, which focuses on around 200 young people aged 14 to 20 across three African cities: Accra, Bukavu and Harare.
Lorraine van Blerk, a human geography researcher at the university, explains how six young people in each city were recruited as researchers, and how their roles were recognised and celebrated.
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In the first episode of a six-part podcast series about research culture and team science, research managers Lorna Wilson and Hilary Noone describe how their skills and expertise can help deliver better research outputs, particularly when their contributions are better understood and valued by academic colleagues.
Noone, research and innovation culture lead at the funding agency UK Research and Innovation, recalls the discomfort felt all round when an academic colleague tells a meeting: “Just get the admin to do it. That’s what they’re there for, to serve you.”
Wilson, who is head of research development at Durham University, UK, describes being overlooked during an external meeting with collaborators where attendees were asked to introduce themselves. She was the only woman and professional services representative in the room. “It was a really disappointing moment for me. Until that point I loved working with my academic colleagues and had felt valued, but then I experienced that,” she says.
Wilson, who chairs the UK Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), says many of her colleagues have expertise in public policy and research impact, so a more positive research culture with parity of esteem between the two teams will result in more funding proposals and higher-profile research outputs.
In 2020 an ARMA research culture survey led by Noone identified that many of its members felt there was a “them and us” mindset in the workplace. She and Wilson describe what the organization is doing to address the findings.
Team Science is a six-part Working Scientist podcast series, a collaboration between Nature Careers and Nature Index and is sponsored by Western Sydney University. Each episode concludes with a section looking at how it is helping to champion team science.
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In November 2021, Maria Leptin became president of the European Research Council. After a long career in biological research, Leptin admits that starting the process of closing her lab at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) before taking up her new role, was difficult. “You win some you lose some,” she tells Naturecareers editor Jack Leeming of this new career step. “It's painful, but that's the decision I've made.”
Leptin shares some advice for early career researchers writing grants and how researchers can advocate for more funding of science from politicians. She also speaks about the different types of research that deserve to be funded. It doesn’t all need to be ground-breaking, she says, adding: “Just because it's incremental and is not another breakthrough, doesn't mean it's not important. It's extremely important.”
This episode is part of an ongoing Working Scientistpodcast series about funding in science.
In late 2021 a BuzzFeed investigation revealed a catalogue of sexual misconduct incidents at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). Ecologist Sarah Batterman, one of more than a dozen women to speak out about their experiences, describes what happened to her and the impact it has had on her career.
Batterman, who filed a formal complaint to the institute in 2020 after being contacted by other women with similar experiences of harassment and abuse at STRI, tells Adam Levy: “It was almost 10 years of a lot of pain after what happened, which made a lot of my research really difficult. I estimate that I lost three of the 10 years in productivity.”
Josh Tewkesbury joined STRI as its director in July 2021, five months before the BuzzFeed story broke. He describes the measures taken to safeguard scientists from sexual harassment and assault since its investigation concluded.
“We have been working with the people that came forward for the BuzzFeed article, engaging them in the process of how we make STRI a more safe place. ” he says. “We’ve been just overwhelmed and really thankful with the degree to which those individuals have, have been willing to engage.”
This episode is part of a Working Scientist podcast series about freedom and safety in science.
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Morteza Mahmoudi witnessed bullying behaviours during a series of lab visits following his PhD in 2009, and now studies the topic alongside his role as a nanoscience and regenerative medicine researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing. In 2019 he co-founded the Academic Parity Movement, a non-profit which aims to end academic discrimination, violence and bullying across the sector.
In the seventh episode of this podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Mahmoudi tells Adam Levy that bullying is triggered by workplace power imbalances and is particularly prevalent in academia with its hierarchical structure, often causing targets to stay silent.
Bullying can cause a range of physical and mental health problems, he says. Perpetrators damage individuals, institutions’ reputations and wider society. He outlines steps to take if you find yourself bullied, and how academic institutions can tackle the problem.
Mahmoudi is joined by geoscientist Chris Jackson, who left academia in 2022 for a role at engineering consultancy Jacobs, based in Manchester, UK. Jackson welcomes the fact that bullying harassment and discrimination in academia is now more talked about, but says its root cause is an individual’s inability to put themselves in someone else’s position and identify with their personality and experience.
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As a child of the Space Age, Jeffrey Gordon dreamed of becoming an astronaut and discovering life on Mars. Instead he found fascinating life forms and interactions closer to home, inside the gastrointestinal tract.
The microbiome researcher, winner of the 2023 Global Grants for Gut Health Research Group Prize, tells Julie Gould about his research focus and the workplace culture in his lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri.
Gordon also describes the “magical meeting,” that forged a longstanding collaboration with physician Tahmeed Ahmed, executive director of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), and their investigations into how immaturity of the gut microbiota contributes to malnutrition.
The two researchers explain how the prize money will help to further strengthen an ongoing two-way knowledge exchange between the US team and their colleagues in Dhaka.
This episode of the podcast is sponsored by the Global Grants for Gut Health, supported by Yakult and Nature Portfolio. Learn more about the current call for grant applications and how to apply at this link.
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A professor invites colleagues and their partners to a Christmas party but reacts negatively when a young gay researcher asks to bring his future husband along. A Black carnivore researcher conceals their bisexuality and pronoun preferences when doing fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa.
These two experiences are among those recounted in this Working Scientist podcast about the challenges faced by researchers from LGBTQIA+ communities.
Paleantologist Alison Olcott, who co-authored a 2020 study of 261 LGBTQIA+ geocientists and their experiences of fieldwork, tells Adam Levy how some academic institutions are changing fieldwork policies in light of the study’s findings.
They are joined by Florence Ashley, a bioethics and legal scholar whose research on trans youth care at the University of Alberta, Canada, has resulted in death threats and accusations of grooming.
This is the sixth episode of a seven-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science. This episode and the five earlier ones conclude with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.
Atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe realised she was the only climate researcher in West Texas when she joined Texas Tech University in Lubbock, 15 years ago.
Within a few months she was being asked to address community groups about climate change, but also a growing number of posts from social media trolls who disagreed with her, many of them misogynistic in tone.
The situation has worsened since October 2022, she says. This follows amendments to Twitter’s free speech policies after the platform changed ownership.
“It used to be that I would receive that hate via letters or emails, or phone calls, or official complaints to my university. And those certainly still arrive. But now the deluge of hundreds of hateful comments in a single day that the internet facilitates, whether it is on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Facebook, or even Instagram, the volume is just 100 times more than it would be without the Internet.”
Hayhoe and Chris Jackson, a geoscientist who was extensively trolled after becoming the first Black researcher to deliver a Royal Institution Christmas lecture, describe how employers can protect scientists facing both online and in-person harassment, alongside they personal strategies they have adopted to protect themselves.
In the fifth episode of this seven-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, they are joined by Alfredo Carpineti, a science journalist who chairs Pride in STEM, a UK charity that supports LGBTQIA+ scientists and engineers, and Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit to help environmental scientists in the United States who find themselves under fire.
The first six episodes in this series conclude with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.
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Hassoni Alodaini hoped to complete a PhD when war broke out in his native Yemen in 2015.
But as research funding dried up as a result of the hostilities, Alodaini fled to Egypt. His arrival there marked the start of a three-year journey to reach the Netherlands, much of it on foot, via Greece, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and Germany.
In the fourth episode of a seven-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Alodani describes how it feels to have his research disrupted by war, and his hopes of finishing his doctorate. “I feel that I waste all the effort that I have done in the past. I feel that I begin from new,” he says.
Syrian researcher Fares el Hasan also sought sanctuary in the Netherlands. He recounts dodging snipers during his daily journey to the University of Aleppo, prompting his decision to flee after ISIS seized control of the village where his parents lived, in 2013.
After completing a Masters’ Degree at Wageningen University on an Erasmus Mundus fellowship, he now works in a support role at the University of Utrecht. “I like my work, but I was looking to do a PhD and becoming a professor or assistant professor. I’m not sure if this is feasible or not,” he says.
Finally, Stephen Wordsworth, executive director of the Council for At Risk Academics (CARA), a UK based charity, describes how the organisation’s fellowship programme seeks to place academics who are seeking refuge at its partner universities and research institutes.
“They’re not just coming to be supported,” he says of the academics CARA has helped over the years. “They are bringing their own experience and knowledge, sharing that while they’re here. And that can then be the basis of lasting partnerships.”
The first six episodes in this seven-part series conclude with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.
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In the third episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series about freedom and safety in science, researchers in Nigeria, Venezuela and Ukraine describe what it is like to live and work in struggling economies.
Ismardo Bonalde currently earns around $500 a month in his role as an experimental physicist and superconductivity researcher at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research in Parroquia Macarao, but at times it has dropped to $15 in a country where inflation was 234% last year, down from 686% the previous year. His lab closed in 2017 after research funding dried up, he tells Adam Levy.
Emmanuel Unuabonah describes the impact of power outages, equipment shortages and brain brains in Nigeria, where he works as a material chemist at Redeemer’s University in Akoda. “I tell my students I have become a hunter,” he says. “I hunt for grants.”
Finally, Nana Voitenko describes how the COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine, where she works as a neuroscientist at Kiev Academic University, has wiped out economic gains made after Ukraine gained independence from Soviet Russia in 1991.
The first six episodes in this seven-part series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.
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In January 2022 the Biden administration announced its long-awaited strategy to safeguard scientific integrity across US federal research facilities and agencies.
But 16 months on, do researchers working in those organisations feel better protected than they did under the administration led by Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump?
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a US non-profit and advocacy organisation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has tracked more than 200 examples where scientific decision-making processes were politicised during the four-year Trump administration, compared to 98 under the 2001-9 presidency of George W Bush.
In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Jacob Carter, research director at the union’s centre for science and democracy, joins Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the US Climate Science Legal Defence Fund, to describe the impact of the Biden strategy in empowering scientist whistleblowers to speak out.
“Don’t punish the people who do come forward,” says Kurtz. “Even if their claims are found to be not a true violation or there was a misunderstanding or something, it’s imperative to not punish people who came forth with good faith claims.”
Finally, Evi Emmenegger, who studies aquatic animal pathogens at a US federal research facility, describes what happened after she raised concerns to her supervisors about contaminated waste water being released in nearby wetlands over a six-month period.
Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
efJf Hawkins’ 2021 book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, focuses on the neocortex and how it helps us to understand the world around us, before examining the future of artificial intelligence, based on what we already know about the brain.
In this final episode of Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series about neuroscience, Hawkins describes how his book finishes on a philosophical note, by covering the future of humanity in an age of intelligent machines.
Hawkins is chief scientist at Numenta, a research company he started 17 years ago in Redwood City, California. He career started in the semiconductor industry but his interest in the theories underpinning brain science was triggered by a 1979 article in Scientific American, written by Francis Crick.
“I realized that I don’t think there’s anything more interesting or important to work on, because every human endeavour is based on the brain. Everything we have ever done in the arts and the sciences, and literature and humanities and politics. It’s all brains,” he says.
Hawkins’ search for an academic career in theoretical brain science proved fruitless, prompting a return to industry and the founding of both Palm Computing and Handspring. In 2002 he established the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, now based at the University of California Berkeley.
Tales from the Synapse is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.
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In the first episode of a six-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Ukrainian neuroscientist Nana Voitenko relives how she and colleagues fled Kiev when war broke out in February 2022, and how the country’s research landscape and infrastructure has fared since.
Also, physicist and climate scientist Liubov Poshyvailo-Strube describes her involvement in the Ukranian Global University (UGU), and how it is helping academics access educational and research opportunities outside Ukraine. Two challenges, she says, are supporting adult males who cannot leave the country during the conflict, and motivating early career researchers to return after hostilities case.
Finally, Arctic researcher Matthew Druckenmiller, who is based at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, describes the war’s impact on Arctic science and collaborations with Russian colleagues, many of them dating back years.
Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Councilabout how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.
Isabelle Mansuy’s neuroepigenetics lab researches the impact of life experiences and environmental factors on mental health, exploring if these impacts can be passed on to descendants.
Epigenetic inheritance, she says, is not confined to diets and exposure of factors such as like endocrine disruptors or environmental pollutants. All of these can modify our body and have effects in our offspring. But Mansuy, who is based at the University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, also asks if trauma modifies not only our brains, but also our reproductive systems.
There is still a lot of work needed, she adds, but the possibility that depression or borderline personality disorder might be something inherited from parents would be important for patients and clinicians to understand.
Mansuy’s lab seeks to expose animals prenatally or after birth to conditions which mimic human stress. Her collaborators also provide access to blood and saliva samples from people exposed to childhood trauma, and medical students who are undergoing work placements in emergency rooms.
This is the tenth episode in Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an experimental treatment strategy which uses an implanted device to help patients with severe depression who have reached a point where no other treatment works.
But despite her involvement in the DBS collaboration, which involves neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, electrophysiologists, engineers and computer scientists, neurologist Helen Mayberg does not see it as a long-term solution.
“I hope I live long enough to see that people won't require a hole in their brain and a device implanted in this way,” she says . “I often have a nightmare with my tombstone that kind of reads like, what did she think she was doing?”
Mayberg, director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, introduces Brandy as a typical patient, who says of her condition; “It kind of holds me down, and it takes so much effort to do anything, or to experience anything, and there’s always that cost of, kind of reminds me of like scar tissue, like every time you stretch, it comes back and it holds you even tighter.”
After receiving the treatment, Brandy describes the incremental changes that occurred: “Things got a little bit easier. And even in the smallest things, it got a little bit easier to brush your teeth, it got a little bit easier to get out of bed, it got a little bit easier to have hope. That just started a cascade of positive instead of the cascade of negative.”
This is the tenth episode in Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal.
The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thomas Hummel, who researches smell and taste disorders at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, describes international efforts to help patients who have lost their sense of smell, perhaps as a result of COVID-19, head trauma, chronic rhinosinusitis, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Hummel points to the development of cochlear implants to help patients with hearing loss. “There could be similar implants inside the nasal cavity connected to the olfactory bulb, eliciting a pattern that might make sense to the brain,” he says.
Describing his career path, Hummel, who is also a medical doctor, says unlike some other clinical research areas, his is more heavily dependent on international collaborations. “When you work in cardiovascular diseases you just look around the corner and there’s somebody who works on cardiovascular disorders. In the sense of smell it is different. You look around the corner, and there’s nobody.”
In 2020 the forced isolation of pandemic-related lockdowns led many of us to attend virtual fitness classes and undertake home baking projects. Chantel Prat wondered why she wasn’t interested in taking part. “I couldn’t help but notice and be frustrated by the fact that my brain was responding to the pandemic in a way that seemed very different from the people around me,” she says.
