Working Scientist

In 1997 Shannon Bros came out as a transgender woman to students and colleagues. “When I transitioned, everything stopped,” says Bros of her research career. “I had a huge friend base by that time. I was confident, you know, what I was doing. Everything collapsed overnight.” 

Bros, an emeritus ecologist at San Jose State University in California, describes the personal pressures that led to the decision and the reservations she had at the time. "I had a perfect life. I had a fabulous marriage. I had kids. I have always been respected in my department. The last thing I wanted to...

In June this year developmental biologist Ottoline Leyser stepped down as chief executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the country’s national research funding agency. In the final episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning, Leyser tells Julie Gould how the opportunity to lead UKRI came about, and how, for her, good career planning starts with reflecting on who you are what your values are. Leyser also finds the notion of work-life balance problematic, arguing that you cannot easily segregate the two from each other. 

“You’re not your job. You are who yo...

In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about career planning in science, Julie Gould discusses some of the setbacks faced by junior researchers, including political upheaval, financial crises and a change in supervisor.

Shortly after embarking on a PhD at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, Katja Loos’ supervisor relocated to the University of Bayreuth, taking his team with him. But weeks later he died of an aggressive cancer.

Loos, who is now a polymer chemistry researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, describes how she worked through the various ch...

In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series about science career planning, Julie Gould investigates "planned happenstance," a theory which encourages workers to embrace chance opportunities during their working lives.

Holly Prescott, a careers guidance practitioner at the University of Birmingham, UK, suggests a slightly alternative approach, whereby a professional reflects on their experiences to decide what they would like more or less of in their current or future role.

Listing the things you want to keep, lose or add in a job description, she argues, enables researchers to have happier working...

In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning, Sam Smith, a behavioral oncologist at the University of Leeds, UK, reflects on his plan as an early career researcher to relocate to the United States and become a professor. Did thing work out as planned?

Instead of chasing job titles at defined points in his career to help him achieve his goal, Smith says he focused on winning specific grants that enabled him to do “cool science and solve problems” along the way. But becoming a parent and needing to earn a highe...

Uschi Symmons says that attending a workshop about individual development plans (IDPs) during her molecular biology postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia blew her mind. Going away and crafting her own IDP helped her to identify technical skills she lacked, and consider alternative career options beyond academia.

But one limitation of IDPs is that they don’t always take personal lives and values into account, says Symmons, who is now a programme manager at the European Innovation Council, the EU funding agency for breakthrough innovation, based in Brussels. In her case she needed to accom...

Many junior researchers see career planning as a luxury item, feeling unable to spare time in their busy personal and professional lives to plan their next move or work out longer-term goals.

In the first episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning in science, Fatimah Williams, founder of Professional Pathways, a training and coaching company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says: “People get lost because they’re either just kind of getting head down, getting the work done. They’re not popping up every so often to say: 'Am I where I want to be...

Women are woefully under-represented in Nepalese science, says Babita Paudel. She blames a combination of gender stereotyping, a paucity of female role models and mentors, poor networking opportunities, institutional discrimination, and a societal pressure that pushes them towards other professions. 

To tackle the challenge, Paudel developed the Women in STEM Network Database, a resource aimed at building a strong mentoring community of female scientists across the Himalayan kingdom. Paudel also runs workshops, training sessions and seminars to help equip women with technical skills, research methodologies and leadership training.  

Her advice to fema...

JoAnn Trejo co-leads the Faculty Mentor Training Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) medical school, where, thanks to her efforts, the number of tenure-track faculty members from under-represented groups shot up by 38% from 2017 to 2022. 

Trejo, a pharmacologist whose research helps to develop drugs to treat vascular diseases, says her mentor colleagues understand that their mission and responsibility is training the next generation of scientists and providing opportunities for them. She describes the people who supported her at the early career stage, and the impact they had. “When I reflect on my life and I...

