He also explores not only why we fear career failure but also (more mysteriously, he says) career success, and why boredom and regrets are a “phenomenal wake-up call” to be learnt from. 

The modern cult of work, May tells Holly Newson in the penultimate episode of this podcast series about books covering the scientific workplace, forces us onto a productivity treadmill that can sap our motivation. 

“If something becomes cold and alienating and simply production-oriented, it ceases to engage,” he says, highlighting some scenarios: “I need to get this out by Monday morning. My competitor in the next lab has produced three papers this year, and I’ve only produced one.” 

But how do you make an important personal or professional goal less important, less intimidating, and so more achievable? 

May, a visiting professor of philosophy at Kings College London, offers some strategies. This includes how he conquers his own procrastination as a book deadline looms, describing himself as someone who feels “paralyzed” by the importance of the project. 

May concludes with a warning about the “mirage of fulfilment”  felt by the 19th century Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Aged 50 and at the height of his fame, Tolstoy felt his life was meaningless. “One other thing to avoid is this sense that the destination is the key, that, once reached, will provide a sense of lasting fulfillment.” Instead, he argues, it’s the journey that counts. 

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His 2025 book, The Brain At Rest, proposes that regular bouts of doing nothing can change your life. Finding time to let your mind wander and take a daily 30-minute nap can make you more creative and efficient, he argues.

In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series focused on books about the scientific workplace, Jebelli describes the "productivity guilt" he felt during his neuroscience PhD at University College London, where he studied the cell biology of neurodegenerative diseases, followed by a postdoc at the University of Washington, Seattle. "It's the guilt in which you equate your worth as a human being with your output, with how many hours you're in the lab. If it were up to me, there would be a napping room in all laboratories. We have to get it out of our heads that we’re switching off, shirking, or being irresponsible or reckless. We’re actually helping our brains produce our best work.”

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Nonterah now works in medical communications and career counselling through The Bold PhD, a consultancy she set up in 2021, and a podcast, which she launched last year. Her 2025 book, Navigating the Pivot, promises strategies and insights to power career transitions from academia.

In the third episode of a podcast series focused on books about the scientific workplace, Nonterah, who is based in San Diego, California, tells Holly Newson how to tailor a CV or resume for industry employers.

Instead of focusing on publications, she urges industry job applicants to show evidence of problem-solving, a highly-prized skill in the sector. Another thing to include are examples of communicating their research to people beyond their academic specialty.

Nonterah then emphasizes the importance of networking, describes strategies to counter imposter syndrome, and offers advice on how to talk about career setbacks.

Finally, she talks about how to bounce back from being laid-off, based on her own experience. She tells Newson: “How do I turn this into my comeback? How do I turn this into a time where I rediscover myself, my skills, when I rebrand and reinvent myself.” 

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In the second episode of a podcast series focused on six books about the scientific workplace, Ashfield, whose 2025 book, Just F**king Say It, includes real-life case studies of both good and bad communication, says scientist interviewees are often burdened by the “curse of knowledge.” This means they include too much detail instead of focusing on telling a simple story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Ashfield, an actor-turned-communications coach based in London, tells Holly Newson that presenters often fail to rehearse a science conference talk sufficiently. They also default to listing their academic achievements rather than focusing on the messages that their audience needs to hear. In the case of an investor pitch, this could mean focusing on a technology’s potential to save lives, not a detailed description of the underlying science, she argues.

She also offers advice on how to approach networking, including tips on how to introduce yourself, keep conversations flowing, and how to politely move on to speak with other attendees. Finally, she offers advice on how to say no, handle difficult supervisors and pay negotiations.

Explaining why she named her book Just F**king Say It, and why people should care less about how they come across, she tells Newson: “We are all desperately, concerned about what other people think of us. When we overthink how we walk into a room, we put levels of pressure on ourselves that just shouldn’t be there. The ethos is to just care less. Let it go. See what happens. Enjoy it.”

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Fine, a psychologist and workplace gender-equity researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers a blueprint for a fairer society that does not single out women as “a problem to be fixed.​​​​​”

Describing the gender pay gap as largely a “motherhood pay gap,” she outlines how employers can support staff who return to work after a career break, without fostering resentment among colleagues. She also explains why many workplace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including unconscious bias training, are ineffective and can sometimes be offensive to the groups they aim to support.

Fine also draws on historical examples of women being pushed out when men enter professions in larger numbers, and the effect this can have on the workplace culture.

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Balsters relies on expertise he gained in psychology and neuroscience, both during his PhD and as an assistant professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. 

But when he made the decision to quit full-time academia in 2020, Balsters struggled to tell his colleagues because he worried that he had let them down.

“There’s a feeling...that you’ve taken up a space, taken an opportunity away from somebody else who would have wanted it more,” he says. “I felt much more comfortable talking to people who had done it, who had already left.” 

Ashley Ruba took a different tack. After completing her PhD in psychology at the University of Washington, Seattle, she spent three years as a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before doubling her salary in an industry role.  

After sharing her story on social media, Ruba was bombarded with messages from early career researchers who felt they couldn’t share their misgivings about remaining in academia with colleagues. 

“It seems like there’s a lot of shame, a lot of fear,” she tells Adam Levy in the final episode of Off Limits: an eight-part podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace. 

Previous episodes have covered religious faith, alcohol dependency, bereavement, fertility challenges, and coming out as a transgender scientist. 

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How good is the academic workplace at supporting women like Behie, a biological anthropology researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra? “The primary feeling was just this guilt that I had prioritized trying to get where I was in my career over my family. That’s not a way anyone should ever feel,“ she says. 

Behie is joined by Karen Jones, whose research focus at the University of Reading, UK, includes women’s career advancement and gender equality in higher education. Jones says the precarity of research careers is often most pronounced at the point when many researchers are contemplating parenthood, telling Levy: “It’s not uncommon for people to be employed on one temporary contract after another possibly for several years. And this often coincides with the age at which people are making decisions about having a family.”  

Finally, Wendy Dossett, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Chester, UK, describes the pressures facing women in academia to juggle career and family ambitions, saying: “I suffered a bit from the assumption that I must be a child-free career woman, when, in truth, I was a broken-hearted, childless woman.” 

Off Limits is a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace. 

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Krista Harrison, a geriatrics researcher at University of California, San Francisco, recalls colleagues being very supportive when she suffered a spate of deaths in her family. But overall she needed advice, direction and resources and, ideally, a year off from having to think about writing grants. She set up a grief group and wrote articles calling for academia to shift norms and expectations around loss and bereavement leave.

In 2023 a colleague of Katie Derington, a cardiovascular researcher at University of Colorado Anschutz in Aurora, died of a chronic illness after being hospitalized for around a month. At the time of her death she was co-author on a series of papers with Derington and other colleagues.

Derington describes having to contact her colleague’s grieving widower to complete documentation related to the team’s soon-to-be-published article. This icky” experience also prompted her to write an article ​​​​​​​calling for academic publishers to show more compassion to bereaved authors.

But how do you juggle mourning a colleague with a lengthy to-do list at work? Putting off an administrative task for a couple of months is okay, Derington says. There’s very, very few things in academia that are truly the fire is on the house.”

Shannon Bros, an emeritus ecologist at San Jose State University in California, says support from counselling team colleagues would have helped when her department chair died of cancer. But seeing people having a good time on campus provided an epiphany. I looked around and went, ‘How many times have I walked anywhere and not seen people in pain? It changed me.​​​​​​​’”

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Dossett, now an emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of Chester, UK, says that as an early career researcher she saw alcohol as the fuel to her academic life, driving her creativity and making the social elements of academic life easier to navigate. When, in her 30s, a colleague suggested she might need help, Dosett says she felt a “mixture of horror and absolute gratitude that somebody had the courage and care for me.” She went on to research the spiritual elements of recovery from addiction, which she says is less talked about in academia than, say, depression and anxiety.

Victoria Burns, a social work scholar at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, founded Recovery on Campus Alberta after telling her Dean that she had an alcohol dependence. He told her she was the first academic to disclose in his 26-year career, prompting her to research other Deans’ experiences of faculty disclosing addiction and recovery. 

This is the fifth episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace, including religion, bereavement, activism and sizeism. 

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In the fourth episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace, she tells Adam Levy: “I would love for academic scientists to recognize that religious scientists can be good scientists, to break down some of their own stereotypes, and to see religion as just one of those identities that sits along other sides, other identities, like one’s social class and background.” 

Ecklund, who leads the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says that despite the reticence felt by many religious scientists, many of their colleagues are in fact quite open to their colleagues’ beliefs, based on her research. But some marginalized groups can face particular challenges.

Maisha Islam, research culture lead at the University of Southampton, UK, shares her experiences of alienation as a British Bangladeshi Muslim woman. These range from a lack of accommodations to comments made by colleagues. “We almost put a target on our backs for having advocated for them in the first place. We are constantly pushing at closed doors,” she says.

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Newbold, a PhD student in plant pathology and diversity, equity and inclusion advocate at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, says the feedback made her feel “as someone who doesn’t want to be perceived as the complaining fat person.”

They are joined by Katharine Hubert, who was diagnosed by Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, shortly after starting a PhD at the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2019. The two researchers discuss some of the workplace accommodations and attitudinal changes that could make academia a more welcoming environment.

This is the third episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace.

Previous episodes feature activist academics who join campus protests and civil disobedience activities. Future episodes will include the experiences of religious scientists at work, and bereavement.

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The open letter that Beisel and others signed didn’t take a position on the conflict, but instead called on university leadership to defend free speech and the right to peaceful process. But Uli — alongside several other of the 1000- plus signatories — was named and pictured in the Bild newspaper. There, she and others were labelled a “university perpetrator” complicit in “Israel hate”. 

Beisel, a human geography researcher at the institution, says the tone of some of the reporting made her fear for her safety on campus. She also worried about how colleagues and students would react. The university responded by offering legal advice and issued a statement that they valued our opinion, says Beisel. 

After the story appeared it was reported that Germany’s higher education ministry had looked into stripping some signatories of federal funding. 

In the second episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace, Adam Levy investigates tensions that sometimes surface when academics become activists. 

Beisel is joined by climate scientist Peter Kalmus. Kalmus dates his activism back to 2006 when he was midway through a physics PhD at Columbia University, New York, and had just become a father for the first time.  

Speaking in a personal capacity, Kalmus, who is now based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, described the arrival of his older son as “a kick in the pants,” making him “think more broadly about the world and what the world was going to be like when he was grown up.” In April 2022 Kalmus and three colleagues padlocked themselves to a JPMorganChase bank entrance in Los Angeles, California, in protest at fossil fuel financing. 

The two researchers discuss how institutions can better support scholars whose concern for human rights and the future of the planet, often informed by their own research, leads to activism. Kalmus concludes: “I think we’re here to try to make a better world for everyone. Being part of this struggle is in some ways really joyful and really meaningful. I definitely do not want to sit on the sidelines.” 

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Bros, an emeritus ecologist at San Jose State University in California, describes the personal pressures that led to the decision and the reservations she had at the time. "I had a perfect life. I had a fabulous marriage. I had kids. I have always been respected in my department. The last thing I wanted to do was transition.” 

She describes the support she received, from female colleagues in particular, as she rebuilt relationships. “I spent a lot of energy saying, 'Don’t worry about pronouns, just get to know me again. I’m pretty much the same person.'” As a result, she adds, “I became the best teacher I’ve ever been. I became a fabulous advisor.”  

Bros is joined by Kihana Wilson, a computational physics PhD student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Wilson describes the “invisibility/hypervisibility paradox” faced by Black queer female scholars like her, who work in predominantly white, male disciplines.  

She adds: “My hope is that the way that we think about how science and academia should be organized, the ideas we have about who are true scientists, and how scientists should look and fit into academic spaces, evolves and expands.” 

Off Limits is a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the academic workplace.

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“You’re not your job. You are who you are,” she says. “And you can build a really fulfilling career by following who you are, and keeping your eyes on the full range of opportunities available to you to be who you are. And it’s not going to be one thing.

“In research careers, people get locked into this idea that there’s really only one pathway, and that’s the only way you can make use of your research skills and your research interests. And it’s so untrue.”

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Shortly after embarking on a PhD at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, Katja Loos’ supervisor relocated to the University of Bayreuth, taking his team with him. But weeks later he died of an aggressive cancer.

Loos, who is now a polymer chemistry researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, describes how she worked through the various choices and challenges she faced as a result of her supervisor’s sudden death, and why she abandoned plans for an industry career.

Funding struggles in Argentina led to paleontologist Mariana Viglino relocating to Germany. But before moving she describes how a very prescribed career path denied her the opportunity to think about her long-term plans.

Tomasz Glowacki says abandoning a rigid career plan helped him to better navigate the various challenges he faced after completing a PhD in computer science at Poznan University of Technology, Poland, in 2013.

Finally, Julia Yates, an organizational psychologist and careers coach at City St George’s, University of London, reassures early career researchers facing a sudden disruption to their careers. It’s fine, she says, to put career planning on hold. Sometimes paying bills and putting food on the table has to take priority.

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Holly Prescott, a careers guidance practitioner at the University of Birmingham, UK, suggests a slightly alternative approach, whereby a professional reflects on their experiences to decide what they would like more or less of in their current or future role.

Listing the things you want to keep, lose or add in a job description, she argues, enables researchers to have happier working lives.

In her view, the technique is preferable to devising a plan at the early career stage and then slavishly following it. This course of action, she says, does not account for new skills, technologies and life events that can open up fresh opportunities.

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Instead of chasing job titles at defined points in his career to help him achieve his goal, Smith says he focused on winning specific grants that enabled him to do “cool science and solve problems” along the way. But becoming a parent and needing to earn a higher salary led to a rethink. 