At the time Prat was writing her book The Neuroscience of You. Published in 2022, it explores how different brains make sense of the world. “I've always been interested in the relationship between the mind and the brain, at the level of the individual, not how do brains work in general,” she says.
“Right now I feel like we’re living through a great social paradox,” she adds. “People are discussing the importance of having diverse minds and brains and decision-making spaces. But yet, we don’t seem to be getting any better at talking through our differences.”
To illustrate her point, Prat, who is based at the University of Washington in Seattle, uses the 2015 online image of a dress which went viral and generated heated debates about its colour. Was it white and gold, or blue and black? “This is just a tiny example of how our experiences shape this world-building that we're doing, the way our brains create inferences and connect the dots, even for something as elementary as colour.” she says.
She also recalls how, as a single mother aged 19, she first recognised that her baby daughter Jasmine perceived the world in ways that surprised her, based on lab experiments that she participated in.
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A child neurologist treating Christin Godale’s epilepsy was so impressed with his young patient’s interest in the brain he gave her some of his textbooks to read during an extended stay in hospital.
“He said I should consider a career in neuroscience. That moment really changed my life,” says Godale, who followed his advice and went on to research epilepsy for her PhD at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Godale describes how at one point she was experiencing up to 30 seizures a day and spent periods in a coma, severely curtailing her quality of life, childhood friendships, and graduate school experiences.
“I’ve developed some habits to combat these cognitive impairments that I experience,” she says. “I find myself writing down everything that I’m learning in a lecture and hearing at a meeting.”
When the pandemic struck in March 2020 and labs shut down, Godale embarked on patient advoacy work and science communication via the Society for Neuroscience’s early career policy ambassadors program.
She lobbied Congress members to increase federal funding for neuroscience research, and in late 2021 decided on a career path that would involve her in both academia and industry, working for a seed fund focused on life science and digital companies in southwest Ohio.
“During my graduate studies, I networked a lot. I encourage any early career researcher listening to this podcast to prioritize networking while you’re in graduate school,” she says.
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In his 2022 book Zero to Birth, How the Human Brain is Built, developmental neurobiologist William Harris includes ice hockey analogies to describe how the body’s most complicated organ develops in the womb, drawing on a 40-year career studying fruit fly, salamander, frog and fish embryos.
Harris, professor emeritus at Cambridge University, UK, played the sport growing up in Canada and is now a coach. “A coach will have tryouts and select the best players for different positions,” he says. “The brain does the same thing. Maybe two neurons try out for every position, one makes it that’s a little bit better at communicating, and the other one doesn’t, going through a process called apoptosis. The survivors have to last your whole life.”
Harris highlights some differences between human and animal brains, (cerebral cortex size, for example, and how newborn babies are hard wired to understand and develop speech). Writing the book, he believes, made him respect human and animal brains even more. “Probably our brains are the most unique things about us. We have unique faces, but our brains are even more unique. You just can’t see them,” he says.
An applied goal of Pieter Roelfsema’s lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam is to create a visual brain prosthesis aimed at people who have lost their sight.
To help achieve this goal, the lab partners with both neurosurgeons and artificial intelligence researchers.
“We are knowledgeable about how to put electrodes in the brain,” says Roelfsema, “but we collaborate with experts who know about how to make these electrodes so that they don't damage the brain tissue too much, also with people in artificial intelligence who can take camera images and translate them into brain stimulation patterns.
“We also collaborate with neurosurgeons who can inform us how to really make this device and make it something that is going to be feasible for a neurosurgeon to really implant in the brain. That is definitely a very important goal for me, to bring this to a patient.”
In episode five of Tales from the Synapse, a podcast series with a focus on brain science, Roelfsema describes how he handles requests from people who are pinning their hopes on being able to see again. “I have to explain this is not a clinically approved device,” he says.
“Our ambition will be to go to humans in the next say, two years, or maybe a little bit later, but it’s still going to be research. There are all kinds of regulations, which are there for a good reason. And we have to show that we comply with all these regulations.”
Tales from the Synapse is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Gina Rippon was a paid-up member of the “male-female brain brigade” earlier in her career as a cognitive neuroscientist, but changed tack, she says, after discovering there was not a lot of sound research behind the well-established belief that male and female brains are biologically different.
In the fourth episode of this 12-part podcast series Tales from the Synapse, Rippon explores the role of social conditioning to explain why boys and girls might respond differently to pink and blue objects, why girls aged nine describe maths “as a boy thing,” and why the same girls shun games that are aimed at children “who work really, really hard.”
Rippon, Professor Emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University in Birmingham, UK and author of the 2019 book The Gendered Brain , is also interested in why women continue to be under-represented in science even in countries that purport to be gender-equal.
Her forthcoming second book investigates why girls and women on the autism spectrum have historically been overlooked. Viewing the condition through a gendered lens hampers our understanding of it, she argues.
Tales of the Synapse, a podcast series with a focus on brain science, is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
After a mostly miserable childhood in the small Israeli village of Tel Aviv (his words), Ori Amir moved to the US, where he gained a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and launched a second career as a stand-up comedian.
Amir is now a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he researches what happens in our neural networks when we are trying to be funny.
His interest in this was triggered after realising there were around 20 studies examining brain activity when we are enjoying comedy, he says, but nothing about the creative process involved in being funny. Amir’s research also investigates attempts to use artificial intelligence to generate humour.
“I’m afraid that if I make any jokes about artificial intelligence, I will get in trouble in the future. Artificial intelligence would cancel me. So I’m refraining from making any such jokes,” he tells his audience.
Amir’s stand-up act also includes anecdotes about life as a PhD student. “It’s going to take seven years, the first five-and-a-half-years to work very hard on developing a silly accent,” he adds. “Then you do some original research and it all culminates in a dissertation defence in which you present your work in front of five important neuroscientists. And if you fail, they eat your brains.”
This is the third episode of Tales of the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series with a focus on brain science, produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal.
The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the second episode of this 12-part podcast series, Tales of the Synapse, neuroscientist Anil Seth describes his research into consciousness, which he describes as “insurance against falling into a single, disciplinary hole.”
Alongside neuroscientists, Seth’s research group at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, also includes string theorists, mathematicians and psychologists. The team also collaborates with academics in the arts and humanities.
His 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. begins by challenging the idea that consciousness is beyond the reach of science, and concludes with a look at consciousness in non-human animals, before asking if artificial intelligence will one day become both sentient and conscious.
Seth’s own academic career path demonstrates the many disciplines with an interest in consciousness. He began studying physics but transitioned to psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, the subject of his PhD at Sussex. He returned there to set up his neuroscience group after completing a postdoc at the The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, from 2001-2006.
He admits to an ongoing sense of wonder that that the self is experienced through brain activity, the “tofu-textured electrical wetware inside our skulls” with its “86 billion neurons and 1000 times more connections,” adding: “It seems like a miracle. But that’s the point of science, isn’t it, to preserve the wonder of a phenomenon, but to explain it too?"
Tales from the Synapse is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.
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As a pharmacy student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Natasha Mason was struck by the high volume of patients who complained about opiates and antidepressants not working, but at the same time became more and more dependent on them.
This observation triggered an interest in the behavioural effects of psychedelic drugs, which took her career in a psychopharmacological direction. She now researches the neural effects of cannabis, both when people are under the influence of the drug, and over the longer term, at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
Mason is also interested in the positive and negative effects of developing a tolerance to cannabis.
“Recreational users tend to use cannabis for the relaxing or the euphoric effects. So here, tolerance can be seen as kind of a maladaptive thing. You have to use more of the drug to get the high that you want … This is where addiction dependence can come in,” she says.
“But tolerance can be a good thing in regards to the clinical use of this drug. Individuals who are using cannabis for pain do not want the high, because this also comes with the impairment as well.”
This 12-part Working Scientist podcast series, Tales of the Synapse, is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?
These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.
In this final episode, Gianpiero Petriglieri focuses on the emotional aspects of leadership — describing it as a love for an idea, and for a group of people whom you’re trying to both protect and advance.
Petriglieri, who researches organizational behaviour at INSEAD Business School in Fontainebleau, France, says that being in the physical presence of an effective leader should ideally make you feel calm, clear about priorities and cared for.
Julie Gould also talks to Robert Harris, a past president of ORPHEUS, the Organisation for PhD Education in Biomedicine and Health Sciences in the European System; he’s also a research-group leader at the Centre for Molecular Medicine, part of the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden.
Good leadership is all about effective communication and being able to inspire and empower others, he says. To do that, you need to ask the right questions, and make suggestions, rather than giving orders.
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How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?
These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.
In this penultimate episode, stem cell biologist Fiona Watt tells Julie Gould that one of her leadership mantras is: “There is nothing wrong with being wrong,” and that science is in good shape if it can acknowledge this.
Watt is director of EMBO, the European molecular biology organization, based in Heidelberg, Germany.
Her leadership positions before joining the organisation in 2022 include leading the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at King's College London.
In this role she was able to indulge an interest in improving scientists’ working environments as part of a redesign project of its labs, offices and core facilities. In 2018 Watt was appointed the first executive chair of Medical Research Council, the UK funder.
She compares her own hands-on and largely self-taught leadership skills (helped by a strong network of female colleagues earlier in her career) with opportunities for young aspiring lab leaders today.
These include EMBO’s lab management course, which provides researchers on the cusp of independence with a trusting environment to learn about the common challenges group leaders are likely to face.
Watt also tells Julie Gould about the role of science leaders in articulating the need for government funding for science, but says that spending decisions should sit with them, and not with politicians.
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How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?
These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.
In this episode, Hagen Zimer tells Julie Gould about the qualities and skills you need to be a science leader in industry and how he approaches his role as managing director of TRUMPF Laser, a global company based in Schramberg, Germany, that manufactures lasers and laser-processing machine tools.
Zimer says that effective leaders are good listeners who display high levels of empathy, so that they can understand individual colleagues’ fears and concerns. They also need to be authentic, he adds. If not, teams will not believe what they are being told.
Zimer says that early-career researchers with leadership ambitions should ask themselves whether they see themselves taking the lead role in a play. “If you are in the leading position, you cannot hide any more. You are at some point also alone.”
How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?
These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of different sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series all about leadership.
In this episode, Spanish neuroscience and mental health researcher Gemma Modinos talks about her own leadership journey as a group leader at King’s College London and former chair of the Young Academy Europe.
Modinos compares “command and control” leadership styles with more collaborative approaches and says aspiring science leaders should not neglect leadership training as part of their career development.
Learning how to say no effectively and allocating time to meet looming deadlines is another key skill, she tells Julie Gould.
But should all early career researchers nurture leadership ambitions? No, says Modinos. “Not everyone has to strive to become a PI, or to be involved in chairing an organization, or being president, or being in boards,” she says.
How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?
These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of different sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series.
In this episode, Charu Kaushic, a research group leader at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, says that leadership is more than just exercising power, competence and confidence, it is also about wanting to do good.
Kaushic, who is also scientific director of the Canadian Institute of Infection and Immunity in Ottawa, describes how a better gender balance in science’s senior ranks will lead to a more consensual style of leading teams.
She also offers some insights into how she honed her personal leadership style and how she adapts it for her different roles. She also talks about some leadership tasks that she still finds challenging.
Alongside the stresses of adapting to a new country and settling into a new lab, scientists who have made the move abroad since 2020 often face extra barriers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These include rescinded job offers, postponed start dates, burdensome vaccine paperwork and long and lonely stints in quarantine hotels.
Neuroscientist Jen Lewendon tells Adam Levy about her move from the United Kingdom to Hong Kong via Thailand to begin a postdoc at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
“The obvious disparity between the way COVID is being handled in the West and the way COVID is often being handled in Asia makes splitting life between two places very difficult,” she says.
Astrophysicist Katie Mack was on an extended visit to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, when the 2020 lockdown took effect, preventing her return North Carolina State University in Raleigh.The experience made her re-assess her career priorities.
This is the final episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on moving labs.
Kelsey Byers outlines some of the things disabled scientists should look out when they are looking to move labs, both at home and abroad. Byers, an evolutionary chemical ecologist who was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome in her 20s and is now a group
leader at the John Innes Institute, a plant and microbial research institute in Norwich, UK, also offers advice on how to talk about disability to potential employers.
She is joined by Logan Gin, a STEM education researcher at Brown University in Providence. Gin, who has diastrophic dysplasia dwarfism, describes how his research is helping to identify solutions to support students with disabilities.
Every institution should be able to support faculty members and scholars with disabilities, adds Siobhán Mattison, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who has myasthenia gravis.
Kim Gerecke, a behavioural neuroscientist at Randolph Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, talks about the measures she has been able to take to support disabled colleagues at her institution.
After completing a PhD in cancer biology at the University of Chicago, Illinois, in 2017, Tim Fessenden moved to a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to focus on immunology.
Fessenden, who is now an editor at the Journal of Cell Biology in New York City, says that alongside adjusting to a new lab culture, he needed to learn new techniques, adding: “I am a lifelong student, someone who always wants to be the dumbest person in the room.”
Fessenden is joined by physician-scientist Ken Kosik, and Jennifer Pursley, a particle physicist-turned-medical physicist.
Kosik’s neuroscience research and collaborations are influenced by his close working proximity to physical scientists. In 2004, he quit a tenured post at Harvard University’s Longwood campus in Boston, Massachusetts, moving to a more multi-disciplinary location at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Pursley, who left the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Batavia, Illinois, in 2010, says of her move to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston: “I walked into this completely new environment — I didn’t know anyone. It was a real shock.”
This is the fourth episode in a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on moving labs.
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In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about moving labs, three researchers who moved abroad for work describe how they handled the challenges it brought, including language barriers, cultural differences and experiences of racism.
Sara Suliman, an immunology researcher and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, shares her experiences of labs in South Africa, Canada and the United States as a scientist from the African diaspora. She was born in Sudan.
Ali Bermani, a PhD student who moved from Iran in 2019 to study electrical engineering at the University of Gävle in Sweden, talks about how he learnt to decipher feedback from Swedish colleagues, and about their calm approach to work compared to previous work experiences.
And Keshun Zhang, a psychologist at Qingdao University in China, explains why he returned to that country after completing his PhD at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and why he now urges his students and colleagues to work and study abroad.
In the second episode of this Working Scientist podcast series about moving labs, physical geographer Mette Bendixen and her ecologist husband Lars Iversen describe how they resolved their two-body problem after moving from Denmark to the United States in 2018 with their three-year-old son.
