Working Scientist

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.

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

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

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

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