Joslynn Lee seeks to bring Indigenous values and heritage into her chemistry and biochemistry teaching at Fort Lewis College. The institution in Durango, Colorado, is a Native American-serving non-tribal institution where 30% of its student population identifies as Indigenous, Native American or Alaska Native.

Lee’s efforts to bridge the Native American worldview with Western science stem from childhood walks with her nálí (paternal grandmother), who pointed out the medicinal properties of plants, and an undergraduate professor who was interested in Lee's background and how Indigenous values and culture could be applied to organic chemistry. 

Lee, a...

Arezoo Khodayari and Laurie Barge started a mentoring collaboration more than a decade ago, providing students at California State University Los Angeles (Cal State LA) with paid research opportunities at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in nearly Pasadena, where Barge is based. 

Khodayari, an environmental scientist at Cal State LA, a minority-serving institution where more than 75% of students identify as Hispanic, says their partnership came about when they co-hosted a student intern who was seeking to turn her summer research project at JPL into a master's thesis. Barge's JPL lab explores the potential for the emergence of life on other w...

Vukosi Marivate helps to build scientific communities and networks for African researchers in machine learning and artificial intelligence. These include Deep Learning Indaba, an events and awards programme inspired by the isiZulu word for gathering. Marivate, a computer scientist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, says Indaba came about to “bring together the African community to strengthen machine learning, so that we can contribute, shape and ultimately be our own owners of these coming technologies.”

Marivate also co-founded the startup Lelapa AI, inspired this time by the Setswana word for home. An early project for...

A paper co-authored by Tatsuya Amano was rejected recently without review because its level of English did not meet the journal’s required standard. His research suggests that 38% of researchers who are not fluent in English have experienced similar rejections.

Amano, whose first language is Japanese, describes how dismantling language barriers will result in improved knowledge sharing, and in the long run, better research.

Journals, he argues, can help by taking steps to distinguish the quality of science from the quality of language when assessing manuscripts. And conference organizers can adopt a range of...

Rana Dajani studies epigenetics of trauma in vulnerable communities around the world. A molecular biologist based at the Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan, her research explores what genes are turned on and off through trauma and if they are transferred to future generations.

In the second episode of an eight-part podcast series to accompany Nature's Changemakers in science Q&A series, collection, Dajani, a daughter of refugees, talks about some formative influences and how she now collaborates with Jordan’s Circassian and Chechen populations, who were violently evicted from their homelands almost two hundred years ago. “I had a...

In her role as director of Bioprotection Aotearoa, a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence, Amanda Black works with local communities to protect the country’s natural and food-producing ecosystems.

Black says the Indigenous values that she applies in her role include te pono, which stands for truth, honesty and integrity, te aroha, encompassing respect and reciprocity, and te tika, a term that means doing what is right, in the right way, for the right reasons.

The soil chemist is the first of eight scientists to feature in a podcast series to accompany Nature's ...

Nature's 2022 special issue on racism in science spawned a follow-up Q&A series with researchers who champion inclusion in their workplace or community.

Now eight of the 21 Changemakers who have appeared in the series so far revisit their stories in a podcast series that also explores their career journeys and the impage of their research.

Kendall Powell, the senior careers editor who launched the article series in May last year, explains how and why it came about, and the criteria for choosing a Changemaker.

“The inclusive practices that these researchers follo...

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...

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 exe...

Three researchers and a career coach discuss if there as much scope to negotiate salaries in academia as there is in industry.

In either setting, they say, negotiation should not be a battleground. Hiring managers should not take advantage of a beloved future colleague who may have zero experience of negotiating anything, says David Perlmutter, a communications researcher at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, who writes about hiring and salary negotiations.

Nor is it like a car sale, adds Jen Heemstra, a chemistry researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, after which the tw...

Should you tailor your job interview style based on the age, gender and cultural background of the person asking the questions?

Margot Smit and Dietmar Hutmacher compare their approaches to hiring and how generational influences might shape how they respond to candidates.