With the help of supportive supervisors and a sympathetic funder, the couple worked 1,200 kilometres apart for a while, before they each found academic positions at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
They are joined by Andrea Stathopoulos, who met her partner in 2010 when they were neuroscience PhD students at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Stathopoulos is now a scientific analyst at Verge Science Communications, based in Arlington, Virginia. She says that her ambivalence about an academic career perhaps defined her as the “trailing spouse” whose career would take a back seat while her husband’s progressed. The couple’s career plans changed frequently over the years, and they’ve had to spend time living apart. They resolved their two-body problem by leaving academia.
Laboratory leaders are not doing you a favour when they hire you, says geneticist Joanne Kamens, a senior consultant at The Impact Seat, a scientific workplace consultancy based in Boston, Massachusetts. Because of the long hours and relatively low pay, you are doing them one by offering them your labour, she explains.
Kamens lists questions you need to have answered before making a move. “I would say item number one is: Is the PI a jerk?" she says.
In the first episode of this six-partWorking Scientist podcast series about moving labs, Kamens shares advice alongside Tim Fessenden, a cancer researcher and postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Kim Gerecke, a behavioural neuroscientist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia.
In 2016, Salome Maswime’s five-year mid-career award from the South African Medical Research Council gave the clinician and global health researcher some much-needed funding security, enabling her to recruit staff and offer bursaries to graduate students as she established her own research group. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) offers something similar through its Mid-Career Advancement programme.
Maswime and Leslie Rissler, a biologist and NSF programme director, tell Julie Gould that research outputs can easily suffer when scientists entering the mid-career stage suddenly get swamped with administrative and teaching duties, which is why the awards were set up.
In the final episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast, Gould also hears the pros and cons of making the mid-career stage better structured to support the development of skills and competencies, as it is in Brazil.
How are mid-career scientists’ research efforts affected when they take on administrative and leadership positions? What is their advice about navigating workplace politics? And do their employers treat them better, or worse, than their junior colleagues?
These are just some of the questions early-career researchers wanted mid-career colleagues to answer in the penultimate episode of Muddle of the Middle, a Working Scientist podcast about the mid-career stage in science.
Julie Gould also asks her five interviewees what they’d tell their younger selves about this often-neglected career stage. Their answers range from finding out more about team-building and conflict management, not to stress about being disagreed with, remembering to be generous and having fun along the way.
Life satisfaction can hit rock bottom in midlife before bouncing back as our ageing brains start to feel less regretful about missed opportunites, says Hannes Schwandt, a health economist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Kieran Setiya, a philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, adds that the mid-career stage can be dominated by having to juggle both urgent and important tasks, some of which have no definite endpoint. These can quickly mount up and become overwhelming, with non-work-related pressures swallowing up increasing amounts of time, he adds.
In the fourth episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast series, host Julie Gould wonders whether this mid-career stage is like a second puberty, a time of confusion and frustration. “It might be worth reaching out to some of those people who have gone through it and come out the other side,” she suggests.
Trying to achieve balance in your personal and professional lives is misguided, four researchers tell Julie Gould in the third episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part podcast series about the mid-career stage in science.
Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says that the aim should instead be to avoid allowing periods of imbalance to last longer than necessary.
Cara Tannenbaum, a physician and a director at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, agrees, saying that the key is to focus on personal fulfilment, and that some aspects of your life will often have to take a back seat.
Inger Mewburn took a data-driven approach to managing her time (and her manager’s expectations) after experiencing two breakdowns in her mid-career stage.
Mewburn, director of research training at the Australian National University in Canberra, now uses a software program to track and prioritize tasks, schedule meetings and negotiate with her supervisor things that she can stop doing.
Chemical engineer Andrea Armani, a vice-dean at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, cautions against accepting all invitations at the mid-career stage, noting that at one point she was sitting on 30 committees.
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In 2012, more than a decade years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in French, mother-of-six Bethany Kolbaba Kartchner switched to science, rising at 4 a.m. to study for an associate’s degree in biochemistry at Maricopa Community Colleges in Tempe, Arizona.
In the second episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part podcast series about the mid-career stage in science, Kolbaba Kartchner, who is now a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. tells Julie Gould how she interacts with her fellow graduate students and manages her busy personal and professional schedules.
Leslie Rissler swapped academia for a post at the US National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. This involved moving in 2015 from Alabama, where she had worked as a professor of biological sciences. The change coincided with a divorce and undergoing a bilateral mastectomy.
They are joined by structured-light researcher Andrew Forbes, who, 10 years after co-founding a company, took a role in academia and is now a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Is 40 too young for a scientist to describe themselves as mid-career? If the term can’t be defined by age, does it refer to landing tenure, to achieving a level of autonomy or to serving on multiple academic committees?
Working scientists who no longer define themselves as ‘early career’ tell Julie Gould what this often-neglected career stage means to them in the absence of an agreed definition from funding agencies and scientific governing bodies.
This is the first episode in Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about the mid-career stage in science.
Mental-health researcher Mary Bitta uses art and artistic performance to tackle public mistrust in science across communities in Kilifi, Kenya.
This distrust can extend to procedures such as taking blood and saliva samples, and also to mental-health problems, which many people think are caused by witchcraft — evil spirits or curses from parents or grandparents, she says.
Such beliefs account for mental health not being prioritized by policymakers, she adds. But change is afoot.
“In the last five years alone, we’ve had policy documents specifically for mental health. There’s also been progress in amending legislation. For example, there has been a recent lobby to decriminalize suicide because, as we speak, suicide is illegal in Kenya,” she says.
Bitta tells Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa, how she uses a form of participatory action research — in which communities are involved in song, dance, video and radio productions — to change attitudes to mental health.This is the final episode of an eight-part podcast series on science in Africa.
Angela Tabiri and Adidja Amani tell Akin Jimoh how they combine family life with career commitments, helped by strong networks of family support.
In Ghana, where Tabiri researches quantum algebra at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Accra, the government requires working women to stay at home for three months after having a child. Once they return to their jobs, they can leave work at 2 p.m. until their child is six months old, she says.
“We don’t have infrastructure to support young mums in Ghana,” Tabiri adds, citing the absence of nursing rooms and nurseries in academic institutions.
mani, deputy director for vaccination at Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health in Yaoundé, and a lecturer in medicine at the University of Yaoundé, points out that it is now government policy to admit equal numbers of men and women to her faculty of medicine. Despite this, women are still under-represented at senior levels.
“I’m a mother of two. I want my boys to be an example and to help the women around them,” she says.
“Educate our boys — educate men around the world to be agents of change by supporting women.”
This is the penultimate episode in an eight-part series on science in Africa hosted by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.
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Molecular biologist Khady Sall returned to Senegal in 2018 after setting up Science Education Exchange for Sustainable Development (SeeSD), a non-profit organization she founded while a PhD student in the United States. SeeSD promotes science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics education to encourage scientific literacy and critical thinking in young people.
Sall tells Akin Jimoh how her career experiences abroad made the return to Africa a daunting prospect. But working and living abroad has convinced her that science careers in Africa, and the cities where science takes place, should not follow US and European models.
“If we’re not authentic in being scientists, and not doing research that follows local problems and our local culture, then at some point, we will just become another US or another France, and that will be very boring. Hopefully that will not happen here. And then we will be vibrant and do a different kind of science. People will say: ‘Wow, why didn’t this happen sooner?’”
Togolese researcher Rafiou Agoro runs the African Diaspora Scientists Federation, a mentoring platform that connects African scientists based abroad with colleagues back home, from his base at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. So far, Agoro and his team of 150 mentors have supported more than 100 scientists.
“I was looking for any any opportunity to have an impact back home. A lot of people who are abroad are eager to do something back here. COVID has taught us distances matter less when it comes to education,” he says.
This is the sixth episode in an eight-part podcast series hosted by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.
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Doreen Anene and Stanley Anigbogu launched separate initiatives to promote science careers to young girls and women in Africa. What motivated them to do so?
Anene, a final-year animal-science PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, says her mother struggled to get a teaching job in Nigeria because she did not have a science background. Her experience inspired her to set up The STEM Belle, a non-profit organization in Nigeria.
“Growing up I had these stereotypes. ‘You’re going to end up in a man’s house. There’s really no need for you to stretch yourself because the end goal is to be married, right?’”
“My mother didn’t want her children to go through this so she started indoctrinating the benefits of science and her experience to us.”
Anigbogu, a storyteller and technologist, founded STEM4HER after meeting a young girl at a science fair. She told him that her mother thought that careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were for boys, not for her.
“We discovered that girls in the rural areas were mostly affected by that societal mindset. Inventors are using science to solve global problems, but women are not in that space,” he says.
This is the fifth episode of an eight-part series on science in Africa, hosted by Nature Africa chief editor Akin Jimoh.
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Africa “gullibly” followed Europe and other Western regions in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that resulted, says Oyewale Tomori, past president of the Nigerian Academy of Science and a former vice-chancellor of Redeemer’s University in Ede.
“Whatever disaster was happening in other parts of the world was not that pronounced in the African region. I think we should have recognized that before we planned our response,” he tells Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.
Tomori says the pandemic exposed flaws in Nigeria’s health system, such as why there were initially so few testing laboratories, and why, after boosting the number to 140, between 40 and 50 are now no longer reporting. He also calls for a continent-wide African Center for Disease Coordination, and a more sustainable vaccine-production strategy across the continent.
This is the fourth episode of an eight-part series on science in Africa.
Paballo Chauke and Shannon Morreira examine a drive by the University of Cape Town (UCT) to cultivate a more inclusive academic environment after a campus statue of nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes was toppled in April 2015.
Chauke, a bioinformatics coordinator and environmental geography PhD student at the South African university, fears that the term ‘decolonization’ has lost much of its meaning since the statue fell, and is now at risk of becoming a mere buzzword, used by people to seem open-minded. He says: “I’m worried that people think it’s all going to be strawberries and cream, it’s going to be peaceful, it’s going to be nice, and people want to feel good, people want to feel comfortable.”
For Chauke, collaborating with other academics from Africa takes priority over the ‘standard’ practice of partnering with people from Europe and North America.
UCT anthropologist Shannon Morreira says: “If we think about decolonization in African science, it’s not saying throw out the contemporary knowledge systems we have, but it’s saying build them up, diversify them, so that other knowledge systems can be brought in as well.”
This is the third episode of an eight-part series on science in Africa, presented by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.
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Nigerian virologist Oyewale Tomori describes how science has fared in the six decades since his country gained independence, with a frank assessment of the current state of academic research in his home country and across the continent.
Tomori, past president of the Nigerian Academy of Science and a former vice-chancellor of Redeemer’s University in Ede, discusses the effects of foreign funding; brain drains and the contribution of diaspora scientists; and the societal changes needed to attract more women into science.
One specific suggestion is that scientific academies and individual researchers work harder to engage the public. “If your science doesn’t affect the life of your people, nobody cares about you,” he says.
Tomori’s assessment of the state of science in Africa is the second episode of an eight-part series, presented by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.
Early career researchers in Africa are starting to reap the benefits of increased investment in science and a growth in the number of research collaborations and partnerships, says Ifeyinwa Aniebo, a molecular geneticist who researches malaria drug resistance in Nigeria.
But the continent’s scientific growth could accelerate even faster if more domestic funding was available to support African scientists. This, alongside better infrastructure, and a stronger commitment to getting more women into scientific careers, would help to prevent future brain drains, she adds.
Aniebo’s assessment of the current state of science across the continent launches an eight-part podcast series, Science in Africa, presented by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.
Future episodes will investigate how African countries are addressing colonial legacies; the continent’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic; creative approaches to science communication; and ongoing efforts to recruit and retain female scientists.
Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands has a long history of partnering with local technology giants such as Philips Electronics and DAF Trucks, with support from city leaders.
University president Robert-Jan Smits tells Julie Gould how mutual trust and a respect for academic freedom have helped academics and industrialists to forge successful collaborations since 1956, when the university was founded.
In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about porosity, the movement of people between academia and other sectors, Julie Gould is also joined by Fiona Watt, director of the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg, Germany, and Dario Alessi, director of the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy at the University of Dundee, UK.
Joan Cordiner took steps to “de-risk” her career when she moved into academia. Having spent her entire career up to that point in industry, she left her role as a technical and change manager role at chemical company Syngenta, and joined the University of Sheffield, UK, in 2020.
Cordiner, who does not have a PhD, reflected on her skills, strengths and experience and how to apply them to her new role as a professor at the university’s department of chemical and biological engineering. This included identifying knowledge gaps and areas that would really benefit her new employer.
De-risking means making any career move less of a learning curve for yourself, but also easier for new employers by ensuring that they benefit from the fresh perspectives that you bring to a role.
In the fifth episode of this six-part podcast series about porosity, the movement of people within academia and beyond, Cordiner is joined by Jorge Abreu-Vicente, who switched to industry after completing his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
Start-ups can be fun; medium-sized companies suit fast learners; multinationals are well resourced, but their internal processes can be hard to navigate.
Industry insiders share their experiences of leaving academia after deciding which type of company best suited their skills, temperament and career goals. They include Bill Haynes, the site head and vice president of Novo Nordisk Research Center, Oxford, UK, and entrepreneur and technology-transfer professional Nessa Carey.
Finally, Anna Sannö, research strategy manager at Volvo Construction Equipment, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, compares problem solving across industry and academia, looking at time management, financial and ethical considerations, and preferred outcomes.
This six-part Working Scientist podcast series looks at porosity, the movement of people within academia and beyond.
Scientist-entrepreneur Javier Garcia Martinez recalls combining an academic role at the University of Alicante, Spain, while getting a catalyst start-up called Rive Technology off the ground.
The experience, he says, taught him that a so-called barrier between academia and other sectors is no more than a state of mind. “To me, it feels all part of the same thing. It’s our own mindset that puts different activities in different silos,” he tells Julie Gould. Martinez adds: “I was studying, discovering better catalysts, you know, in my academic lab, also in my company, and at the same time talking to customers, to investors, to raise money, and to put that into a commercial plan.”
In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about porosity, defined as the movement of people between sectors, Gould also hears from drug-discovery researcher Martin Gosling. He combines an academic post at the University of Sussex, UK, with a role as chief scientific officer at Enterprise Therapeutics, a biotech company that he co-founded in 2015.
She also talks to technology-transfer professional Nessa Carey, biochemist Dario Alessi, who leads the signal-transduction-therapy industry collaboration at the University of Dundee, UK, and Chaya Nayak, head of Facebook’s open research and transparency team.
