Working Scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.