Milicia Radisic, a cell and tissue engineer at the University of Toronto, Canada, left Serbia during the Yugoslav War in the 1990s, motivated in part by problems accessing scientific journals to develop her career expertise.

Radisic tells Gould that she now encourages her students to work on both high and low risk projects simultaneously. Having this kind of contingency plan protects them if, say, a high-impact paper in Science or Nature doesn’t work out. She also recommends that junior colleagues allocate plenty of time to regularly think about their career path and the direction it is taking. 

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But one limitation of IDPs is that they don’t always take personal lives and values into account, says Symmons, who is now a programme manager at the European Innovation Council, the EU funding agency for breakthrough innovation, based in Brussels. In her case she needed to accommodate family priorities also, alongside her own career ambitions.

In the second episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on career planning, Julie Gould assesses how IDPs compare to more formal coaching sessions with careers guidance professionals, who either work on a one-to-one basis or in small groups to help researchers plan their careers.

“I act as a kind of mirror,” says careers coach Sarah Blackford. Blackford and other career coaches who feature in the episode say they ask clients open questions and then reflect back they’ve told her about their skills, ambitions, priorities and personal circumstances. The next step, Blackford adds, is to help them develop an action plan to identify their longer-term goals.

Each episode in this series concludes with a sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) with the support of the China Association for Science and Technology.

The ISC is exploring perspectives on career development in a changing world through conversations with emerging and established scientists on themes such as policy, AI, transdisciplinarity, mental health and international collaboration.

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In the first episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning in science, Fatimah Williams, founder of Professional Pathways, a training and coaching company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says: “People get lost because they’re either just kind of getting head down, getting the work done. They’re not popping up every so often to say: 'Am I where I want to be? Do I have the skills to get where I want to go? Do I have the relationships to get where I want to go next?' ”

Williams is joined by careers consultant Sarah Blackford. Blackford, whose clients include European universities and research institutes, describes some of the career planning frameworks that can help identify longer-term goals, including her own PhD Career Choice Indicator.

Cynthia Fuhrmann, who leads the Professional Development Hub, a US-based initiative to help early career scientists, says career planning falls into three phases. This involves building awareness of yourself and your needs and priorities, and then investigating different types of career paths, before finally preparing for roles you might be interested in.

The episode concludes with Julia Yates, an organizational psychologist at City St George’s University in London. Yates outlines her own research, which looked at less formal career planning strategies employed by recent graduates as they searched for jobs.

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To tackle the challenge, Paudel developed the Women in STEM Network Database, a resource aimed at building a strong mentoring community of female scientists across the Himalayan kingdom. Paudel also runs workshops, training sessions and seminars to help equip women with technical skills, research methodologies and leadership training.  

Her advice to female colleagues? “If you face barriers, also break them, not just for yourself, but for the next generation of women in STEM. Your journey can inspire change that that also you need to think.  And most importantly, enjoy the process. Science is about curiosity, discovery and innovation. So stay passionate, keep learning and trust that you are making a difference.” 

Paudel, who is based at the Centre for Natural and Applied Sciences in Kathmandu, is the final researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work. 

Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series' aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature's Black Employee Network. 

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Trejo, a pharmacologist whose research helps to develop drugs to treat vascular diseases, says her mentor colleagues understand that their mission and responsibility is training the next generation of scientists and providing opportunities for them. She describes the people who supported her at the early career stage, and the impact they had. “When I reflect on my life and I think about how a poor Mexican American farm worker kid from an impoverished background, became a scientist professor, it’s actually extraordinary,” she says. 

Trejo is the seventh researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work. 

Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series' aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature's Black Employee Network. 

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Lee’s efforts to bridge the Native American worldview with Western science stem from childhood walks with her nálí (paternal grandmother), who pointed out the medicinal properties of plants, and an undergraduate professor who was interested in Lee's background and how Indigenous values and culture could be applied to organic chemistry. 

Lee, an associate professor whose research focus includes the microbial makeup of acid mine drainage in the mountains and rivers surrounding Durango, is the sixth researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work.

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Khodayari, an environmental scientist at Cal State LA, a minority-serving institution where more than 75% of students identify as Hispanic, says their partnership came about when they co-hosted a student intern who was seeking to turn her summer research project at JPL into a master's thesis. Barge's JPL lab explores the potential for the emergence of life on other worlds, more than a decade ago.

The pair realized they could create more projects that are focused at the intersection of astrobiology and environmental science. ​​​​​​

Khodayari, a first generation college student who grew up in Iran before moving to the US aged 24 for a PhD at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, describes her passion for teaching and research, and how the two scientific disciplines are a good fit. They combine a focus on ecosystems and habitability of planets, she says.

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Marivate also co-founded the startup Lelapa AI, inspired this time by the Setswana word for home. An early project for the company, which aims to be a home for the top AI talent and researchers in Africa, was to build natural language processing systems for Africa languages. There are more than 2000 of them, he says.

The computer scientist, based at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, is the fourth researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work.

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Amano, whose first language is Japanese, describes how dismantling language barriers will result in improved knowledge sharing, and in the long run, better research.

Journals, he argues, can help by taking steps to distinguish the quality of science from the quality of language when assessing manuscripts. And conference organizers can adopt a range of measures to support presenters and attendees whose first language is not English.

The biodiversity researcher is one of eleven scientists leading TranslatE, a project which strives to make environmental science more accessible to non-fluent English speakers.

AI and translation tools can bring huge benefits to researchers like him, he says, but they won’t all have been trained on many of the world’s estimated 7000 different languages, deepening inequities in science. Cost is another factor, particularly for those in global south countries. “People from high income countries may be more likely to benefit from those emerging AI technologies,” he says.

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In the second episode of an eight-part podcast series to accompany Nature's Changemakers in science Q&A series, collection, Dajani, a daughter of refugees, talks about some formative influences and how she now collaborates with Jordan’s Circassian and Chechen populations, who were violently evicted from their homelands almost two hundred years ago. “I had a treasure trove in my backyard to discover novel gene risk factors for disease that nobody else had discovered, because of their very unique gene pool,” she says.

Changemakers launched last year as a follow-up to the journal's Racism in Science special issue.

Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series' aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature's Black Employee Network.

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Black says the Indigenous values that she applies in her role include te pono, which stands for truth, honesty and integrity, te aroha, encompassing respect and reciprocity, and te tika, a term that means doing what is right, in the right way, for the right reasons.

The soil chemist is the first of eight scientists to feature in a podcast series to accompany Nature's Changemakers in science Q&A series, which launched last year as a follow-up to the journal's Racism in Science special issue.

Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series' aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature's Black Employee Network.

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Now eight of the 21 Changemakers who have appeared in the series so far revisit their stories in a podcast series that also explores their career journeys and the impage of their research.

Kendall Powell, the senior careers editor who launched the article series in May last year, explains how and why it came about, and the criteria for choosing a Changemaker.

“The inclusive practices that these researchers follow result in richer collaborations and ultimately better science,” Powell tells Deborah Daley, who is global chair of Springer Nature's Black Employee Network, and the series host.

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Lauren Celano, a careers coach who co-founded Propel Careers, based in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2009, defines a high-calibre candidate as someone who hits up to 70% of the technical things being asked for in a job spec, plus being a strong team player with good communication skills.

David Perlmutter, a communications researcher at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, says recruiters today are seeking what he terms Renaisance people who are able to demonstrate eight or nine qualities and qualifications. Thirty years ago, there might have been just two requirements listed on a job ad. “We’re asking too much of them, so of course they’re coming up short,” he says.

Julie Gould tests Perlmutter’s hypothesis by comparing a 1995 job ad in Nature for a postdoctoral researcher with one posted this year, at the same organisation. The results are revealing.

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Jen Heemstra, a chemistry researcher and lab leader at Washington University in St. Louis, warns of a mismatch when a candidate submits a thoughtful and reflective application, but these qualities aren’t evident at interview. Fatimah Williams, an executive careers coach at Professional Pathways, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recommends using it as a “thinking partner” by giving it appropriate prompts to help with documentation and identify career goals. Holly Prescott, a careers transition specialist based in Birmingham, UK, suggests that candidates who are looking to move, say, from academia to industry, could use AI to explain jargon in a job ad.

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In either setting, they say, negotiation should not be a battleground. Hiring managers should not take advantage of a beloved future colleague who may have zero experience of negotiating anything, says David Perlmutter, a communications researcher at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, who writes about hiring and salary negotiations.

Nor is it like a car sale, adds Jen Heemstra, a chemistry researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, after which the two sides part company forever. “In an academic negotiation if there’s a winner and a loser, then you’ve really both lost,” she says.

Perlmutter advises early career researchers to build confidence by practicing salary negotiation with a colleague before doing it for real. “No matter what’s going on, try to be respectful, friendly and positive,” he says.

Margot Smit, a plant molecular biologist at Tübingen University, Germany, and Lauren Celano, a careers coach who co-founded Propel Careers, based in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2009, lists non-pay elements to work into a negotiation.

This is the fourth episode in a six-part podcast series about hiring in science.

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Margot Smit and Dietmar Hutmacher compare their approaches to hiring and how generational influences might shape how they respond to candidates.

Smit, a plant molecular biologist who became a group leader at Tübingen University Germany, in late 2023, and Hutmacher, a regenerative medicine researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, list what they look for at interview. Coming from different generations, one with a background in industry, do they differ?

This is the third episode in a six-part podcast series about hiring in science.

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Persson, whose coaching business is called passage2pro, tells Gould why it typically takes longer to hire scientists in academia. Margot Smit, a plant molecular biologist who now recruits scientists for her lab at Tübingen University in Germany, reflects on her own experiences as an academic jobseeker in 2022. It involved panel interviews, lab tours, team dinners, and, in one case, a symposium where all candidates gave a talk. Now, as someone who recruits scientists to her lab, she involves junior colleagues in hiring decisions.

Jen Heemstra tells a similar tale. Her search for a department chair position in 2022 meant moving not only herself but also her entire chemistry research group to Washington University in St. Louis. She explains how she updated her colleagues and addressed their questions and concerns about the impending move.

Finally, Rachel Howard describes how she hopes to make the process quicker and easier for hiring managers at the Francis Crick Institute in London, where she is head of talent acquisition.

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Wisby, a physicist and former chief executive of Oxford Quantum Circuits, which builds quantum computers from its base in Reading, UK, says recruiters use interviews to gauge a candidate’s values, their emotional intelligence, and their growth potential. Asking someone how they received difficult feedback, she adds, is a test of their humility and willingness to admit mistakes, and what they learned from them.

The episode begins with Linda Nordling, a freelance science writer who led coverage of Nature’s 2024 global hiring in science survey, talking about some of the surprising things that caught her eye in the data.

Future episodes include insights from a careers coach about industry hiring trends, and how an academic research institute based in London is centralizing its postdoc hiring process.

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Korreck, who experienced pandemic-related burnout while working on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, describes a competitive and ultimately damaging ‘lone wolf’ culture. She is joined by psychologist Desiree Dickerson to discuss how a stronger focus on group success can better protect researchers.

Dickerson also calls for improved onboarding processes for early career researchers. They should involve clear conversations about looming challenges, including first person accounts from people who faced work-related stress, anger, anxiety and depression, she argues.

“If we only value papers and funding, then of course, we protect those who have great papers and bring in lots of funding. We don’t look after the well-being of the people who actually need to be looked after,” she says.

Social and clinical psychologist Ciro De Vincenzo reflects on the positive emotions he felt and witnessed during a fieldwork project as part of his research into migration patterns in the European Union.

In contract, his experience of academic life at the University of Padua, Italy, was often less positive, pervaded by a strong sense of imposter syndrome and professional isolation. But being elected to the university senate enabled him to explore the systemic changes needed to improve researcher mental health, he says.

And finally, Tammy Steeves, a conservation genomicist at the University of Canterbury in Chistchurch, New Zealand, describes her involvement in the Kindness in Science initiative, a movement to counter many of the perverse incentives that pervade academia, and its achievements to date.

This is the final episode of this eight-part podcast series Mind matters: academia’s mental health crisis.

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“We are not very good at taking the spotlight off ourselves, a pressure that can lead to burnout other mental health problems, adds Dickerson, who is based in Valencia, Spain.

To boost workplace well-being, Ellen Wehrens describes the impact of a happiness programme that was introduced in 2019 to her lab at the Princess Máxima paediatric oncology centre in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The programme includes both a buddying system and a colour-coded index that enables individuals to signal to colleagues how they are feeling. “So green, you are doing great, yellow, not so much, and red, you are not doing well,” explains Wehrens.

Ana Pineda, an ecologist who now runs I focus and write, an education and coaching business, says she began practicing yoga and meditation after feeling stressed at work. At the same time she also actively enlisted the support of friends and colleagues, describing them as “angels.” Meditation, she adds, enables her to find joy, even when faced with daunting tasks.

This episode is the penultimate one in Mind Matters, an eight-part podcast series on mental health and wellbeing in academia.

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Ruth Cerezo-Mota, a climate scientist based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, found herself grieving for the state of the

planet through her work for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Experiencing a panic attack at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a fear of checking emails and a sense of disengagement from work, led to her seeking professional help. “I was in a really dark place,” she tells Adam Levy. Retreating to a “happy place” that combines home, books, yoga, running, cats and wine is a key copying strategy when things get tough, she says.

Similar experiences are recounted by Dave Reay, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh UK, and Daniel Gilford, a meteorologist who works at Climate Central, a science-led non-profit based in Princeton, New Jersey, that researches and reports the facts about climate change and its effects on peoples lives.