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Researchers looking to switch sectors are often plagued by uncertainty. Many take years to make the move after weighing up the pros and cons of quitting academia.
As academic research careers become increasingly precarious, Nessa Carey, a UK entrepreneur and technology transfer professional, tells Julie Gould that today’s scientists are better at planning for the future than were previous generations.
US science journalist Chris Woolston, who reports on Nature’s annual careers surveys, says the findings from 2021 show that researchers in industry are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs, enjoy high salaries and be optimistic about the future than their colleagues in academia.
The second episode of this six-part podcast series about porosity, the movement of people within academia and beyond, also includes perspectives from Shambhavi Naik, whose career has straddled academic research, journalism, start-ups and policy roles in Bengalaru, India. Gould is also joined by Søren Bregenholt, chief executive of the Sweden-based biotech company Alligator Bioscience, and Helke Hillebrand, director of the graduate academy at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
After more than three decades working for the same chemical company, Joan Cordiner accepted a senior role at a university. For many, she says, the move from industry to academia can feel like being a square peg in a round hole. Academic colleagues sometimes need to be persuaded that skills acquired elsewhere have value. But collaborations and career moves between the two sectors are crucial, she adds, in countries with ambitions to become (or remain) research powerhouses.
David Bogle, pro-vice provost of the Doctoral School at University College London, defines this “porosity” as the movement of people within academia and beyond it — including careers in government and the non-profit sector — and the skills and experience acquired en route.
This first episode of a six-part series about porosity also includes perspectives from Søren Bregenholt, chief executive of the Sweden-based biotech company Alligator Bioscience; UK entrepreneur and technology-transfer professional Nessa Carey; and US science journalist Chris Woolston. Woolston reports on Nature’s annual career surveys, including its most recent one on salary and job satisfaction in academia and beyond.
In the final episode of this seven-part series about mentoring, Ruth Gotian and Christine Pfund outline their hopes for post-pandemic mentoring and the changing nature of other collaborative relationships in scientific research.
As lockdowns took hold and mentoring sessions went online, many conversations moved beyond workplace topics and led to honest exchanges about work-life balance for the first time, they say.
The most successful relationships were ones where mentors led by example by showing their own vulnerabilities as they juggled home schooling, running labs, and trying to publish, they add.
“The pandemic opened an opportunity for us to talk about what’s happening in our home life in a way that had never happened before,” says Pfund, a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Gotian, chief learning officer and assistant professor of education in anaesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, anticipates a future where early career researchers cast their net more widely when selecting mentors.
“I think the pool of mentors has expanded exponentially, because we can easily and comfortably look outside of our department, outside of our institution and outside of our industryNo longer do we have to meet in person,” she says.
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Some researchers never lose touch with group leaders or committee members who mentored them as graduate students.
As Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says of one early-career mentor: “I was absolutely terrified of them. They couldn't even understand why because they’re a very kind and wonderful person.
"We’ll see each other now at conferences, we’ll be in the same town to be reviewing grants together, or whatever it is, and, and we’ll spend time together as friends. But they’re also someone I know I can go to if I need advice on something because they still, you know, have been in the field a lot longer than I have, and so they have a lot of wisdom to share.”
Martin Gargiulo, who teaches entrepreneurship at the INSEAD business school in Singapore, says that mentoring relationships are like parenthood:
“There is a point at which your children, your mentees, need to become independent from you and need to challenge you. And if you didn’t get to that point, you didn’t do your job. So building the relationship, letting go and rebuilding that relationship, perhaps under a different mindset, is important,” he says.
Reverse mentoring, peer-to-peer, group sessions. Choose one or more to tackle a tough career transition.
Andy Morris, employability mentoring manager at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, describes himself as a professional Cupid, connecting students who are seeking careers in industry with mentors who can help them achieve their goals.
He tells Julie Gould how the employability mentors he works with in industry differ from the employer mentoring offered to researchers when they join an organization or take on a new role.
Lucia Prieto-Gordino joined a mentoring programme after becoming a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London in 2018.
“You unavoidably encounter situations that you have never encountered before. And your mentor is there to help you navigate those situations with their experience,” she says.
And Carol Zuegner, an associate professor of journalism at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, describes the reverse mentoring sessions held with former students to help her navigate the digital age.
Good scientific mentors can provide both careers and psychosocial support, says Erin Dolan, who researches innovative approaches to science education at the University of Georgia in Athens.
They provide answers to questions and often use their own professional network to help colleagues who want to move to a different sector, for example.
How does this compare with the support offered by academic supervisors? Gemma Modinos, a neuropsychologist at King’s College London, explains.
Finally, career consultants Sarah Blackford and Tina Persson explain how mentoring differs from coaching. They outline the techniques used by professional coaches to help researchers decide on a course of action to reach their career goals.
Many mentoring relationships were disrupted by the pandemic, particularly ones that relied on regular face-to-face contact.
How did these established mentoring relationships survive the switch to virtual meetings?
In the third episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series, Julie Gould also explores the challenges of being a mentor beyond those presented by the pandemic.
Alongside the emotional investment and the absence of much formal training in mentoring techniques, there are also logistical and time management pressures.
Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, tells Gould: “My role is to be a bit like an athletic coach. I want to help everyone be able to perform at their best. And different people have different modes of motivation.”
Science has become more international in the past few decades. This means that you might encounter a variety of people from different geographical and cultural backgrounds in your lab. So how does this affect your mentoring relationships?
In the second episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series, researchers share some of their cross-cultural mentoring encounters.
These range from Asian attitudes to hierarchies, to a Scandinavian enthusiasm for peer-to-peer mentoring and a very British fixation with mentoring and afternoon tea.
How can science better support and reward academics who, alongside running labs, writing grants, authoring papers and teaching students, also devote precious hours of their working week to mentoring colleagues?
In the first episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series, three winners of the 2020 Nature Research Awards for Mentoring in Science describe why this part of their role is so important and needs to be recognized more prominently.
This week, Nature has a special issue on collaborations, looking at the benefits to science and society that working together can bring. In this collaboration-themed episode (produced jointly with the Nature Podcast and Working Scientist podcast teams), we discuss the issue, and the state of research collaborations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
How does graduate school and academia prepare you for entrepreneurship and a commercial career?
J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, a social scientist who swapped a faculty position to launch a craft beer consultancy, says: “I’ve been in the position of acting as a department chair, and like most of us in who’ve done kind of full time, faculty appointments, have to navigate colleagues, navigate administration. We simultaneously do a lot, and a lot of things of consequence, prepping courses, building a curriculum, maintaining our research programs.
“The complexities of navigating those spaces provided me with a great head start to doing client work. To be honest, client work is a lot easier in comparison to navigating personalities in academia.”
Javier Garcia Martinez, who founded Rive Technology and now combines a business role with an academic position at the University of Alicante, Spain, adds: “Our education as scientists in terms of rigour, looking at data, connecting the dots, makes us very well equipped to launch a startup.
“Any group leader is also an entrepreneur. You need to raise money from industry or from government, you need to deliver papers on time, present in conferences, you need to hire, you need to inspire your team, you need a vision, you need to develop new technologies.”
“I know when my students come to my class I can share with them not only what's in the textbooks, but also my own personal experience on why a patent is important, and how to create a team.”
This is the final episode in our six-part Business of science series. Previous episodes looked at investor pitches, registering patents, technology transfer teams, scaling up and learning from setbacks.
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The road to commercializing research is strewn with challenges, but how can science start-ups prepare for developments that are harder to predict, such as a global pandemic?
Daniel Batten, an investor and business coach in Auckland, New Zealand, describes strategies to prepare for unexpected events as well as more common crises, such as failed funding rounds or supplier problems.
Barbara Domayne-Hayman, entrepreneur in residence at the Francis Crick Institute in London, says the path to commercialization seldom runs smoothly, which is why it is important to have a ‘plan B’, together with a network of trusted mentors.
“Things never go exactly as you expect, even when things are going well. There’s usually some bumps along the road. Resilience is the single most important thing that you need to have,” she says.
“You have to be the one that actually continues to keep the faith. You just have to keep picking yourself up and carry on.”
This episode is part of Business of science, a six-part podcast series exploring how to commercialize your research and launch a spin-off.
The series looks at investor pitches, patents, technology transfer and how to survive the inevitable setbacks along the way.
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In their early stages, science start-ups require solid commitment, with founders and their teams clocking up long hours with little financial reward.
Despite the uncertainty, company leaders also need to think about business growth. This includes transferring knowledge and skills to junior colleagues, planning organizational structure, product development and quality control, and considering customers and competitors.
Charles Christy leads contract development and manufacturing at Ibex Dedicate, part of Lonza, a Swiss pharmaceutical and biotechnology company headquartered in Basle. He describes how science entrepreneurs should approach this crucial stage. Christy is joined by investor Daniel Batten and science entrepreneurs Javier Garcia Martinez, Wei Wu and Patrick Anquetil, who discuss their experiences of scaling up.
“In an early-stage company, people can’t be half-hearted about things. They really have to commit,” says Barbara Domayne-Hayman, entrepreneur in residence at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
This episode is part of Business of science, a six-part podcast series exploring how to commercialize your research and launch a spin-off.
The series looks at investor pitches, patents, and how to survive the inevitable setbacks along the way.
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Meet the people who advise researcher entrepreneurs on patents, licensing, business plans and commercial partnerships.
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How does registering a patent compare to other scientific career milestones? For science entrepreneurs, is it akin to publishing a first paper, landing tenure or securing a grant?
Three scientists who successfully commercialized their research tell Adam Levy about the process, and its significance to them and their fledgling businesses.
Patent lawyer Tamsen Valoir describes different types of patents, the typical costs of registering one and how having a patent can reassure potential investors.
She also outlines some common misconceptions around patents, including the extent to which they do or don't apply in other countries.
This episode is part of Business of science, a six-part podcast series exploring how to commercialize your research and launch a spin-off.
The series looks at investor pitches, patents, technology transfer, scaling up and how to survive the inevitable setbacks along the way.
If you want your product idea to succeed, one of the first steps is to interest potential investors.
This can be hard for academic researchers, whose previous focus will have been on getting published, winning grants and teaching classes, says Javier Garcia-Martinez, a chemist at the University of Alicante in Spain, and founder of Rive Technology
This episode is part of Business of science, a six-part podcast series exploring how to commercialize your research and launch a spin-off. The series looks at investor pitches, patents, technology transfer, scaling up and how to survive the inevitable setbacks along the way.
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Two researchers with disabilities describe an ‘ableist’ culture in academia, a system designed for fully fit and healthy people that does little to account for those who fall outside those parameters. This culture can sideline scientists with disabilities, chronic illnesses, neurological or mental health problems. As a result many choose not to disclose their conditions for fear of being stigmatised.
This episode is part of Science diversified, a seven-part podcast series exploring how having a more diverse range of researchers ultimately benefits not only the scientific enterprise, but also the wider world.
In 2020 Antentor Hinton led an online initiative via the Cell Mentor platform to mark the achievements of 1000 Black scientists. The list includes the cell biologist and diversity champion Sandra Murray. “If it wasn’t for her, putting up with certain institutional challenges....I wouldn’t be able to have a postdoc at Iowa, nor be able to be mentored by an African American male”, says Hinton, an assistant professor who studies mitochondrial dynamics regulation during aging at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Carla Faria, a Brazilian laser physicist whose research group at University College London studies strong-field and attosecond-science, offers advice to scientists from under-represented groups on when to volunteer for workplace diversity initiatives. “You really have to ensure that time and the effort that you're putting there is effective”, she says. “ And what is going to happen is that your white male counterparts are going to publish another paper while you are spending your time doing this”.
This episode is part of Science diversified, a seven-part podcast series which explores how having a more diverse range of researchers ultimately benefits not only the scientific enterprise, but also the wider world.
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In the past, many institutions produced similar types of scientists: researchers with a shared educational history who go straight from school to university then do a PhD and postdoctoral research.
But not everyone follows this path. We meet two researchers who forged research careers later in life, and took very different routes to get there.
How valuable has their previous life experience been in their current career? What skills did they learn along the way? And how did they overcome the obstacles they faced?
This episode is part of Science diversified, a seven-part podcast series exploring how having a more diverse range of researchers ultimately benefits not only the scientific enterprise, but also the wider world.
Each episode in this series concludes with a sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) about how it is exploring diversity in science.
Two LGBTQ+ scientists describe how sexual and gender identities can help to drive research by offering perspectives that others in a lab group or collaboration might not have considered.
What role, for example, did gay scientists have in developing the direction of research into HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s, when the condition was erroneously seen as something that only affected homosexual men?
And how are transgender researchers helping to shape investigations into the physiology of transitioning women undergoing oestrogen therapy to underpin fairness in sport?
This episode is part of Science diversified, a seven-part podcast series exploring how having a more diverse range of researchers ultimately benefits not only the scientific enterprise, but also the wider world.
For all sorts of reasons, women remain under-represented in senior-level jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
To overcome these blocks, what can male allies do to challenge discriminatory practices and unconscious bias, and to recognize their own privilege
and the career advantages it has delivered?
Two male scientists saw how female colleagues were ignored or talked over in meetings and treated more harshly than male candidates in job interviews.
They discuss the need to take supportive action, including a range of measures that include a boycott of ‘manels’ — all-male panels.
This episode is part of Science diversified, a seven-part podcast series exploring how having a more diverse range of researchers ultimately benefits not only the scientific enterprise, but also the wider world.
Each episode in this series concludes with a sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) about how it is exploring diversity in science.
Different countries have varying working cultures — what works in China will not necessarily work in, say, Mexico.
But what if you brought these cultural perspectives together in one place. How might that change research output?
The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, an island university off the coast of Japan, has developed a research facility with an ethos based on international diversity. Currently, 83% of its PhD students come from abroad.
Researchers there describe the challenges and opportunities of working in a university with no departments, and where the campus layout encourages interdisciplinary collaboration.
This episode is part of Science Diversified, a seven-part podcast series exploring how having a more-diverse range of researchers ultimately benefits not only the scientific enterprise, but also the wider world.
Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) about how it is exploring diversity in science.
Imagine a world where science is still the sole preserve of the white, the male, the privileged. What research interests would be prevalent? And what research would get funded as a result? Then imagine a very different world where different groups engage, bringing fresh ideas and perspectives. Because of their diverse backgrounds, these scientists study subject areas previously neglected or simply unthought-of.
In this podcast series, Science Diversified, we explore how a more diverse range of researchers ultimately benefits not only the scientific enterprise, but also the wider world.