Smit, a plant molecular biologist who became a group leader at Tübingen University Germany, in late 2023, and Hutmacher, a regenerative medicine researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, list what they look for at interview. Coming from different generations, one with a background in industry, do they differ?

Julie Gould compares hiring practices across industry and academia by seeking perspectives from Tina Persson, an organic chemist-turned-careers coach based in Malmö, Sweden, and Lauren Celano, a recruitment consultant who founded Propel Careers, based in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2009.

Persson, whose coaching business is called passage2pro, tells Gould why it typically takes longer to hire scientists in academia. Margot Smit, a plant molecular biologist who now recruits scientists for her lab at Tübingen University in Germany, reflects on her own experiences as an academic jobseeker in 2022. It involved panel interviews, lab tours, team dinners, and, in...

Successful job candidates aren’t necessarily the smartest or most confident people in the room, Ilana Wisby tells Julie Gould in the first episode of a six-part weekly podcast series about hiring in science.

Wisby, a physicist and former chief executive of Oxford Quantum Circuits, which builds quantum computers from its base in Reading, UK, says recruiters use interviews to gauge a candidate’s values, their emotional intelligence, and their growth potential. Asking someone how they received difficult feedback, she adds, is a test of their humility and willingness to admit mistakes, and what they learned from...

Academia’s focus on individual achievement can be a breeding ground for poor mental health, says astrophysicist Kelly Korreck.

Korreck, who experienced pandemic-related burnout while working on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, describes a competitive and ultimately damaging ‘lone wolf’ culture. She is joined by psychologist Desiree Dickerson to discuss how a stronger focus on group success can better protect researchers.

Dickerson also calls for improved onboarding processes for early career researchers. They should involve clear conversations about looming challenges, including first person accounts from people who faced work-related stress, anger, anxiety and depression, she argu...

A relentless pursuit of perfection in science can mean that researchers are in perpetual and self-critical ‘survival mode,’ forever questioning their behaviours and actions in the workplace, says clinical psychologist Desiree Dickerson.

“We are not very good at taking the spotlight off ourselves, a pressure that can lead to burnout other mental health problems, adds Dickerson, who is based in Valencia, Spain.

To boost workplace well-being, Ellen Wehrens describes the impact of a happiness programme that was introduced in 2019 to her lab at the Princess Máxima paediatric oncology centre in Utrecht, the Netherl...

Three researchers with personal experience of anxiety and depression triggered by studying the environmental destruction caused by a changing climate describe the steps they take to protect their mental health.

Ruth Cerezo-Mota, a climate scientist based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, found herself grieving for the state of the

planet through her work for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Experiencing a panic attack at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a fear of checking emails and a sense of disengagement from...

Krutika Kuppalli, a physician researcher who studies emerging infectious diseases, joined the World Health Organization in 2021, where she worked to combat the COVID-19 on a global level.

She had previously been targeted by threats and harassment as a result of media and US congressional appearances to inform the public about the emerging pathogen. These were often focused on her race and gender. Concerned for her safety, Kuppalli went to the police twice. She was told to get a weapon.

She tells Adam Levy how employers can support colleagues who face harassment, and the measures...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 th...

When Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency, sought to change the country’s food systems in 2020, it started by looking at school meals and funding several projects around menus, procurement, and how cafeterias were organised.

Breaking down a big goal into smaller component parts and bringing together different interested parties, as Vinnova did, is key to delivering the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), says Kate Roll, a political scientist based at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College, London.

Roll’s particular focus is the last of the 17 SDGs with its focu...

Growing up in the last years of the Cold War motivated Gabriele Jacobs to enter academia and play her part in building peaceful societies. 

Jacobs works at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where she researches the role artificial intelligence (AI) can play in public safety and the ethical debate surrounding this.

She describes how experiments are being conducted on beaches in the Netherlands to see if AI can be used to predict human behaviour. These experiments also test the ethical, legal and social implications of this use of AI, and question who has the power t...

Sigit Sasmito describes how his research at James Cook University in Brisbane, Australia, is helping to protect both peatlands and mangroves across southeast Asia, as part of a drive to meet Sustainable Development Goal 15.

