Working Scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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