Many young children have little or no exposure to working scientists and the types of jobs that they do. So the idea of pursuing a career in science is not on their radar. But that can change when you invite scientists to spend time with a class of lively pupils from a socially and ethnically diverse community. They plant a seed, in which the idea of pursuing a career in science can take root. This is what the education outreach programme team of London’s Francis Crick Institute aims to do. The team hopes that building ‘science capital’ in those crucial early years will lead to a more diverse scientific workforce.
Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) about how it is exploring diversity in science.
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Many postdoctoral researchers can trace their career journey back to childhood experiences. In Pearl Ryder’s case it was spending lots of time outdoors in the rural area where she grew up, combined with the experience of having a sibling who experienced poor health.
Ryder, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts, and founder of the Future PI Slack group, says: “It made me realize how important health is, and that there’s so little that we understand about the world.”
But is science, like some other professions a calling? Yes, says Christopher Hayter, who specializes in entrepreneurship, technology policy, higher education and science at Arizona State University in Phoenix. “There are professions that are a little bit different from your day-to-day job, something people gravitate towards, something bigger than themselves,” he says.
“It is often referred to as a calling. I think we could say that about a lot of scientists. It’s how they define themselves: ‘I’m a scientist.’ ‘I’m going to cure cancer.’ ‘I’m going to discover the next planet.’ When students transition from doctoral students to postdoc they are really doubling down on that identity.”
Michael Moore, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, adds: “Being a scientist is overcoming a series of hurdles, and you need to see yourself as a scientist to get that internal motivation to keep going. You have to publish so much, get so many grants, teach so many courses. Having that identity and that motivation is really key to moving forward.”
Gould’s guests discuss how to maintain that motivation despite the setbacks, and how a scientist’s professional identity and career path is underpinned by the networks, mentors and transferable skills acquired during a postdoc.
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Postdocs and other career researchers need better trained lab leaders, not just nicer ones, Julie Gould discovers.
Calls to change the research culture have grown louder in 2020 as COVID-19 lockdowns led to extended grant application and publication deadlines.
As the world emerges from the pandemic, will researchers adopt more respectful ways of communicating, collaborating and publishing?
Anne Marie Coriat, head of the UK and Europe research landscape at the funder Wellcome, tells Julie Gould about the organisation's 2019 survey of more than 4,000 researchers. The results were published in January this year.
She adds: "We know that not everything is completely kind, constructive, and conducive to encouraging and enabling people to be at their best.
"We tend to count success as things that are easy to record. And so inadvertently, I think funders have contributed to hyper competition, to the status of the cult hero of an individual being, you know, the leader who gets all the accolades."
But what else is needed, beyond a kinder culture? In June 2020 Jessica Malisch, an assistant professor of physiology at St. Mary's College of Maryland, co-authored an opinion article calling for new solutions to ensure gender equity in the wake of COVID-19. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/15378 She says "We can't rely on kindness and good intentions to correct the systemic inequity in academia.
Katie Wheat, head of engagement and policy at the researcher development non-profit Vitae, tells Gould that researchers who feel that they're their manager or their supervisor is supportive and available for them during the pandemic have better indicators of wellbeing than those who are not getting that support.
"A PI might also be in a relatively precarious situation, reliant on grant income for their own salary, and for their team's salary.
"You can be in a scenario where the individualistic markers of success put everybody in a competitive situation against everybody else, rather than a more collaborative and collegial situation where, where one person's success is everybody's success."
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Experience as a postdoctoral researcher might not fast-track your career outside academia, Julie Gould discovers.
Nessa Carey, a UK entrepreneur and technology-transfer professional whose career has straddled academia and industry, including a senior role at Pfizer, shares insider knowledge on how industry employers often view postdoctoral candidates. She also offers advice on CVs and preparing for interviews.
“It is very tempting sometimes for people to keep on postdoc-ing, especially if they have a lab head who has a lot of rolling budget and who likes having the same postdocs there, because they're productive and they know them,” she says. “That’s great for the lab head. It’s typically very, very bad for the individual postdoc,” she adds.
Carey is joined by Shulamit Kahn, an economist at Boston University in Massachusetts, who co-authored a 2017 paper about the impact of postdoctoral training on early careers in biomedicine1.
According to the paper, published in Nature Biotechnology, employers did not financially value the training or skills obtained during postdoc training. “Based on these findings, the majority of PhDs would be financially better off if they skipped the postdoc entirely,” it concludes.
Malcolm Skingle, academic liaison at GlaxoSmithKline, adds: “You really will get people who have done their PhD, they’ve done a two-year postdoc, they think they’re pretty much going to run the world and single-handedly develop a drug.
“They have got no idea how difficult drug discovery is, and their place in that very big jigsaw.”
“And why don’t postdocs get great salaries straightaway? Well, actually, they haven’t proven themselves in our environment, where, if they’re any good, then their salaries will go up quite quickly.”
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Closed labs and rescinded job offers have snatched away opportunities. How can science bounce back?
Earlier this year, Michael Moore was due to start a permanent faculty position in Michigan, a move to his “dream job” that would have brought him and his family of five children closer to where their grandparents live.
Moore, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, contacted his prospective employer after hearing that job offers were being put on hold at many places as a result of the pandemic. He was later told that, as a result of continued funding uncertainty, all new hires were cancelled.
Pearl Ryder, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts, and founder of the Future PI Slack channel, tells Gould that Moore's situation is sadly not unusual. She adds:
“The group that has been most harmed by this pandemic are the youngest members of our profession, the graduate students who were hoping to move on to a postdoc … and the postdocs who were hoping to move on to new positions, but those new positions no longer exist.”
Can any positives be drawn from the pandemic? A kinder and more open research culture, perhaps? Shirley Tilghman, president emerita of Princeton University, New Jersey, thinks so.
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Julie Gould investigates how brain drains and demographic time bombs are forcing some countries to rethink the postdoc.
The problems facing postdocs who are more than ready for life as an independent researcher are well documented. A lack of faculty positions forces many to spend years moving from one temporary contract to another, often internationally.
But moving abroad can rob many countries of talented researchers, particularly if they leave for good, says Melody Mentz-Coetzee, a senior researcher at the University of Pretoria’s centre for the advancement of scholarship in South Africa.
Her country faces exactly this problem — a situation she dates back to the late 1970s and early 1990s. “At this point, we started to see a lot of talented researchers being trained abroad, and many of those never returned home: the so-called brain drain in Africa,” Mentz-Coetzee tells Gould.
“Many institutions face a severe shortage of highly qualified staff, many of whom are older, close to retirement. So you do have this kind of a ‘missing middle’.”
Mentz-Coetzee describes an initiative across ten Carnegie-funded postdoc fellowship programmes on the African continent to help tackle the problem.
Shambhavi Naik, a former postdoc who turned to journalism and is now a research fellow at the Takshashila Institution’s technology and policy programme in Bengaluru, explores why talented graduate students who opted to develop their careers in India, rather than move abroad, are overlooked for faculty positions. Their motivation to stay at home is a wake-up call for science in India, she argues.
And Shirley Tilghman, emeritus professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey, says the problem is a cultural one, and could be addressed by the development of staff-scientist roles to oversee technological change in the scientific enterprise.
“It’s about changing the mindset of each individual principal investigator, who kind of wants to circle the wagons and say, ‘Don't mess with my stuff’. And that’s the culture we have to change,” she says.
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What is a postdoc and why undertake one? Julie Gould gets some metaphorical answers to a complicated question.
“A postdoc is a scientist with training wheels,” says Jessica Esquivel, a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab, the particle physics and accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. “It is a space where we can fumble, really start to flex our muscles in building innovative experiments and learn skills that we didn't necessarily get to beef up while we were in graduate school.”
In the first episode of a six-part podcast series, Julie Gould seeks to define this key career stage by asking postdocs past and present why it attracts so many different job titles (37, at the last count), and how many years one should ideally devote to postdoctoral research before moving on. Also, what should come next, given the paucity of permanent posts in academia? Should you do a postdoc if you are planning a career in another sector?
“The only thing that you absolutely need a postdoc for is to go onto a tenured track faculty position,” says Bill Mahoney, associate dean for student and postdoctoral affairs at the University of Washington Graduate School in Seattle.
Shirley Tilghman, emeritus professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey, returns to a metaphor coined before COVID-19 lockdowns changed New York’s heavily congested LaGuardia Airport. “Passengers were always finding themselves flying over LaGuardia, over and over and over round in circles.”
“Postdocs were experiencing essentially the same phenomenon, which is that they were longer and longer and longer in postdoctoral positions waiting for their turn to finally have a chance to land.”
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Ditch jargon, keep sentences short, stay topical. Pakinam Amer shares the secrets of good science writing for books and magazines.
In the final episode of this six-part series about science communication, three experts describe how they learned to craft stories about research for newspaper, magazine and book readers.
David Kaiser, a physicist and science historian at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the 2012 book How the Hippies Saved Physics, tells Amer how he first transitioned from academic writing to journalism. “This kind of writing is different from the kinds of communication I had been practising as a graduate student and young faculty member.
“It took other sets of eyes and skilled editors to very patiently and generously work with me, saying 'These paragraphs are long, the sentences are long, you've buried the lede.' It was quite a process, quite a transition. It took a lot of practice to work on new habits.”
David Berreby runs an annual science writing workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He adds: “One of the hardest things for scientists to do is to tell a story as they would to a friend on campus. If you run into someone in the hall you say 'Hey, the most surprising thing happened....'
“Generally your instinct for how you would tell someome informally is a good guide. This is hard for scientists as it's been trained out of them. They have been trained to formalise and jargonise."
Beth Daley, editor of the The Conservation US, an online non-profit that publishes news and comment from academic researchers and syndicates them to different national and regional news outlets, describes how she and her colleagues commission articles.
After a daily 9am meeting, they issue an 'expert call out' seeking comment on that day's news stories.
Her team also receives direct pitches from academics. “The question I always ask scientists is 'What is it about your work that can be relevant for people today?” she says.
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Funding agencies and societies love novel approaches to science communication. Here is some expert advice on how to grab their attention.
In the penultimate episode of this six-part series about science communication, dermatologist and immunologist Muzlifah Haniffa tells Pakinam Amer how art and poetry inspired her 2016 exhibition Inside Skin following a meeting with Linda Anderson, a professor of English and American literature at Newcastle University, UK.
Carla Ross, who leads the public engagement team at UK funder Wellcome, describes its 25 Trailblazers initiative to showcase excellence in science communication.
Trailblazer finalist Raphaela Kaisler tells Amer how she and colleagues crowdsourced potential research questions around child mental health in Austria.
And Gail Cardew, director of science and education at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, offers advice on how to set up public engagement programmes.
Finally, Joshua Chu-Tan recounts how he distilled his PhD research into 180 seconds as part of the Three Minute Thesis programme, and raised funds for his lab by running blindfold to highlight age-related macular degeneration, his research focus at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he is now a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer.
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In the fourth episiode of this six-part Working Scientist series about science communication, Pakinam Amer examines how festivals, film, comedy clubs and virtual space camps can be ideal vehicles to explain your research to young people.
In 2018, propulsion development engineer Diana Alsindy launched Arabian Stargazer, a bilingual Instagram page that promotes rocket science and STEM careers to young people in Arabic-speaking countries.
Alsindy, who moved to the US from Iraq aged 14, tells Amer she developed the platform after realising that online resources in Arabic for young people seeking information about space science were thin on the ground.
“I'm passionate about science and I want to make other people passionate about it," she says. "My vision and my dream is to create space clubs, but virtually, engaging young people in techical conversations, using games, riddles, and Q&As with astronauts.”
Typically Alsindy runs one-hour presentations in both Arabic and English. “I’ve done it for five-year-olds and high school students. All I need is a latop and a screen, a Skype call or Google Hangout. If we want to open space science to everyone don’t open it for only English speaking populations.”
Helen Pilcher transitioned from UK stem cell researcher to writing and stand-up comedy, and is now science advisor at The Beano a children’s comic. A gig at one of the first Cheltenham Science Festivals with scientist friend Timandra Harkness marked a turning point.
“We called ourselves The Comedy Research Project and the aim was to prove scientifically that science can be funny.”
Alexis Gambis, assistant professor of biology at New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, founded labocine.com, a science film platform and magazine. “Whenever I talk about my films I always say in some ways I consider it to be research. I don’t consider it to be science communication. I’m really interested in how to bring microscopy into film for a general audience.”
Urmila Chadayammuri, a pre-doctoral fellow and a PhD student Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, worked with three colleagues she met at a two-day hackathon in 2019 to launch Cosmos VR, an app that offers a simulation including colliding galaxies, black holes and exploding stars. She tells Amer how the science communication project came about.
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In the third episode of this six-part series about the skills needed to explain your research to a general audience, Pakinam Amer talks to scientists who left the lab to work as full-time science communicators in print, online and broadcast journalism.
Often the biggest challenge some of them faced was telling family they were swapping the well-trodden career path of academic research for the more precarious field of science communication.
Gareth Mitchell, a technology reporter and science communications lecturer who presents the BBC programme Digital Planet, tells Amer:
“I was fine with the transfer and the lack of money and the insecurity and the randomness that came when I transferred from a reasonably safe and hard fought-for career in engineering into something much more uncertain and media-related, but my parents freaked out.
“Maybe that's putting it a bit strongly, but they questioned me quite forensically about why on earth their wonderful bright engineering son would possibly want to get his hands dirty with a Masters course in communication and then busk it in the land of radio.”
Buzzfeed science editor Azeen Ghorayshi was a fruit fly researcher until 2012, and recalls breaking news of her career switch to her parents, who fled to the US from Iran following the 1979 Revolution.
“Journalism plays a very different role there. There’s state media, for example. It’s not a job that they thought of as being easy, or safe, or secure or prestigious. My dad wanted me to become a doctor. That’s a very common thing with immigrant parents.”
How do you break into the field, either in a staff or freelance role? Do you need to complete an expensive graduate programme? Mitchell tells Amer: “Ask yourself why you want to do it, why it matters to you, and it’s OK to say because it’s cool and will make me happy.
“But maybe you have a deeper reason. Perhaps you think your particular subject area or discipline is insufficiently represented in the wider media? Or maybe it’s over-represented, or misrepresented? Then tell yourself that you can do it, and then think about the mode.
Are you the kind of person who might be better going round schools giving talks, or doing stand-up comedy in a science festival? Do you want to be a podcaster, a blogger, a vlogger, a YouTuber?”
Finally, Ferris Jabr tells Amer about his work as a science writer and author, and his forthcoming book about the co-evolution of earth and life.