Talking to other climate researchers and focusing on positive developments around climate change also helps, says Reay. Gilford, who is based in Orlando, Florida, likens climate change to being in the path of an approaching train: “I can see it coming with all of its weight and heaviness, and I’m screaming ‘Stop. Stop the train. Stop the train.’

“By screaming, by saying what is happening, by naming the problem and telling people about it, I think that that can become a solution as well,” he says.

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She had previously been targeted by threats and harassment as a result of media and US congressional appearances to inform the public about the emerging pathogen. These were often focused on her race and gender. Concerned for her safety, Kuppalli went to the police twice. She was told to get a weapon.

She tells Adam Levy how employers can support colleagues who face harassment, and the measures she took to protect herself.

Kuppalli is joined by Atom Lesiak, a transgender non-binary genome sciences researcher based in Houston, Texas. Lesiak now runs Atomic Brains, a science tutoring and coaching organisation.

Being open about their gender as a PhD student and beyond brought profound challenges. It forced them to question their decision to pursue a career in academia.

This episode is the fifth in Mind Matters, an eight-part series on mental health and wellbeing in academia.

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In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic deprived Korreck, an astrophysicist then working on NASA's Parker Solar Probe, of the favourite parts of her job. These included face-to-face mentoring, public engagement and conference travel. ”It really took a toll,” she says. ”There was none of the joy that I experienced previously. I thought it was my fault, that I was an imposter. I had gotten to this level, and I just wasn't good enough.”

Desiree Dickerson, a clinical psychologist based in Valencia, Spain, outlines the different stages of burnout, and how the academic culture often encourages researchers to present a ”shiny façade” to the world.

Dickerson, who works with academic institutions to develop healthier and more sustainable approaches to research, outlines three different stages of burnout, and how and when to seek help.

This episode is the fourth in Mind Matters, an eight-part series on mental health and wellbeing in academia.

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A heart attack in 2016 forced Lashuel, a neurogenerative diseases researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, to question success in science and how it is defined.

The pressure to be an excellent researcher, manager, accountant and mentor can exact a heavy mental toll, he says.

Since his heart attack Lashuel has taken steps to reduce his workload and spend more time with his family, but also to lobby for systemic change in academia to better support faculty colleagues who are struggling.

Climate scientist Dave Reay describes the mental health problems he experienced as a PhD student and the suicidal thoughts it triggered.

Now, as a faculty member at the University of Edinburgh, UK, he is protective of family time, talks openly about the struggles he faced, and champions kindness at work and in his pastoral role as a supervisor.

Finally, Michelle Kimple, an endocrinology researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison, describes how junior colleagues react to her openness about her bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

This episode is the third in an eight-part series about mental health and wellbeing in academia.

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But socially camouflaging and striving to appear as neurotypical to others led to burnout and poor mental health, she tells Adam Levy.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which straddled her Masters and PhD programmes, was a turning point. She cultivated a community via social media, becoming an advocate for neurodiversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Being neurodivergent brings benefits to her role as a biological teaching technician at the University of Newcastle, UK, she says. She offers advice and how and when to disclose an autism diagnosis at work, based on her own experience, and how institutions and lab mates can support neurodivergent colleagues.

Endocrinology researcher Michelle Kimple tells a similar story, recounting the relief she felt on receiving a bipolar and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis.

She describes how this impacts her role as a faculty member in the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

In 2024 Kimple wrote about her experiences in Nature, prompting other neurodiverse scientists to get in touch, and enabling her to mentor and support others.

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Desiree Dickerson is a clinical psychologist based in Valencia, Spain, who works with academic institutions to develop healthier and more sustainable approaches to research. She joins Simone Lackner to discuss why poor mental health is often so prevalent in academia, and often described as reaching crisis proportions.

Lackner is a multidisciplinary researcher and ambassador for the Researcher Mental Health Observatory (REmO), an international network focussed on wellbeing and mental health within academia. In 2022 she founded The Empathic Scientist, a consultancy which focuses on wellbeing and inclusion in academia.

This episode is the first of an eight-part series on mental health and wellbeing in academia. Over the next few weeks Adam Levy will be speaking with a wide range of people who share their own experiences and expertise, including potential solutions to a longstanding problem.

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Curtis, whose movies include Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually and the Bridget Jones series, is also a UN Advocate for the SDGs. The meeting in Trollbäck’s New York studio suddenly turned to the 17 goals, with Curtis telling him: “I think this may be our last shot of fixing a lot of the things that’s wrong with the planet. And I also think that these goals are going to fail if we can't make them popular. Do you want to help me?”

Trollbäck, founder of The New Division agency, rose to the challenge. Over the course of a year, alongside designer colleague Christina Rüegg-Grässli, he designed the now famous multi-colour palette, individual icons and logo of the SDGs.

Their design had to tick three boxes: be accessible, universal and positive. The interconnectedness of the goals leant itself to the overall circular logo type, and the bright colours were key to making the framework interesting and likeable.

Some icons were almost instantaneous in their creation — such as the fish that represents SDG 14: Life Below Water — while others needed collaboration with the UN communications team colleagues to get right.

For example, Trollbäck remembers SDG 2: Zero Hunger; the initial design had a fork in it, until someone pointed out that two thirds of the of the world’s population don't use forks.

The World Economic Forum say 74% of the adults globally are aware of the SDGs.

This is the final episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 13–18 are produced in partnership with Nature Sustainability, and introduced by Monica Contestabile, its chief editor.

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Breaking down a big goal into smaller component parts and bringing together different interested parties, as Vinnova did, is key to delivering the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), says Kate Roll, a political scientist based at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College, London.

Roll’s particular focus is the last of the 17 SDGs with its focus on strengthening the means of implementation. Roll calls it an “enabling SDG,” its success ultimately measured when the other 16 “big, wooly, hairy SDG goals,” as she terms them, are achieved. These straddle poverty, hunger, education, gender equity, clean water and energy, among others.

Roll explains that one approach to tackling SDG 13’s climate change targets, for example, might be to aim for 100 carbon-neutral cities in Europe by 2030, approaching it from both a transport and energy perspective, but also the built environment, real estate, and people’s behaviour, and bringing together relevant stakeholders, as Vinnova did for its food systems goal.

This is the penultimate episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 13–18 are produced in partnership with Nature Sustainability, and introduced by Monica Contestabile, its chief editor.

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Jacobs works at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where she researches the role artificial intelligence (AI) can play in public safety and the ethical debate surrounding this.

She describes how experiments are being conducted on beaches in the Netherlands to see if AI can be used to predict human behaviour. These experiments also test the ethical, legal and social implications of this use of AI, and question who has the power to choose the definitions used in the algorithms.  

Jacobs’ work addresses Sustainable Development Goal Number 16: to promote peaceful and inclusive societies and justice for all. 

This is episode 16 of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist series podcast that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs.   Episodes 13–18 are produced in partnership with Nature Sustainability, and introduced by Monica Contestabile, its chief editor.

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The goal, one of 17 agreed by the United Nations in 2015. aims to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. This includes sustainable forest management, combating desertification, and halting biodiversity loss.

Indonesia, where Samito grew up, aims to restore 1.2 million hectare of peatlands and 600,000 hectares of mangroves, he tells How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series. Ultimately these efforts must involve local communities and needs to deliver benefits for them, he says.

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But Orcutt says there is so much we still don't know about the deep sea, which is a problem for the sustainable development of this environment. Orcutt works at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay, Maine, where her research helps to understand how deep-sea mining might impact unique ocean communities.

Research on similarly destructive activities, such as deep-sea trawling, show decades-long recovery times for keystone species such as corals and sponges, or in some cases no recovery at all.

Orcutt works through the Crustal Ocean Biosphere Research Accelerator (COBRA) project funded by the US National Science Foundation to bring academics, policymakers and science communicators together to accelerate research about the deep sea and translate that knowledge for decision makers.

This is episode 14 of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist series podcast that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Orcutt's work addresses Sustainable Development Goal number 14: to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine sources.

Episodes 13–18 are produced in partnership with Nature Sustainability, and introduced by Monica Contestabile, its chief editor.

This episode ends with a sponsored slot from La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food in Melbourne, Australia, where we hear about how its researchers are focusing on the SDGs and the university’s holistic approach to food security.

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Labs are estimated to use 10 times more energy and five times more water than office spaces, she says, and the average bench scientist uses around 10 times more single-use plastics than the average person. 

Kilcoyne, who works at the Marine Institute, a government agency responsible for marine research, in Galway, Ireland, describes how their efforts feed into the thirteenth of 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015 (to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts). 

How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that profiles scientists whose work addresses one or more of the SDGs. Episodes 13–18 are produced in partnership with Nature Sustainability, and introduced by Monica Contestabile, its chief editor.

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Inger Mewburn, who leads research and development training at the Australian National University in Canberra, tells her: “There’s a fine line between being around and being valued, to being around and kind of being a pain in the ass and no one will tell you to go away.”

Gould also talks to scientists who, despite reaching retirement age, continue to engage with younger colleagues, enjoying positive interactions at conferences and co-authoring papers.

They include Heather Middleton, who started trawling England’s Jurassic Coast in her 60s, looking for specimens that might lead to a deeper understanding of palaeontology. Middleton, who is approaching her 80th birthday, taught science in schools and colleges, and in retirement balances her fossil-hunting, (and the collaboration opportunities it brings), with family holidays, grandchildren, friends and Tai Chi. "It’s a great balance, which I hope other retiring scientists will be able to enjoy such opportunities that I’ve had," she says.

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But in the United States, when the principal investigator leaves it is likely the lab itself will close down, Gould discovers. For microbiologist Roberto Kolter, emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, this meant gradually downsizing his team before retirement, so all members had a clear timeframe in which to finish their work.

Often what happens to the contents of a lab is decided by the institution. Equipment such as freezers are often given to other research groups, while unique resources — such as Kolter’s 10,000 strong collection of bacterial strains created from his years of research — are kept and managed by the institution.

Chemist Craig Merlic, executive director of the University of California Center for Laboratory Safety in Los Angeles, stresses that it is important to think about the fate of hazardous lab materials to prevent future accidents.

Sometimes there isn’t time to plan, as experienced by immunologist Carol Shoshkes Reiss at New York University, when she had to suddenly close her lab due to a lack of funds. Shoshkes Reiss shares the surprising feeling she experienced after this abrupt closure — relief.

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Carol Shoshkes Reiss, an immunologist at New York University, explains how her institution assigns individual wealth managers to advise on retirement investments and budgeting.

Inger Mewburn, who leads researcher training at the Australian National University in Canberra, chose a private accountant to manage her finances, who probes not only her approach to risk around investments, but also potential retirement dates and her income expectations.

Entomologist Matan Shelomi, associate professor at the National Taiwan University in Taipei and originally a citizen of the United States, describes how he has had to amend his retirement plans as an expat academic.

Gerontologist Stacey Gordon works with Shoshkes Reiss at New York University as part of a personalised program to support individuals with the mental and social aspects of their retirement, helping colleagues to find purpose and meaning in retirement.

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Microbiologist Roberto Kolter, emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, is keen to show others that retirement is a joyous time and a chance to broaden one’s scientific area of interest. It can also bring with it new speaking and travel opportunities.

Experimental physicist Athene Donald is soon to complete a 10-year stint as master of Churchill College at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Donald tells Gould how she is handling the nervousness that comes with the arrival of a second retirement phase, and what she is doing to balance continued involvement in academia with the slower pace of life.

Inger Mewburn, who leads research training at the Australian National University in Canberra, and Pat Thompson, education researcher at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, acknowledge how hard it can be to give up something that has given you purpose and drive for so many years.

Some, such as Thompson, have developed hobbies alongside their working careers that they are looking forward to doing more as they step back from academia. Both Mewburn and Thompson agree that an important part of the process is figuring out which parts of your working identity, such as writer or educator, you want to carry through to retirement.

This is the third episode of the six-part podcast series: The last few miles: planning for the late-stage career in science.

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Roger Baldwin, a retired researcher of higher education at Michigan State University in East Lansing and chair of the US Association of Retirement Organizations in Higher Education (AROHE), a membership organization based in Los Angeles, California, describes it instead as “an open ended period after one’s main professional employment that has almost infinite potential opportunities” — academic or otherwise.

Some take on the role of an emeritus professor, an honorary title that grants the holder continued involvement with their university. Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and emeritus professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, continues to serve on university boards and advise on science policy.

Carlos García Canal, a physicist at the University of La Plata in Argentina, took the emeritus title after forced retirement 15 years ago (aged 65) so that he could continue teaching at the institution.

An alternative option for academics is an adjunct professorship, which human molecular biologist and geneticist Juergen Reichardt selected. It enables him to continue in a research role at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia.

It can be difficult deciding whether to continue with a role in academia after retiring or to switch to something different. Health and family considerations can have a big impact on this decision. As Baldwin explains, it can be hard to balance the freedom and flexibility offered by retirement with continued academic commitments.

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Working backwards from your planned retirement date can help you to re-evaluate your priorities and predict the challenges the next few years might bring. But in many countries there is no set retirement age, so it can be difficult to know when to start preparing.

Scientists from across the globe talk to Julie Gould about their different approaches, from reviewing timelines and forming succession plans to returning to the lab.

Inger Mewburn, who leads research training at the Australian National University in Canberra, and Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and former president of Princeton University in New Jersey, highlight the importance of thinking about and planning for the future.

This is the first episode of the six-part podcast series: The last few miles: planning for the late stage career in science.

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Sonja Salmon describes advances in enzymatic processes to deconstruct and then recycle mixed fibre garments made from both polyester and cotton, alongside the environmental costs of producing and transporting clothes in the first place. “Technically, there are going to be some challenges in it. But that’s why we’re scientists, right? That's what we do,” says Salmon, who is based at Wilson College of Textiles in Raleigh, North Carolina.