The goal, one of 17 agreed by the United Nations in 2015. aims to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. This includes sustainable forest management, combating desertification, and halting biodiversity loss.

Indonesia, where Samito grew up, aims to restore 1.2 million hectare of peatlands and 600,000 hectares of mangroves, he tells How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series. Ultimately th...

Watching documentaries about the Titanic inspired deep-sea microbiologist Beth Orcutt to study life at the bottom of the ocean - a world of ‘towering chimneys, weird shrimp and octopus nurseries’ that she has visited 35 times.

But Orcutt says there is so much we still don't know about the deep sea, which is a problem for the sustainable development of this environment. Orcutt works at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay, Maine, where her research helps to understand how deep-sea mining might impact unique ocean communities.

Research on similarly destructive activities, such as deep...

Analytical chemist Jane Kilcoyne was working in her biotoxin monitoring lab one day in 2018 when she noticed a bin overflowing with plastic waste. The observation prompted her to join forces with like-minded colleagues and develop a package of measures aimed at reducing their lab’s carbon footprint. Their efforts include reducing energy consumption, composting shellfish waste, polystyrene recycling, and digitizing documentation. 

Labs are estimated to use 10 times more energy and five times more water than office spaces, she says, and the average bench scientist uses around 10 times more single-use plastics than the average person. 

Ki...

In the sixth and final episode of The Last few miles: planning for the late stage career in science, Julie Gould unpicks some of the generational tensions that can arise in academia when a colleague approaches retirement.

Inger Mewburn, who leads research and development training at the Australian National University in Canberra, tells her: “There’s a fine line between being around and being valued, to being around and kind of being a pain in the ass and no one will tell you to go away.”

Gould also talks to scientists who, despite reaching...

In the fifth episode of this six-part podcast series about the late career stage, physicist María Teresa Dova outlines how she is preparing colleagues years in advance to ensure a smooth handover of her lab at the University of La Plata, in Argentina.

But in the United States, when the principal investigator leaves it is likely the lab itself will close down, Gould discovers. For microbiologist Roberto Kolter, emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, this meant gradually downsizing his team before retirement, so all members had a clear timeframe in which to f...

The list of things to organize as retirement from academia approaches can feel daunting. In the fourth episode of The last few miles, a six-part podcast series about the late career stage in science, researchers talk about health, housing and financial planning.

Carol Shoshkes Reiss, an immunologist at New York University, explains how her institution assigns individual wealth managers to advise on retirement investments and budgeting.

Inger Mewburn, who leads researcher training at the Australian National University in Canberra, chose a private accountant to manage her finances, who probes not only her approach t...

Because many scientists see their career as a calling, when retirement arrives it can bring with it feelings of insecurity and worry about what this means for them.

Microbiologist Roberto Kolter, emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, is keen to show others that retirement is a joyous time and a chance to broaden one’s scientific area of interest. It can also bring with it new speaking and travel opportunities.

Experimental physicist Athene Donald is soon to complete a 10-year stint as master of Churchill College at Cambridge University in the United Ki...

The idea that retirement marks the end of employment and the beginning of a life of leisure is one that many academics feel is outdated.

Roger Baldwin, a retired researcher of higher education at Michigan State University in East Lansing and chair of the US Association of Retirement Organizations in Higher Education (AROHE), a membership organization based in Los Angeles, California, describes it instead as “an open ended period after one’s main professional employment that has almost infinite potential opportunities” — academic or otherwise.

Some take on the role of an emeritus professor, an honorary...

What are the signs that you’re transitioning from the middle to the late stage of a career in science? Is this transition something you can plan in advance, and if so, what does this look like?

Working backwards from your planned retirement date can help you to re-evaluate your priorities and predict the challenges the next few years might bring. But in many countries there is no set retirement age, so it can be difficult to know when to start preparing.

Scientists from across the globe talk to Julie Gould about their di...

