Working Scientist

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-part Working 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.