Working Scientist

In the sixth episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the academic workplace, three researchers describe their personal experiences of loss and how their respective institutions handled it, both practically and emotionally.Krista Harrison, a geriatrics researcher at University of California, San Francisco, recalls colleagues being very supportive when she suffered a spate of deaths in her family. But overall she needed advice, direction and resources and, ideally, a year off from having to think about writing grants. She set up a grief group and wrote articles calling for academia to shift norms and expectations around loss and bereavement leave.In 2023 a colleague of Katie Derington, a cardiovascular researcher at University of Colorado Anschutz in Aurora, died of a chronic illness after being hospitalized for around a month. At the time of her death she was co-author on a series of papers with Derington and other colleagues.Derington describes having to contact her colleague’s grieving widower to complete documentation related to the team’s soon-to-be-published article. This icky” experience also prompted her to write an article ​​​​​​​calling for academic publishers to show more compassion to bereaved authors.But how do you juggle mourning a colleague with a lengthy to-do list at work? Putting off an administrative task for a couple of months is okay, Derington says. There’s very, very few things in academia that are truly the fire is on the house.”Shannon Bros, an emeritus ecologist at San Jose State University in California, says support from counselling team colleagues would have helped when her department chair died of cancer. But seeing people having a good time on campus provided an epiphany. I looked around and went, ‘How many times have I walked anywhere and not seen people in pain? It changed me.​​​​​​​’” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist who studies attitudes towards religion in academic workplaces, says that scientists often feel they cannot be open about their faith at work.  In the fourth episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace, she tells Adam Levy: “I would love for academic scientists to recognize that religious scientists can be good scientists, to break down some of their own stereotypes, and to see religion as just one of those identities that sits along other sides, other identities, like one’s social class and background.”  Ecklund, who leads the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says that despite the reticence felt by many religious scientists, many of their colleagues are in fact quite open to their colleagues’ beliefs, based on her research. But some marginalized groups can face particular challenges. Maisha Islam, research culture lead at the University of Southampton, UK, shares her experiences of alienation as a British Bangladeshi Muslim woman. These range from a lack of accommodations to comments made by colleagues. “We almost put a target on our backs for having advocated for them in the first place. We are constantly pushing at closed doors,” she says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In May 2024, Uli Beisel signed what she thought was a fairly innocuous petition. But it led to her face being printed in a national tabloid. This was after student demonstrators at the Free University of Berlin had occupied a lecture theatre in protest at the ongoing Israel assault on Gaza. The university called the police to clear the space.The open letter that Beisel and others signed didn’t take a position on the conflict, but instead called on university leadership to defend free speech and the right to peaceful process. But Uli — alongside several other of the 1000- plus signatories — was named and pictured in the Bild newspaper. There, she and others were labelled a “university perpetrator” complicit in “Israel hate”. Beisel, a human geography researcher at the institution, says the tone of some of the reporting made her fear for her safety on campus. She also worried about how colleagues and students would react. The university responded by offering legal advice and issued a statement that they valued our opinion, says Beisel. After the story appeared it was reported that Germany’s higher education ministry had looked into stripping some signatories of federal funding. In the second episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace, Adam Levy investigates tensions that sometimes surface when academics become activists. Beisel is joined by climate scientist Peter Kalmus. Kalmus dates his activism back to 2006 when he was midway through a physics PhD at Columbia University, New York, and had just become a father for the first time.  Speaking in a personal capacity, Kalmus, who is now based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, described the arrival of his older son as “a kick in the pants,” making him “think more broadly about the world and what the world was going to be like when he was grown up.” In April 2022 Kalmus and three colleagues padlocked themselves to a JPMorganChase bank entrance in Los Angeles, California, in protest at fossil fuel financing. The two researchers discuss how institutions can better support scholars whose concern for human rights and the future of the planet, often informed by their own research, leads to activism. Kalmus concludes: “I think we’re here to try to make a better world for everyone. Being part of this struggle is in some ways really joyful and really meaningful. I definitely do not want to sit on the sidelines.”  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 you are,” she says. “And you can build a really fulfilling career by following who you are, and keeping your eyes on the full range of opportunities available to you to be who you are. And it’s not going to be one thing. “In research careers, people get locked into this idea that there’s really only one pathway, and that’s the only way you can make use of your research skills and your research interests. And it’s so untrue.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 lives.In her view, the technique is preferable to devising a plan at the early career stage and then slavishly following it. This course of action, she says, does not account for new skills, technologies and life events that can open up fresh opportunities. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 accommodate family priorities also, alongside her own career ambitions.In the second episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on career planning, Julie Gould assesses how IDPs compare to more formal coaching sessions with careers guidance professionals, who either work on a one-to-one basis or in small groups to help researchers plan their careers.“I act as a kind of mirror,” says careers coach Sarah Blackford. Blackford and other career coaches who feature in the episode say they ask clients open questions and then reflect back they’ve told her about their skills, ambitions, priorities and personal circumstances. The next step, Blackford adds, is to help them develop an action plan to identify their longer-term goals.Each episode in this series concludes with a sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) with the support of the China Association for Science and Technology.The ISC is exploring perspectives on career development in a changing world through conversations with emerging and established scientists on themes such as policy, AI, transdisciplinarity, mental health and international collaboration. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.