In many parts of the world these days garments are bought purely as fashion items, and discarded after just a few months or years. But as the global population grows and personal wealth levels increase, solutions are urgently needed to process increasing volumes of textile waste as consumption rises. This waste includes synthetic fibres, which do not degrade in nature.

Sonja Salmon describes advances in enzymatic processes to deconstruct and then recycle mixed fibre garments made from both polyester and cotton, alongside the environmental costs of producing and transporting clothes in the first place. “Technically, there ar...

Draw a Scientist is a test developed in 1983 to explore children’s perspectives of scientists and how stereotypical views can emerge at an early age, influenced both by popular culture and how STEM subjects are taught in schools.

In April, 50 images from Nature’s weekly Where I Work section, a photo essay which depicts an individual researcher at work, went on display in London’s Kings Cross district.

The photographs were chosen to reflect the diversity of scientific careers, and in the words of senior careers editor Jack Leeming, to demonstrate that “scientists aren’t all...

Lynette Cheah’s research group collaborates with psychologists, computer scientists and urban designers to develop smarter and more sustainable ways of city transportation. “We can’t have sustainable cities without transforming the way people move and how goods are moved around,” says Cheah, an engineering systems researcher who is based at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia.

Cheah outlines some challenges to meeting targets in the eleventh of 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015 (making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable) by 2030. In part these rely on more cit...

Francisco Ferreira’s first exposure to inequality of opportunity was during his daily ride to school in São Paulo, Brazil, and seeing children his age selling chewing gum on the streets. Ferreira, a former World Bank economist who now researches inequality at the London School of Economics, speculates on the wasted human talent caused by such hardships, and how many more scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and writers there would be if inequalities could be tackled at an early stage in children’s lives. “I think it deserves even more attention than it already gets,” he says, before going on to descri...

Power networks are humankind’s biggest engineering achievement to date, says Sinan Küfeoğlu. But ageing infrastructure in advanced industrialised economies, coupled with the fact that around one billion people in the world lack continuous power access, particularly in Global South countries, could threaten the delivery of Sustainable Development Goal 9 by 2030, he warns. The goal promotes resilient infrastructure, inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and innovation.

Speaking in a personal capacity, Küfeoğlu, a senior policy manager at the UK government gas and electricity market regulator OFGEM, lists some of the hurdles ahead, based on his work a...

In Kenya, where Moses Ngoze teaches entrepreneurship and management at Masinde Muliro University in Kakamega, micro, small and medium enterprises provide 75% of jobs and more than 80% of the country’s gross domestic product. Typically these organizations employ between one and 100 people and include subsistence farming, hospitality and artisan businesses, mostly operating in a jua kali environment, a Swahili term meaning “hot sun,” he says.

Ngoze's research explores how the enterprises can help achieve full employment and sustained (and sustainable) economic growth by 2030, captured in Sustainable Development Goal 8, one of 17 agreed by the United Nations in 2015.

...

Julien Harou’s career started in geology in his current role as a water management and infrastructure researcher now straddles economics and engineering, with a particular focus on using artificial intelligence (AI) to measure Ghana’s future energy needs. 

Harou is relatively upbeat about progress so far towards achieving sustainable and reliable energy for all by 2030, the seventh of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the United Nations in 2015. He points out that from 2015 to 2021, the portion of the global population with access to electricity increased from 87% to 91%, and last year about 30% came from renewable sources. 

María Teresa Dova describes how an early career move to CERN as the first Latin American scientist to join Europe’s organisation for nuclear research ultimately benefited both her but also the researchers she now works with back home in Argentina.

The move to Geneva, Switzerland, where CERN is based, required Dova to pivot from condensed matter physics, the subject of her PhD at the University of La Plata, Argentina, which she gained in 1988. 

But any misgivings about the move to Europe and switching to a new field were quickly banished by her e...

A 2021 report by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean revealed that only 18% of public universities in the region had female rectors. 

