In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about hiring in science, Julie Gould asks what it takes to be the perfect candidate for a science job vacancy.

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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In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about hiring and getting hired in science, Julie Gould investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by recruiters to draft job ads, process applications and shortlist candidates. She also asks how recruiters feel about jobseekers using it in their applications, and whether or not they can even tell.

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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Kelly Korreck tells Adam Levy how a once-loved career in science gradually left her feeling exhausted, upset, and chronically stressed, with accompanying feelings of imposter syndrome.

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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Doreen Anene and Stanley Anigbogu launched separate initiatives to promote science careers to young girls and women in Africa. What motivated them to do so?

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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Africa “gullibly” followed Europe and other Western regions in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that resulted, says Oyewale Tomori, past president of the Nigerian Academy of Science and a former vice-chancellor of Redeemer’s University in Ede.

“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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Paballo Chauke and Shannon Morreira examine a drive by the University of Cape Town (UCT) to cultivate a more inclusive academic environment after a campus statue of nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes was toppled in April 2015.

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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Nigerian virologist Oyewale Tomori describes how science has fared in the six decades since his country gained independence, with a frank assessment of the current state of academic research in his home country and across the continent.

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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Early career researchers in Africa are starting to reap the benefits of increased investment in science and a growth in the number of research collaborations and partnerships, says Ifeyinwa Aniebo, a molecular geneticist who researches malaria drug resistance in Nigeria.

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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Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands has a long history of partnering with local technology giants such as Philips Electronics and DAF Trucks, with support from city leaders.

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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Joan Cordiner took steps to “de-risk” her career when she moved into academia. Having spent her entire career up to that point in industry, she left her role as a technical and change manager role at chemical company Syngenta, and joined the University of Sheffield, UK, in 2020.

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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Start-ups can be fun; medium-sized companies suit fast learners; multinationals are well resourced, but their internal processes can be hard to navigate.

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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Scientist-entrepreneur Javier Garcia Martinez recalls combining an academic role at the University of Alicante, Spain, while getting a catalyst start-up called Rive Technology off the ground.

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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Researchers looking to switch sectors are often plagued by uncertainty. Many take years to make the move after weighing up the pros and cons of quitting academia.

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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Hilal Lashuel and Dave Reay join Michelle Kimple to talk about faculty mental health and why it is often overlooked.

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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After more than three decades working for the same chemical company, Joan Cordiner accepted a senior role at a university. For many, she says, the move from industry to academia can feel like being a square peg in a round hole. Academic colleagues sometimes need to be persuaded that skills acquired elsewhere have value. But collaborations and career moves between the two sectors are crucial, she adds, in countries with ambitions to become (or remain) research powerhouses.

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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In the final episode of this seven-part series about mentoring, Ruth Gotian and Christine Pfund outline their hopes for post-pandemic mentoring and the changing nature of other collaborative relationships in scientific research.

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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Some researchers never lose touch with group leaders or committee members who mentored them as graduate students.

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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Reverse mentoring, peer-to-peer, group sessions. Choose one or more to tackle a tough career transition.

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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Good scientific mentors can provide both careers and psychosocial support, says Erin Dolan, who researches innovative approaches to science education at the University of Georgia in Athens.

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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Many mentoring relationships were disrupted by the pandemic, particularly ones that relied on regular face-to-face contact.

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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Science has become more international in the past few decades. This means that you might encounter a variety of people from different geographical and cultural backgrounds in your lab. So how does this affect your mentoring relationships?

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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How can science better support and reward academics who, alongside running labs, writing grants, authoring papers and teaching students, also devote precious hours of their working week to mentoring colleagues?

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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This week, Nature has a special issue on collaborations, looking at the benefits to science and society that working together can bring. In this collaboration-themed episode (produced jointly with the Nature Podcast and Working Scientist podcast teams), we discuss the issue, and the state of research collaborations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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How does graduate school and academia prepare you for entrepreneurship and a commercial career?

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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Charlotte Roughton says she developed a deep-rooted shame and resentment towards her autism diagnosis, causing her to mask the condition during her biosciences degree at the University of Durham, UK.

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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The road to commercializing research is strewn with challenges, but how can science start-ups prepare for developments that are harder to predict, such as a global pandemic?

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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In their early stages, science start-ups require solid commitment, with founders and their teams clocking up long hours with little financial reward.

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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How does registering a patent compare to other scientific career milestones? For science entrepreneurs, is it akin to publishing a first paper, landing tenure or securing a grant?

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.

If you want your product idea to succeed, one of the first steps is to interest potential investors.

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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Two researchers with disabilities describe an ‘ableist’ culture in academia, a system designed for fully fit and healthy people that does little to account for those who fall outside those parameters.  This culture can sideline scientists with disabilities, chronic illnesses, neurological or mental health problems. As a result many choose not to disclose their conditions for fear of being stigmatised. 

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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In 2020 Antentor Hinton led an online initiative via the Cell Mentor platform to mark the achievements of 1000 Black scientists. The list includes the cell biologist and diversity champion Sandra Murray. “If it wasn’t for her, putting up with certain institutional challenges....I wouldn’t be able to have a postdoc at Iowa, nor be able to be mentored by an African American male”, says Hinton, an assistant professor who studies mitochondrial dynamics regulation during aging at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

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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In the past, many institutions produced similar types of scientists: researchers with a shared educational history who go straight from school to university then do a PhD and postdoctoral research.

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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Two LGBTQ+ scientists describe how sexual and gender identities can help to drive research by offering perspectives that others in a lab group or collaboration might not have considered.

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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For all sorts of reasons, women remain under-represented in senior-level jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

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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Why do so many academics struggle to ‘power down’ at the end of a long working day, and what are the longer-term health effects of failing to switch off at evenings and weekends?

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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Different countries have varying working cultures — what works in China will not necessarily work in, say, Mexico.

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.

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Imagine a world where science is still the sole preserve of the white, the male, the privileged. What research interests would be prevalent? And what research would get funded as a result?  Then imagine a very different world where different groups engage, bringing fresh ideas and perspectives. Because of their diverse backgrounds, these scientists study subject areas previously neglected or simply unthought-of.

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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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.

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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."

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Graphic designer Jakob Trollbäck remembers a 2014 meeting with film director Richard Curtis and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, then very much a work in progress, coming up in conversation.

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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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.

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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.

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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.'”

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