Tag Archives: British Council

Becoming a global researcher

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Posted on behalf of Hywel Curtis

What would it take for your research to go global? At Vitae’s international researcher development conference, held in Manchester in the United Kingdom last week, several speakers offered advice on how to boost your international profile. It’s an expanding area of interest: Emma Gillaspy, Vitae’s north-west hub manager, explains that institutions throughout academia are looking at how they can support the development of truly global researchers, and half of respondents to a recent Naturejobs poll said it was ‘very important’ for young researchers to work abroad early in their careers.

Furthermore, an increasing focus on international collaboration in funding calls and the development of new platforms and technologies mean it is easier than ever before for researchers to operate internationally. Adopting a global outlook is also highly beneficial for careers in a growing number of fields — not solely in disciplines that traditionally expect it, such as astrophysics. So how do you take those first steps towards gaining international credentials?

Work on ‘international’ research

Most fields of research offer scope for you to gain international experience. “Research is inherently a global endeavour,” says Claire McNulty, adviser on life sciences and science policy at the British Council. To start with, find out which areas of research your current institution recognises as being of international significance, as you are likely to receive more support in these areas. “International ties lend greater prestige to institutions,” explains Julie Reeves, the early career researcher (ECR) training coordinator at the UK’s University of Southampton. Quite simply, if you aren’t working in an area that offers international opportunities, you’ll need to consider moving into one that does.

Make connections, seize opportunities

Your network of contacts is potentially the best source of international opportunities. Lynn Clark of the graduate skills team at the UK’s University of Liverpool says that making connections with those who have a “global mindset” and value international collaboration could be the catalyst for your global experience. As with all aspects of your research career it is vital to identify and develop meaningful relationships with those in your field — whether they are someone you met at a conference, a previous collaborator or a personal connection. In addition, opportunities may arise in calls for funding, research partners or collaborations that have international elements, so be aware of these. Also watch out for industry research and development projects and exchanges.

Explore working abroad

If you’re considering working in another country, be sure this is really the right choice for you. Seek advice from those with experience and consider your family, financial situation and career prospects when evaluating options. “It is about your physical mobility to some degree,” says Clark.

You need to be willing and able to travel and live in a foreign culture for extended periods. Employers “are looking for someone who can cope with diversity”, explains Reeves. Consider whether you will really be able to thrive in a new environment despite professional or cultural differences. For example, “one particular problem for UK researchers is the language barrier,” says McNulty of the British Council, which is why many choose to gain international experience in the US.

Move successfully

To prepare for an international move, find out what support your home institution offers and query the internationalisation strategy it has in place. Additional help may be available at national and international levels; in Europe, for example, a scientific visa programme, coordinated by EURAXESS, helps researchers from non-European countries to work in the region. As part of the programme, research organizations sign hosting agreements with individual researchers. “The hosting agreement is fast-track immigration for researchers,” says Magdalena Wislocka, hosting agreement scheme manager at the Irish Universities Association. Support such as this can simplify your relocation significantly.

Succeed overseas

Once you have acquired a position, there are many ways to make your international experience a success. One area to focus on is preserving the same standards and professional integrity that you maintained previously. Cross-cultural supervision issues are a key concern for those managing researchers internationally, says Vitae’s Gillaspy, so it’s important to foster self-management skills. These can also benefit your career in general (see ‘Getting a pay rise in academia’).

In addition, operating effectively abroad will require you to develop global awareness and think beyond literature reviews to the people, institutions and cultures that those citations represent. This approach is used in Japan to improve graduate education, helping to foster researchers with a “comprehensive and panoramic” view of their field, particularly in the natural sciences, says Mutsuhiro Arinobu, comptroller of the University of Tokyo.

Finally, an important aspect of an effective global research experience is the new relationships you develop while abroad. Working alongside successful researchers in other countries will enhance your own international standing and benefit your career both during and after the placement.

If you have any other advice for researchers looking to gain international experience please feel free to share it below.

Science in the Arab world

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rana.bmp Dr. Rana Dajani teaches molecular biology and is the Director of the Center for Studies at the Hashemite University of Jordan. She is also the founder of the initiative We Love Reading, which aims to encourage children in the Arab world to read for pleasure. Dr Rana Dajani, who took part in the Belief in Dialogue conference on 21-23 June, blogs about what’s needed for science to flourish.

The conference was organised by the British Council in partnership with the American University of Sharjah and in association with the International Society of Science and Religion.

As a scientist in the Arab world, I practise science and research everyday. The challenges are multiple and in many cases not so obvious for those in the West, who can afford to take these things for granted. The most important element for fostering research is creating an environment to encourage, support and sustain it.

Firstly, such an environment can only be created if you put in the work and deal with the problems as they arise. It’s not something that you can just dream up while sitting at your desk. Secondly, to make it sustainable, management needs to be accountable for its actions. Unfortunately, this is not always the case here. Without these two elements, no money in the world will allow science to progress and develop.

There is an abundance of minds and creativity in the Arab world. However, most of them drain into the West because there is a well-established support system for research.

So, what is the solution? The solution is freedom; freedom of opinion, being able to come to a decision through questioning, unhindered contemplation, institutional accountability, democracy and human rights.

Freedom will ultimately lead to progress and development not only in science but in all aspects of life in the Arab world. Freedom of opinion starts at home, with children given the opportunity and encouragement to question, challenge and form their own opinions.

This should further be fostered in schools, where teachers encourage students to ask questions. If teachers don’t have the answers, they should say so honestly and without covering up gaps in their knowledge by stifling the student. Children can learn to form their own opinions if they are taught reasoning and deduction and are granted the space to practise those skills. That is what our children need and that is what is missing in the Arab world.

