Monthly Archives: October 2015

Most read on Naturejobs: October 2015

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Career uncertainty, industrial postdocs, writing for highly-selective journals and more!

naturejobs-readsThank you to everyone for reading our posts this month. We’ve been working closely with a lot of new writers, and we’re pleased that you’ve enjoyed what they have to say! Here’s a list of your top ten favourite reads from October.

This year Nature have been running their Graduate Student Survey, trying to understand what careers graduates are looking to do when they finish their training, and how they are preparing for them. In Graduate survey: Uncertain futures, Chris Woolston gives a great summary of the results, and shares some stories from graduate students around the world.

Industrial postdocs: A bridge between two worlds is a report from the Naturejobs Career Expo in London earlier this year, where Roche presented a workshop on the postdoctoral opportunities they offer.

The traditional route in academia – PhD, a postdoc or two (or three) and then professor – is one everyone is familiar with. But there are other options, as Careers in academia: Different options explores. This is another report from the 2015 Naturejobs Career Expo in London, where different types of academics gave an insight into their different roles.

The Naturejobs Career Expo reports are popular this month! Nature Masterclasses: Writing for highly-selective journals, is another report from the event, this time about one of the workshops run by the Nature Masterclasses team. Continue reading →

Academia to industry and back again

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Eric Betzig, one of three chemistry Nobel laureates from 2014, shares what he learned from working in both academia and industry, and how he applies it to his career now.


Naturejobs-podcast
It’s often said that being a science graduate is a great thing: it opens so many doors and gives you the chance to take on any career. Although this might be true, it also makes deciding what career to focus on, and train for, very difficult.

This month, Nature Careers published a great piece based on the 2015 Nature Graduate Student Survey, where Nature tried to uncover what careers early career researchers were hoping to get, and how they were preparing themselves. In this podcast I was joined by Monya Baker, one of the Nature Careers editors, to give us some further insight into the survey.

The second part of the podcast is an interview I did with Eric Betzig, one of the three chemistry Nobel prize winners in 2014. In our chat we talk about his work in breaking the diffraction limit, what it’s like to see living cells move and his transitions from academia to industry and back again.

Career decisions: Too complex for the rational brain?

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Combining our rational thought process and gut instinct may give us the best of both worlds, says Julia Yates at the 2015 Naturejobs Career Expo in London.

Guest contributor Catherine Seed

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{credit}Image credit: Catherine Seed{/credit}

Deciding on our next career move is a struggle over which many of us have lost sleep. Whether we stay within academia or decide to start looking beyond the ivory tower, there are many paths to choose from. Conventional wisdom stresses the importance of logically thinking through the decision and weighing the available options before we decide. After all, career decisions are life changing: it is important to take time and care in making them, isn’t it? Well, maybe not. This rational approach may leave us unhappier in the long term, argues Julia Yates, a psychologist and career coach at the University of East London, UK.

While the idea of keeping career options open has traction, the reality is that there are more options than we can properly evaluate. “Actually, our brains can cope with about six,” Yates said. She noted that the UK Office of National Statistics recently catalogued some 37,000 available job titles, far more than can be rationally assimilated at once. Continue reading →

Science communication: Sculpting your role

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The field of science communication is highly varied, so don’t be afraid to find what works for you, says the panel of experts in science communication at the 2015 Naturejobs Career Expo in London.

Guest contributor Catherine Seed

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Left to right: Robert Dawson, Catherine Ball, Anke Sparmann and Belinda Quick{credit}Image credit: Catherine Seed{/credit}

Science communication is rapidly becoming a core requirement for scientists, and has long been a highly sought-after career in its own right.

There is a huge breadth and diversity in the field of science communication, agreed the panel members, yet the use of ‘science communication’ as an umbrella term often obscures this variety.  Panellists agreed that the key to developing a successful science communication career is in finding how you prefer to communicate, and determining which avenues of communication match your style. With options ranging from news reporting to working for academic institutions or societies, or in simply starting your own blog, the options are countless. The process, they said, requires much experimentation; test different forms of communication to discover what works best for you.

The objectives of organisations shape the form of communication that they use, said Robert Dawson, head of news at the BBSRC. He stressed the importance of familiarising yourself with different media outlets, universities, research institutions, and companies and their communication style.  In his own role, he communicates to scientists, journalists and other members of the media. “Science PR is about balancing the need to encourage the public to be enthusiastic about your organisation and about science, with the need to produce accurate and balanced coverage,” he said. Continue reading →

Career paths: How to decide which path to take

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Rui Pires Martins, researcher development advisor at Queen Mary University of London, encourages scientists to self-reflect in order to make future career decisions.