How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that 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.

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In April, 50 images from Nature’s weekly Where I Work section, a photo essay which depicts an individual researcher at work, went on display in London’s Kings Cross district.

The photographs were chosen to reflect the diversity of scientific careers, and in the words of senior careers editor Jack Leeming, to demonstrate that “scientists aren’t all wacky lab-coated, round-goggled people from the science fiction film Back to the Future.”

In this Working Scientist podcast, Julie Gould visits the exhibition with a group of 12-13 year-old female pupils from London’s Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, where she repeats the Draw a Scientist test, based on their perceptions of scientists. The children draw two pictures, one before and one after viewing the 50 photographs. Gould then asks them how their perceptions have changed, based on what they have seen.

As one pupil put it after seeing the exhibition, which closes later this month: “You can be a scientist in almost any part of the world. You could be involved with flowers, with the ocean, with weather, with space. You can do anything.”

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Cheah outlines some challenges to meeting targets in the eleventh of 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015 (making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable) by 2030. In part these rely on more cities using the data-driven and centrally-planned approach taken by Singapore, the south Asian city state in which she grew up and worked until recently, she argues.

Informal transport options such as tuktuk rikshaws in Thailand and shared taxi matatus in Kenya, for example, can present a barrier to delivering smarter cities, but they also have advantages. She explains why.

“I am very optimistic that good science and knowledge does exist to help us, you know, track the path towards sustainable urban development,” she says. “It’ll take lots of work. It’ll take public-private partnerships. It’ll take some credible financing, lots of capacity building.”

How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that 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.

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How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that 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.

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Speaking in a personal capacity, Küfeoğlu, a senior policy manager at the UK government gas and electricity market regulator OFGEM, lists some of the hurdles ahead, based on his work as an energy systems researcher in Finland, UK, US, and Turkey, where he grew up.

Many funding proposals, he says, pack in “buzzwords” such as green, sustainable, holistic, inclusive, and circular economy, but governments and other infrastructure project funders are often poor at measuring impact, and undertaking return-on-investment and cost-benefit analyses.

How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals is a podcast series that 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.

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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.

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Harou is relatively upbeat about progress so far towards achieving sustainable and reliable energy for all by 2030, the seventh of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the United Nations in 2015. He points out that from 2015 to 2021, the portion of the global population with access to electricity increased from 87% to 91%, and last year about 30% came from renewable sources. 

Harou’s research at the University of Manchester, UK, incorporates computer modeling and artificial intelligence design algorithms to balance Ghana’s long term renewable energy and infrastructure needs. But AI also helps to address the environmental and human health impacts. For example, Ghana’s Volta River was dammed in the 1960s to create the Akosombo dam. But its arrival depleted fish stocks and increased weed and algae growth, providing habitat for vectors of waterborne diseases. It’s all about compromise, he tells the seventh episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a podcast series that 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 Pullizi, its chief editor.

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The move to Geneva, Switzerland, where CERN is based, required Dova to pivot from condensed matter physics, the subject of her PhD at the University of La Plata, Argentina, which she gained in 1988. 

But any misgivings about the move to Europe and switching to a new field were quickly banished by her excitement at working on the L3 Large Electron Positron Collider project, she tells Julie Gould. 

Dova returned to Argentina two-and-a-half years later, launching the experimental high energy group at La Plata and driving other important collaborations, including the inclusion of Argentina in CERN’s ATLAS particle detector collaboration. She describes how it happened.

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Vanessa Gottifredi, a biologist and president of Argentina’s Leloir Institute Foundation, a research institute based in Buenos Aires, says this paucity of visible role models for female scientists in the region means that damaging stereotypes are perpetuated.

A female, she says, will not be judged harshly for staying at home to handle a family emergency, but will be for being pushy at work, unlike male colleagues. “Women need to hear that they are good, more than men do, because they tend to convince themselves they're not good enough,” she adds.

In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about female scientists in Latin America, Gottifredi, who worked abroad for 11 years before returning to Argentina, tells Julie Gould how she aims to empower female colleagues, based on what she witnessed elsewhere.

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“Of course I did not have as much time as I was used to have. And everything impacted my productivity,” she tells Julie Gould.

The Brazilian biologist founded the Parent in Science advocacy movement after talking with other scientist parents.

In the fourth episode of this six-part podcast series about Latin American women in science, Staniscuaski lists the movement’s achievements so far, and the challenges that lie ahead.

In 2021 Parent in Science won the science outreach category in the Nature Inspiring Women in Science awards, in partnership with the Estée Lauder Companies.

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“When you are in a room sharing a scientific idea or project, nobody listens to you. Then another person, usually a male researcher, says what you said,” says Valenzuela-Toro, who is based in Caldero, Chile. 

Mariana Viglino, a Puerto Madryn-based researcher at CONICET, an Argentine government science agency, says the election of far-right governments inevitably results in science funding cuts. “And that means many people having their careers cut. Many research projects that are not going to be able to continue,” she warns.

“It makes me feel really hopeless, and really burnt out, and really sad. I really don’t even know how to put it into words. You want to give back to the government who has invested in you. You want to give back to society. You just feel like they are just pushing you out.”

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The program exposes girls to university life, including lab visits and meetings with female academics. “There are several girls who have never met someone who has been to university,” says Brita. “It’s beyond a gender problem.”

Jessica Germann was one of them. The 19-year-old is about to start an undergraduate physics degree. She tells Julie Gould how writing a school essay about particle physics and a fascination for YouTube science videos helped in her career choices.

This episode is the second episode in a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about Latin American women in science.

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To mark International Women's Day on 8 March, Stein outlines the steps needed to attract girls into science careers. Access to higher education needs to widen, she argues, alongside more robust legal and regulatory frameworks to make research careers more diverse.

“We need to inspire other women, we need to mentor other women, we need to be available for conversations,” she says. “We need to tell them it’s okay to say no to a project, because you’re pregnant, just giving birth, or your child is young, which is something that is so common here in Guatemala.”

This episode is the first episode in a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about Latin American women in science.

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Sione’s PhD research focused on water management challenges in Kathmandu, but she now focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa and the problems caused by open defecation and excrement-filled pit latrines that are sited too close to the water table, risking contamination.

A third option is toilets layered with Tiger Worms. A key advantage is that these take longer to fill up as the worms quickly degrade faeces, but one barrier is getting people to use them in the first place. “It’s like, it’s a gross thing, and they don’t want to think about it. But I think the benefits quickly take over,” she says.

Each episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series from Nature Careers, features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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Elaine Wong and Georgina Such tell the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast why certain schools wanted only female candidates to apply, and how staff and students reacted to the policy. They also explain what it achieved in terms of addressing the under-representation of female faculty in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects.

Both Wong, a photonics researcher who was appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor (People and Equity) at the university in 2023, and Such, a polymer chemist and associate professor there, explain how the university’s “affirmative action” strategy is helping to address the fifth of the 17 United National Sustainable Development Goals: to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Each episode in this series, from Nature Careers, features researchers whose work addresses one or more of the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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The rejection promoted Benge to launch Fundi Bots in 2011. The social education initiative aims to give education a stronger practical focus, a move away from learning by rote in front of a blackboard. Last year it reached 22,000 students, most of them in Uganda, and hopes eventually to cover one million across Africa.

Robotics is a key component of the program. Benge recalls one child in northern Uganda who built a sensor-driven robot and was asked what he might do with it. He said: “I think I can now create something that lets the goats out of the pen in the morning so that I don’t have to wake up early.”

Benge tells the How to save humanity in 17 goals podcast series: “It was hilarious for us, but a very real testament of once you empower children and make learning meaningful, then they actually begin looking at the practical applications of that learning.”

The educator and entrepreneur describes how Fundi Bots addresses SDG 4 and its aim to deliver quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030.

Each episode in the series features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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“They have to struggle through the school education, competitive examinations, then they have to struggle for a job,” says Saxena, who now teaches at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And many young people decide that dying is easier than struggling through for many years, which is very sad. It reflects the society that we live in where a young person does not feel that life is worth living.”

In the third episode How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, Saxena welcomes the inclusion of mental health in SDG 3 and its aim to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. But he points out that countries on average spend less than 2% of their health budget on mental health, when the disease burden is around 10%. 

Each episode in the series features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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But Golden’s research also focuses on “hidden hunger,” a term he uses to describe the impact of dietary deficiencies in micronutrients such as iron, zinc, fatty acids, and vitamins A and B12.

Hidden hunger, he argues in the second episode of the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, could be better addressed if more people adopted a diet that includes more ‘blue’ or aquatic foods. These include fish, molluscs and plant species.

Golden, who is based at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, says discussions about hunger and food security have tended to focus on terrestrial food production.

As soil nutrient levels deplete and farmland becomes scarcer as human populations rise, more attention needs to be paid to marine and freshwater food sources, he adds.

But rising sea temperatures threaten millions of people in equatorial regions whose diets are rich in blue foods. As aquatic species migrate polewards in search of cooler waters, their livelihoods and food security are at risk.

Each episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series from Nature Careers, features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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Thomas’s research into anti-poverty programs has focused on the effects of one aimed at women in the West African country of Niger, which aims to support subsistence farmers whose livelihoods are impacted by climate change.

One branch of the program involved providing an unconditional $300 cash transfer alongside business and life skills training. Thomas, who is based at the Unversity of Michigan in Ann Arbor, describes the impact it had, compared to similar schemes. These include microfinance business loans, but these tend not to reach those most in need, she says.

Thomas’s research is very much focused on the first of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which aims to end poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030. Each episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series, features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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The episode is part of the Nature Spotlight on India, an editorially-independent supplement.

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Jay, who is Dean of the graduate school of biomedical sciences at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, says today’s early career researchers want what he calls a “post disciplinary society,” offering the freedom to pick and choose different areas and competencies.

Lou Muglia, a medical geneticist who is now president and CEO of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a private foundation located in North Carolina, co-authored a 2023 paper in PloS Biology on art-science collaborations. 

Muglia says many early career researchers today don’t see themselves running a traditional lab, but are as excited about communication and the arts as they are about their science. Many funders now recognise this. Academia should too, he argues.

Callie Chappell, Muglia’s co-author and a professional artist who researches biosecurity and innovation at Stanford University, California, says: “I would argue that science is actually a type of art. 

“To do science, you have to be creative, you have to blend different ideas, you have to communicate those ideas by creating something. In many ways that's what artists do.” 

Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.

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Keep things simple wherever possible, agree Duncan Ross, chief data officer at the Times Higher Education publication, and James Bayliss, an interaction and visualisation analyst at Springer Nature. “My go-to tool is a pen and paper or coloured pencils,” says Bayliss. “Start slow and don't get too complicated too fast.”

Akshat Rathi, a senior climate reporter at Bloomberg News, describes how he used data to visualise the devastating impact of a 2015 earthquake in Nepal for an article in the business title Quartz.

And Nathalie Miebach, a basketware artist who created a reed sculpture based on daily weather data she had collected in Provincetown, Massachusetts, says that translating data into artwork brings up all sorts of biases and expectations.

Finally, Rebecca Fiebrink, a classically-trained musician with a PhD in computer science who now works as professor at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts, London, agrees. “Any kind of data analysis itself is creative, right?” she asks.

Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.

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In the fourth episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Julie Gould talks to some of the artists and scientist whose collaborations created exhibits for the event, which ran from March to June 2023.

Its curator Laura Splan, an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, says GUI/GOOEY reconsidered how technology affects our understanding of nature and our constructions of nature. She is joined by Diana Scarborough, arist-in-residence in bionanotechnologist Ljiljana Fruk’s lab at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Scarborough describes a project involving Anna Melekhova, an inorganic chemist based in Fruk’s lab, which was influenced by an ancient method used in Mayan art to stabilise pigments using clay.

Scarborough says the film she produced to communicate Melekhova’s science depicted a “luminous jelly,” included soundtracks from space, and a conversation generated by ChatGPT to symbolise the new material coming to life.

“I was fascinated by the movement of this nonliving material. It looked really as though it is a living organism. I could very easily imagine alien species looking like this,” says Fruk, who also talks about how she and Scarborough first started working together.

Will Etheridge, a PhD student in Fruk’s lab, also attended the first screening. “It just represented this kind of embryonic substance that was just coming into being and questioning its own existence,” he says.

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For Lucy Smith, a botanical artist at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, measurement and accuracy is important, she says.

But accuracy can sometimes take a back seat for illustrator Glendon Mellow, who is also a senior marketing manager a life sciences learning and development company Red Nucleus, based in Toronto, Canada.

“When I put wings on trilobites, I’m not too concerned. It’s not likely that anything I do is going to suddenly nudge opinions into someplace they shouldn’t go on these fossils,” he says.

But what if the science changes? You need 10 to 20 years to be able to look back on data to see whether something’s accurate or not, says artist Luke Jerram, who describes a 2004 project to produce a glass models of the hepatitis C virus. ”You ask the scientists if it actually look like that?” And they say, 'Well, we don’t really know.'”

Sculptor and ceramicist Nadav Drukker outlines the challenges of capturing string theory in art, plus other concepts that form the basis of his theoretical physics research at King's College London.

Kelly Krause, creative director at Springer Nature, explains how the art displayed on a Nature front cover comes about, and how she and her team aim to strike the right balance between accuracy, creativity and clarity to draw readers in.

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But Smith, who joined London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, more than 20 years ago, says: “We also feed back to the scientists and say, 'I’ve seen what you’ve asked me to see. But do you know what, I’ve also seen this? Did you know that this flower has this structure.'”

In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Smith is joined by other artists with experience of science collaborations. David Ibbett, resident composer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says:

“By trying to synthesize these different perspectives on what the science means, we arrive at something new.”

