Working Scientist

In the fourth episiode of this six-part Working Scientist series about science communication, Pakinam Amer examines how festivals, film, comedy clubs and virtual space camps can be ideal vehicles to explain your research to young people. In 2018, propulsion development engineer Diana Alsindy launched Arabian Stargazer, a bilingual Instagram page that promotes rocket science and STEM careers to you...

In the third episode of this six-part series about the skills needed to explain your research to a general audience, Pakinam Amer talks to scientists who left the lab to work as full-time science communicators in print, online and broadcast journalism. Often the biggest challenge some of them faced was telling family they were swapping the well-trodden career path of academic research for the more...

Do researchers and frontline clinicians have a moral obligation to communicate science around the coronavirus? 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...

In a world currently facing an unparalleled health crisis, the need for clear science communication has never been greater. Explaining complex ideas in a concise manner does not come naturally to everyone, but there are some simple rules you can follow. In the opening episode of this six-part series about science communication, Pakinam Amer discusses the craft of clear storytelling and science wri...

Adam Levy delves into the article of the future, examining the rise of lay summaries, the pros and cons of preprint servers, and how peer review is being crowd-sourced and opened up. 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...

Your paper has been accepted, reviewed and published. Now you need to get it talked about by journalists, the public, your peers and funders. 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's important not to take reviewers' comments personally, even if you feel they have misunderstood the science, Adam Levy discovers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Getting published for the first time is a crucial career milestone, but how does a set of experiments evolve into a scientific paper? In the first episode of this four-part podcast series about writing a paper, Adam Levy delves into the all-important first stage of the process, preparing a manuscript for submission to a journal. He also finds out about the importance of titles, abstracts, figures...

PhD programmes in "the rainbow nation" mostly lead to academic careers, but reform is needed to boost collaboration and integration, higher education experts tell Julie Gould. It's 25 years since since South Africa's first free elections swept Nelson Mandela to power as president. But higher education in the "rainbow nation" (a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe the post-apartheid...

The thesis is a central element of how graduate students are assessed. But is it time for an overhaul? Julie Gould finds out. How do you decide whether or not somebody is a fully trained researcher? Janet Metcalfe, head of Vitae, a non-profit that supports the professional development of researchers, tells Julie Gould that it's time to be "really brave" and look at how doctoral degrees are examine...

Scientific research is not the endeavour of a single person. It requires a team of people. How can this be better reflected in graduate student training, asks Julie Gould. Is science ready for "Team PhD", whereby a group of students work more collaboratively, delivering a multi-authored thesis at their end of their programme?  Jeanette Woolard, who recently secured a £4.5m Wellcome...

Julie Gould asks six higher education experts if it's now time to go back to the drawing board and redesign graduate programmes from scratch. Suzanne Ortega, president of the US Council of Graduate Schools, says programmes now include elements to accommodate some of the skills now being demanded by employers, including project and data management expertise. "We can't expect to prepare doctoral res...

Students need to be clear about their reasons for pursuing a PhD and the career options open to them, Julie Gould discovers. In 2015, labour economist Paula Stephan told an audience of early career researchers in the US that the supply of PhD students was outstripping demand. “Since 1977, we've been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening. "We...

Adam Levy talks to 2019 John Maddox Prize winner Bambang Hero Saharjo and Olivier Bernard, the Canadian pharmacist whose campaign against vitamin C injections for cancer patients earned him the early career stage prize. The John Maddox Prize recognises the work of individuals who promote science and evidence, advancing the public discussion around difficult topics despite challenges or hostility....

Tom Baden's work into the neuroscience of vision has earned him the inaugural Nature Research Award for Driving Global Impact. Tom Baden, professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex, UK, is the first winner of an award to recognise early career researchers whose work has made, or has the potential to make, a positive impact on society. Baden's research on zebrafish and mice showed that e...

Two projects aimed at boosting female representation in STEM have won the second Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Science and Innovating Science, in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies. Jean Fan spent a year volunteering at a science club for high school students during her PhD programme at Harvard University and was struck by how many of them dismissed the idea of becoming scientists...

In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about physics careers, Gaia Donati draws on her contact with fellow physicists in her role as a manuscript editor at  Nature,  where she oversees research papers in several areas, including quantum information and computing, high-energy physics and plasma physics. She also reflects on her own career experience and how academia in her n...

Moving to a new branch of science is scary, but learning new skills and collaborating with different colleagues can be exhilarating, Julie Gould discovers. In the penultimate episode of this six-part series about physics careers, Julie Gould talks to Stuart Higgins, a research associate at Imperial College London, who switched from solid state physics to bioengineering, and Anna Lappala, who moved...

Media interest in particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider boosted Jon Butterworth's interest in public engagement, reports Julie Gould. Jon Butterworth developed a taste for public engagement after repeated media appearances related to his work on the ATLAS experiment, one of two Large Hadron Collider detectors at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab. Butterworth, a physics professor at Univ...

Industry has long courted physicists for their data science expertise, but will this change as more undergraduates acquire these skills? In 2013, Kim Nilsson co-founded Pivigo , a training company to prepare researchers for data science careers. She tells Julie Gould how and why she moved into business. Nilsson's Pivigo colleague Deepak Mahtani quit academia after completing a PhD in astronomy. Wh...

Elizabeth Tasker's career has taken her from Europe to Japan via North America, including a Florida campus where alligators lurked in drainage ditches. If your career looks set to include geographical transitions, and the cultural, workplace and linguistic challenges that they can pose, listen to Elizabeth's advice in this second episode of a six-part podcast series about careers and physics. Host...

Earlier this year Eindhoven University of Technology faced a social media backlash after announcing that from July 2019, all academic staff vacancies will be open to female applicants only for the first six months. Many people questioned the legality of the move. In this first episode of a six-part series about careers in physics, Cornelis Storm, who leads the theory of polymers and soft matters g...

In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about workplace technology, Lee Cronin talks about the "chemputer," a device he and his team developed as a "chemical Google to search for the origin of life." In November 2018 Cronin and colleagues at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, unveiled this new method of producing drug molecules, using downloadable blueprints to synthesise organic ch...

Ben Britton's experimental micromechanics lab at Imperial College London currently includes four postdoctoral researchers, 11 PhD students, and four Masters students. Alongside computational analysis tools used to detect how materials perform (including Matlab as the group's main programming environment, chosen for its speed, global user base and visual interaction), Britton and his team use the o...

Machine learning and data management skills can raise your scientific profile and open up career opportunities, Julie Gould discovers. As a biomedical science student, Jake Schofield felt frustrated at the length of time it took to repeat experiments, record results and manage protocols, with most of the work paper-based. In 2016 he and Jan Domanski, a biochemist with programming skills, launched...