Many postdoctoral researchers can trace their career journey back to childhood experiences. In Pearl Ryder’s case it was spending lots of time outdoors in the rural area where she grew up, combined with the experience of having a sibling who experienced poor health.Ryder, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts, and founder of the Future PI Slack group, says: “It made me realize how important health is, and that there’s so little that we understand about the world.”But is science, like some other professions a calling? Yes, says Christopher Hayter, who specializes in entrepreneurship, technology policy, higher education and science at Arizona State University in Phoenix. “There are professions that are a little bit different from your day-to-day job, something people gravitate towards, something bigger than themselves,” he says.“It is often referred to as a calling. I think we could say that about a lot of scientists. It’s how they define themselves: ‘I’m a scientist.’ ‘I’m going to cure cancer.’ ‘I’m going to discover the next planet.’ When students transition from doctoral students to postdoc they are really doubling down on that identity.”Michael Moore, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, adds: “Being a scientist is overcoming a series of hurdles, and you need to see yourself as a scientist to get that internal motivation to keep going. You have to publish so much, get so many grants, teach so many courses. Having that identity and that motivation is really key to moving forward.”Gould’s guests discuss how to maintain that motivation despite the setbacks, and how a scientist’s professional identity and career path is underpinned by the networks, mentors and transferable skills acquired during a postdoc.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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The postdoc career journeys that date back to kindergarten

Postdocs and other career researchers need better trained lab leaders, not just nicer ones, Julie Gould discovers.Calls to change the research culture have grown louder in 2020 as COVID-19 lockdowns led to extended grant application and publication deadlines.As the world emerges from the pandemic, will researchers adopt more respectful ways of communicating, collaborating and publishing?Anne Marie Coriat, head of the UK and Europe research landscape at the funder Wellcome, tells Julie Gould about the organisation's 2019 survey of more than 4,000 researchers. The results were published in January this year.She adds: "We know that not everything is completely kind, constructive, and conducive to encouraging and enabling people to be at their best. "We tend to count success as things that are easy to record. And so inadvertently, I think funders have contributed to hyper competition, to the status of the cult hero of an individual being, you know, the leader who gets all the accolades."But what else is needed, beyond a kinder culture? In June 2020 Jessica Malisch, an assistant professor of physiology at St. Mary's College of Maryland, co-authored an opinion article calling for new solutions to ensure gender equity in the wake of COVID-19. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/15378 She says "We can't rely on kindness and good intentions to correct the systemic inequity in academia.Katie Wheat, head of engagement and policy at the researcher development non-profit Vitae, tells Gould that researchers who feel that they're their manager or their supervisor is supportive and available for them during the pandemic have better indicators of wellbeing than those who are not getting that support. "A PI might also be in a relatively precarious situation, reliant on grant income for their own salary, and for their team's salary. "You can be in a scenario where the individualistic markers of success put everybody in a competitive situation against everybody else, rather than a more collaborative and collegial situation where, where one person's success is everybody's success."  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A kinder research culture is not a panacea

Experience as a postdoctoral researcher might not fast-track your career outside academia, Julie Gould discovers.Nessa Carey, a UK entrepreneur and technology-transfer professional whose career has straddled academia and industry, including a senior role at Pfizer, shares insider knowledge on how industry employers often view postdoctoral candidates. She also offers advice on CVs and preparing for interviews.“It is very tempting sometimes for people to keep on postdoc-ing, especially if they have a lab head who has a lot of rolling budget and who likes having the same postdocs there, because they're productive and they know them,” she says. “That’s great for the lab head. It’s typically very, very bad for the individual postdoc,” she adds.Carey is joined by Shulamit Kahn, an economist at Boston University in Massachusetts, who co-authored a 2017 paper about the impact of postdoctoral training on early careers in biomedicine1.According to the paper, published in Nature Biotechnology, employers did not financially value the training or skills obtained during postdoc training. “Based on these findings, the majority of PhDs would be financially better off if they skipped the postdoc entirely,” it concludes.Malcolm Skingle, academic liaison at GlaxoSmithKline, adds: “You really will get people who have done their PhD, they’ve done a two-year postdoc, they think they’re pretty much going to run the world and single-handedly develop a drug.“They have got no idea how difficult drug discovery is, and their place in that very big jigsaw.”“And why don’t postdocs get great salaries straightaway? Well, actually, they haven’t proven themselves in our environment, where, if they’re any good, then their salaries will go up quite quickly.”  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Planning a postdoc before moving to industry? Think again

Closed labs and rescinded job offers have snatched away opportunities. How can science bounce back?Earlier this year, Michael Moore was due to start a permanent faculty position in Michigan, a move to his “dream job” that would have brought him and his family of five children closer to where their grandparents live.Moore, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, contacted his prospective employer after hearing that job offers were being put on hold at many places as a result of the pandemic. He was later told that, as a result of continued funding uncertainty, all new hires were cancelled.Pearl Ryder, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts, and founder of the Future PI Slack channel, tells Gould that Moore's situation is sadly not unusual. She adds: “The group that has been most harmed by this pandemic are the youngest members of our profession, the graduate students who were hoping to move on to a postdoc … and the postdocs who were hoping to move on to new positions, but those new positions no longer exist.”Can any positives be drawn from the pandemic? A kinder and more open research culture, perhaps? Shirley Tilghman, president emerita of Princeton University, New Jersey, thinks so.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The career costs of COVID-19: how postdocs and PhD students are paying the price

Julie Gould investigates how brain drains and demographic time bombs are forcing some countries to rethink the postdoc.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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Stop the postdoc treadmill … I want to get off

What is a postdoc and why undertake one? Julie Gould gets some metaphorical answers to a complicated question.“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.”  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Why life as a postdoc is like a circling plane at LaGuardia Airport

Ditch jargon, keep sentences short, stay topical. Pakinam Amer shares the secrets of good science writing for books and magazines.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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How to craft and communicate a simple science story

Funding agencies and societies love novel approaches to science communication. Here is some expert advice on how to grab their attention.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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Untitled EpisodeHow to sell your public outreach ideas to res

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 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How films and festivals can showcase your science

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

How to come out to your parents as a science communicator

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 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.'”  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Coronavirus conversations: Science communication during a pandemic

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 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Science communication made simple

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 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. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

How the academic paper is evolving in the 21st century

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 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.She also warns against over-hyping a paper's findings. ”Try not to sensationalize or over-simplify. You can work with your press office to make sure the message gets across properly.” For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

How to get media coverage for your research

It's important not to take reviewers' comments personally, even if you feel they have misunderstood the science, Adam Levy discovers. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

How to bounce back from a bruising peer-review or paper rejection

Naturejobs is the careers resource for the Nature Publishing Group, publishers of the journal Nature. The Naturejobs podcast is a free audio show highlighting career issues for scientists with interviews from industry experts and key information from presentations at Naturejobs career fairs such as the Source Event.

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