Diana Scarborough, artist-in-residence in bionanotechnolost Ljiljana Fruk’s lab at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that the best collaborations are long term ones, requiring also curiosity and passion. “Looking at their research from a different angle opens up opportunities. If I can make a difference at that point, that will be superb.”

Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.

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Like science, art is a way of asking questions about the world, says Jessica Bradford, head of collections and principal curator at the Science Museum in London. But unlike art, science about interrogating the world in a way that is hopefully repeatable, adds UK-based artist Luke Jerram, who creates sculptures, installations and live artworks around the world.

Ljiljana Fruk, a bionanotechnology researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, says artists can be more playful and work faster, whereas scientists need to repeatedly back up their work by data, a more time-consuming exercise. They are joined by Arthur I. Miller, a physicist who launched the UK’s first undergraduate degree in history and philosophy of science in 1993, and Nadav Drukker, a ceramic artist and theoretical physicist at King’s College London.

Future episodes in this series will focus on how scientists collaborate with artists and why their partnerships are so important. It will also feature researchers who, like Drukker, juggle research careers alongside creating art. 

Each episode concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence. 

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UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the largest public funder of UK science, is one adopter. In September 2021 it announced that its new approach would “enable people to better demonstrate their contributions to research, teams, and wider society”.

In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about team science, Hilary Noone, research culture lead for the UK Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), says that to push the boundaries of knowledge, we need to hear from more than just people with a long list of publications to their name. Narrative CVs, she argues, make these other, hidden contributions more visible, and more funders globally should start using them.

Nik Claesen, managing director of the Brussels-based European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA), says his organisation is keen to see greater awareness of the role of research managers and how they support the scientific enterprise. Confusingly, the profession is called different things around the world, he adds.

This is the final episode of Team Science, a six-part podcast series that showcases the roles of research managers, administrators and technicians, and their often hidden contributions to the scientific enterprise. It is a collaboration between Nature Careers and Nature Index. The series is sponsored by Western Sydney University. This episode, and others in the series, concludes with a section looking at how it is helping to champion team science.

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The early warning system they developed with Andrea Beradi, an environmental systems researcher and a colleague of Holliman’s at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, involved satellite technology, drones and ground monitoring systems.

Holliman, who studies engaged research, says members of the wider project team were all paid and listed as co-authors. “That was a really straightforward example of just recognizing contributions from some fabulous people,” he adds. But sometimes, he argues, payment and authorship on a peer-reviewed paper may not be what co-producers are seeking. Instead they may want to co-write a report that would better serve their community’s needs in discussions with policymakers.

Helen Manchester, who researches participatory sociodigital futures at the University of Bristol, UK, adds: “For me, there’s a real politics to knowledge production. We really need to be considering all the time when we’re doing our research, to think about our own position as researchers and our relationship to and with other people.”

And finally, Lorraine van Blerk, whose project about homeless young people in African cities featured in a previous episode, lists key questions to ask when working with young people in a research setting. “How do we make sure that young people are involved in the research design, in the data collection, and the analysis and impact of data?” she asks.

Team Science showcases the roles of research managers, administrators and technicians, and their often hidden contributions to the scientific enterprise, and is a collaboration between Nature Careers and Nature Index. The series is sponsored by Western Sydney University. This episode, and others in the series, concludes with a section looking at how it is helping to champion team science.

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Fitzcharles and her team oversee five BAS research stations, its main facility in Cambridge, UK, and the research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough. Their responsibilities include advising on health and safety, import licenses, and chemicals and kit can be taken into the field. 

Their skillsets are completely different to researcher colleagues’, she argues in the fourth episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about team science. “Recognising that everybody brings different  things to the table gives you a much stronger organization, and much better science output,” Fitzcharles adds.

Terri Adams, a scientific glassblower at the University of Oxford, UK, says speaking up at work helps to promote the contributions of lab managers and technicians: “It pays to ask for investment, to tell people what you can do, and to be proactive in seeking things out and publicising yourself rather than sitting back,” she says.

One obvious example of recognition for lab managers and technicians is to acknowledge their contributions in publications. But Devin Lake, a lab manager and PhD student at Michigan State University in East Lansing, has mixed feelings about this. “Some lab managers don’t intend on moving forward in academia, so it doesn’t matter to them whether or not their name is added,” he says.

Team Science showcases the roles of research managers, administrators and technicians, and their often hidden contributions to the scientific enterprise. 

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But how empowered do research managers and administrators based in other countries feel, particularly those working in nations with rigid hierarchies, or where the profession is less established?

Allen Mukhwana leads ReMPro Africa, a research management professional developement programme based in Nairobi. Some professors don't understand why a “lowly research manager” has the audacity to stop their study for ethical or regulatory reasons, she says. “They feel that research managers and administrators are adding extra layers of bureaucracy to their research.”

Tadashi Sugihara, a research manager at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, says a Japanese government scheme to develop the research manager role envisaged that postholders would have a PhD, as he has. Having a doctorate can help build trust between administrators and academic staff as the “customer”, he adds.

Kerridge says the research management career pathway is most established in the US, with perhaps three generations from the same family joining the profession. Meeting a project proposal deadline or collaborating on a successful grant application at a research-intensive institution, he adds, will often result in a bottle of wine or box of chocolates from an appreciative researcher. But the pressure on them to increase their research income often results in huge power dynamics, says Kerridge, who cites instances of bullying and of academics setting unreasonably tight deadlines to submit a project proposal.

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The Hidden REF, set up in 2020, looks at alternative measures. Simon Hettrick, its chair and director of the Software Susaintability Institute at the University of Southampton, UK, explains what can be submitted, and why publications are excluded. 

Gemma Derrick, a former member of the Hidden REF advisory committee who studies research policy and culture at the University of Bristol, UK, talks about its “hidden roles” category, and why some entries moved judges to tears. 

Kevin Atkins, who has worked as a site engineer at the University of Plymouth’s Marine Biological Association for 32 years, was highly commended in the category. He describes a typical day, and how his work contributes to the wider research enterprise.

Another highly commended entry was Growing up on the Streets, an international co-produced research project led by the University of Dundee, which focuses on around 200 young people aged 14 to 20 across three African cities: Accra, Bukavu and Harare. 

Lorraine van Blerk, a human geography researcher at the university, explains how six young people in each city were recruited as researchers, and how their roles were recognised and celebrated.

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Noone, research and innovation culture lead at the funding agency UK Research and Innovation, recalls the discomfort felt all round when an academic colleague tells a meeting: “Just get the admin to do it. That’s what they’re there for, to serve you.”

Wilson, who is head of research development at Durham University, UK, describes being overlooked during an external meeting with collaborators where attendees were asked to introduce themselves. She was the only woman and professional services representative in the room. “It was a really disappointing moment for me. Until that point I loved working with my academic colleagues and had felt valued, but then I experienced that,” she says.

Wilson, who chairs the UK Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), says many of her colleagues have expertise in public policy and research impact, so a more positive research culture with parity of esteem between the two teams will result in more funding proposals and higher-profile research outputs.

In 2020 an ARMA research culture survey led by Noone identified that many of its members felt there was a “them and us” mindset in the workplace. She and Wilson describe what the organization is doing to address the findings.

Team Science is a six-part Working Scientist podcast series, a collaboration between Nature Careers and Nature Index and is sponsored by Western Sydney University. Each episode concludes with a section looking at how it is helping to champion team science.

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Leptin shares some advice for early career researchers writing grants and how researchers can advocate for more funding of science from politicians. She also speaks about the different types of research that deserve to be funded. It doesn’t all need to be ground-breaking, she says, adding: “Just because it's incremental and is not another breakthrough, doesn't mean it's not important. It's extremely important.”

This episode is part of an ongoing Working Scientist podcast series about funding in science.

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Batterman, who filed a formal complaint to the institute in 2020 after being contacted by other women with similar experiences of harassment and abuse at STRI, tells Adam Levy: “It was almost 10 years of a lot of pain after what happened, which made a lot of my research really difficult. I estimate that I lost three of the 10 years in productivity.”

Josh Tewkesbury joined STRI as its director in July 2021, five months before the BuzzFeed story broke. He describes the measures taken to safeguard scientists from sexual harassment and assault since its investigation concluded.

“We have been working with the people that came forward for the BuzzFeed article, engaging them in the process of how we make STRI a more safe place. ” he says. “We’ve been just overwhelmed and really thankful with the degree to which those individuals have, have been willing to engage.”

This episode is part of a Working Scientist podcast series about freedom and safety in science.

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In the seventh episode of this podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Mahmoudi tells Adam Levy that bullying is triggered by workplace power imbalances and is particularly prevalent in academia with its hierarchical structure, often causing targets to stay silent.

Bullying can cause a range of physical and mental health problems, he says. Perpetrators damage individuals, institutions’ reputations and wider society. He outlines steps to take if you find yourself bullied, and how academic institutions can tackle the problem.

Mahmoudi is joined by geoscientist Chris Jackson, who left academia in 2022 for a role at engineering consultancy Jacobs, based in Manchester, UK. Jackson welcomes the fact that bullying harassment and discrimination in academia is now more talked about, but says its root cause is an individual’s inability to put themselves in someone else’s position and identify with their personality and experience.

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The microbiome researcher, winner of the 2023 Global Grants for Gut Health Research Group Prize, tells Julie Gould about his research focus and the workplace culture in his lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri.

Gordon also describes the “magical meeting,” that forged a longstanding collaboration with physician Tahmeed Ahmed, executive director of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), and their investigations into how immaturity of the gut microbiota contributes to malnutrition.

The two researchers explain how the prize money will help to further strengthen an ongoing two-way knowledge exchange between the US team and their colleagues in Dhaka.

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by the Global Grants for Gut Health, supported by Yakult and Nature Portfolio. Learn more about the current call for grant applications and how to apply at this link.

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These two experiences are among those recounted in this Working Scientist podcast about the challenges faced by researchers from LGBTQIA+ communities.

Paleantologist Alison Olcott, who co-authored a 2020 study of 261 LGBTQIA+ geocientists and their experiences of fieldwork, tells Adam Levy how some academic institutions are changing fieldwork policies in light of the study’s findings.

They are joined by Florence Ashley, a bioethics and legal scholar whose research on trans youth care at the University of Alberta, Canada, has resulted in death threats and accusations of grooming.

This is the sixth episode of a seven-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science. This episode and the five earlier ones conclude with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.

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Within a few months she was being asked to address community groups about climate change, but also a growing number of posts from social media trolls who disagreed with her, many of them misogynistic in tone.

The situation has worsened since October 2022, she says. This follows amendments to Twitter’s free speech policies after the platform changed ownership.

“It used to be that I would receive that hate via letters or emails, or phone calls, or official complaints to my university. And those certainly still arrive. But now the deluge of hundreds of hateful comments in a single day that the internet facilitates, whether it is on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Facebook, or even Instagram, the volume is just 100 times more than it would be without the Internet.”

Hayhoe and Chris Jackson, a geoscientist who was extensively trolled after becoming the first Black researcher to deliver a Royal Institution Christmas lecture, describe how employers can protect scientists facing both online and in-person harassment, alongside they personal strategies they have adopted to protect themselves.

In the fifth episode of this seven-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, they are joined by Alfredo Carpineti, a science journalist who chairs Pride in STEM, a UK charity that supports LGBTQIA+ scientists and engineers, and Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit to help environmental scientists in the United States who find themselves under fire.

The first six episodes in this series conclude with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.

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But as research funding dried up as a result of the hostilities, Alodaini fled to Egypt. His arrival there marked the start of a three-year journey to reach the Netherlands, much of it on foot, via Greece, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and Germany.

In the fourth episode of a seven-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Alodani describes how it feels to have his research disrupted by war, and his hopes of finishing his doctorate. “I feel that I waste all the effort that I have done in the past. I feel that I begin from new,” he says.

Syrian researcher Fares el Hasan also sought sanctuary in the Netherlands. He recounts dodging snipers during his daily journey to the University of Aleppo, prompting his decision to flee after ISIS seized control of the village where his parents lived, in 2013.

After completing a Masters’ Degree at Wageningen University on an Erasmus Mundus fellowship, he now works in a support role at the University of Utrecht. “I like my work, but I was looking to do a PhD and becoming a professor or assistant professor. I’m not sure if this is feasible or not,” he says.

Finally, Stephen Wordsworth, executive director of the Council for At Risk Academics (CARA), a UK based charity, describes how the organisation’s fellowship programme seeks to place academics who are seeking refuge at its partner universities and research institutes.

“They’re not just coming to be supported,” he says of the academics CARA has helped over the years. “They are bringing their own experience and knowledge, sharing that while they’re here. And that can then be the basis of lasting partnerships.”

The first six episodes in this seven-part series conclude with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.

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Ismardo Bonalde currently earns around $500 a month in his role as an experimental physicist and superconductivity researcher at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research in Parroquia Macarao, but at times it has dropped to $15 in a country where inflation was 234% last year, down from 686% the previous year. His lab closed in 2017 after research funding dried up, he tells Adam Levy.

Emmanuel Unuabonah describes the impact of power outages, equipment shortages and brain brains in Nigeria, where he works as a material chemist at Redeemer’s University in Akoda. “I tell my students I have become a hunter,” he says. “I hunt for grants.”

Finally, Nana Voitenko describes how the COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine, where she works as a neuroscientist at Kiev Academic University, has wiped out economic gains made after Ukraine gained independence from Soviet Russia in 1991.

The first six episodes in this seven-part series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science.

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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.

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In this final episode of Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series about neuroscience, Hawkins describes how his book finishes on a philosophical note, by covering the future of humanity in an age of intelligent machines.