Vanessa Gottifredi, a biologist and president of Argentina’s Leloir Institute Foundation, a research institute based in Buenos Aires, says this paucity of visible role models for female scientists in the region means that damaging stereotypes are perpetuated.

A female, she says, will not be judged harshly for staying at home to handle a family emergency, but will be for being pushy at work, unlike mal...

Fernanda Staniscuaski earned her PhD aged 27. Five years later she had a child. But in common with many scientist mothers, Staniscuaski, a biologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, saw funding and other career opportunities diminish as she combined motherhood with her professional life.

“Of course I did not have as much time as I was used to have. And everything impacted my productivity,” she tells Julie Gould.

The Brazilian biologist founded the Parent in Science advocacy movement after talking with other scientist parents.

In the fourth episod...

Paleontologists Ana Valenzuela-Toro and Mariana Viglino outline some of the challenges shared by researchers across Latin America. These include funding, language barriers, journal publication fees and conference travel costs. But the two women then list some of the extra burdens faced by female researchers who live and work there, many of which will resonate with female colleagues based elsewhere. 

“When you are in a room sharing a scientific idea or project, nobody listens to you. Then another person, usually a male researcher, says what you said,” says Valenzuela-Toro, who is based in Caldero, Chile. 

Marian...

In 2013 physicist Carolina Brito co-launched Meninas na Ciência (Girls in Science), a program based at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul.

The program exposes girls to university life, including lab visits and meetings with female academics. “There are several girls who have never met someone who has been to university,” says Brita. “It’s beyond a gender problem.”

Jessica Germann was one of them. The 19-year-old is about to start an undergraduate physics degree. She tells Julie Gould how writing a school essay about particle physics and a fascination...

In her role as Vice Rector for research partnerships and collaboration at the University of the Valley in Guatemala City, Monica Stein works to strengthen science and technology ecosystems in the Central American country and across the wider region.

To mark International Women's Day on 8 March, Stein outlines the steps needed to attract girls into science careers. Access to higher education needs to widen, she argues, alongside more robust legal and regulatory frameworks to make research careers more diverse.

“We need to inspire other women, we need to mentor other women, we need to...

Laure Sione’s postdoctoral research at Imperial College London addresses the sixth of the 17 United Nations SDGs, but, she argues, sanitation also plays a huge role in gender equality (SDG 5) and good health and well being (SDG 3) targets.

Sione’s PhD research focused on water management challenges in Kathmandu, but she now focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa and the problems caused by open defecation and excrement-filled pit latrines that are sited too close to the water table, risking contamination.

A third option is toilets layered with Tiger Worms. A key advantage is that these take...

In 2016 the University of Melbourne, Australia, asked for female-only applicants when it advertised three vacancies in its School of Mathematics and Statistics. It repeated the exercise in 2018 and 2019 to fill similar vacancies in physics, chemistry, and engineering and information technology.

Elaine Wong and Georgina Such tell the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast why certain schools wanted only female candidates to apply, and how staff and students reacted to the policy. They also explain what it achieved in terms of addressing the under-representation of female faculty in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects.

...

As a child Solomon King Benge loved Eric Laithwaite’s 1974 book The Engineer in Wonderland, based on the mechanical engineer’s 1966 Royal Institution Christmas lectures. After reading it he asked his physics teacher if he and his classmates might try some of Laithwaite’s practical experiments, but was told: “Don’t waste your time with this. This is not important, because it’s not in the curriculum.” 

The rejection promoted Benge to launch Fundi Bots in 2011. The social education initiative aims to give education a stronger practical focus, a move away from learning by rote in front of a black...

A drive to reduce suicide mortality rates is a key indicator of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Psychiatrist Shekhar Saxena, who led the World Health Organization’s mental health and substance abuse program after working in clinical practice for more than two decades, says that although progress is being made, a worryingly high number of young people are choosing to end their lives.

“They have to struggle through the school education, competitive examinations, then they have to struggle for a job,” says Saxena, who now teaches at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, in Cambridge, Massach...

