Monthly Archives: March 2015

Ask the expert: Meet Clare Jones

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Clare Jones, senior careers advisor at Nottingham University, is our Naturejobs Expert this coming month.

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{credit}Image credit: Clare Jones{/credit}

What is your scientific background?

I am sorry to say that I struggled with science at school and only continued with biology to O’level and even managed to be unsuccessful at that stage. However if the researchers I work with can explain their science to me they are certainly developing that great skill of being able to communicate effectively to a non-scientist.

Why did you decide to leave academia?

Actually I’m a career changer into academia. I’ve had an eclectic career journey beginning with a short career commission in the (then) Women’s Royal Naval Service followed by working mainly in the not-for-profit and government sectors. I moved into HE to work on skills and employability projects before qualifying as a Careers Adviser and then specialising in working with Early Career Researchers.

Why did you decide to take on the role you have now?

I was working at Swansea University as the Employability and Skills Officer and decided to ask my boss if I could take on extra duties as a Careers Adviser. Why? – because I was on a fixed term contract and realised that investing in some additional work and getting a qualification within HE Careers work might provide a more “secure” career route, a way out of the fixed term contract insecurities. My role at Swansea was inevitably going to come to an end and so I wanted to take a proactive approach to my career rather than waiting for something to happen. The role at Nottingham was advertised just as I qualified and it was a new post working with ECRs and it looked really interesting, a bit different to other roles and a chance to develop a new area of work – all things I had a history of doing. So here I am 10 years later and still enjoying it!

How do you want to help scientists in their careers?

Working in academia is very challenging and sometimes researchers lose touch with the breadth and depth of the competencies, skills and behaviours they have. They also may not have explored other careers outside academia and when faced with a decision about staying or going I am able to offer an impartial and confidential opportunity to talk through options and make informed and confident decisions about their future career direction. I also support those who are continuing in academia.

Why did you chose the questions below for your audience to vote on?

I based these questions on themes that recur in my individual guidance interviews with Post docs and PhD students and on areas that perhaps they don’t want to talk about yet with their supervisors, PIs or research managers. Some have a hidden or additional theme behind the question, for example, question one can be answered in a factual way but may also generate a discussion on wider commitment and understanding of the academic career pathway and is it what the individual really wants? Question two is also expressing concern about making career decisions as well as knowledge of career options. I have therefore tried to provide questions that will enable me to cover a number of points in the response.

Tell us something about yourself?

My other passion is golf, handicap 11 and I’ve been Lady Captain at three different golf clubs which is a bit unusual (most people do it once) so I think I may suffer from  “not-able-to-say-no” syndrome.

Vote for the question that you would like Clare to answer next month:

The postdoc series: What is a postdoc?

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Postdocs are stepping-stones in a career, not a final destination.

The National Institute of Health and National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA both define a postdoc as:

“An individual who has received a doctoral degree (or equivalent) and is engaged in a temporary and defined period of mentored advanced training to enhance the professional skills and research independence needed to pursue his or her chosen career path.”

The defined period covers an approximately 3 year contract where scientists work in a laboratory helping a principle investigator (PI) to conduct their research. Ideally it is an opportunity to develop skills, work on interesting projects with interesting people in interesting places and train to become an independent scientist.

In the UK, the average starting salary for a first postdoc is approximately £27,000. This will increase incrementally throughout the duration of the postdoc. Normally, you would then start the second postdoc at the salary that you finished the first one on, and receive incremental increases again. In the USA, the National Institute of Health (NIH) National Research Service Award (NRSA) had a baseline postdoctoral stipend for new postdocs of approximately $39,000 in 2012 (this was raised to $42,000 in 2014). This increases to approximately $54,000 for those with seven or more yearsof experience.

However, “being a postdoc is not a career in itself,” warns Karen Hinxman, consultant at the Postdoc Development Centre at Imperial College, London. “It’s a stepping stone to the next part of your career, whether this is inside or outside of academia.” You will not be able to become a perpetual postdoc in the current research sphere. There is an age (and experience) limit to many fellowships: if you have done too many postdocs (or are above a certain age), you will not be eligible for certain funding schemes. If that is the case, you will need to rely on your PI to provide funding. Unfortunately, perpetual postdocs become expensive and PIs often cannot afford them.

The number of scientists taking on a postdoc in the US has increased dramatically since the late 1970’s, according to data collected by the NSF for their Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering (GSS). (Note: data before 2007 was collected in a slightly different way compared to data collected from 2007 onwards).

