Working Scientist

In the third episode of this seven-part  Working Scientist  podcast series about freedom and safety in science, researchers in Nigeria, Venezuela and Ukraine describe what it is like to live and work in struggling economies. Ismardo Bonalde currently earns around $500 a month in his role as an experimental physicist and superconductivity researcher at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientif...

In January 2022 the Biden administration announced its long-awaited strategy to safeguard scientific integrity across US federal research facilities and agencies. But 16 months on, do researchers working in those organisations feel better protected than they did under the administration led by Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump? The Union of Concerned Scientists, a US non-profit and advocacy or...

efJf Hawkins’ 2021 book  A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence,  focuses on the neocortex and how it helps us to understand the world around us, before examining the future of artificial intelligence, based on what we already know about the brain. In this final episode of  Tales from the Synapse , a 12-part podcast series about neuroscience, Hawkins describes how his book...

In the first episode of a six-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Ukrainian neuroscientist Nana Voitenko relives how she and colleagues fled Kiev when war broke out in February 2022, and how the country’s research landscape and infrastructure has fared since. Also, physicist and climate scientist Liubov Poshyvailo-Strube describes her involvement in the Ukranian Global Univers...

Isabelle Mansuy’s neuroepigenetics lab researches the impact of life experiences and environmental factors on mental health, exploring if these impacts can be passed on to descendants. 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. B...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an experimental treatment strategy which uses an implanted device to help patients with severe depression who have reached a point where no other treatment works. 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...

Thomas Hummel, who researches smell and taste disorders at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, describes international efforts to help patients who have lost their sense of smell, perhaps as a result of COVID-19, head trauma, chronic rhinosinusitis, and neurodegenerative diseases. Hummel points to the development of cochlear implants to help patients with hearing loss. “There could be...

In 2020 the forced isolation of pandemic-related lockdowns led many of us to attend virtual fitness classes and undertake home baking projects. Chantel Prat wondered why she wasn’t interested in taking part. “I couldn’t help but notice and be frustrated by the fact that my brain was responding to the pandemic in a way that seemed very different from the people around me,” she says. At the time Pra...

A child neurologist treating Christin Godale’s epilepsy was so impressed with his young patient’s interest in the brain he gave her some of his textbooks to read during an extended stay in hospital. “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 Cincinna...

In his 2022 book  Zero to Birth, How the Human Brain is Built , developmental neurobiologist William Harris includes ice hockey analogies to describe how the body’s most complicated organ develops in the womb, drawing on a 40-year career studying fruit fly, salamander, frog and fish embryos. Harris, professor emeritus at Cambridge University, UK, played the sport growing up in Canada and is n...

An applied goal of Pieter Roelfsema’s lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam is to create a visual brain prosthesis aimed at people who have lost their sight. 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 ex...

Gina Rippon was a paid-up member of the “male-female brain brigade” earlier in her career as a cognitive neuroscientist, but changed tack, she says, after discovering there was not a lot of sound research behind the well-established belief that male and female brains are biologically different. In the fourth episode of this 12-part podcast series  Tales from the Synapse , Rippon explores the...

After a mostly miserable childhood in the small Israeli village of Tel Aviv (his words), Ori Amir moved to the US, where he gained a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and launched a second career as a stand-up comedian. 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 tri...

In the second episode of this 12-part podcast series,  Tales from the Synapse , neuroscientist Anil Seth describes his research into consciousness, which he describes as “insurance against falling into a single, disciplinary hole.” Alongside neuroscientists, Seth’s research group at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, also includes string theorists, mathematicians and psychologists. The...

As a pharmacy student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Natasha Mason was struck by the high volume of patients who complained about opiates and antidepressants not working, but at the same time became more and more dependent on them. This observation triggered an interest in the behavioural effects of psychedelic drugs, which took her career in a psychopharmacological direction. She now res...

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders? 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 — d...

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders? 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 l...

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders? 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 lead...

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders? 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...

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders? 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 leadershi...

Alongside the stresses of adapting to a new country and settling into a new lab, scientists who have made the move abroad since 2020 often face extra barriers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 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 th...

Kelsey Byers outlines some of the things disabled scientists should look out when they are looking to move labs, both at home and abroad. Byers, an evolutionary chemical ecologist who was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome in her 20s and is now a group leader at the John Innes Institute, a plant and microbial research institute in Norwich, UK, also offers advice on how to talk about disability...

After completing a PhD in cancer biology at the University of Chicago, Illinois, in 2017, Tim Fessenden moved to a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to focus on immunology. 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 a...

In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about moving labs, three researchers who moved abroad for work describe how they handled the challenges it brought, including language barriers, cultural differences and experiences of racism. Sara Suliman, an immunology researcher and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, shares her experiences of...

In the second episode of this Working Scientist podcast series about moving labs, physical geographer Mette Bendixen and her ecologist husband Lars Iversen describe how they resolved their two-body problem after moving from Denmark to the United States in 2018 with their three-year-old son. With the help of supportive supervisors and a sympathetic funder, the couple worked 1,200 kilometres apart f...