As a nutrition and planetary health researcher, Christopher Golden takes a keen interest in the second of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and its aim to end hunger.

But Golden’s research also focuses on “hidden hunger,” a term he uses to describe the impact of dietary deficiencies in micronutrients such as iron, zinc, fatty acids, and vitamins A and B12.

Hidden hunger, he argues in the second episode of the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, could be better addressed if more people adopted a diet that includes more ‘blue’ or aquatic f...

Poverty is about more than just meeting basic material needs, says Catherine Thomas. Its corrosive effects are also social and psychological, causing people to feel marginalized and helpless.

Thomas’s research into anti-poverty programs has focused on the effects of one aimed at women in the West African country of Niger, which aims to support subsistence farmers whose livelihoods are impacted by climate change.

One branch of the program involved providing an unconditional $300 cash transfer alongside business and life skills training. Thomas, who is based at the Unversity of Michigan in Ann Arbor, de...

In August the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft touched down, making India only the fourth to have successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon. In this special episode of the Working Scientist podcast, Somak Raychaudhuryan astrophysicist and vice-chancellor at Ashoka University, tells Jack Leeming about India’s history of space research, the significance of the lunar landing, and how it might help to stem a “brain drain” of Indian researchers moving abroad permanently to develop their careers. 

The episode is part of the Nature Spotlight on India, an editorially-independent supplement.

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For a three-year period as a postdoctoral researcher, molecular biologist and visual artist Daniel Jay was given both a lab and a sudio to work in. In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist about art and science, Julie Gould asks why, decades later, Jay’s experience is still unusual. Why do scientists with expertise in, say, music, sculpture, pottery or creative writing have to pursue these interests as weekend hobbies, with science “paying the bills?”

Jay, who is Dean of the graduate school of biomedical sciences at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, says today’s early ca...

Data form the backbone of the scientific method, but it can be impenetrable. In the penultimate episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art-science collaborations, Julie Gould talks to artists and data visualisation specialists about how they interpret and present data in art forms ranging from music to basket weaving.

Keep things simple wherever possible, agree Duncan Ross, chief data officer at the Times Higher Education publication, and James Bayliss, an interaction and visualisation analyst at Springer Nature. “My go-to tool is a pen and paper or coloured pencils,” says Bayliss. “Start slow and don't get...

GUI/GOOEY is an international online exhibition that explores digital and technological representations of the biological world.

In the fourth episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Julie Gould talks to some of the artists and scientist whose collaborations created exhibits for the event, which ran from March to June 2023.

Its curator Laura Splan, an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, says GUI/GOOEY reconsidered how technology affects our understanding of nature and our constructions of nature. She is joined by Diana Scarborough, arist-in-residence in bionanotechnologist Ljiljana Fr...

In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, artists and illustrators describe examples where accuracy is key, but also ones where they can exert some artistic licence in science-based drawings, sculptures, music and installations.

For Lucy Smith, a botanical artist at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, measurement and accuracy is important, she says.

But accuracy can sometimes take a back seat for illustrator Glendon Mellow, who is also a senior marketing manager a life sciences learning and development company Red Nucleus, based in Toronto, Canada.

Artist and illustrator Lucy Smith helps botanists to identify new species. Usually they request a set of drawings, she says, with a detailed set of requirements.

But Smith, who joined London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, more than 20 years ago, says: “We also feed back to the scientists and say, 'I’ve seen what you’ve asked me to see. But do you know what, I’ve also seen this? Did you know that this flower has this structure.'”

In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, S...

In the first episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series, Julie Gould explores the history of science and art and asks researchers and artists to define what the two terms mean to them.

Like science, art is a way of asking questions about the world, says Jessica Bradford, head of collections and principal curator at the Science Museum in London. But unlike art, science about interrogating the world in a way that is hopefully repeatable, adds UK-based artist Luke Jerram, who creates sculptures, installations and live artworks around the world.

Ljiljana Fruk...

