Naturejobs Podcast

In the second episode of this Working Scientist podcast series about moving labs, physical geographer Mette Bendixen and her ecologist husband Lars Iversen describe how they resolved their two-body problem after moving from Denmark to the United States in 2018 with their three-year-old son.With the help of supportive supervisors and a sympathetic funder, the couple worked 1,200 kilometres apart for a while, before they each found academic positions at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.They are joined by Andrea Stathopoulos, who met her partner in 2010 when they were neuroscience PhD students at Florida State University in Tallahassee.Stathopoulos is now a scientific analyst at Verge Science Communications, based in Arlington, Virginia. She says that her ambivalence about an academic career perhaps defined her as the “trailing spouse” whose career would take a back seat while her husband’s progressed. The couple’s career plans changed frequently over the years, and they’ve had to spend time living apart. T

Laboratory leaders are not doing you a favour when they hire you, says geneticist Joanne Kamens, a senior consultant at The Impact Seat, a scientific workplace consultancy based in Boston, Massachusetts. Because of the long hours and relatively low pay, you are doing them one by offering them your labour, she explains.Kamens lists questions you need to have answered before making a move. “I would say item number one is: Is the PI a jerk?" she says.In the first episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about moving labs, Kamens shares advice alongside Tim Fessenden, a cancer researcher and postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Kim Gerecke, a behavioural neuroscientist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2016, Salome Maswime’s five-year mid-career award from the South African Medical Research Council gave the clinician and global health researcher some much-needed funding security, enabling her to recruit staff and offer bursaries to graduate students as she established her own research group. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) offers something similar through its Mid-Career Advancement programme.Maswime and Leslie Rissler, a biologist and NSF programme director, tell Julie Gould that research outputs can easily suffer when scientists entering the mid-career stage suddenly get swamped with administrative and teaching duties, which is why the awards were set up.In the final episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast, Gould also hears the pros and cons of making the mid-career stage better structured to support the development of skills and competencies, as it is in Brazil. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How are mid-career scientists’ research efforts affected when they take on administrative and leadership positions? What is their advice about navigating workplace politics? And do their employers treat them better, or worse, than their junior colleagues?These are just some of the questions early-career researchers wanted mid-career colleagues to answer in the penultimate episode of Muddle of the Middle, a Working Scientist podcast about the mid-career stage in science.Julie Gould also asks her five interviewees what they’d tell their younger selves about this often-neglected career stage. Their answers range from finding out more about team-building and conflict management, not to stress about being disagreed with, remembering to be generous and having fun along the way. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Life satisfaction can hit rock bottom in midlife before bouncing back as our ageing brains start to feel less regretful about missed opportunites, says Hannes Schwandt, a health economist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.Kieran Setiya, a philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, adds that the mid-career stage can be dominated by having to juggle both urgent and important tasks, some of which have no definite endpoint. These can quickly mount up and become overwhelming, with non-work-related pressures swallowing up increasing amounts of time, he adds.In the fourth episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast series, host Julie Gould wonders whether this mid-career stage is like a second puberty, a time of confusion and frustration. “It might be worth reaching out to some of those people who have gone through it and come out the other side,” she suggests. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trying to achieve balance in your personal and professional lives is misguided, four researchers tell Julie Gould in the third episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part podcast series about the mid-career stage in science.Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says that the aim should instead be to avoid allowing periods of imbalance to last longer than necessary.Cara Tannenbaum, a physician and a director at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, agrees, saying that the key is to focus on personal fulfilment, and that some aspects of your life will often have to take a back seat.Inger Mewburn took a data-driven approach to managing her time (and her manager’s expectations) after experiencing two breakdowns in her mid-career stage.Mewburn, director of research training at the Australian National University in Canberra, now uses a software program to track and prioritize tasks, schedule meetings and negotiate with her supervisor things that she can stop doing.Che

In 2012, more than a decade years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in French, mother-of-six Bethany Kolbaba Kartchner switched to science, rising at 4 a.m. to study for an associate’s degree in biochemistry at Maricopa Community Colleges in Tempe, Arizona.In the second episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part podcast series about the mid-career stage in science, Kolbaba Kartchner, who is now a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. tells Julie Gould how she interacts with her fellow graduate students and manages her busy personal and professional schedules. Leslie Rissler swapped academia for a post at the US National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. This involved moving in 2015 from Alabama, where she had worked as a professor of biological sciences. The change coincided with a divorce and undergoing a bilateral mastectomy. They are joined by structured-light researcher Andrew Forbes, who, 10 years after co-founding a

Is 40 too young for a scientist to describe themselves as mid-career? If the term can’t be defined by age, does it refer to landing tenure, to achieving a level of autonomy or to serving on multiple academic committees?Working scientists who no longer define themselves as ‘early career’ tell Julie Gould what this often-neglected career stage means to them in the absence of an agreed definition from funding agencies and scientific governing bodies.This is the first episode in Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about the mid-career stage in science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mental-health researcher Mary Bitta uses art and artistic performance to tackle public mistrust in science across communities in Kilifi, Kenya.This distrust can extend to procedures such as taking blood and saliva samples, and also to mental-health problems, which many people think are caused by witchcraft — evil spirits or curses from parents or grandparents, she says.Such beliefs account for mental health not being prioritized by policymakers, she adds. But change is afoot.“In the last five years alone, we’ve had policy documents specifically for mental health. There’s also been progress in amending legislation. For example, there has been a recent lobby to decriminalize suicide because, as we speak, suicide is illegal in Kenya,” she says.Bitta tells Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa, how she uses a form of participatory action research — in which communities are involved in song, dance, video and radio productions — to change attitudes to mental health.This is the final episode of an eight-par

Angela Tabiri and Adidja Amani tell Akin Jimoh how they combine family life with career commitments, helped by strong networks of family support.In Ghana, where Tabiri researches quantum algebra at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Accra, the government requires working women to stay at home for three months after having a child. Once they return to their jobs, they can leave work at 2 p.m. until their child is six months old, she says.“We don’t have infrastructure to support young mums in Ghana,” Tabiri adds, citing the absence of nursing rooms and nurseries in academic institutions.mani, deputy director for vaccination at Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health in Yaoundé, and a lecturer in medicine at the University of Yaoundé, points out that it is now government policy to admit equal numbers of men and women to her faculty of medicine. Despite this, women are still under-represented at senior levels.“I’m a mother of two. I want my boys to be an example and to help the women around them,” sh

Molecular biologist Khady Sall returned to Senegal in 2018 after setting up Science Education Exchange for Sustainable Development (SeeSD), a non-profit organization she founded while a PhD student in the United States. SeeSD promotes science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics education to encourage scientific literacy and critical thinking in young people.Sall tells Akin Jimoh how her career experiences abroad made the return to Africa a daunting prospect. But working and living abroad has convinced her that science careers in Africa, and the cities where science takes place, should not follow US and European models.“If we’re not authentic in being scientists, and not doing research that follows local problems and our local culture, then at some point, we will just become another US or another France, and that will be very boring. Hopefully that will not happen here. And then we will be vibrant and do a different kind of science. People will say: ‘Wow, why didn’t this happen sooner?’”Togolese rese

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 th

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

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

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

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. See acast.com/

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

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 A

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

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 biote