Academic research: Getting into a lab

Posted on 28 Aug 2015 by Julie Gould

Three chemistry Nobel laureates share how they select the PhD students and faculty members that join their labs and departments.

For many young researchers entering graduate school for a PhD, a career in academic research is the end goal. Yet the pyramidal career structure doesn’t make this easy for everyone to reach. So, when it comes to finding out how you can get your foot in the door, who better to ask than three of the most successful academic research scientists?

One of my best trips this year was to the 65th Lindau Nobel Meeting. It was set on Lindau Island, a beautiful, picturesque little place in Lake Constance in Germany. And whilst I was there enjoying the sights, I also had the opportunity to speak to some very interesting people. The meeting was an opportunity for hundreds of early-career researchers to meet Nobel Prize winners from across the sciences. They networked, presented and had informal conversations about the scientific life.

This month’s podcast is a collection of conversations and thoughts I had at that meeting with three Chemistry Nobel Laureates: the 2008 Laureate Martin Chalfie from the University of Columbia; Venki Ramakrishnan from the Laboratory of Molecular biology, Cambridge, UK, who won the prize in 2009; and Arieh Warshel from the University of Southern California, the 2013 prize winner.

Amongst other things, we discussed what each of them looks for in PhD students that they take on into their laboratories and faculty members that they hire into their departments. The main message from all laureates I spoke to, not just these three, was that without visible, tangible passion and enthusiasm for the science, it’s going to be difficult for you to get a position in a laboratory.

This lead us nicely onto a discussion about how you communicate this in an interview. And so, in the last part of this podcast, Warshel and Ramakrishnan, share their concerns for young scientists in this endeavour: They understand the importance of being a good communicator, but scientists need to know the limits to this. It’s no good over-selling your work if it means neglecting it, or even fabricating it.

Nature Biotechnology podcast: First Rounders with Julian Davies

Posted on 14 Aug 2014 by Julie Gould

{credit}Image courtesy of Julian Davies{/credit}

Contributor Brady Huggett

Julian Davies has a long history in biotechnology research, particularly in antibiotics and resistance, and he also served as head of research at Biogen’s European division in the 1980s. But for more than 20 years now, he’s been at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he’s the principal investigator at the Davies Lab. I spoke to Julian for the Nature Biotechnology First Rounders podcast, which was recorded in his office on the UBC campus, with the door closed to help with audio quality, and the overhead lights off. A light rain fell against his office window.

We talked at length about his early family life during World War II, his education in chemistry and biology, and his research across countries. A Nature Biotechnology profile in 2008 had covered TerraGen, Davies’ spinout from UBC, and it’s a topic in the podcast, too. But the element that perhaps stands out most is his eagerness to move around: he’s lived in New York, Manchester, Boston, Paris, Geneva, and beyond – partly to follow research he found interesting, and partly, it seems, because he was perpetually invited to work alongside others. This willingness to relocate helped facilitate his career, as well as allowed him to see the world.

Hear more about Julian’s life on the Nature Biotechnology First Rounders podcast.

Brady Huggett is the Business Editor for Nature Biotechnology

Chemists call for boycott over all-male speaker line up

Posted on 17 Feb 2014 by Elizabeth Gibney

Clarification added on 18 Feburary*.

Scientists are being urged to boycott a major international chemistry conference after its preliminary list of invited speakers and chairs featured no women.

An open letter on the website Change.org has called for a boycott of the 15^th International Congress of Quantum Chemistry (ICQC), to be held in Beijing in June 2015. The move came after a list was posted on the conference website that allegedly showed no women among 24 speakers and 5 chairs and honorary chairs. The list, screenshots of which were seen by Nature, has since been taken down.

According to a blog by chemist Christopher Cramer of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the organizers had invited 27 scientists as speakers, only one of whom was a woman.

The letter, which has gained more than 600 signatures in 48 hours, was authored by three eminent theoretical chemists: Emily Carter of Princeton University in New Jersey; Laura Gagliardi of the University of Minnesota; and Anna Krylov of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

It reads: “It happened again — another major theoretical chemistry conference features an all-male program. One of us began boycotting such conferences 14 years ago and can’t believe that 14 years later we are still seeing such overt discrimination.”

In an e-mail to Nature, Josef Michl, president of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS), which runs the congress, said that the three letter writers had pointed out “a very serious problem” and were “justifiably concerned” with the partial list, which accounted for two-thirds of the eventual speakers.