Hawkins is chief scientist at Numenta, a research company he started 17 years ago in Redwood City, California. He career started in the semiconductor industry but his interest in the theories underpinning brain science was triggered by a 1979 article in Scientific American, written by Francis Crick.

“I realized that I don’t think there’s anything more interesting or important to work on, because every human endeavour is based on the brain. Everything we have ever done in the arts and the sciences, and literature and humanities and politics. It’s all brains,” he says.

Hawkins’ search for an academic career in theoretical brain science proved fruitless, prompting a return to industry and the founding of both Palm Computing and Handspring. In 2002 he established the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, now based at the University of California Berkeley.

Tales from the Synapse is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.

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

Also, physicist and climate scientist Liubov Poshyvailo-Strube describes her involvement in the Ukranian Global University (UGU), and how it is helping academics access educational and research opportunities outside Ukraine. Two challenges, she says, are supporting adult males who cannot leave the country during the conflict, and motivating early career researchers to return after hostilities case.

Finally, Arctic researcher Matthew Druckenmiller, who is based at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, describes the war’s impact on Arctic science and collaborations with Russian colleagues, many of them dating back years.

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. https://council.science/podcast/

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Epigenetic inheritance, she says, is not confined to diets and exposure of factors such as like endocrine disruptors or environmental pollutants. All of these can modify our body and have effects in our offspring. But Mansuy, who is based at the University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, also asks if trauma modifies not only our brains, but also our reproductive systems.

There is still a lot of work needed, she adds, but the possibility that depression or borderline personality disorder might be something inherited from parents would be important for patients and clinicians to understand.

Mansuy’s lab seeks to expose animals prenatally or after birth to conditions which mimic human stress. Her collaborators also provide access to blood and saliva samples from people exposed to childhood trauma, and medical students who are undergoing work placements in emergency rooms.

This is the tenth episode in Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.

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But despite her involvement in the DBS collaboration, which involves neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, electrophysiologists, engineers and computer scientists, neurologist Helen Mayberg does not see it as a long-term solution.

“I hope I live long enough to see that people won't require a hole in their brain and a device implanted in this way,” she says . “I often have a nightmare with my tombstone that kind of reads like, what did she think she was doing?”

Mayberg, director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, introduces Brandy as a typical patient, who says of her condition; “It kind of holds me down, and it takes so much effort to do anything, or to experience anything, and there’s always that cost of, kind of reminds me of like scar tissue, like every time you stretch, it comes back and it holds you even tighter.”

After receiving the treatment, Brandy describes the incremental changes that occurred: “Things got a little bit easier. And even in the smallest things, it got a little bit easier to brush your teeth, it got a little bit easier to get out of bed, it got a little bit easier to have hope. That just started a cascade of positive instead of the cascade of negative.”

This is the tenth episode in Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal.

The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.

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

Hummel points to the development of cochlear implants to help patients with hearing loss. “There could be similar implants inside the nasal cavity connected to the olfactory bulb, eliciting a pattern that might make sense to the brain,” he says.

Describing his career path, Hummel, who is also a medical doctor, says unlike some other clinical research areas, his is more heavily dependent on international collaborations. “When you work in cardiovascular diseases you just look around the corner and there’s somebody who works on cardiovascular disorders. In the sense of smell it is different. You look around the corner, and there’s nobody.”

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At the time Prat was writing her book The Neuroscience of You. Published in 2022, it explores how different brains make sense of the world. “I've always been interested in the relationship between the mind and the brain, at the level of the individual, not how do brains work in general,” she says.

“Right now I feel like we’re living through a great social paradox,” she adds. “People are discussing the importance of having diverse minds and brains and decision-making spaces. But yet, we don’t seem to be getting any better at talking through our differences.”

To illustrate her point, Prat, who is based at the University of Washington in Seattle, uses the 2015 online image of a dress which went viral and generated heated debates about its colour. Was it white and gold, or blue and black? “This is just a tiny example of how our experiences shape this world-building that we're doing, the way our brains create inferences and connect the dots, even for something as elementary as colour.” she says.

She also recalls how, as a single mother aged 19, she first recognised that her baby daughter Jasmine perceived the world in ways that surprised her, based on lab experiments that she participated in.

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“He said I should consider a career in neuroscience. That moment really changed my life,” says Godale, who followed his advice and went on to research epilepsy for her PhD at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Godale describes how at one point she was experiencing up to 30 seizures a day and spent periods in a coma, severely curtailing her quality of life, childhood friendships, and graduate school experiences.

“I’ve developed some habits to combat these cognitive impairments that I experience,” she says. “I find myself writing down everything that I’m learning in a lecture and hearing at a meeting.”

When the pandemic struck in March 2020 and labs shut down, Godale embarked on patient advoacy work and science communication via the Society for Neuroscience’s early career policy ambassadors program.

She lobbied Congress members to increase federal funding for neuroscience research, and in late 2021 decided on a career path that would involve her in both academia and industry, working for a seed fund focused on life science and digital companies in southwest Ohio.

“During my graduate studies, I networked a lot. I encourage any early career researcher listening to this podcast to prioritize networking while you’re in graduate school,” she says.

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Harris, professor emeritus at Cambridge University, UK, played the sport growing up in Canada and is now a coach. “A coach will have tryouts and select the best players for different positions,” he says. “The brain does the same thing. Maybe two neurons try out for every position, one makes it that’s a little bit better at communicating, and the other one doesn’t, going through a process called apoptosis. The survivors have to last your whole life.”

Harris highlights some differences between human and animal brains, (cerebral cortex size, for example, and how newborn babies are hard wired to understand and develop speech). Writing the book, he believes, made him respect human and animal brains even more. “Probably our brains are the most unique things about us. We have unique faces, but our brains are even more unique. You just can’t see them,” he says.

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To help achieve this goal, the lab partners with both neurosurgeons and artificial intelligence researchers.

“We are knowledgeable about how to put electrodes in the brain,” says Roelfsema, “but we collaborate with experts who know about how to make these electrodes so that they don't damage the brain tissue too much, also with people in artificial intelligence who can take camera images and translate them into brain stimulation patterns.

“We also collaborate with neurosurgeons who can inform us how to really make this device and make it something that is going to be feasible for a neurosurgeon to really implant in the brain. That is definitely a very important goal for me, to bring this to a patient.”

In episode five of Tales from the Synapse, a podcast series with a focus on brain science, Roelfsema describes how he handles requests from people who are pinning their hopes on being able to see again. “I have to explain this is not a clinically approved device,” he says.

“Our ambition will be to go to humans in the next say, two years, or maybe a little bit later, but it’s still going to be research. There are all kinds of regulations, which are there for a good reason. And we have to show that we comply with all these regulations.”

Tales from the Synapse is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.

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

In the fourth episode of this 12-part podcast series Tales from the Synapse, Rippon explores the role of social conditioning to explain why boys and girls might respond differently to pink and blue objects, why girls aged nine describe maths “as a boy thing,” and why the same girls shun games that are aimed at children “who are really, really smart.”

Rippon, Professor Emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University in Birmingham, UK and author of the 2019 book The Gendered Brain , is also interested in why women continue to be under-represented in science even in countries that purport to be gender-equal.

Her forthcoming second book investigates why girls and women on the autism spectrum have historically been overlooked. Viewing the condition through a gendered lens hampers our understanding of it, she argues.

Tales of the Synapse, a podcast series with a focus on brain science, is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.

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

Amir is now a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he researches what happens in our neural networks when we are trying to be funny.

His interest in this was triggered after realising there were around 20 studies examining brain activity when we are enjoying comedy, he says, but nothing about the creative process involved in being funny. Amir’s research also investigates attempts to use artificial intelligence to generate humour.

“I’m afraid that if I make any jokes about artificial intelligence, I will get in trouble in the future. Artificial intelligence would cancel me. So I’m refraining from making any such jokes,” he tells his audience.

Amir’s stand-up act also includes anecdotes about life as a PhD student. “It’s going to take seven years, the first five-and-a-half-years to work very hard on developing a silly accent,” he adds. “Then you do some original research and it all culminates in a dissertation defence in which you present your work in front of five important neuroscientists. And if you fail, they eat your brains.”

This is the third episode of Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series with a focus on brain science, produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal.

The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.

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

Alongside neuroscientists, Seth’s research group at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, also includes string theorists, mathematicians and psychologists. The team also collaborates with academics in the arts and humanities.

His 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. begins by challenging the idea that consciousness is beyond the reach of science, and concludes with a look at consciousness in non-human animals, before asking if artificial intelligence will one day become both sentient and conscious.

Seth’s own academic career path demonstrates the many disciplines with an interest in consciousness. He began studying physics but transitioned to psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, the subject of his PhD at Sussex. He returned there to set up his neuroscience group after completing a postdoc at the The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, from 2001-2006.

He admits to an ongoing sense of wonder that that the self is experienced through brain activity, the “tofu-textured electrical wetware inside our skulls” with its “86 billion neurons and 1000 times more connections,” adding: “It seems like a miracle. But that’s the point of science, isn’t it, to preserve the wonder of a phenomenon, but to explain it too?"

Tales from the Synapse is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.

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

This observation triggered an interest in the behavioural effects of psychedelic drugs, which took her career in a psychopharmacological direction. She now researches the neural effects of cannabis, both when people are under the influence of the drug, and over the longer term, at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Mason is also interested in the positive and negative effects of developing a tolerance to cannabis.

“Recreational users tend to use cannabis for the relaxing or the euphoric effects. So here, tolerance can be seen as kind of a maladaptive thing. You have to use more of the drug to get the high that you want … This is where addiction dependence can come in,” she says.

“But tolerance can be a good thing in regards to the clinical use of this drug. Individuals who are using cannabis for pain do not want the high, because this also comes with the impairment as well.”

This 12-part Working Scientist podcast series, Tales from the Synapse, is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research.

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

These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.

In this final episode, Gianpiero Petriglieri focuses on the emotional aspects of leadership — describing it as a love for an idea, and for a group of people whom you’re trying to both protect and advance.

Petriglieri, who researches organizational behaviour at INSEAD Business School in Fontainebleau, France, says that being in the physical presence of an effective leader should ideally make you feel calm, clear about priorities and cared for.

Julie Gould also talks to Robert Harris, a past president of ORPHEUS, the Organisation for PhD Education in Biomedicine and Health Sciences in the European System; he’s also a research-group leader at the Centre for Molecular Medicine, part of the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden.

Good leadership is all about effective communication and being able to inspire and empower others, he says. To do that, you need to ask the right questions, and make suggestions, rather than giving orders.

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These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.

In this penultimate episode, stem cell biologist Fiona Watt tells Julie Gould that one of her leadership mantras is: “There is nothing wrong with being wrong,” and that science is in good shape if it can acknowledge this.

Watt is director of EMBO, the European molecular biology organization, based in Heidelberg, Germany.

Her leadership positions before joining the organisation in 2022 include leading the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at King's College London.

In this role she was able to indulge an interest in improving scientists’ working environments as part of a redesign project of its labs, offices and core facilities. In 2018 Watt was appointed the first executive chair of Medical Research Council, the UK funder.

She compares her own hands-on and largely self-taught leadership skills (helped by a strong network of female colleagues earlier in her career) with opportunities for young aspiring lab leaders today.

These include EMBO’s lab management course, which provides researchers on the cusp of independence with a trusting environment to learn about the common challenges group leaders are likely to face.

Watt also tells Julie Gould about the role of science leaders in articulating the need for government funding for science, but says that spending decisions should sit with them, and not with politicians.

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These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.

In this episode, Hagen Zimer tells Julie Gould about the qualities and skills you need to be a science leader in industry and how he approaches his role as managing director of TRUMPF Laser, a global company based in Schramberg, Germany, that manufactures lasers and laser-processing machine tools.

Zimer says that effective leaders are good listeners who display high levels of empathy, so that they can understand individual colleagues’ fears and concerns. They also need to be authentic, he adds. If not, teams will not believe what they are being told.

Zimer says that early-career researchers with leadership ambitions should ask themselves whether they see themselves taking the lead role in a play. “If you are in the leading position, you cannot hide any more. You are at some point also alone.”

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These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of different sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series all about leadership.

In this episode, Spanish neuroscience and mental health researcher Gemma Modinos talks about her own leadership journey as a group leader at King’s College London and former chair of the Young Academy Europe.

Modinos compares “command and control” leadership styles with more collaborative approaches and says aspiring science leaders should not neglect leadership training as part of their career development.

Learning how to say no effectively and allocating time to meet looming deadlines is another key skill, she tells Julie Gould.

But should all early career researchers nurture leadership ambitions? No, says Modinos. “Not everyone has to strive to become a PI, or to be involved in chairing an organization, or being president, or being in boards,” she says.

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These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of different sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series.

In this episode, Charu Kaushic, a research group leader at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, says that leadership is more than just exercising power, competence and confidence, it is also about wanting to do good.

Kaushic, who is also scientific director of the Canadian Institute of Infection and Immunity in Ottawa, describes how a better gender balance in science’s senior ranks will lead to a more consensual style of leading teams.

She also offers some insights into how she honed her personal leadership style and how she adapts it for her different roles. She also talks about some leadership tasks that she still finds challenging.

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These include rescinded job offers, postponed start dates, burdensome vaccine paperwork and long and lonely stints in quarantine hotels.

Neuroscientist Jen Lewendon tells Adam Levy about her move from the United Kingdom to Hong Kong via Thailand to begin a postdoc at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

“The obvious disparity between the way COVID is being handled in the West and the way COVID is often being handled in Asia makes splitting life between two places very difficult,” she says.

Astrophysicist Katie Mack was on an extended visit to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, when the 2020 lockdown took effect, preventing her return North Carolina State University in Raleigh.The experience made her re-assess her career priorities.

