Working Scientist

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.

Some researchers never lose touch with group leaders or committee members who mentored them as graduate students.As Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says of one early-career mentor: “I was absolutely terrified of them. They couldn't even understand why because they’re a very kind and wonderful person."We’ll see each other now at conferences, we’ll be in the same town to be reviewing grants together, or whatever it is, and, and we’ll spend time together as friends. But they’re also someone I know I can go to if I need advice on something because they still, you know, have been in the field a lot longer than I have, and so they have a lot of wisdom to share.”Martin Gargiulo, who teaches entrepreneurship at the INSEAD business school in Singapore, says that mentoring relationships are like parenthood:“There is a point at which your children, your mentees, need to become independent from you and need to challenge you. And if you didn’t get to that point, you didn’t do your job. So building the relationship, letting go and rebuilding that relationship, perhaps under a different mindset, is important,” he says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good scientific mentors can provide both careers and psychosocial support, says Erin Dolan, who researches innovative approaches to science education at the University of Georgia in Athens. They provide answers to questions and often use their own professional network to help colleagues who want to move to a different sector, for example.How does this compare with the support offered by academic supervisors? Gemma Modinos, a neuropsychologist at King’s College London, explains.Finally, career consultants Sarah Blackford and Tina Persson explain how mentoring differs from coaching. They outline the techniques used by professional coaches to help researchers decide on a course of action to reach their career goals. 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.

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.

In January 2022 the Biden administration announced its long-awaited strategy to safeguard scientific integrity across US federal research facilities and agencies.But 16 months on, do researchers working in those organisations feel better protected than they did under the administration led by Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump?The Union of Concerned Scientists, a US non-profit and advocacy organisation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has tracked more than 200 examples where scientific decision-making processes were politicised during the four-year Trump administration, compared to 98 under the 2001-9 presidency of George W Bush.In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Jacob Carter, research director at the union’s centre for science and democracy, joins Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the US Climate Science Legal Defence Fund, to describe the impact of the Biden strategy in empowering scientist whistleblowers to speak out.“Don’t punish the people who do come forward,” says Kurtz. “Even if their claims are found to be not a true violation or there was a misunderstanding or something, it’s imperative to not punish people who came forth with good faith claims.”Finally, Evi Emmenegger, who studies aquatic animal pathogens at a US federal research facility, describes what happened after she raised concerns to her supervisors about contaminated waste water being released in nearby wetlands over a six-month period.Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the final episode of this seven-part series about mentoring, Ruth Gotian and Christine Pfund outline their hopes for post-pandemic mentoring and the changing nature of other collaborative relationships in scientific research.As lockdowns took hold and mentoring sessions went online, many conversations moved beyond workplace topics and led to honest exchanges about work-life balance for the first time, they say.The most successful relationships were ones where mentors led by example by showing their own vulnerabilities as they juggled home schooling, running labs, and trying to publish, they add.“The pandemic opened an opportunity for us to talk about what’s happening in our home life in a way that had never happened before,” says Pfund, a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Gotian, chief learning officer and assistant professor of education in anaesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, anticipates a future where early career researchers cast their net more widely when selecting mentors.“I think the pool of mentors has expanded exponentially, because we can easily and comfortably look outside of our department, outside of our institution and outside of our industryNo longer do we have to meet in person,” she says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Reverse mentoring, peer-to-peer, group sessions. Choose one or more to tackle a tough career transition.Andy Morris, employability mentoring manager at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, describes himself as a professional Cupid, connecting students who are seeking careers in industry with mentors who can help them achieve their goals.He tells Julie Gould how the employability mentors he works with in industry differ from the employer mentoring offered to researchers when they join an organization or take on a new role.Lucia Prieto-Gordino joined a mentoring programme after becoming a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London in 2018.“You unavoidably encounter situations that you have never encountered before. And your mentor is there to help you navigate those situations with their experience,” she says.And Carol Zuegner, an associate professor of journalism at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, describes the reverse mentoring sessions held with former students to help her navigate the digital age. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Many mentoring relationships were disrupted by the pandemic, particularly ones that relied on regular face-to-face contact.How did these established mentoring relationships survive the switch to virtual meetings?In the third episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series, Julie Gould also explores the challenges of being a mentor beyond those presented by the pandemic.Alongside the emotional investment and the absence of much formal training in mentoring techniques, there are also logistical and time management pressures.Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, tells Gould: “My role is to be a bit like an athletic coach. I want to help everyone be able to perform at their best. And different people have different modes of motivation.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Science has become more international in the past few decades. This means that you might encounter a variety of people from different geographical and cultural backgrounds in your lab. So how does this affect your mentoring relationships?In the second episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series, researchers share some of their cross-cultural mentoring encounters.These range from Asian attitudes to hierarchies, to a Scandinavian enthusiasm for peer-to-peer mentoring and a very British fixation with mentoring and afternoon tea. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How can science better support and reward academics who, alongside running labs, writing grants, authoring papers and teaching students, also devote precious hours of their working week to mentoring colleagues?In the first episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series, three winners of the 2020 Nature Research Awards for Mentoring in Science describe why this part of their role is so important and needs to be recognized more prominently. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Nature has a special issue on collaborations, looking at the benefits to science and society that working together can bring. In this collaboration-themed episode (produced jointly with the Nature Podcast and Working Scientist podcast teams), we discuss the issue, and the state of research collaborations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 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.

