Naturejobs Podcast

PhD programmes in "the rainbow nation" mostly lead to academic careers, but reform is needed to boost collaboration and integration, higher education experts tell Julie Gould.It's 25 years since since South Africa's first free elections swept Nelson Mandela to power as president.But higher education in the "rainbow nation" (a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe the post-apartheid era), could do more to encourage integration and collaboration between black, white and international students.Jonathan Jansen, a professor in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University, tells Julie Gould that despite seismic political change in 1994, education, research, and economics have not kept pace with the country's democratic transformation.Liezel Frick, director of the Centre for Higher and Adult Education at Stellenbosch University, says that around 60% of students are part-time, with many having staff positions at universities.Doctoral education still clings to a research-focused "Oxbridge model," s

The thesis is a central element of how graduate students are assessed. But is it time for an overhaul? Julie Gould finds out.How do you decide whether or not somebody is a fully trained researcher? Janet Metcalfe, head of Vitae, a non-profit that supports the professional development of researchers, tells Julie Gould that it's time to be "really brave" and look at how doctoral degrees are examined.But what role should the thesis play in that assessment? Does it need overhauling, updating, or even scrapping?Inger Mewburn, who leads research training at the Australian National University in Canberra and who founded of The Thesis Whisperer blog in 2010, suggests science could learn from architecture. Student architects are required to produce a portfolio, creating a "look book" for assessors or potential employers to examine as part as part of a candidate's career narrative. For graduate students in science, this could include papers, journals, articles, presentations, certificates, or even video files

Scientific research is not the endeavour of a single person. It requires a team of people. How can this be better reflected in graduate student training, asks Julie Gould.Is science ready for "Team PhD", whereby a group of students work more collaboratively, delivering a multi-authored thesis at their end of their programme? Jeanette Woolard, who recently secured a £4.5m Wellcome Trust grant to fund a four-year collaborative doctoral training programme in her lab at the University of Nottingham, UK, believes it could happen one day."The team driven PhD is not distant dream. It's soon-to-be a fulfilled reality," Woolard, professor of cardiovascular physiology and pharmacology, tells Julie Gould. "If you give it enough of an incentive and wave the flag hard enough for team science, it will come."Woolard's Wellcome grant allows four graduate students to have their own research focus but to work collaboratively. "Each of the individual candidates are still pursuing an individual

Julie Gould asks six higher education experts if it's now time to go back to the drawing board and redesign graduate programmes from scratch.Suzanne Ortega, president of the US Council of Graduate Schools, says programmes now include elements to accommodate some of the skills now being demanded by employers, including project and data management expertise. "We can't expect to prepare doctoral researchers in a timely fashion by simply adding more and more separate activities," she tells Gould. "We need to redesign the curricula and the capstone project," referring to the PhD as a long-term investigative project that culminates in a final product.Jonathan Jansen, professor of education at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, calls for more flexible and modular programmes and describes as an example how MBA programmes have evolved from a full-time one year course to include part-time online only programmes and a "blended" combination of the two approaches. "It's about trying to figure out in terms of your own

Students need to be clear about their reasons for pursuing a PhD and the career options open to them, Julie Gould discovers.In 2015, labour economist Paula Stephan told an audience of early career researchers in the US that the supply of PhD students was outstripping demand. “Since 1977, we've been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening."We are definitely producing many more PhDs than there is demand for them in research positions,” she said.In this first episode of this five-part series about the future of the PhD and how it might change, Julie Gould asks Stephan, who is based at Georgia State University, if her view has altered.Anne-Marie Coriat, head of UK and EU research landscape at the Wellcome Trust in London, says students need to be clear about why they want to pursue a PhD. "Look at what you're getting into, try and understand that, and then network," she says.Forty per cent of respondents to Nature's 2019 PhD survey, published this week, said

Adam Levy talks to 2019 John Maddox Prize winner Bambang Hero Saharjo and Olivier Bernard, the Canadian pharmacist whose campaign against vitamin C injections for cancer patients earned him the early career stage prize.The John Maddox Prize recognises the work of individuals who promote science and evidence, advancing the public discussion around difficult topics despite challenges or hostility.Bambang Hero Saharjo, winner of the 2019 prize, is a lead expert witness on illegal peatland fires in Indonesia. He has presented evidence on nearly 500 environmental cases for the Indonesian government, often facing threats and harassment.Saharjo, a professor in the forestry faculty at Bogor Agricultual University, was nominated by Jacob Phelps, a lecturer in tropical environmental change and policy at Lancaster University, UK, who says: "His work serves not only to bring justice in individual cases, but has inspired a vision of what is possible in Indonesia—a future in which courts are true centres of evidence-based

