Working Scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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