University students have not been able to form independent opinions reflecting their original thinking. The day my students wrote essays expressing themselves was the day they felt human. One student told me that he was finally Someone – with a capital S.

The day I listened to a student explain her opinion was the day she could give me a big smile and tell me it was the first time she felt respected. It is such individuals who build our communities and nations, who will make a difference, who will take us into the twenty-first century with confidence.

How do we achieve this goal?

I believe the only effective way is to instil a love of reading in our young ones, so that they can learn from other people’s experiences across time and space and see and respect other ways, other narratives, that are equally justified. I have developed a programme called We Love Reading to do that throughout the Arab world by training women to read aloud to children in their neighbourhoods.

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Belief in Dialogue: Science, Culture and Modernity

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fern.JPG Dr Fern Elsdon-Baker is Director of the British Council’s Belief in Dialogue Programme. Belief in Dialogue is a new intercultural programme, which explores how people in the UK and internationally can live peacefully with diversity and difference in an increasingly pluralistic world. Fern currently serves on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Science in Culture Advisory Group. A passionate believer in the interactive communication of science, history and philosophy, in her spare time she is the recorder for the History of Science section for the British Science Association. She also serves on the programme’s committee for the British Society for the History of Science.

This blog post is coming to you from the United Arab Emirates. I am at a British Council conference organised with the American University of Sharjah, in association with the International Society for Science and Religion. The title of the conference, Belief in Dialogue: Science, Culture and Modernity, may at first seem a little challenging to some regular readers of Nature. How can there possibly be a dialogue of this kind?

One of the key questions we will be asking at the conference is what factors need to be in place in any society or culture for scientific endeavour or inquiry to flourish. At first these might seem like quite simplistic questions – surely it’s just about good science education and funding for scientific research institutions? However, I would argue it takes much more than that to build a thriving scientific economy. There are certain building blocks needed in areas of society that we might not readily recognise.

The role technological and medical advances can play in our daily lives is clear. We are all aware where the ethical boundaries may lie, whether this be around a range of questions from stem cell research, reproductive technologies, climate change through to water security.

However, to get to the root of what makes science flourish we need to make one fundamental observation – what we mean when we use the terms ‘science’, ‘technology’ or ‘medicine’ are all different. Intrinsically intertwined with shared – yet in places divergent – historical contexts, they have different approaches to methodology or their philosophical underpinning.

For technology to flourish you do not necessarily need a flourishing ‘scientific’ culture – significant societal drivers such as industry and entrepreneurship play perhaps a bigger role than a purely ‘scientific’ approach. Scientific inquiry is as much a way of thinking, seeing and asking questions about the world around us, as it is a consensus on a type of agreed methodological approach.

‘Science’ in this way, whether we recognise it or not, is an integral part of our daily lives. It is the very fabric of our cultural context but in different ways. I am far from arguing that there is no hope of an ‘objective science’ in the way that many scientists would argue – I am certainly not suggesting that the very stuff of science is culturally relative. But the cradle of all scientific inquiry is the broader societal and cultural context in which it sits. Not just the cultural perspective of the individual or team of researchers, but the context of the political system which supports or suppresses, the funding stream that can inadvertently create fashions and trends, and those of us in wider society who are ultimately the end users of any research and in turn fuel both political and funding priorities. This rich tapestry of influences ultimately shapes the scientific discourse of the day.

The answer then to my question lies outside of the science faculty or classroom. It is becoming increasingly recognised in developing scientific economies that the humanities play a key part in helping to frame the systems of thinking that are needed to engage both critically and analytically with the world around us. In the UK, we have long recognised the role of strong multidisciplinary discourse and it is to our credit that our research funding councils see the critical value in this interplay between sciences and humanities – even in these difficult economic times.

Another factor that we are growing to value more and more is the open engagement with wider society and cultures in science communication. Gone are the days when we would expect to disseminate ‘knowledge’ to an uninformed and apparently wilfully ignorant public. We are all members of that amorphous mass we like to call public and we cannot assume that we are all uninformed, uninterested or do not have valid questions about the role of science in society today or how it relates to our own individual cultural perspectives.

Freedom of thought and expression play a key role here too. Too often fundamentalists at the extremes of the spectrum close down on other’s perspectives not because of any epistemological impasse, but merely due to an unwillingness to even engage with another’s cultural perspective. Too often when we communicate science we cleave to polarising narratives that create an ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach to science communication – which can exclude a large proportion of the world’s population. There is no ‘them’, there is only an ‘us’.

In an increasingly globalised world where we all have multiple identities it is not possible to delineate between communities or cultures in the simplistic ways of the past. We cannot therefore assume, as has been done in previous years, that it is possible to create divisions between any culture – be that a disciplinary cultural divide between science and humanities or a cultural divide between world views.

In my work I have had the opportunity to meet a number of people from many different cultures, communities and faiths. Sometimes my perspective on how we view the world might differ from those I meet, but I have as yet not had the misfortune to meet someone who is so set in his own world view that we cannot openly engage in a discussion about those differences. In some surprising and heart-warming circumstances I have found considerable common ground with those who initially felt they were in opposition to my work communicating evolutionary science but have since become firm supporters. At other times I have come away with my own prejudices and misconceptions challenged and found a new respect or understanding of another’s world view even if it is one I do not wholly share.

What I hope we will see at the conference at the American University of Sharjah is an opportunity to openly share different perspectives on the issues and challenges at the core of scientific discourse that are fundamental to all societies’ growth. But more importantly I would hope that by bringing people together from different countries with different beliefs and world views, we will each take our part of the jigsaw and place it together – so that in the future we can build a clearer global picture of how to communicate science in a more effective way as we face the many challenges ahead of us all in the 21st century.

To join in the discussion on Twitter, the conference hashtag is #BIDSCM and you can find the official Belief in Dialogue Twitter account here.