Guest contributor Rui Pires Martins

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I love cities, especially large, diverse ones. Moving from Toronto to Detroit for my PhD studies in 2000 made me appreciate the importance of the place I live in beyond just ‘somewhere near work’. I took the post knowing very little of the complex socioeconomic history that led to the city’s decline. After almost seven years of tough-love, it became apparent that Motown wasn’t really able to provide “city” at the level that I craved.

Even as starved for “urbania” as I was, my next move in 2007 was more guided by the reputation of the The Gurdon Institute, and of its scientists, than location (Cambridge, UK). The logistics of studying a stage of embryonic development that happened in the early morning hours would soon start to impact my work-life balance. So while my fellowship was a tremendous opportunity for my development, when I began to search for my next post, I set my sights on London. I also focused my search on groups working with embryonic stem cells, thinking I’d have more control over my working hours. In 2009, I took a position as a postdoctoral research assistant at QMUL, where I would work for just over four years.

Location: check. Work-life balance: fingers crossed. Continue reading →

Data sharing: Contribute to the community

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Data sharing can make a significant contribution to the scientific community, but it comes with challenges, says Caroline Weight.

Guest contributor Caroline Weight

We have all heard of it. We are all worried about it. We hear whispers of it in the corridors. We are advised to be careful what we say to ‘others’. We constantly check the literature. It matters to us. After all, it is our careers on the line.

‘Scooped’.

The process of publication is vigorous, competitive and tricky. It’s not uncommon for five years to pass between writing the grant application and publishing the work. Big labs with state-of-the-art facilities stand a better chance of getting their work out there first, given the extra manpower and often more-established protocols. This race for ownership of the data makes it difficult to share information and present new findings at meetings or conferences. Even at manuscript submission, there is often a chance to actively inhibit particular referees in case of conflicts of interest or personal competitors, to retain the novel concepts and data until they have been made public. Not until the publication has been accepted and is in print can you heave a sigh of relief and move on to the next project. Yet, sharing of data is essential to the progression of science in the modern world. Continue reading →

Data sharing: Fewer experiments, more knowledge

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Data sharing will reduce the experiments needed in the lab and will increase the speed of knowledge generation by decreasing the time spent on the generation of equivalent datasets.

Guest contributor Ana Sofia Figueiredo

biological-model-naturejobs-blogI’m a postdoctoral scientist in systems biology at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. There, I build mathematical models to understand the mechanisms behind certain biological processes, such as the process of energy production by cells under extreme conditions. These mathematical models are representations of reality and some of them can be useful, although all of them are wrong. When well parameterized with data, these models give a quantitative representation and better understanding of such biological processes. Using a systems biology approach, I can do experiments in silico that are very difficult or technically impossible to do in vitro or in vivo.  However, a model is only as good as the data it incorporates.

When I have access to publicly available experimental datasets, I can plug the data into my models and, from the synergy of combining mathematical models with experimental data, learn more about the biological system I have at hands.

Sharing data, models and experimental protocols can push forward the generation of knowledge in science. Continue reading →

Open research: Open up to open access

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Six myths about open access were addressed in an open research workshop at the 2015 Naturejobs Career Expo in London.

Guest contributor Gaia Donati

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How open-minded do you feel about open access publishing?

The Open Research workshop at the 2015 London Naturejobs Career Expo, led by Mithu Lucraft (head of Open Research Marketing at NPG) and Ros Pyne (Research and Development manager of the Open Research Group at Springer Nature, who manage the Open Research portal), explored several myths about open access publishing, now a well-established alternative route to disseminating scientific results.

Myth 1: Open access benefits readers, but not authors

Open access is great for readers, but the advantage for researchers may seem less obvious at first. A study of open access and subscription-only PNAS articles found that earlier, more frequent citations characterize the former category when compared with the latter. A more recent study of the citations for papers published in Nature Communications (before it became fully open access) seems to confirm these findings and extends the observations to downloads and social-media interest, with open access articles experiencing higher downloads. Interestingly, these also appear to be sustained over a longer period of time – “attention lasts longer,” said Lucraft. In this way, open access – together with similar initiatives such as open data – may well be a primary route to accelerate and facilitate science while ensuring reproducibility. Continue reading →