Narrative CVs are increasingly being used by funders to capture how a successful grant application will positively impact society and promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Crucially, the narrative format also acknowledges contributions from citizen scientists, local communities and administrator colleagues.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the largest public funder of UK science, is one adopter. In September 2021 it announced that its new approach would “enable people to better demonstrate their contributions to research, teams, and wider society”.

In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about team science, Hilary Noon...

In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about team science, Richard Holliman describes a project involving indigenous researchers in Guyana who wanted to limit insecticide spraying without jeopardising the South American country’s efforts to tackle malaria.

The early warning system they developed with Andrea Beradi, an environmental systems researcher and a colleague of Holliman’s at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, involved satellite technology, drones and ground monitoring systems.

Holliman, who studies engaged research, says members of the wider project team were all paid and listed as co-authors. “That w...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 re...

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 t...

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...

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 st...

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...

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...

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.

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 ep...

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 Redwo...

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 af...

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.

...

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 o...

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...

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 relationshi...

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 qual...

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

Harris, professor emeritus at Cambridge University, UK, played the sport growing up in Canada and is now a coach. “A coach will have tryouts and select the best players for different positions,” he says. “The brain does the same thing. Maybe two neurons try out for every position, one makes it that’s...

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

To help achieve this goal, the lab partners with both neurosurgeons and artificial intelligence researchers.

“We are knowledgeable about how to put electrodes in the brain,” says Roelfsema, “but we collaborate with experts who know about how to make these electrodes so that they don't damage the brain tissue too much, also with people in artificial intelligence who can take camera images and tran...

Gina Rippon was a paid-up member of the “male-female brain brigade” earlier in her career as a cognitive neuroscientist, but changed tack, she says, after discovering there was not a lot of sound research behind the well-established belief that male and female brains are biologically different.

In the fourth episode of this 12-part podcast series Tales from the Synapse, Rippon explores the role of social conditioning to explain why boys and girls might respond differently to pink and blue objects, why girls aged nine describe maths “as a boy thing,” and why the same girls shun games tha...

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

Amir is now a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he researches what happens in our neural networks when we are trying to be funny.

His interest in this was triggered after realising there were around 20 studies examining brain activity when we are enjoying comedy, he says, but nothing about the creative process...

In the second episode of this 12-part podcast series, Tales from the Synapse, neuroscientist Anil Seth describes his research into consciousness, which he describes as “insurance against falling into a single, disciplinary hole.”

Alongside neuroscientists, Seth’s research group at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, also includes string theorists, mathematicians and psychologists. The team also collaborates with academics in the arts and humanities.

His 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. begins by challenging the idea that consciousness is beyond the reach of science, and concludes with a look at consciou...

As a pharmacy student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Natasha Mason was struck by the high volume of patients who complained about opiates and antidepressants not working, but at the same time became more and more dependent on them.

This observation triggered an interest in the behavioural effects of psychedelic drugs, which took her career in a psychopharmacological direction. She now researches the neural effects of cannabis, both when people are under the influence of the drug, and over the longer term, at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Mason is also interested in...

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

These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.

In this final episode, Gianpiero Petriglieri focuses on the emotional aspects of leadership — describing it as a love for an idea, and for a group of people whom you’re trying to both protect and advance.

Petriglieri, who researches organizational behaviour at INS...

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

These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.

In this penultimate episode, stem cell biologist Fiona Watt tells Julie Gould that one of her leadership mantras is: “There is nothing wrong with being wrong,” and that science is in good shape if it can acknowledge this.

Watt is director of EMB...

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

These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.

In this episode, Hagen Zimer tells Julie Gould about the qualities and skills you need to be a science leader in industry and how he approaches his role as managing director of TRUMPF Laser, a global company based in Schramberg, Germany, that manufactures lasers...

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

These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of different sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series all about leadership.

In this episode, Spanish neuroscience and mental health researcher Gemma Modinos talks about her own leadership journey as a group leader at King’s College London and former chair of the Young Academy Europe.

Modinos compares “command and control” leadership styles w...