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The logical next step after completing a postdoc (or two) is to apply for your own funding so that you can become an independent scientist with your own lab in an academic institution. In the current climate this will most likely depend on your publication history (number and in what journal). If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that.

What some young postdocs don’t know is that there are limits attached to some of the grants you can apply for. The Future Leaders grant from the Biotechnology and Bio Science Research Council in the UK, for example, has an eligibility limit on it that states:

“Applicants should not exceed five years in active postdoctoral research employment prior to announcement of the awarded FLFs (30 November 2015)”

And this one from the Wellcome Trust is only for newly appointed postdocs in the biomedical sciences with less than two years experience. More postdoc funding opportunities and challenges will be covered in another post.

However, academia is not the only option post-postdoc. The skills learned during the three year contract are diverse and transferable. In part 3 of this series, we explore those other options, and other issues that trouble postdocs.

Related reading:

 

In the classroom: Expect the unexpected

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Nature-nanotechnologyTaking regular breaks from experiments can help illuminate explanations for unexpected data.

doi:10.1038/nnano.2015.30

How many experiments that seem a complete waste of time and energy and create nothing but frustration does a PhD student do? You don’t see what you expect to see, and despite your efforts you really have no clue to why you see what you see. In most cases these results end up in a bottom drawer and get forgotten. But sometimes, all you need is to get away from them, concentrate on something else, and suddenly an idea comes to help you proceeding further and maybe explain the results. In our March issue of In the classroom, Renren Deng tells us how this happened to him when he first observed a variation in the colour of the light emitted from the nanocrystals he was studying if he simply shook the sample. It was only after many months experience and better knowledge of the nanoparticles known as upconversion nanocrystals that he figured out how he could properly characterize his sample. His perseverance was instrumental in the publication of the paper that appears on the March cover of Nature Nanotechnology, and that reports results that could lead to more efficient optoelectronic devices.

Read more here on the Nature Nano website

Do you ever wish you’d stayed in science?

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Science communication has become more accepted in academic circles, allowing researchers to do both.

The career paths in science communication panel at the 2014 London Naturejobs Career Expo was chaired by the Naturejobs editor, Julie Gould, who was joined by Greg Foot (Freelance), Jonathan Sanderson (StoryCog), Steven Palmer (Cancer Research UK) and Celeste Biever (Chief editor for online Nature news & comment).

Greg Foot would have liked to have had a chance to experiment with it: could he have done both and use his research to build himself a science communication niche? But he thinks that science communication is now an “accepted and applauded thing to be done as training or to further science,” which means people don’t have to make the decision of “either or” anymore. Continue reading →

The postdoc series: Insights, options, careers

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This is the first part in a series of blog posts about post doctoral research positions, exploring what they are, what options researchers have and where postdocs go next.

From the age of four, Vita Godec knew exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a professor. She planned ahead and set herself up for a PhD in her home country of Slovenia at the University of Ljubljana, exploring the enzymes that form cell walls, approaching the problem from different scientific perspectives: biology, chemistry and physics. After completing in 2012, however, she realised that that she would need to go abroad to fulfil her life dream. “There are only three universities in Slovenia, and only one of them has a natural sciences department,” she recalls.

Luckily, she was eligible for the UNESCO L’Oreal International Fellowships Programme, which took her to Warwick University, UK, where she continued her research as a postdoc. Godec knew that one postdoc wouldn’t be enough, and “the combination of doing my PhD at a university that no-one had heard of, plus problems with experiments and hence a lack of publications, made it difficult for me to continue in academia,” she says. After a lot of self-reflection, Godec make the difficult decision to explore other options.

Godec was lucky her postdoctoral research had put her in a good position for a job in industry. “Our lab group in Warwick had a lot of partnerships with industry, which meant that I had an insight into how industry worked and I understood some of the regulatory processes.” Godec now works as a scientist in Drug Product Development of Biopharmaceuticals at Lek, a Sandoz company based in Slovenia, and although she didn’t become an academic, she still very much enjoys her job.

Godec’s story is far from unique: around 90% of postdocs leave academia: it has become the alternative career, so why do so many people still do a postdoc? Naturejobs ran a survey in 2014 asking this very question. The results showed that the top two reasons were because of people’s love of science and that it was the next logical step in their career.

With that in mind, I thought it might be worth having a look at what a postdoc is, whether it’s worth doing one if you don’t want to/cannot stay in academia and what your options are for if you leave academia. In this series I speak to past, present and future postdocs as well as career experts and people in industry who work with postdocs to find out what everyone thinks they are and whether or not they’re useful.

Stay tuned!