According to Michl, Zhigang Shuai, a theoretical chemist from Tsinghua University who heads the conference organizing committee, had already asked Michl to send academy members the partial list and ask for suggestions of speakers — specifically women — to complete the line-up. The response to this had been excellent and the final list would be gender-balanced, Michl adds.

Michl says that it had been a mistake to release a partial and very imbalanced list, because “it can easily be misinterpreted”, adding that he would be sending a letter of apology to the three signatories and members of the IAQMS. Michl’s letter, a draft of which has been seen Nature, adds that a large fraction of the people already on the list were outside the control of the organizing committee, including medalists and newly elected IAQMS members and previous organizers.

~~However,~~ Carter says that asking for female speakers after publicizing the all-male list of speakers looked like “tokenism” and that organizers should have solicited advice long before posting the list. “Asking afterward definitely is a subtle message that we ‘need to add some women, let’s just dig around the dregs’,” she says.

“There are mediocre scientists of both genders, but there are also outstanding scientists of both genders. And to not have bothered to think about this — or to think about the message it sends to every young scientists when you have a meeting that only has men speaking — is deeply discouraging,” she says. “This happens over and over again, and it’s not reasonable.”

Organizers of the ICQC say, however, that the message sent to members, which included the partial list of 24 speakers and request for further suggested speakers — specifically women — was sent on 9 February. This was done before the partial list was posted on the conference website, on 14 February.

The letter includes a link to the Women in Theoretical Chemistry web directory, which lists more than 300 female scientists holding tenured and tenure-track academic positions or equivalents in related areas. “Many of these women are far more distinguished than many of the men being invited to speak at these conferences,” the letter reads.

————-

*The article was amended to include the ICQC organizers’ clarification that the request for additional speakers was sent out five days before the list was posted on the website.

The periodic table: matter matters

Posted on 07 Dec 2011 by Soapbox Science Editor

Cross-posted with permission of OUPblog.

Eric Scerri is a chemist and philosopher of science, author and speaker. He is a lecturer in chemistry, as well as history and philosophy of science, at UCLA in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books including The Periodic Table, Its Story and Its Significance, Collected Papers on the Philosophy of Chemistry and Selected Papers on the Periodic Table. His latest book, The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction, is published this week.

As far back as I can remember, I have always liked sorting and classifying things. As a boy I was an avid stamp collector. I would sort my stamps into countries, particular sets, then arrange them in order of increasing monetary value shown on the face of the stamp. I would go to great lengths to select the best possible copy of any stamp that I had several versions of. It’s not altogether surprising that I have therefore ended up doing research and writing books on what is perhaps the finest example of a scientific system of classification – the periodic table of the elements. Following degrees in chemistry I wrote a PhD thesis in the history and philosophy of science and specialised in the question of whether chemistry has been explained by quantum mechanics. A large part of this work dealt with the periodic table, the explanation of which is considered as one of the major triumphs of quantum theory, and the notion of atomic orbitals.

As I often mention in public lectures, it is curious that the great 20th century physicist, Ernest Rutherford, looked down on chemistry and compared it to stamp collecting. But we chemists had the last laugh since Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry and not for his beloved field of physics.

In 2007 I published a book called The Periodic Table, Its Story and Its Significance, which people tell me has become the definitive book on the subject. More recently I was asked to write a Very Short Introduction to the subject, which I have now completed. Although I first thought this would be a relatively easy matter it turned out not to be. I had to rethink almost everything contained in the earlier book, respond to comments from reviewers and had to deal with some new areas which I had not developed fully enough in the earlier book. One of these areas is the exploration of elements beyond uranium or element number 92, all of which are of a synthetic nature.

At the same time, there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the elements and the periodic table especially in the popular imagination. There have been i-Pad applications, YouTube videos, two highly successful popular books, people singing Tom Leher’s element song in various settings as well as artists and advertisers helping themselves to the elegance and beauty of the periodic table. On the scientific side, elements continue to be discovered or more precisely synthesised and there are official deliberations concerning how the recently discovered elements should be named.