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Do researchers and frontline clinicians have a moral obligation to communicate science around the coronavirus?
In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about science communication, Pakinam Amer explores crisis communication and asks how well researchers have explained the underlying uncertainties to the public.
Epidemiologist Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University's school of public health, says academic researchers have three roles, to generate scholarship and science, to teach that science to students, and to clearly translate it for a general audience.
“Our job is to help the world see how we can bridge the science to the very real practical decisions that the world has to make to create a healthier world,” he says.
But how is science communication evolving during the pandemic? “We are entering a new era. We need a new playbook for communicating science in a time of uncertainty, and how policy can be informed by uncertain science. We have not done that well,” he tells her.
“There has been this mismatch between what we do not know and our capacity to communicate what we do not know, and to inform policy that needs to be made anyway. Those have been glaring gaps in my assessment.”
Ron Daniels, a critical care consultant at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, sees a role for scientists to plug knowledge gaps alongside the understandably “cautious and risk-averse" messages that often emanate from government and professional bodies.
Daniels produced a short video in response to calls to explain why COVID-19 patients are ventilated on their stomachs, using a simple drawing on a white paper board to explain the underlying physiology.
“People want to make sensible informed decisions. With a very filtered and controlled flow of information coming from government, which is designed to avoid panic and instil calm, making informed decisions can be challenging.
“This is not about profile, this is not about gaining followers or scoring points. Usually this should not be about academic argument. This should be around 'I've appraised the evidence, I have a level of expertise, here are my opinions and this is what I think you as a member of the public should do with that information.'”
What about journalists reporting on the pandemic and busting myths and misinformation? How does their communication role differ from scientists and clinicians on the frontline?
US science journalist Roxanne Khamsi says: “I feel some kind of personal obligation to try to disseminate what I know, which is a fraction of what virologists know. I don't want to oblige anyone to do anything. If folks have the time there has never been a more urgent time to communicate your science.”
US photojournalist and science writer Tara Haelle adds: “I think journalists and scientists in general have done a reasonably good job of trying to focus on the good information and counter the bad information. It is a hard job to do. The entire base of science is uncertainty. It is a quest for knowledge. If you had the knowledge you would not be seeking it.”
Anica Butler, editor of the Boston Globe Ideas section, tells Amer how she works with scientist contributors who submit expert opinion pieces to the newspaper. “I think of myself as standing in for the public. I am going to ask stupid questions.
“The editor is trying to help your work be understood by the average everyday person. In a crisis like this, that is the ultimate goal. Think about you explaining to your next door neighbour 'Here is what is happening.'”
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In a world currently facing an unparalleled health crisis, the need for clear science communication has never been greater. Explaining complex ideas in a concise manner does not come naturally to everyone, but there are some simple rules you can follow.
In the opening episode of this six-part series about science communication, Pakinam Amer discusses the craft of clear storytelling and science writing with seasoned communicators and journalists.
Siri Carpenter, editor of The Craft of Science Writing, a selection of resouces from science writing platform The Open Notebook, explains how science journalism and science communication differ, but share important characteristics, including “a search for some kind of truth, driven by curiosity and sometimes the desire to right some wrong.”
But how do you structure a story so readers are hooked from the start, explain complicated ideas, avoid jargon, check facts? “There are so many skills that go into good science writing,” Carpenter says. “It takes time and practice to get better, learning from mistakes, and from feedback.”
Islam Hussein, a virologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells Amer why he took to the video platform YouTube in 2014 to tackle pseudoscience after a hand-held device was wrongly touted as a tool to detect viral infections in his native Egypt.
“There was a lot of interaction between me and the public. Some of it was good. Some of it was not, in the form of insults and threats," he says.
With the help of his son, he rigged up a home studio in his basement to create more multimedia content, using his wife and colleagues to get feedback before getting it live. “When I hit record I want to make sure I am saying something useful and accurate,” he says.
Hussein now regularly appears on the TV to explain the emerging science behind COVID-19.
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Adam Levy delves into the article of the future, examining the rise of lay summaries, the pros and cons of preprint servers, and how peer review is being crowd-sourced and opened up.
Manuscripts are mutating. These changes range from different approaches to peer-review, to reformatting the structure of the paper itself.
Pippa Whitehouse, an Antarctica researcher at Durham University, UK, commends small changes to the paper's summary over the last few years, telling Adam Levy: “Often now there's a short layman's review of the work. I find those really useful in subjects slightly outside my field.
“I see a title that looks useful and don't quite understand the language in the technical abstract, but sometimes the lay abstract can give me just enough insight into the study.”
Sarvenaz Sarabipour, a systems biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, praised preprint servers from an early career researcher perspective in a February 2019 article published in PloS Biology.
She tells Levy: “It's very beneficial for researchers to deposit their work immediately, because journals are not able to do that. Preprinting is decoupling dissemination from the peer-review process. It's wonderful to have it published earlier.
“The peer review process is inhibitory to dissemination but of course has added value.
“As a very early career researcher you don't have many papers, so it's wonderful to have something out quicker and be able to discuss
that with colleagues and more senior researchers.
"Researchers can notice each others' work quicker. They contact each other if they have something similar and they may start collaborating.”
But catalyst researcher Ben List, managing director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim, Germany, sounds a note of caution about preprints.
"In my field of chemical synthesis it's a bit risky,” he tells Levy. "It's a different thing in physics or biology where experiments take a long time. In chemistry you see something and within a few days you can actually reproduce this work. I'm not 100% sure if this is the future of publishing, in chemistry at least."
List is editor-in-chief of organic chemistry journal Synlett. Its approach to peer-review involves e-mailing a paper to a panel of up to 70 reviewers. This "crowd-reviewing" system is both quicker and more collaborative, he argues, and the size of the panel reduces the risk of bias.
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Your paper has been accepted, reviewed and published. Now you need to get it talked about by journalists, the public, your peers and funders.
Pippa Whitehouse recalls seeking advice and media training from colleagues in her university press office when her first paper was published.
“I recorded some soundbites and listened back to them and reflected on how to communicate information very clearly. It gave me a lot of confidence,” says Whitehouse, an Antarctica researcher at the University of Durham, UK.
”All of the interaction I've had with the press has been really positive,” she adds. “It can seem a little bit daunting to begin with, but if you give it a go I think you'll find the media are very interested in finding out about science.”
In the third episode of this four-part podcast series about getting published, Jane Hughes describes her role as director of communications and public engagement at The Francis Crick Institute in London.
She and her team help 1,500 researchers communicate their science to the press, public, policymakers and funders. Hughes recommends reaching out to press-office colleagues as soon as possible to discuss a paper's potential for attracting newspaper, broadcast or online media coverage.
Researchers can take other steps themselves to get a paper talked about, she tells Levy. ”One thing that can make a difference is an image, a video or something alongside the paper that you can share on social media,” says Hughes.
She also warns against over-hyping a paper's findings. ”Try not to sensationalize or over-simplify. You can work with your press office to make sure the message gets across properly.”
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It's important not to take reviewers' comments personally, even if you feel they have misunderstood the science, Adam Levy discovers.
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Getting published for the first time is a crucial career milestone, but how does a set of experiments evolve into a scientific paper?
In the first episode of this four-part podcast series about writing a paper, Adam Levy delves into the all-important first stage of the process, preparing a manuscript for submission to a journal.
He also finds out about the importance of titles, abstracts, figures and results, why good storytelling counts, and the particular challenges faced by researchers whose first language is not English.
Pamela Yeh, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, shares some personal pet peeves when she reads a paper: “I can’t stand those papers that have really long sentences with a ton of commas and a lot of jargon. I don’t think the writer is thinking about the reader,” she says.
PhD programmes in "the rainbow nation" mostly lead to academic careers, but reform is needed to boost collaboration and integration, higher education experts tell Julie Gould.
It's 25 years since since South Africa's first free elections swept Nelson Mandela to power as president.
But higher education in the "rainbow nation" (a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe the post-apartheid era), could do more to encourage integration and collaboration between black, white and international students.
Jonathan Jansen, a professor in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University, tells Julie Gould that despite seismic political change in 1994, education, research, and economics have not kept pace with the country's democratic transformation.
Liezel Frick, director of the Centre for Higher and Adult Education at Stellenbosch University, says that around 60% of students are part-time, with many having staff positions at universities.
Doctoral education still clings to a research-focused "Oxbridge model," she adds, and unlike programmes in North America does not offer credits for coursework and elective classes. "What is different is that we do not have an over-production of PhDs. A lot of PhDs still get absorbed into the academic sphere," she says.
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The thesis is a central element of how graduate students are assessed. But is it time for an overhaul? Julie Gould finds out.
How do you decide whether or not somebody is a fully trained researcher? Janet Metcalfe, head of Vitae, a non-profit that supports the professional development of researchers, tells Julie Gould that it's time to be "really brave" and look at how doctoral degrees are examined.
But what role should the thesis play in that assessment? Does it need overhauling, updating, or even scrapping?
Inger Mewburn, who leads research training at the Australian National University in Canberra and who founded of The Thesis Whisperer blog in 2010, suggests science could learn from architecture. Student architects are required to produce a portfolio, creating a "look book" for assessors or potential employers to examine as part as part of a candidate's career narrative. For graduate students in science, this could include papers, journals, articles, presentations, certificates, or even video files.
"The PhD is meant to turn out individual, beautifully crafted, entirely bespoke and unique knowledge creators," she tells Gould. "And we need people like that. We need creative people with really different sorts of talents. We don't want to turn out 'cookie cutter' researchers."
David Bogle, who leads early career researcher development at University College London, tells Gould that UCL's three-pronged mission statement includes impact.
"We want our research to make an impact, and in order to support and reinforce that it is now mandatory to include a one page impact statement at the front saying 'this is the difference it will make in the world,'" he tells Gould. "Any impact — curriculum, society, business, anything. It might not end up making that difference, but we want people to think about it."
What about the pressure to publish? In October 2019 Anne-Marie Coriat, Head of UK and EU Research Landscape at the Wellcome Trust in London, argued in a World View article published in Nature Human Behaviour that PhD merit needs to be defined by more than publications.
She tells Gould that the experience of getting published is a good thing, but making it mandatory is not. "Learning writing skills is a hugely important part of PhD training. Should it be a requirement that all students publish in peer reviewed journals in order to pass the PhD? My answer is absolutely and emphatically no."
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Scientific research is not the endeavour of a single person. It requires a team of people. How can this be better reflected in graduate student training, asks Julie Gould.
Is science ready for "Team PhD", whereby a group of students work more collaboratively, delivering a multi-authored thesis at their end of their programme?
Jeanette Woolard, who recently secured a £4.5m Wellcome Trust grant to fund a four-year collaborative doctoral training programme in her lab at the University of Nottingham, UK, believes it could happen one day.
"The team driven PhD is not distant dream. It's soon-to-be a fulfilled reality," Woolard, professor of cardiovascular physiology and pharmacology, tells Julie Gould. "If you give it enough of an incentive and wave the flag hard enough for team science, it will come."
Woolard's Wellcome grant allows four graduate students to have their own research focus but to work collaboratively. "Each of the individual candidates are still pursuing an individual PhD and they will each write up an individual thesis at the end of their four year period of study," she says, arguing that the scientific community and students themselves aren't yet ready for programmes that culminate in a team focused thesis. "I think individual students still either like the idea or deserve the opportunity to defend their own piece of work at the end of their studies."
The new programme at Nottingham, she says, provides them with "the most collaborative environment possible, where they have the opportunity to work together as much as they can, to utilise as many skills as are available, and to really experience a dynamic, collaborative team-driven environment.
"Ultimately that's what there are going to experience especially if they go into industry or pursue excellence in academia. Our best outputs now are judged as being multidisciplinary," Woolard adds.
A team thesis may be some way off in science, but what about other disciplines? Jill Perry is Executive Director at the Carnegie Project. She tells Gould how the project is helping to redefine the education doctorate in the US.
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Julie Gould asks six higher education experts if it's now time to go back to the drawing board and redesign graduate programmes from scratch.
Suzanne Ortega, president of the US Council of Graduate Schools, says programmes now include elements to accommodate some of the skills now being demanded by employers, including project and data management expertise. "We can't expect to prepare doctoral researchers in a timely fashion by simply adding more and more separate activities," she tells Gould. "We need to redesign the curricula and the capstone project," referring to the PhD as a long-term investigative project that culminates in a final product.
Jonathan Jansen, professor of education at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, calls for more flexible and modular programmes and describes as an example how MBA programmes have evolved from a full-time one year course to include part-time online only programmes and a "blended" combination of the two approaches. "It's about trying to figure out in terms of your own lifestyle what kind of progarmme design works for you," he says. "One size does not fit all."
But Jansen's colleague Liezel Frick, director of the university's centre for higher and adult education, says it's important to remember the ultimate goal of a PhD. She tells Gould: "I get the point around flexibility but it's still a research focused degree. You still have to make an original contribution to your field of knowledge. Otherwise it becomes a continuing professional development programme where you can do odds and ends but never get to the core of it, which is a substantive research contribution."
David Bogle, a doctoral school pro-vice-provost at UCL, London, says it's important to remember that graduate students are part of a cohort and community who should be respected and rewarded, not looked down on and treated as second class citizens. "At the moment there's a certain amount of 'I'm the supervisor. You should be looking to me as the primary source of inspiration,' when in fact the inspiration comes from peers, professional communities, training and cross disciplinary activities."
This is the second episode in a five-part series timed to coincide with Nature's 2019 PhD survey. Many of the 6,300 graduate students who responded call for more one-to-one support and better career guidance from PhD supervisors.
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Students need to be clear about their reasons for pursuing a PhD and the career options open to them, Julie Gould discovers.
In 2015, labour economist Paula Stephan told an audience of early career researchers in the US that the supply of PhD students was outstripping demand. “Since 1977, we've been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening.
"We are definitely producing many more PhDs than there is demand for them in research positions,” she said.
In this first episode of this five-part series about the future of the PhD and how it might change, Julie Gould asks Stephan, who is based at Georgia State University, if her view has altered.
Anne-Marie Coriat, head of UK and EU research landscape at the Wellcome Trust in London, says students need to be clear about why they want to pursue a PhD. "Look at what you're getting into, try and understand that, and then network," she says.
Forty per cent of respondents to Nature's 2019 PhD survey, published this week, said that their programme didn’t meet their original expectations, and only 10% said that it exceeded their expectations — a sharp drop from 2017, when 23% of respondents said that their PhD programme exceeded their expectations.