In the third episode of this six-part series about the skills needed to explain your research to a general audience, Pakinam Amer talks to scientists who left the lab to work as full-time science communicators in print, online and broadcast journalism.Often the biggest challenge some of them faced was telling family they were swapping the well-trodden career path of academic research for the more precarious field of science communication.Gareth Mitchell, a technology reporter and science communications lecturer who presents the BBC programme Digital Planet, tells Amer:“I was fine with the transfer and the lack of money and the insecurity and the randomness that came when I transferred from a reasonably safe and hard fought-for career in engineering into something much more uncertain and media-related, but my parents freaked out.“Maybe that's putting it a bit strongly, but they questioned me quite forensically about why on earth their wonderful bright engineering son would possibly want to get his hands dirty with a Masters course in communication and then busk it in the land of radio.”Buzzfeed science editor Azeen Ghorayshi was a fruit fly researcher until 2012, and recalls breaking news of her career switch to her parents, who fled to the US from Iran following the 1979 Revolution.“Journalism plays a very different role there. There’s state media, for example. It’s not a job that they thought of as being easy, or safe, or secure or prestigious. My dad wanted me to become a doctor. That’s a very common thing with immigrant parents.”How do you break into the field, either in a staff or freelance role? Do you need to complete an expensive graduate programme? Mitchell tells Amer: “Ask yourself why you want to do it, why it matters to you, and it’s OK to say because it’s cool and will make me happy.“But maybe you have a deeper reason. Perhaps you think your particular subject area or discipline is insufficiently represented in the wider media? Or maybe it’s over-represented, or misrepresented? Then tell yourself that you can do it, and then think about the mode.Are you the kind of person who might be better going round schools giving talks, or doing stand-up comedy in a science festival? Do you want to be a podcaster, a blogger, a vlogger, a YouTuber?”Finally, Ferris Jabr tells Amer about his work as a science writer and author, and his forthcoming book about the co-evolution of earth and life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

PhD programmes in "the rainbow nation" mostly lead to academic careers, but reform is needed to boost collaboration and integration, higher education experts tell Julie Gould.It's 25 years since since South Africa's first free elections swept Nelson Mandela to power as president.But higher education in the "rainbow nation" (a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe the post-apartheid era), could do more to encourage integration and collaboration between black, white and international students.Jonathan Jansen, a professor in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University, tells Julie Gould that despite seismic political change in 1994, education, research, and economics have not kept pace with the country's democratic transformation.Liezel Frick, director of the Centre for Higher and Adult Education at Stellenbosch University, says that around 60% of students are part-time, with many having staff positions at universities.Doctoral education still clings to a research-focused "Oxbridge model," she adds, and unlike programmes in North America does not offer credits for coursework and elective classes. "What is different is that we do not have an over-production of PhDs. A lot of PhDs still get absorbed into the academic sphere," she says. 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.

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.

In Kenya, where Moses Ngoze teaches entrepreneurship and management at Masinde Muliro University in Kakamega, micro, small and medium enterprises provide 75% of jobs and more than 80% of the country’s gross domestic product. Typically these organizations employ between one and 100 people and include subsistence farming, hospitality and artisan businesses, mostly operating in a jua kali environment, a Swahili term meaning “hot sun,” he says.Ngoze's research explores how the enterprises can help achieve full employment and sustained (and sustainable) economic growth by 2030, captured in Sustainable Development Goal 8, one of 17 agreed by the United Nations in 2015.He tells the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast that African economies and employment ambitions need more than multinational employers moving there. These firms only employ 10% of the world’s workforce, he says.Infrastructure improvements are also needed, Ngoze adds, alongside more reliable energy, stronger internet connectivity, and tax breaks for business. Government funding for university-based centres of enterprise development are also a priority.The podcast series profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 7-12 are produced in partnership with Nature Water, and introduced by Fabio Pulizzi, its chief editor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.