This is the final episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on moving labs.

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leader at the John Innes Institute, a plant and microbial research institute in Norwich, UK, also offers advice on how to talk about disability to potential employers.

She is joined by Logan Gin, a STEM education researcher at Brown University in Providence. Gin, who has diastrophic dysplasia dwarfism, describes how his research is helping to identify solutions to support students with disabilities.

Every institution should be able to support faculty members and scholars with disabilities, adds Siobhán Mattison, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who has myasthenia gravis.

Kim Gerecke, a behavioural neuroscientist at Randolph Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, talks about the measures she has been able to take to support disabled colleagues at her institution.

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Fessenden, who is now an editor at the Journal of Cell Biology in New York City, says that alongside adjusting to a new lab culture, he needed to learn new techniques, adding: “I am a lifelong student, someone who always wants to be the dumbest person in the room.”

Fessenden is joined by physician-scientist Ken Kosik, and Jennifer Pursley, a particle physicist-turned-medical physicist.

Kosik’s neuroscience research and collaborations are influenced by his close working proximity to physical scientists. In 2004, he quit a tenured post at Harvard University’s Longwood campus in Boston, Massachusetts, moving to a more multi-disciplinary location at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Pursley, who left the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Batavia, Illinois, in 2010, says of her move to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston: “I walked into this completely new environment — I didn’t know anyone. It was a real shock.”

This is the fourth episode in a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on moving labs.

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Sara Suliman, an immunology researcher and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, shares her experiences of labs in South Africa, Canada and the United States as a scientist from the African diaspora. She was born in Sudan.

Ali Bermani, a PhD student who moved from Iran in 2019 to study electrical engineering at the University of Gävle in Sweden, talks about how he learnt to decipher feedback from Swedish colleagues, and about their calm approach to work compared to previous work experiences.

And Keshun Zhang, a psychologist at Qingdao University in China, explains why he returned to that country after completing his PhD at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and why he now urges his students and colleagues to work and study abroad.

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With the help of supportive supervisors and a sympathetic funder, the couple worked 1,200 kilometres apart for a while, before they each found academic positions at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

They are joined by Andrea Stathopoulos, who met her partner in 2010 when they were neuroscience PhD students at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Stathopoulos is now a scientific analyst at Verge Science Communications, based in Arlington, Virginia. She says that her ambivalence about an academic career perhaps defined her as the “trailing spouse” whose career would take a back seat while her husband’s progressed. The couple’s career plans changed frequently over the years, and they’ve had to spend time living apart. They resolved their two-body problem by leaving academia.

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Kamens lists questions you need to have answered before making a move. “I would say item number one is: Is the PI a jerk?" she says.

In the first episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about moving labs, Kamens shares advice alongside Tim Fessenden, a cancer researcher and postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Kim Gerecke, a behavioural neuroscientist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia.

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Maswime and Leslie Rissler, a biologist and NSF programme director, tell Julie Gould that research outputs can easily suffer when scientists entering the mid-career stage suddenly get swamped with administrative and teaching duties, which is why the awards were set up.

In the final episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast, Gould also hears the pros and cons of making the mid-career stage better structured to support the development of skills and competencies, as it is in Brazil.

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These are just some of the questions early-career researchers wanted mid-career colleagues to answer in the penultimate episode of Muddle of the Middle, a Working Scientist podcast about the mid-career stage in science.

Julie Gould also asks her five interviewees what they’d tell their younger selves about this often-neglected career stage. Their answers range from finding out more about team-building and conflict management, not to stress about being disagreed with, remembering to be generous and having fun along the way.

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Kieran Setiya, a philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, adds that the mid-career stage can be dominated by having to juggle both urgent and important tasks, some of which have no definite endpoint. These can quickly mount up and become overwhelming, with non-work-related pressures swallowing up increasing amounts of time, he adds.

In the fourth episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast series, host Julie Gould wonders whether this mid-career stage is like a second puberty, a time of confusion and frustration. “It might be worth reaching out to some of those people who have gone through it and come out the other side,” she suggests.

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Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says that the aim should instead be to avoid allowing periods of imbalance to last longer than necessary.

Cara Tannenbaum, a physician and a director at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, agrees, saying that the key is to focus on personal fulfilment, and that some aspects of your life will often have to take a back seat.

Inger Mewburn took a data-driven approach to managing her time (and her manager’s expectations) after experiencing two breakdowns in her mid-career stage.

Mewburn, director of research training at the Australian National University in Canberra, now uses a software program to track and prioritize tasks, schedule meetings and negotiate with her supervisor things that she can stop doing.

Chemical engineer Andrea Armani, a vice-dean at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, cautions against accepting all invitations at the mid-career stage, noting that at one point she was sitting on 30 committees.

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In the second episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part podcast series about the mid-career stage in science, Kolbaba Kartchner, who is now a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. tells Julie Gould how she interacts with her fellow graduate students and manages her busy personal and professional schedules. 

Leslie Rissler swapped academia for a post at the US National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. This involved moving in 2015 from Alabama, where she had worked as a professor of biological sciences. The change coincided with a divorce and undergoing a bilateral mastectomy. 

They are joined by structured-light researcher Andrew Forbes, who, 10 years after co-founding a company, took a role in academia and is now a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

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Working scientists who no longer define themselves as ‘early career’ tell Julie Gould what this often-neglected career stage means to them in the absence of an agreed definition from funding agencies and scientific governing bodies.

This is the first episode in Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about the mid-career stage in science.

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This distrust can extend to procedures such as taking blood and saliva samples, and also to mental-health problems, which many people think are caused by witchcraft — evil spirits or curses from parents or grandparents, she says.

Such beliefs account for mental health not being prioritized by policymakers, she adds. But change is afoot.

“In the last five years alone, we’ve had policy documents specifically for mental health. There’s also been progress in amending legislation. For example, there has been a recent lobby to decriminalize suicide because, as we speak, suicide is illegal in Kenya,” she says.

Bitta tells Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa, how she uses a form of participatory action research — in which communities are involved in song, dance, video and radio productions — to change attitudes to mental health.This is the final episode of an eight-part podcast series on science in Africa.

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In Ghana, where Tabiri researches quantum algebra at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Accra, the government requires working women to stay at home for three months after having a child. Once they return to their jobs, they can leave work at 2 p.m. until their child is six months old, she says.

“We don’t have infrastructure to support young mums in Ghana,” Tabiri adds, citing the absence of nursing rooms and nurseries in academic institutions.

mani, deputy director for vaccination at Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health in Yaoundé, and a lecturer in medicine at the University of Yaoundé, points out that it is now government policy to admit equal numbers of men and women to her faculty of medicine. Despite this, women are still under-represented at senior levels.

“I’m a mother of two. I want my boys to be an example and to help the women around them,” she says.

“Educate our boys — educate men around the world to be agents of change by supporting women.”

This is the penultimate episode in an eight-part series on science in Africa hosted by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.

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Sall tells Akin Jimoh how her career experiences abroad made the return to Africa a daunting prospect. But working and living abroad has convinced her that science careers in Africa, and the cities where science takes place, should not follow US and European models.

“If we’re not authentic in being scientists, and not doing research that follows local problems and our local culture, then at some point, we will just become another US or another France, and that will be very boring. Hopefully that will not happen here. And then we will be vibrant and do a different kind of science. People will say: ‘Wow, why didn’t this happen sooner?’”

Togolese researcher Rafiou Agoro runs the African Diaspora Scientists Federation, a mentoring platform that connects African scientists based abroad with colleagues back home, from his base at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. So far, Agoro and his team of 150 mentors have supported more than 100 scientists.

“I was looking for any any opportunity to have an impact back home. A lot of people who are abroad are eager to do something back here. COVID has taught us distances matter less when it comes to education,” he says.

This is the sixth episode in an eight-part podcast series hosted by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.

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Anene, a final-year animal-science PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, says her mother struggled to get a teaching job in Nigeria because she did not have a science background. Her experience inspired her to set up The STEM Belle, a non-profit organization in Nigeria.

“Growing up I had these stereotypes. ‘You’re going to end up in a man’s house. There’s really no need for you to stretch yourself because the end goal is to be married, right?’”

“My mother didn’t want her children to go through this so she started indoctrinating the benefits of science and her experience to us.”

Anigbogu, a storyteller and technologist, founded STEM4HER after meeting a young girl at a science fair. She told him that her mother thought that careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were for boys, not for her.

“We discovered that girls in the rural areas were mostly affected by that societal mindset. Inventors are using science to solve global problems, but women are not in that space,” he says.

This is the fifth episode of an eight-part series on science in Africa, hosted by Nature Africa chief editor Akin Jimoh.

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“Whatever disaster was happening in other parts of the world was not that pronounced in the African region. I think we should have recognized that before we planned our response,” he tells Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.

Tomori says the pandemic exposed flaws in Nigeria’s health system, such as why there were initially so few testing laboratories, and why, after boosting the number to 140, between 40 and 50 are now no longer reporting. He also calls for a continent-wide African Center for Disease Coordination, and a more sustainable vaccine-production strategy across the continent.

This is the fourth episode of an eight-part series on science in Africa.

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Chauke, a bioinformatics coordinator and environmental geography PhD student at the South African university, fears that the term ‘decolonization’ has lost much of its meaning since the statue fell, and is now at risk of becoming a mere buzzword, used by people to seem open-minded. He says: “I’m worried that people think it’s all going to be strawberries and cream, it’s going to be peaceful, it’s going to be nice, and people want to feel good, people want to feel comfortable.”

For Chauke, collaborating with other academics from Africa takes priority over the ‘standard’ practice of partnering with people from Europe and North America.

UCT anthropologist Shannon Morreira says: “If we think about decolonization in African science, it’s not saying throw out the contemporary knowledge systems we have, but it’s saying build them up, diversify them, so that other knowledge systems can be brought in as well.”

This is the third episode of an eight-part series on science in Africa, presented by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.

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Tomori, past president of the Nigerian Academy of Science and a former vice-chancellor of Redeemer’s University in Ede, discusses the effects of foreign funding; brain drains and the contribution of diaspora scientists; and the societal changes needed to attract more women into science.

One specific suggestion is that scientific academies and individual researchers work harder to engage the public. “If your science doesn’t affect the life of your people, nobody cares about you,” he says.

Tomori’s assessment of the state of science in Africa is the second episode of an eight-part series, presented by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.

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But the continent’s scientific growth could accelerate even faster if more domestic funding was available to support African scientists. This, alongside better infrastructure, and a stronger commitment to getting more women into scientific careers, would help to prevent future brain drains, she adds.

Aniebo’s assessment of the current state of science across the continent launches an eight-part podcast series, Science in Africa, presented by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.

Future episodes will investigate how African countries are addressing colonial legacies; the continent’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic; creative approaches to science communication; and ongoing efforts to recruit and retain female scientists.

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University president Robert-Jan Smits tells Julie Gould how mutual trust and a respect for academic freedom have helped academics and industrialists to forge successful collaborations since 1956, when the university was founded.

In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about porosity, the movement of people between academia and other sectors, Julie Gould is also joined by Fiona Watt, director of the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg, Germany, and Dario Alessi, director of the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy at the University of Dundee, UK.

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Cordiner, who does not have a PhD, reflected on her skills, strengths and experience and how to apply them to her new role as a professor at the university’s department of chemical and biological engineering. This included identifying knowledge gaps and areas that would really benefit her new employer.

De-risking means making any career move less of a learning curve for yourself, but also easier for new employers by ensuring that they benefit from the fresh perspectives that you bring to a role.

In the fifth episode of this six-part podcast series about porosity, the movement of people within academia and beyond, Cordiner is joined by Jorge Abreu-Vicente, who switched to industry after completing his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

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Industry insiders share their experiences of leaving academia after deciding which type of company best suited their skills, temperament and career goals. They include Bill Haynes, the site head and vice president of Novo Nordisk Research Center, Oxford, UK, and entrepreneur and technology-transfer professional Nessa Carey.

Finally, Anna Sannö, research strategy manager at Volvo Construction Equipment, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, compares problem solving across industry and academia, looking at time management, financial and ethical considerations, and preferred outcomes.

This six-part Working Scientist podcast series looks at porosity, the movement of people within academia and beyond.

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The experience, he says, taught him that a so-called barrier between academia and other sectors is no more than a state of mind. “To me, it feels all part of the same thing. It’s our own mindset that puts different activities in different silos,” he tells Julie Gould. Martinez adds: “I was studying, discovering better catalysts, you know, in my academic lab, also in my company, and at the same time talking to customers, to investors, to raise money, and to put that into a commercial plan.”

In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about porosity, defined as the movement of people between sectors, Gould also hears from drug-discovery researcher Martin Gosling. He combines an academic post at the University of Sussex, UK, with a role as chief scientific officer at Enterprise Therapeutics, a biotech company that he co-founded in 2015.

She also talks to technology-transfer professional Nessa Carey, biochemist Dario Alessi, who leads the signal-transduction-therapy industry collaboration at the University of Dundee, UK, and Chaya Nayak, head of Facebook’s open research and transparency team.

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As academic research careers become increasingly precarious, Nessa Carey, a UK entrepreneur and technology transfer professional, tells Julie Gould that today’s scientists are better at planning for the future than were previous generations.

US science journalist Chris Woolston, who reports on Nature’s annual careers surveys, says the findings from 2021 show that researchers in industry are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs, enjoy high salaries and be optimistic about the future than their colleagues in academia.