On November 4th The International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) officially announced that elements 110, 111 and 112 are to be known officially as darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn). The names come from the German city of Darmstadt where several new elements have been artificially created; Wilhelm Konrad Roentgenm, the discoverer of X-rays; and the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus who was one of the first to propose the heliocentric model of the solar system. Of the three names it is the last one that has caused the most controversy. Apart from honouring a great scientist it was chosen because the structure of the atom broadly speaking resembles that of a miniature solar system in which the nucleus plays the role of the sun and the electrons behave as the planets do, an idea that originated with the work of Rutherford incidentally. Except that electrons don’t quite orbit the nucleus. One of the major discoveries to emerge from the application of quantum mechanics to the study of the atom has been the realisation that electrons do not follow planetary-like orbits around the nucleus. The electrons behave as much as diffuse waves as they do as particles, and as such they exist everywhere at once within so-called orbitals. The change in wording from ‘orbit’ to ‘orbital’ is a little unfortunate since it does not begin to convey the enormous conceptual change from Rutherford’s solar system model to the quantum model.

Another controversial aspect of all the synthetic elements, that lie beyond the old boundaries of the periodic table, or elements 1 to 92, is that they are radioactive and mostly very short lived which leads most people to think that making them is an enormous waste of time and resources. But such a view is a little short sighted. Some of these elements have found important applications. Take element 95 or americium for example. It has managed to find its way into every modern household as a vital component of smoke detectors.

Or consider the element technetium, which has a far lower atomic number of 43 but which was first discovered in Palermo, Sicily in 1937 after being artificially created in a cyclotron machine in Berkeley, California. Over the subsequent years technetium has found its way into every major hospital in the world and is used in a plethora of medical scanning procedures as well as for treating various medical conditions. It was later found that technetium occurs naturally on earth but in absolutely minute amounts. This happens because technetium is a bi-product of the natural decay of uranium and also because it is a bi-product in the operation of nuclear reactors. The second of these sources provides macroscopic amounts of technetium, which allow scientists to study the chemistry of the element in great detail and to make many new and medically useful compounds. There have been entire conferences devoted to the chemistry and uses of technetium.

Nobody has yet found the means of producing macroscopic amounts of the most recently named elements, and they probably won’t, but their formation provides chemists and physicists with an excellent opportunity to refine theories on nuclei and atoms and new techniques with which to experiment upon them. Almost of matter is made of the elements and that’s why the elements really matter to us, even the more exotic ones.

Chemistry: time to celebrate

Posted on 28 Jul 2011 by Allison Doerr

In our August issue, we join in the celebration of the International Year of Chemistry with a special feature, including an Editorial that highlights some of the most important contributions of chemistry to method and tool development for biology research, a Technology Feature on protein engineering, a Historical Commentary on the history of mass spectrometry, a Commentary on bioorthogonal chemistry, another Commentary on small-molecule fluorescent probes, and finally, a selection of Chemistry Methods papers published in past issues of Nature Methods.

It is clear that many important insights in biology research would not have been possible without the use of methods and tools developed originally by chemists. Even today, the expertise of chemists continues to be necessary for making new discoveries and advancements in the biological sciences.

Please feel free to share your thoughts about the impact of chemistry, of methods and tools in particular, on biology research!

Chemists face employment woes – but there are ways to prosper

Posted on 28 Feb 2011 by Rachel Bowden

The rise of the biochemist and the challenges faced by recent chemistry graduates were among US employment trends discussed by analysts from the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in a webinar last week. We’ve summarised the key points for you below – let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Troubling figures

Unemployment among ACS members in 2009 and 2010 was at the highest level since 1972, when the society started collecting annual data, according to ACS researcher Gareth Edwards. “It’s a very troublesome figure,” says Edwards. “We are hoping it has at least plateaued or is going to decrease in forthcoming years.”

But biochemistry is blossoming

Brian Roberts from the BLS says employment trends for life scientists are much more positive than for chemists.

One of the reasons is that while chemists are “falling out of favour” in pharmaceutical research, biochemists are flourishing due to the shift in emphasis towards biotechnology and other life sciences in the sector.

Experience beats youth

Recent chemistry graduates are losing out to older, more experienced employees when it comes to finding a job. “In the race between people with experience and new graduates, people with experience are winning,” says David Harwell, assistant director for careers at ACS.

“Having seasoned vets on staff seems to be cheaper than hiring two [less experienced people] at half the price,” adds Edwards.

“Try before you buy”

The unpredictable financial climate in the United States has resulted in an increase in the number of people being employed on fixed-term contracts. “That’s especially true at the bachelor’s or associate level,” says Harwell. “It’s a little bit of ‘try before you buy’ for the employers.”

Have you been affected?

Are you a recent chemistry graduate struggling to find a job? Are you looking at biochemistry as an alternative option? Share your experiences in the comment box.

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