Tom Baden's work into the neuroscience of vision has earned him the inaugural Nature Research Award for Driving Global Impact.Tom Baden, professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex, UK, is the first winner of an award to recognise early career researchers whose work has made, or has the potential to make, a positive impact on society.Baden's research on zebrafish and mice showed that eyes have vastly greater computational powers than people previously thought, rather than being faithful recorders of the real world.The judges of the award, run in partnership with Chinese technology company Tencent, said Baden's research could have a significant impact on both diagnostic and therapeutic ophthalmology research.In addition to his research, Baden tells Julie Gould about his interest in open hardware and 3D printing and its potential to make well equipped labs more affordable for developing countries.Baden is also cofounder of Teaching and Research in Neuroscience for Development (TReND) in Africa. This n

Two projects aimed at boosting female representation in STEM have won the second Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Science and Innovating Science, in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies.Jean Fan spent a year volunteering at a science club for high school students during her PhD programme at Harvard University and was struck by how many of them dismissed the idea of becoming scientists themselves."A lot of my students would make remarks like 'I'm not quite a maths person,' or would not see themselves as future scientists," she tells Julie Gould."I really wanted to leave them with some type of gift to encourage them to continue developing their interest in science."As a result Fan, who was the sole female graduate student in her PhD bioinformatics programme, launched cuSTEMized, a non-profit that uses personalised educational storybooks (which she writes and illustrates) to inspire girls about scientific careers.This week, at a ceremony in London, she won the 2019 Inspiring Science Award, one of two

In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about physics careers, Gaia Donati draws on her contact with fellow physicists in her role as a manuscript editor at Nature, where she oversees research papers in several areas, including quantum information and computing, high-energy physics and plasma physics.She also reflects on her own career experience and how academia in her native Italy compares to the UK, where she gained her PhD in 2015. "Start looking for jobs before you finish your PhD," Donati advises.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Moving to a new branch of science is scary, but learning new skills and collaborating with different colleagues can be exhilarating, Julie Gould discovers.In the penultimate episode of this six-part series about physics careers, Julie Gould talks to Stuart Higgins, a research associate at Imperial College London, who switched from solid state physics to bioengineering, and Anna Lappala, who moved from biochemistry to physics.How easy were these transitions, and what is their advice to others planning similar moves?Higgins says: "It's important to ask yourself why you want to make the transition. Do you want to apply the same skills or to learn new ones? Give yourself time to understand your motivation."Overall, the transition was "liberating," he adds, allowing him to ask "basic, silly questions" of colleagues, who were very supportive of his situation and the learning curve he faced.Lappala, a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, describes how she was initially terrified of peop

Media interest in particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider boosted Jon Butterworth's interest in public engagement, reports Julie Gould.Jon Butterworth developed a taste for public engagement after repeated media appearances related to his work on the ATLAS experiment, one of two Large Hadron Collider detectors at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab.Butterworth, a physics professor at University College London, describes life at CERN, and how it felt to be one of 5154 authors listed in the 2015 paper that produced the most precise estimate yet of the mass of the Higgs boson.As part of his public engagement activities, Butterworth was persuaded to auction an after-dinner lecture or school talk about the Higgs. The auction "lot" was part of a fundraising effort for his children's primary school in north London."Someone else at the school was Lady Gaga's designer and they brought along a pair of her boots," he tells Julie Gould. "My talk went for more than Lady Gaga's boots. I'm still doing it now. Interes

Industry has long courted physicists for their data science expertise, but will this change as more undergraduates acquire these skills?In 2013, Kim Nilsson co-founded Pivigo, a training company to prepare researchers for data science careers. She tells Julie Gould how and why she moved into business.Nilsson's Pivigo colleague Deepak Mahtani quit academia after completing a PhD in astronomy. What is his advice to someone looking to move into data science? "There are three main things you should do. Learn about the programming languages Python or R, read up about machine learning, and understand a bit about SQL," he says.Lewis Armitage's PhD at Queen Mary Unversity London took him to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. But he craved a better work-life balance and a move which played to his data science skills. Now he is a data analyst for consumer behaviour consultancy Tsquared Insights, based in Geneva, Switzerland.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Elizabeth Tasker's career has taken her from Europe to Japan via North America, including a Florida campus where alligators lurked in drainage ditches.If your career looks set to include geographical transitions, and the cultural, workplace and linguistic challenges that they can pose, listen to Elizabeth's advice in this second episode of a six-part podcast series about careers and physics.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Earlier this year Eindhoven University of Technology faced a social media backlash after announcing that from July 2019, all academic staff vacancies will be open to female applicants only for the first six months. Many people questioned the legality of the move.In this first episode of a six-part series about careers in physics, Cornelis Storm, who leads the theory of polymers and soft matters group at the Dutch university, tells Julie Gould why the "radical step," was sorely needed. He also describes why the physics department, and the discipline more generally, will benefit from being more diverse."For whatever reason there is a large group of people that are not considering a carer in physics." he says. "There's not a single piece of research that suggests men are better at this job than women."Astrophysicist Elizabeth Tasker, an associate professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, was hired through a similar policy, and tells Gould about her experience.  See acast.com/privacy for priv