The second episode of this six-part podcast series about porosity, the movement of people within academia and beyond, also includes perspectives from Shambhavi Naik, whose career has straddled academic research, journalism, start-ups and policy roles in Bengalaru, India. Gould is also joined by Søren Bregenholt, chief executive of the Sweden-based biotech company Alligator Bioscience, and Helke Hillebrand, director of the graduate academy at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

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David Bogle, pro-vice provost of the Doctoral School at University College London, defines this “porosity” as the movement of people within academia and beyond it — including careers in government and the non-profit sector — and the skills and experience acquired en route.

This first episode of a six-part series about porosity also includes perspectives from Søren Bregenholt, chief executive of the Sweden-based biotech company Alligator Bioscience; UK entrepreneur and technology-transfer professional Nessa Carey; and US science journalist Chris Woolston. Woolston reports on Nature’s annual career surveys, including its most recent one on salary and job satisfaction in academia and beyond.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, a social scientist who swapped a faculty position to launch a craft beer consultancy, says: “I’ve been in the position of acting as a department chair, and like most of us in who’ve done kind of full time, faculty appointments, have to navigate colleagues, navigate administration. We simultaneously do a lot, and a lot of things of consequence, prepping courses, building a curriculum, maintaining our research programs.

“The complexities of navigating those spaces provided me with a great head start to doing client work. To be honest, client work is a lot easier in comparison to navigating personalities in academia.”

Javier Garcia Martinez, who founded Rive Technology and now combines a business role with an academic position at the University of Alicante, Spain, adds: “Our education as scientists in terms of rigour, looking at data, connecting the dots, makes us very well equipped to launch a startup.

“Any group leader is also an entrepreneur. You need to raise money from industry or from government, you need to deliver papers on time, present in conferences, you need to hire, you need to inspire your team, you need a vision, you need to develop new technologies.”

“I know when my students come to my class I can share with them not only what's in the textbooks, but also my own personal experience on why a patent is important, and how to create a team.”

This is the final episode in our six-part Business of science series. Previous episodes looked at investor pitches, registering patents, technology transfer teams, scaling up and learning from setbacks.

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Daniel Batten, an investor and business coach in Auckland, New Zealand, describes strategies to prepare for unexpected events as well as more common crises, such as failed funding rounds or supplier problems.

Barbara Domayne-Hayman, entrepreneur in residence at the Francis Crick Institute in London, says the path to commercialization seldom runs smoothly, which is why it is important to have a ‘plan B’, together with a network of trusted mentors.

“Things never go exactly as you expect, even when things are going well. There’s usually some bumps along the road. Resilience is the single most important thing that you need to have,” she says.

“You have to be the one that actually continues to keep the faith. You just have to keep picking yourself up and carry on.”

This episode is part of Business of science, a six-part podcast series exploring how to commercialize your research and launch a spin-off.

The series looks at investor pitches, patents, technology transfer and how to survive the inevitable setbacks along the way.

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Despite the uncertainty, company leaders also need to think about business growth. This includes transferring knowledge and skills to junior colleagues, planning organizational structure, product development and quality control, and considering customers and competitors.

Charles Christy leads contract development and manufacturing at Ibex Dedicate, part of Lonza, a Swiss pharmaceutical and biotechnology company headquartered in Basle. He describes how science entrepreneurs should approach this crucial stage. Christy is joined by investor Daniel Batten and science entrepreneurs Javier Garcia Martinez, Wei Wu and Patrick Anquetil, who discuss their experiences of scaling up.

“In an early-stage company, people can’t be half-hearted about things. They really have to commit,” says Barbara Domayne-Hayman, entrepreneur in residence at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

This episode is part of Business of science, a six-part podcast series exploring how to commercialize your research and launch a spin-off.

The series looks at investor pitches, patents, and how to survive the inevitable setbacks along the way.

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Three scientists who successfully commercialized their research tell Adam Levy about the process, and its significance to them and their fledgling businesses.

Patent lawyer Tamsen Valoir describes different types of patents, the typical costs of registering one and how having a patent can reassure potential investors.

She also outlines some common misconceptions around patents, including the extent to which they do or don't apply in other countries.

This episode is part of Business of science, a six-part podcast series exploring how to commercialize your research and launch a spin-off.

The series looks at investor pitches, patents, technology transfer, scaling up and how to survive the inevitable setbacks along the way.

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

This can be hard for academic researchers, whose previous focus will have been on getting published, winning grants and teaching classes, says Javier Garcia-Martinez, a chemist at the University of Alicante in Spain, and founder of Rive Technology

This episode is part of Business of science, a six-part podcast series exploring how to commercialize your research and launch a spin-off. The series looks at investor pitches, patents, technology transfer, scaling up and how to survive the inevitable setbacks along the way.

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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.

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Carla Faria, a Brazilian laser physicist whose research group at University College London studies strong-field and attosecond-science, offers advice to scientists from under-represented groups on when to volunteer for workplace diversity initiatives. “You really have to ensure that time and the effort that you're putting there is effective”, she says. “ And what is going to happen is that your white male counterparts are going to publish another paper while you are spending your time doing this”.

This episode is part of Science diversified, a seven-part podcast series which explores how having a more diverse range of researchers ultimately benefits not only the scientific enterprise, but also the wider world.

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But not everyone follows this path. We meet two researchers who forged research careers later in life, and took very different routes to get there.

How valuable has their previous life experience been in their current career? What skills did they learn along the way? And how did they overcome the obstacles they faced?

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 sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) about how it is exploring diversity in science.

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What role, for example, did gay scientists have in developing the direction of research into HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s, when the condition was erroneously seen as something that only affected homosexual men? 

And how are transgender researchers helping to shape investigations into the physiology of transitioning women undergoing oestrogen therapy to underpin fairness in sport?

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.

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To overcome these blocks, what can male allies do to challenge discriminatory practices and unconscious bias, and to recognize their own privilege

and the career advantages it has delivered?

Two male scientists saw how female colleagues were ignored or talked over in meetings and treated more harshly than male candidates in job interviews.

They discuss the need to take supportive action, including a range of measures that include a boycott of ‘manels’ — all-male panels.

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 sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) about how it is exploring diversity in science.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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."

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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In 2018, propulsion development engineer Diana Alsindy launched Arabian Stargazer, a bilingual Instagram page that promotes rocket science and STEM careers to young people in Arabic-speaking countries.

Alsindy, who moved to the US from Iraq aged 14, tells Amer she developed the platform after realising that online resources in Arabic for young people seeking information about space science were thin on the ground.

“I'm passionate about science and I want to make other people passionate about it," she says. "My vision and my dream is to create space clubs, but virtually, engaging young people in techical conversations, using games, riddles, and Q&As with astronauts.”

Typically Alsindy runs one-hour presentations in both Arabic and English. “I’ve done it for five-year-olds and high school students. All I need is a latop and a screen, a Skype call or Google Hangout. If we want to open space science to everyone don’t open it for only English speaking populations.”

Helen Pilcher transitioned from UK stem cell researcher to writing and stand-up comedy, and is now science advisor at The Beano a children’s comic. A gig at one of the first Cheltenham Science Festivals with scientist friend Timandra Harkness marked a turning point.

“We called ourselves The Comedy Research Project and the aim was to prove scientifically that science can be funny.”

Alexis Gambis, assistant professor of biology at New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, founded labocine.com, a science film platform and magazine. “Whenever I talk about my films I always say in some ways I consider it to be research. I don’t consider it to be science communication. I’m really interested in how to bring microscopy into film for a general audience.”

Urmila Chadayammuri, a pre-doctoral fellow and a PhD student Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, worked with three colleagues she met at a two-day hackathon in 2019 to launch Cosmos VR, an app that offers a simulation including colliding galaxies, black holes and exploding stars. She tells Amer how the science communication project came about.

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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.

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In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about science communication, Pakinam Amer explores crisis communication and asks how well researchers have explained the underlying uncertainties to the public.

Epidemiologist Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University's school of public health, says academic researchers have three roles, to generate scholarship and science, to teach that science to students, and to clearly translate it for a general audience.

“Our job is to help the world see how we can bridge the science to the very real practical decisions that the world has to make to create a healthier world,” he says.

But how is science communication evolving during the pandemic? “We are entering a new era. We need a new playbook for communicating science in a time of uncertainty, and how policy can be informed by uncertain science. We have not done that well,” he tells her.

“There has been this mismatch between what we do not know and our capacity to communicate what we do not know, and to inform policy that needs to be made anyway. Those have been glaring gaps in my assessment.”

Ron Daniels, a critical care consultant at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, sees a role for scientists to plug knowledge gaps alongside the understandably “cautious and risk-averse" messages that often emanate from government and professional bodies.

Daniels produced a short video in response to calls to explain why COVID-19 patients are ventilated on their stomachs, using a simple drawing on a white paper board to explain the underlying physiology.

“People want to make sensible informed decisions. With a very filtered and controlled flow of information coming from government, which is designed to avoid panic and instil calm, making informed decisions can be challenging.

“This is not about profile, this is not about gaining followers or scoring points. Usually this should not be about academic argument. This should be around 'I've appraised the evidence, I have a level of expertise, here are my opinions and this is what I think you as a member of the public should do with that information.'”

What about journalists reporting on the pandemic and busting myths and misinformation? How does their communication role differ from scientists and clinicians on the frontline?

US science journalist Roxanne Khamsi says: “I feel some kind of personal obligation to try to disseminate what I know, which is a fraction of what virologists know. I don't want to oblige anyone to do anything. If folks have the time there has never been a more urgent time to communicate your science.”

US photojournalist and science writer Tara Haelle adds: “I think journalists and scientists in general have done a reasonably good job of trying to focus on the good information and counter the bad information. It is a hard job to do. The entire base of science is uncertainty. It is a quest for knowledge. If you had the knowledge you would not be seeking it.”

Anica Butler, editor of the Boston Globe Ideas section, tells Amer how she works with scientist contributors who submit expert opinion pieces to the newspaper. “I think of myself as standing in for the public. I am going to ask stupid questions.

“The editor is trying to help your work be understood by the average everyday person. In a crisis like this, that is the ultimate goal. Think about you explaining to your next door neighbour 'Here is what is happening.'”

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In the opening episode of this six-part series about science communication, Pakinam Amer discusses the craft of clear storytelling and science writing with seasoned communicators and journalists.

Siri Carpenter, editor of The Craft of Science Writing, a selection of resouces from science writing platform The Open Notebook, explains how science journalism and science communication differ, but share important characteristics, including “a search for some kind of truth, driven by curiosity and sometimes the desire to right some wrong.”

But how do you structure a story so readers are hooked from the start, explain complicated ideas, avoid jargon, check facts? “There are so many skills that go into good science writing,” Carpenter says. “It takes time and practice to get better, learning from mistakes, and from feedback.”

Islam Hussein, a virologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells Amer why he took to the video platform YouTube in 2014 to tackle pseudoscience after a hand-held device was wrongly touted as a tool to detect viral infections in his native Egypt.

“There was a lot of interaction between me and the public. Some of it was good. Some of it was not, in the form of insults and threats," he says.

With the help of his son, he rigged up a home studio in his basement to create more multimedia content, using his wife and colleagues to get feedback before getting it live. “When I hit record I want to make sure I am saying something useful and accurate,” he says.

Hussein now regularly appears on the TV to explain the emerging science behind COVID-19.

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Manuscripts are mutating. These changes range from different approaches to peer-review, to reformatting the structure of the paper itself.

Pippa Whitehouse, an Antarctica researcher at Durham University, UK, commends small changes to the paper's summary over the last few years, telling Adam Levy: “Often now there's a short layman's review of the work. I find those really useful in subjects slightly outside my field.

“I see a title that looks useful and don't quite understand the language in the technical abstract, but sometimes the lay abstract can give me just enough insight into the study.”

Sarvenaz Sarabipour, a systems biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, praised preprint servers from an early career researcher perspective in a February 2019 article published in PloS Biology.

She tells Levy: “It's very beneficial for researchers to deposit their work immediately, because journals are not able to do that. Preprinting is decoupling dissemination from the peer-review process. It's wonderful to have it published earlier.

“The peer review process is inhibitory to dissemination but of course has added value.

“As a very early career researcher you don't have many papers, so it's wonderful to have something out quicker and be able to discuss

that with colleagues and more senior researchers.

"Researchers can notice each others' work quicker. They contact each other if they have something similar and they may start collaborating.”

But catalyst researcher Ben List, managing director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim, Germany, sounds a note of caution about preprints.

"In my field of chemical synthesis it's a bit risky,” he tells Levy. "It's a different thing in physics or biology where experiments take a long time. In chemistry you see something and within a few days you can actually reproduce this work. I'm not 100% sure if this is the future of publishing, in chemistry at least."

List is editor-in-chief of organic chemistry journal Synlett. Its approach to peer-review involves e-mailing a paper to a panel of up to 70 reviewers. This "crowd-reviewing" system is both quicker and more collaborative, he argues, and the size of the panel reduces the risk of bias.

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Pippa Whitehouse recalls seeking advice and media training from colleagues in her university press office when her first paper was published.

“I recorded some soundbites and listened back to them and reflected on how to communicate information very clearly. It gave me a lot of confidence,” says Whitehouse, an Antarctica researcher at the University of Durham, UK.

”All of the interaction I've had with the press has been really positive,” she adds. “It can seem a little bit daunting to begin with, but if you give it a go I think you'll find the media are very interested in finding out about science.”

In the third episode of this four-part podcast series about getting published, Jane Hughes describes her role as director of communications and public engagement at The Francis Crick Institute in London.

She and her team help 1,500 researchers communicate their science to the press, public, policymakers and funders. Hughes recommends reaching out to press-office colleagues as soon as possible to discuss a paper's potential for attracting newspaper, broadcast or online media coverage.

Researchers can take other steps themselves to get a paper talked about, she tells Levy. ”One thing that can make a difference is an image, a video or something alongside the paper that you can share on social media,” says Hughes.