Despite a global shortage of jobs at universities and colleges, 56% of respondents said that academia is their first choice for a career. Just under 30% chose industry as their preferred destination. The rest named research positions in government, medicine or non-profit organizations. In 2017, 52% of respondents chose academia and 22% chose industry.
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Adam Levy talks to 2019 John Maddox Prize winner Bambang Hero Saharjo and Olivier Bernard, the Canadian pharmacist whose campaign against vitamin C injections for cancer patients earned him the early career stage prize.
The John Maddox Prize recognises the work of individuals who promote science and evidence, advancing the public discussion around difficult topics despite challenges or hostility.
Bambang Hero Saharjo, winner of the 2019 prize, is a lead expert witness on illegal peatland fires in Indonesia. He has presented evidence on nearly 500 environmental cases for the Indonesian government, often facing threats and harassment.
Saharjo, a professor in the forestry faculty at Bogor Agricultual University, was nominated by Jacob Phelps, a lecturer in tropical environmental change and policy at Lancaster University, UK, who says: "His work serves not only to bring justice in individual cases, but has inspired a vision of what is possible in Indonesia—a future in which courts are true centres of evidence-based justice, even in the face of entrenched interests; where academics are genuine public servants, and in which science has a prominent role inthe public discourse."
In 2012 pharmacist and broadcaster Olivier Bernard created Le Pharmachien, a comic website to help the public separate myths from facts about healthcare. An English version, The Pharmafist, is also available. More recently Bernard has spoken out against high-dose vitamin C injections for cancer patients. This intervention is not supported by the current body of scientific evidence and Olivier's campaign led to him facing intimidation and cyberbullying. Bernard is winner of the John Maddox Prize early career stage award.
The prize is a joint initiative between Nature and the charity Sense about Science, which challenges the misrepresentation of science and evidence in public life. It is named in honour of Sir John Maddox, who edited Nature for a total of 22 years between 1966 and 1995.
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Tom Baden's work into the neuroscience of vision has earned him the inaugural Nature Research Award for Driving Global Impact.
Tom Baden, professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex, UK, is the first winner of an award to recognise early career researchers whose work has made, or has the potential to make, a positive impact on society.
Baden's research on zebrafish and mice showed that eyes have vastly greater computational powers than people previously thought, rather than being faithful recorders of the real world.
The judges of the award, run in partnership with Chinese technology company Tencent, said Baden's research could have a significant impact on both diagnostic and therapeutic ophthalmology research.
In addition to his research, Baden tells Julie Gould about his interest in open hardware and 3D printing and its potential to make well equipped labs more affordable for developing countries.
Baden is also cofounder of Teaching and Research in Neuroscience for Development (TReND) in Africa. This nonprofit, which launched in 2010, runs research courses in sub-Saharan Africa and helps to place scientists who’d like to teach there into the region’s universities.
The group also collects unused lab equipment from facilities in the United States and Europe and redistributes it to laboratories across Africa.
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Two projects aimed at boosting female representation in STEM have won the second Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Science and Innovating Science, in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies.
Jean Fan spent a year volunteering at a science club for high school students during her PhD programme at Harvard University and was struck by how many of them dismissed the idea of becoming scientists themselves.
"A lot of my students would make remarks like 'I'm not quite a maths person,' or would not see themselves as future scientists," she tells Julie Gould.
"I really wanted to leave them with some type of gift to encourage them to continue developing their interest in science."
As a result Fan, who was the sole female graduate student in her PhD bioinformatics programme, launched cuSTEMized, a non-profit that uses personalised educational storybooks (which she writes and illustrates) to inspire girls about scientific careers.
This week, at a ceremony in London, she won the 2019 Inspiring Science Award, one of two offered by Nature Research and the Estée Lauder Companies.
The second award, Innovation in Science, goes to Doreen Anene, a PhD student at the University of Nottingham, UK.
In 2017 Anene launched The STEM Belle, a non-profile based in Nigeria, her home country. The STEM Belle also works in Ghana and Pakistan.
As its website says, The STEM Belle is "focused on levelling up the female representation in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics fields by attracting, retaining and advancing more girls and young women to STEM subjects and fields."
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In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about physics careers, Gaia Donati draws on her contact with fellow physicists in her role as a manuscript editor at Nature,where she oversees research papers in several areas, including quantum information and computing, high-energy physics and plasma physics.
She also reflects on her own career experience and how academia in her native Italy compares to the UK, where she gained her PhD in 2015. "Start looking for jobs before you finish your PhD," Donati advises.
Moving to a new branch of science is scary, but learning new skills and collaborating with different colleagues can be exhilarating, Julie Gould discovers.
In the penultimate episode of this six-part series about physics careers, Julie Gould talks to Stuart Higgins, a research associate at Imperial College London, who switched from solid state physics to bioengineering, and Anna Lappala, who moved from biochemistry to physics.
How easy were these transitions, and what is their advice to others planning similar moves?
Higgins says: "It's important to ask yourself why you want to make the transition. Do you want to apply the same skills or to learn new ones? Give yourself time to understand your motivation."
Overall, the transition was "liberating," he adds, allowing him to ask "basic, silly questions" of colleagues, who were very supportive of his situation and the learning curve he faced.
Lappala, a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, describes how she was initially terrified of people discovering she was not a "real physicist" and worked hard to learn about general physics, quantum field theory, and soft matter, among other things.
Media interest in particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider boosted Jon Butterworth's interest in public engagement, reports Julie Gould.
Jon Butterworth developed a taste for public engagement after repeated media appearances related to his work on the ATLAS experiment, one of two Large Hadron Collider detectors at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab.
Butterworth, a physics professor at University College London, describes life at CERN, and how it felt to be one of 5154 authors listed in the 2015 paper that produced the most precise estimate yet of the mass of the Higgs boson.
As part of his public engagement activities, Butterworth was persuaded to auction an after-dinner lecture or school talk about the Higgs. The auction "lot" was part of a fundraising effort for his children's primary school in north London.
"Someone else at the school was Lady Gaga's designer and they brought along a pair of her boots," he tells Julie Gould. "My talk went for more than Lady Gaga's boots. I'm still doing it now. Interest hasn't died away.
"The key thing is you have to be genuinely excited about your project. We've lowered the bar so more physics stories get into the news.
"If you tell your mum and dad now that you're doing physics, you get kudos for it in the way you wouldn't have done before," he says.
Tom Weller taught physics for eight years at a west London school following his second postdoc at Harvard University, a career change triggered in part by the enjoyment he derived from organising children's science parties. "They made me recognize how much I enjoyed explaining stuff that was fun and engaging," he says in the fourth episode of this six-part podcast series about physics careers.
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Industry has long courted physicists for their data science expertise, but will this change as more undergraduates acquire these skills?
In 2013, Kim Nilsson co-founded Pivigo, a training company to prepare researchers for data science careers. She tells Julie Gould how and why she moved into business.
Nilsson's Pivigo colleague Deepak Mahtani quit academia after completing a PhD in astronomy. What is his advice to someone looking to move into data science? "There are three main things you should do. Learn about the programming languages Python or R, read up about machine learning, and understand a bit about SQL," he says.
Lewis Armitage's PhD at Queen Mary Unversity London took him to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. But he craved a better work-life balance and a move which played to his data science skills. Now he is a data analyst for consumer behaviour consultancy Tsquared Insights, based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Elizabeth Tasker's career has taken her from Europe to Japan via North America, including a Florida campus where alligators lurked in drainage ditches.
If your career looks set to include geographical transitions, and the cultural, workplace and linguistic challenges that they can pose, listen to Elizabeth's advice in this second episode of a six-part podcast series about careers and physics.
Earlier this year Eindhoven University of Technology faced a social media backlash after announcing that from July 2019, all academic staff vacancies will be open to female applicants only for the first six months. Many people questioned the legality of the move.
In this first episode of a six-part series about careers in physics, Cornelis Storm, who leads the theory of polymers and soft matters group at the Dutch university, tells Julie Gould why the "radical step," was sorely needed. He also describes why the physics department, and the discipline more generally, will benefit from being more diverse.
"For whatever reason there is a large group of people that are not considering a carer in physics." he says. "There's not a single piece of research that suggests men are better at this job than women."
Astrophysicist Elizabeth Tasker, an associate professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, was hired through a similar policy, and tells Gould about her experience.
In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about workplace technology, Lee Cronin talks about the "chemputer," a device he and his team developed as a "chemical Google to search for the origin of life."
In November 2018 Cronin and colleagues at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, unveiled this new method of producing drug molecules, using downloadable blueprints to synthesise organic chemicals via a modular chemical-robot system.
He tells Julie Gould: "I imagined this Lego kit of chemical reactors I could slot together. We are literally building the Large Hadron Collider for the origin of life in the lab."
Cronin, regius chair of chemistry at Glasgow, tells Gould the chemputer is the latest technology development in his 20-year research career, and how academic chemistry is ripe for a revolution.
"There's always been this arms race between technology and fundamental research. For almost 200 years the chemistry lab has been a manual labour place, " he says. "Everybody has been doing everything by hand. I realised by building the chemputer there are things you never want to do by hand anymore. Shouldn't we train people how to use robots, even at the undergraduate level?"
Ben Britton's experimental micromechanics lab at Imperial College London currently includes four postdoctoral researchers, 11 PhD students, and four Masters students.
Alongside computational analysis tools used to detect how materials perform (including Matlab as the group's main programming environment, chosen for its speed, global user base and visual interaction), Britton and his team use the online collaboration and communication tool Slack. He also uses the Slack bot Howdey to check in with colleagues each week.
But why Slack? "There's not enough time in the day to micro-manage every individual person," he tells Julie Gould. "Part of being in an academic environment is about developing people, trying to encourage a working environment where people are free to share ideas, to fail, and also to have very open communication. Slack doesn't replace the in-person interaction but it supplements and enhances it."
Machine learning and data management skills can raise your scientific profile and open up career opportunities, Julie Gould discovers.
As a biomedical science student, Jake Schofield felt frustrated at the length of time it took to repeat experiments, record results and manage protocols, with most of the work paper-based.
In 2016 he and Jan Domanski, a biochemist with programming skills, launched Labstep, an online platform to help scientists record and reproduce experiments.
Schofield, now Labstep's CEO, tells Julie Gould how launching a start-up and seeking investor funding has honed his business skills.
"Every step we've taken has been a huge learning experience," he says. "I wish there were more opportunities for scientists to try entreprenurial pursits. Scientific analytical problem-based thinking has so many parallels in the start-up world."
Brian MacNamee, a computer scientist at University College Dublin, outlines the high value of data and its potential to solve science's reproducibility crisis, citing large sky-scanning telescope projects as an example.
"These projects are generating colossal amounts of data scanning large portions of the sky and that data needs to be categorised," he says. "Astrophysicists want to go to large data collections and look for the bits they are interested in. It's impossible to do that by hand. You need to put machine learning systems into those pipelines to categorise and compare data.
"Other researchers are not reading a paper and trying to figure out where the gremlins are inside a data set. They can open the dataset up and find it themselves."
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Mona Nemer tells Julie Gould about her role as Canada's chief scientific adviser and how she aims to strengthen science in the country.
"We're bordered by three oceans," says Mona Nemer of Canada, where she has been chief scientific adviser since September 2017. "On one side we are close to Europe, on the other we are close to Asia. It's a great country to study the Arctic, climate research, oceanography, but also astrophysics, information technology and health."
Nemer describes her role as "convener of the dialogue between the broader science community and government," providing scientific advice to current prime minister Justin Trudeau and his ministerial team, and making recommendations on how to improve Canadian science.
Simon Hettrick tells Julie Gould about the role of research software engineers, what they do and how you can become one.
In the third episode of our six-part podcast series on workplace technology, we learn more about the importance of coding for scientists followed by an introduction to the work of research software engineers.
Simon Hettrick, deputy director of the UK Software Sustainability Institute, tells Julie Gould about the typical career path of a research software engineer, and how their skills can support researchers with limited coding skills.
Harriet Alexander starts the programme by telling Nature technology editor Jeff Perkel about her role as an instructor for Software Carpentry, a global non-profit organisation which teaches research computing skills to scientists. Who typically attends a Carpentry course and what do they learn during a workshop?
Alexander, a postdoctoral fellow in oceanography bioinformatics at the University of California, Davis, also tells us about the recent course she ran in Antarctica.
Learning how to coding brings career benefits and helps science by aiding reproducibility, Julie Gould discovers.
Jessica Hedge tells Julie Gould about how she learned to code as a PhD student, and the freedom and flexibility it provides to manage large datasets.
"I never saw myself as a coder and it took me a long time to realise I had to pick up the skills myself," she tells Julie Gould in the second episode of this six-part series about technology and scientific careers. "A colleague was using Python and R and I saw the potential." What is her advice to other early career researchers who are keen to develop coding expertise?
Also, Brian MacNamee, an assistant professor in the school of computer science at University College Dublin, talks about the college's data science course and how it can benefit both humanities and science students.
Finally, Nature technology editor Jeffrey Perkel describes how coding can help with computational reproducibility.
Mark Dodgson and Lee Cronin discuss the revolutionary potential of artificial intelligence on university teaching, research, and scientific careers.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been hailed as the "fourth Industrial Revolution," a disruptive technology set to transform world economies and the traditional workplace. But how will AI and deep learning affect the future of universities, the very institutions that developed the technology in the first place?
Kicking off this six-part Working Scientist podcast series on technology and scientific careers, Mark Dodgson, professor of innovation studies at the University of Queensland Business School and a visiting professor at Imperial College London, predicts how AI could change university teaching, how institutions measure student performance, and how they conduct scientific research.
"Unless universities get pretty coherent strategies to deal with this technology, they will struggle" he warns.
But Lee Cronin, regius chair of chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, disagrees.
"There's no magic in AI," he argues. "It's just a tool, a series of mathematical processes that allows you to extract meaning, or some degree of meaning, from large data sets."
Addressing the technology's potential impact on teaching, Cronin adds: "If we want to use AI as a tool to basically make grading cheaper, then fine, do that.
"But universities aren't about grading. They are about educating people to think critically, about preparing people with sufficient high level skills to add to the economy and be creative.
"The thing I really love about our universities is their creativity. There's no AI that can assess creativity. There just isn't."
Finally, Nature technology editor Jeffrey Perkel describes how technology underpins the entire scientific enterprise, pointing to some of the most popular topics covered in his section recently, including a feature on deep learning for biology.
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China's investment in materials science makes it an attractive destination for young foreign researchers looking to relocate, with decent salaries and facilities that many western universities would envy.
