Naturejobs Podcast

Elaine Fitzcharles, a senior lab manager at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), says the role is sometimes wrongly perceived as someone who “couldn’t cut it as a scientist.” 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

Before launching his own consultancy in 2021, Simon Kerridge worked as a research manager in UK academia. “We’re the oil in the cogs,” he says of the role, adding: “Obviously, it’s a service profession, but we have to be careful not to be subservient.”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

The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) collects research outputs from UK universities and is used by the the country’s government to distribute around £2 billion in research funding. But its focus on publications to measure outputs has drawn criticism. 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 com

In the first episode of a six-part podcast series about research culture and team science, research managers Lorna Wilson and Hilary Noone describe how their skills and expertise can help deliver better research outputs, particularly when their contributions are better understood and valued by academic colleagues.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

In November 2021, Maria Leptin became president of the European Research Council. After a long career in biological research, Leptin admits that starting the process of closing her lab at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) before taking up her new role, was difficult. “You win some you lose some,” she tells Nature careers editor Jack Leeming of this new career step. “It's painful, but that's the decision I've made.”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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In late 2021 a BuzzFeed investigation revealed a catalogue of sexual misconduct incidents at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). Ecologist Sarah Batterman, one of more than a dozen women to speak out about their experiences, describes what happened to her and the impact it has had on her career.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

Morteza Mahmoudi witnessed bullying behaviours during a series of lab visits following his PhD in 2009, and now studies the topic alongside his role as a nanoscience and regenerative medicine researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing. In 2019 he co-founded the Academic Parity Movement, a non-profit which aims to end academic discrimination, violence and bullying across the sector.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

As a child of the Space Age, Jeffrey Gordon dreamed of becoming an astronaut and discovering life on Mars. Instead he found fascinating life forms and interactions closer to home, inside the gastrointestinal tract.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, sup

A professor invites colleagues and their partners to a Christmas party but reacts negatively when a young gay researcher asks to bring his future husband along. A Black carnivore researcher conceals their bisexuality and pronoun preferences when doing fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa.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

Atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe realised she was the only climate researcher in West Texas when she joined Texas Tech University in Lubbock, 15 years ago.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 r

Hassoni Alodaini hoped to complete a PhD when war broke out in his native Yemen in 2015.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 wor

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 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

In January 2022 the Biden administration announced its long-awaited strategy to safeguard scientific integrity across US federal research facilities and agencies.But 16 months on, do researchers working in those organisations feel better protected than they did under the administration led by Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump?The Union of Concerned Scientists, a US non-profit and advocacy organisation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has tracked more than 200 examples where scientific decision-making processes were politicised during the four-year Trump administration, compared to 98 under the 2001-9 presidency of George W Bush.In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Jacob Carter, research director at the union’s centre for science and democracy, joins Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the US Climate Science Legal Defence Fund, to describe the impact of the Biden strategy in empowering scientist whistleblowers to speak out.

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 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

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 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 I

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. 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

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 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

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

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 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 Washingt

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 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