In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about workplace technology, Lee Cronin talks about the "chemputer," a device he and his team developed as a "chemical Google to search for the origin of life."In November 2018 Cronin and colleagues at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, unveiled this new method of producing drug molecules, using downloadable blueprints to synthesise organic chemicals via a modular chemical-robot system.He tells Julie Gould: "I imagined this Lego kit of chemical reactors I could slot together. We are literally building the Large Hadron Collider for the origin of life in the lab."Cronin, regius chair of chemistry at Glasgow, tells Gould the chemputer is the latest technology development in his 20-year research career, and how academic chemistry is ripe for a revolution."There's always been this arms race between technology and fundamental research. For almost 200 years the chemistry lab has been a manual labour place, " he says. "Everybody has been doing everything by hand.

Ben Britton's experimental micromechanics lab at Imperial College London currently includes four postdoctoral researchers, 11 PhD students, and four Masters students.Alongside computational analysis tools used to detect how materials perform (including Matlab as the group's main programming environment, chosen for its speed, global user base and visual interaction), Britton and his team use the online collaboration and communication tool Slack. He also uses the Slack bot Howdey to check in with colleagues each week.But why Slack? "There's not enough time in the day to micro-manage every individual person," he tells Julie Gould. "Part of being in an academic environment is about developing people, trying to encourage a working environment where people are free to share ideas, to fail, and also to have very open communication. Slack doesn't replace the in-person interaction but it supplements and enhances it."  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Machine learning and data management skills can raise your scientific profile and open up career opportunities, Julie Gould discovers.As a biomedical science student, Jake Schofield felt frustrated at the length of time it took to repeat experiments, record results and manage protocols, with most of the work paper-based.In 2016 he and Jan Domanski, a biochemist with programming skills, launched Labstep, an online platform to help scientists record and reproduce experiments.Schofield, now Labstep's CEO, tells Julie Gould how launching a start-up and seeking investor funding has honed his business skills."Every step we've taken has been a huge learning experience," he says. "I wish there were more opportunities for scientists to try entreprenurial pursits. Scientific analytical problem-based thinking has so many parallels in the start-up world."Brian MacNamee, a computer scientist at University College Dublin, outlines the high value of data and its potential to solve science's reproducibility crisis, citing la

Mona Nemer tells Julie Gould about her role as Canada's chief scientific adviser and how she aims to strengthen science in the country."We're bordered by three oceans," says Mona Nemer of Canada, where she has been chief scientific adviser since September 2017. "On one side we are close to Europe, on the other we are close to Asia. It's a great country to study the Arctic, climate research, oceanography, but also astrophysics, information technology and health."Nemer describes her role as "convener of the dialogue between the broader science community and government," providing scientific advice to current prime minister Justin Trudeau and his ministerial team, and making recommendations on how to improve Canadian science.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Simon Hettrick tells Julie Gould about the role of research software engineers, what they do and how you can become one.In the third episode of our six-part podcast series on workplace technology, we learn more about the importance of coding for scientists followed by an introduction to the work of research software engineers.Simon Hettrick, deputy director of the UK Software Sustainability Institute, tells Julie Gould about the typical career path of a research software engineer, and how their skills can support researchers with limited coding skills.Harriet Alexander starts the programme by telling Nature technology editor Jeff Perkel about her role as an instructor for Software Carpentry, a global non-profit organisation which teaches research computing skills to scientists. Who typically attends a Carpentry course and what do they learn during a workshop?Alexander, a postdoctoral fellow in oceanography bioinformatics at the University of California, Davis, also tells us about the recent course

Learning how to coding brings career benefits and helps science by aiding reproducibility, Julie Gould discovers.Jessica Hedge tells Julie Gould about how she learned to code as a PhD student, and the freedom and flexibility it provides to manage large datasets."I never saw myself as a coder and it took me a long time to realise I had to pick up the skills myself," she tells Julie Gould in the second episode of this six-part series about technology and scientific careers. "A colleague was using Python and R and I saw the potential." What is her advice to other early career researchers who are keen to develop coding expertise?Also, Brian MacNamee, an assistant professor in the school of computer science at University College Dublin, talks about the college's data science course and how it can benefit both humanities and science students.Finally, Nature technology editor Jeffrey Perkel describes how coding can help with computational reproducibility.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and op