John Plummer, senior portfolio editor for Nature Research and a former senior editor for Nature Materials, based in Shanghai, says this investment is driven by the Chinese government's desire to deliver cutting-edge research and raise the living standard of people living in rural areas.
The challenge, as with other parts of the world, is to give researchers independence and time to innovate, rather than face pressure to publish, and to deliver a quick return on investment, he adds.
Xin Li, associate editor of Nature Materials, also based in Shanghai, describes China's technology transfer environment and how the country's lab culture compares to labs in the west.
Finally, Plummer speculates on the likely impact of the current trade war between the US and China have on research collaboration and innovation.
Nature Briefing
Many grant funding decisions are random, with luck playing a large part. How can the system be improved, particularly when funds are tight?
In the final episode of our six-part series on funding, Feric Fang, a professor in the departments of laboratory medicine and microbiology at the University of Washington, Seattle, describes how a two-tier "modified lottery" could be a fairer process, with grants randomly prioritised to applications that had some merit but did not attract funding first time round.
New Zealand's Health Research Council already operates a similar system, says Vernon Choy, the council's direct of research investments and contracts.
Its Explorer Grants panel does not discuss rankings but instead judges if an application's proposals are viable and if they meet an agreed definition of "transformative." These applications then go into a pool and a random number generator is applied to to allocate funding based on the budget available.
Because applications are anonymised, Choy says there is no bias against a particular institution or research team, allowing young and inexperienced researchers to compete more fairly against senior colleagues.
Johan Bollen, a professor at Indiana University's school of informatics, computing and engineering, describes how a Self Organising Funding Allocation system (SOFA) would work, removing the burden of writing grant applications.
"What if we just give everybody a pot of money at the beginning of the year and then redistribute a certain percentage to others?" he asks.
Paid content: European Research Council
"We are open to the world" says ERC president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon. Its grantees straddle 80 nationalities and the organisation has signed collaboration agreements with 11 countries, including China, India, Brazil, Australia and Japan.
Helen Tremlett, who leads the pharmacoepidemiology in multiple sclerosis research group at the University of British Colombia, Canada, spent time in the lab of an ERC grantee at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany.
This experience, along with publication of a 2011 paper in Nature looking at how the gut microbiome may be influential in triggering the animal model of MS, had career-changing consequences, leading her down a new research path.
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Julie Gould asks how early career researchers can develop their careers in the face of funding's "boom and bust" cycle and the short-termism it engenders.
Governments are swayed by political uncertainty and technological developments, argues Michael Teitelbaum, author of Falling Behind?Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.
In the US, for example, space research funding dramatically increased after Soviet Russia launched the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957, ending after the 1969 moon landing.
Similar booms followed in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, says Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York.
But he argues that they are unsustainable and can have a negative impact on the careers of junior scientists and their research. Will Brexit trigger a funding downturn, and if so, for how long? Watch this space, says Teitelbaum.
In April 2018 the UK's funding environment was transformed with the launch of UK Research and Innovation, an umbrella agency which oversees more than £6 billion (US$7.4 billion) of research funding per year, led by Sir Mark Walport, formerly the UK government's chief scientific adviser.
In episode four of this six-part series on funding, Julie Gould discusses the changes with James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, UK. Wilsdon describes how the new funding landscape compares to the previous structure of seven research councils, how UKRI can support interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research, and what this new funding landscape means for early career researchers.
Expert advice on how to get the details of a grant submission right, and planning for "curveball questions" if you are asked to deliver an oral presentation:
- Peter Gorsuch, Chief Editor at Nature Research Editing Services, tells Julie Gould about the all-important details to include in your grant application.
- Jernej Zupanc, who runs visual communication skills training for scientists, talks fonts, colours and other ways make your application easier to navigate.
- Anne-Marie Coriat, Head of UK and Europe Research Landscape at Wellcome Trust, London, describes how to prepare for an oral presentation, including answers to some difficult questions.
Paid content: European Research Council
Romanian researcher Alina Bădescu describes her experience of successfully applying for an ERC grant. Bădescu, an associate professor at the Faculty of Electronic, Telecommunications and Information Technology, University of Bucharest, also talks about the second-stage interview process run by the ERC at its HQ in Brussels.
It's best to start planning for a grant application at least 9-12 months before the submission deadline, says Anne Marie Coriat, Head of UK and Europe Research Landscape at Wellcome Trust, London. She outlines the preparatory steps you need to take.
Also in the second episode of this six-part podcast series on funding, Peter Gorsuch, Chief Editor at Nature Research Editing Services, highlights the importance of your grant application summary statement. A clearly worded document can help to convince a funding panel that you are the right person for a grant, he says.
Paid content
This episode concludes with a second sponsored slot featuring the work of the European Research Council (ERC). Alejandro Martin Hobday, who manages the unit in charge of receiving applications and coordinating the ERC's two-stage evaluation process, describes how his team supports both successful and unsuccessful applicants.
And panel chair Maria Leptin, a research scientist at the University of Cologne and director of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in Heidelberg, Germany, explains how she and her expert colleagues evaluate individual applications.
In this first episode of a six-part weekly series about funding, Julie Gould outlines the US National Institutes of Health's (NIH) grant review process and the extent to which reviewers evaluating the same applications agree or disagree. Is the current system the best way, she asks Elizabeth Pier, lead author of a March 2018 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Low agreement among reviewers evaluating the same NIH grant applications.
Paid content
This episode concludes with a slot sponsored by the European Research Council. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, its president, outlines the organisation's role and remit as a grant funder.
Chris Woolston and Julie Gould discuss the findings of Nature's 2018 salary and job satisfaction survey, which found that despite some common concerns about pay, promotion prospects, bullying and discrimination, 75% are happy with their career choice and would recommend it to others.
Also, ahead of the 2019 Nature Careers Events Guide publication later this month, Julie talks to Jamie Krueger about her drive to make conferences more accessible for mothers and other researchers who juggle caring responsibilities alongside work.
Krueger, a neuroscience graduate student at the University of California Davis, had her daughter three years ago and the 2019 Guide includes an interview with her.
Earlier this year she chaired a panel discussion at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, California. Its focus was female scientists who began their careers and family in parallel.
See also:
Satisfaction in science
Alexandra Olaya-Castro describes how she draws on experiences she faced earlier in her career to support women and colleagues from minority groups in her current role as professor of physics at University College London. "Like any stereotype you can only break it down by doing what you really think is right. But you also need a network of colleagues that you can trust. The advice I give to both men and women is that if there is a minority in any group, pay them attention. Be sensitive to that person," she says.
Astrophysicist Mirjana Pović, winner of Nature Research’s inaugural Inspiring Science Award, one of two prizes developed in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies, describes her efforts to encourage African women and girls to pursue science careers, a role she juggles alongside her own research at the Ethiopian Space Science and Technology Institute in Addis Ababa and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain.
See also:
- Meet the space researcher smoothing the path for women in science across Africa
- Hungarian association wins prize for promoting participation of women in science
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The Association of Hungarian Women in Science (NATE) has won Nature Research's inaugural Innovation in Science Award, one of two global prizes launched in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies and presented at a ceremony in London held on 30 October 2018.
In this podcast Julie Gould talks to NATE president Katalin Balázsi about the organisations's achievements and its success at inspiring women and girls to develop careers in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Balázsi was one of ten women scientists who founded the association ten years ago. A follow-up podcast interview with Mirjana will go live soon.
Many of the women helped by NATE juggle their careers alongside family commitments. Nana Lee, a mother of three and an assistant professor in biochemistry at the University of Toronto, concludes this episode with some advice on how to strike a balance between the two competing pressures.
A companion prize, the Inspiring Science Award, was presented to Mirjana Pović, an astrophysicist at the Ethiopian Space Science and Technology Institute in Addis Ababa.
See also:
- Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Science and Innovating Science
- Hungarian association wins prize for promoting participation of women in science
- Meet the space researcher smoothing the path for women in science across Africa
- New awards aim to celebrate women in science
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Lego Grad Student is the alter ego of an early career researcher whose schadenfreude-laden Twitter posts "capture an adult's distress in adult education." He tells Jack Leeming how a childhood love of Lego was reignited after a painful dissertation catch-up with his supervisor. Jack asks about his anonymity, his advice to other graduate students, and if his 63,000 @legogradstudent followers need to worry about the real-life person behind the poignant posts.
Julian Kirchherr applied his experiences of running a start-up to his PhD, which he completed in less than two years. His book, The Lean PhD, describes how the principles adopted by many start-ups to get "minimal viable products" to market quickly can make PhD programmes more time-efficient and impactful. Kircherr discusses his ideas with Julie Gould.
In early October more than 800 early career researchers attended the annual Naturejobs Career Expo in London, the last to be held before the UK is due leave the European Union in 2019. Julie talks to four PhD students about their career aspirations, and if Brexit is influencing their plans.
See also:
- How to build a better PhD
- Graduate survey: A love-hurt relationship
- Teach undergraduates that doing a PhD will require them to embrace failure
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UK careers consultant Sarah Blackford describes how a "SWOT analysis" of your skills can identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in your career roadmap. Sarah's sound advice might well have been followed by biotechnology engineer Samuel Juillot and materials engineer Arnold Oswald. In April 2018 the two friends opened Eurekafé in Toulouse, France. Their crowdfunded cafe of curiosities is aimed at the city's scientists and the general public, offering science-related events and exhibits alongside snacks and drinks. They tell Julie Gould how the idea came about.
Career mobility is a fact of life in science and there are plenty of opportunities to study and work abroad. Andrew Spencer, a workplace trainer based in the UK, describes some of the cultural differences and hierarchies you may face when you move to another country, and how best to handle them.
And Erna Karalija, a plant physiologist and assistant professor at the University of Sarajevo, talks about the current academic environment in Bosnia, and how it has been shaped by the country's turbulent recent history.
See also:
How to fit in when you join a lab abroad
How to deliver sound science in resource-poor regions
The value of scientific careers outside academia needs to be acknowledged. Universities can help by publishing data on where their researchers end up.
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Julie Gould discusses problem solving, research integrity, and the importance of feedback in PhD programmes at the 2018 ORPHEUS conference, held in Iceland.
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How two women showcase the achievements of India's female research community and the career challenges they face.
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Julia Hubbard has Type 1 diabetes and lupus. Collin Diedrich has dyslexia. Listen to their top tips for juggling scientific careers alongside illness and disability.
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Alaina G Levine and Peter Fiske describe how networking can help you move between industry and academia.
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Two scientists describe their career moves from academia to vintinculture and bread making
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Lessons on a move from industry to academia from a mother-of-five.
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Recognising your skills and accomplishments boosts job satisfaction
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How to get better at mentoring when you’re new to a leadership role.
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An insight into sports science, plus Nature's 2017 PhD survey findings explained.
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London Naturejobs Career Expo speakers, exhibitors and attendees share how flexibility in a scientific career can stretch your career options.
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Starting a lab can be a daunting prospect as there is often little formal training in how to do it.
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Following scientific dreams can be fulfilling, but you may have to make personal sacrifices.
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The history and development of science is littered with failures, so early-career researchers should embrace, rather than be afraid of them.
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Graduate students are uncertain about their career paths and Eric Betzig, 2014 Chemistry Nobel laureate gievs an insight into his transition from academia to industry, and back again.
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Brian Schmidt, 2011 physics Nobel laureate, explains why early career researchers need to relax a little when it comes to their future.
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A brief insight into what the funding process is like for Starting and Consolidator grant applications, once you click submit!
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Becoming faculty is a goal for many scientists in academia, but the path is littered with hurdles, challenges and lessons to learn.
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Women have a 2:1 advantage over men when applying for a tenure-track role in maths intensive subjects, say researchers.
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Recent scientific discoveries are opening up exciting opportunities for scientists in the field of personalised healthcare.
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Postdocs are urged by peers and senior scientists to help change the postdoc research culture.
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Julie Gould speaks to Professor Athene Donald about the expectations and responsibilities of PhD researchers' careers.
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An interview with Jana Watson-Capps about the blossoming relationships between academia and industry, and a snippet from this week's Nature podcast on cross-disciplinary research.
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The challenges of science blogging for an established professor and young PhD student.
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A quick round-up from the Naturejobs Career Expo in Boston, with clips from speakers, exhibitors, delegates and organisers.
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Dr Donna J Nelson and Dr David Kirby share their experiences of working with Hollywood blockbusters and hit TV series.
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Naturejobs asks Susanna-Assunta Sansone how scientists can manage the vast amounts of data that are produced in scientific experiments.
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Sofie Carsten Nielsen, the Danish Minister for Higher Education and Science is putting a lot of energy into battling the barriers that women in science face in Denmark.
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Edwina Dunn, founder of dunnhumby and the Tesco Club Card, and currently starting up Starcount, discusses how data science is a passion for her, not just at work, but outside too.
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Una Ryan, chair of the Bay Area Bioeconomy Initiative and angel investor, talks to Naturejobs about her mentor and how they helped her break through barriers and glass ceilings that many women face.
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Roma Agrawal, physicist turned structural engineer at WSP, was the woman who designed the top of The Shard.
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Frances Ashcroft, professor of physiology at the University of Oxford, inspires us with her infectious energy and curiosity for science in this first episode of the Women in Science Spotlight series.
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Andy Kirk talks to Julie Gould about the importance of data visualisation for scientists.
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Kit Malthouse, the Deputy Mayor of London for Business and Enterprise, talks to Naturejobs about his plans to turn London into a "fizzing, buzzing ecosystem" for biotech and life sciences.
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Steve Blank speaks to Julie Gould about the Lean Start-up model for entrepreneurs.
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Euan Adie from Altmetric and Alex Hodgson from ReadCube talk to Julie Gould about the future of digital scientific publishing.
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An interview with Sterghios Moschos from the University of Westminster about his move from industry back to academia.
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An interview with Nessa Carey, senior director at Pfizer, about her journey from academia to industry.
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Moving countries - or even continents - might sound like a daunting prospect, but it can give your research career a real boost. Listen to this podcast for advice on moving to the United States.
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Networking is an important aspect of your job search or career development. This podcast includes tips on networking for introverts and online networking.
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Paul Stein is Director of Science and Technology at the Ministry of Defence. He describes the benefits of pursuing a science career there, including access to high level government training and cutting edge research and development.
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Pit your wits against Nature's contestants, and learn the results of the Naturejobs Salary Survey in the process.
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Many academic posts require teaching as well as research. Roger Morris, head of biomedical and health sciences at King's College London, explains how to get a job as a lecturer, and how to handle a workload of teaching at the same time as building a great track record in research.
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