Author Archives: Julie Gould

Scientific communities: How to follow the right people on Twitter

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Following the right people on Twitter can help develop supportive and beneficial communities, say speakers at the 2015 London Naturejobs Career Expo.

Jon Tennant, a paleontologist and avid social media user shares his tips on how to make the most of a social media community on Twitter.

Jon Tennant’s four top tips:

  1. Identify learned societies in your field and find out who they follow. These people will be high-profile scientists in that particular speciality.
  2. Tweet at conferences and you’ll quickly find that people follow you back, especially those who cannot attend.
  3. Curate your feeds into lists. For example, develop a list appropriate to science communication, or on microbiology. You can be as specific as you like
  4. If you don’t like what someone does/says on Twitter, you can unfollow them.

Further reading:

Scientific communities: Build your own

Scientific communities: Membership at learned societies

Scientific communities: From Twitter to paper

Scientific communities: From Twitter to paper

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Networking on Twitter can lead to new collaborations, research projects and, ultimately, published papers.

Jon Tennant spent time networking  with fellow paleontologists on Twitter. Unbeknownst to him, this method of communication would ultimately lead to a new research collaboration and a published paper. Here he explains his story at the 2015 London Naturejobs Career Expo.

Further reading:

Scientific communities: Build your own

Scientific communities: Membership at learned societies

Scientific communities: Membership at learned societies

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There’s a decrease in the number of people knowing about learned societies, says Sarah Blackford at the 2015 London Naturejobs Career Expo.

Sarah Blackford is the Head of Education & Public Affairs at the Society for Experimental Biology. Here she answers a question from the 2015 London Naturejobs Career Expo on the decreasing interest in learned societies.

Further reading

Scientific communities: Build your own.

How to make the most of professional societies

 

 

The faculty series: Nobody rides for free

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Faculty need to learn how to add value to their institution when starting their first role, says John Tregoning.

Guest contributor John Tregoning

Congratulations, you have your first academic appointment and are now a member of faculty.

Commiserations, you are now a massive financial burden to the faculty and will need to continually justify your appointment.

As a postdoc, financially you were someone else’s problem: your salary came from whoever funded your project. Now, as a member of faculty, the cost of your salary comes from the university’s pocket. But it doesn’t stop at salary. The university also pays for bench space, utilities, parental leave, and – if you were better than me at negotiating – consumables, equipment and possibly even a technician’s salary. None of which comes cheaply. In this age of austerity, heads of department are forced to make budgetary decisions and salaries are not only the biggest cost to most departments, they often account for more than 50% of the total budget. In business speak, these costs mean that not only do you need to demonstrate that the department is making a return on its investment in you, but you also need to add value. Continue reading →

Most read on Naturejobs: November 2015

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Career supervision, networking, women in science and more from Naturejobs in November 2015!

naturejobs-readsAnother busy month for the Naturejobs team, as we’ve held our very first Career Expo in Dusseldorf, Germany only last week. As well as that, we’ve started publishing the films from the 2015 London Naturejobs Career Expo.

And last Friday, we published out last podcast of the year, celebrating the failures in science.

So, there’s been plenty for you to feast your eyes and ears on. We’ve had a look at the numbers, and here are your favourite pieces from the last month.

Managing laboratory members as well as a research strategy can be difficult for early-career principal investigators, but help is at hand, says Boer Deng in Supervision: Clear direction.

Networking: Hello stranger, by Emily Sohn, explores how conferences are great for career development, but miscalculated moves can foil future prospects.

Non-profit organizations: Scientists on a mission, by Julie Gould, explores how scientists are ideally suited to a career in the non-profit sector. Continue reading →

Careers in science: Celebrate the failures

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The history and development of science is littered with failures, so early-career researchers should embrace, rather than be afraid of them.

Naturejobs-podcast“Success is advancing from failure to failure without loosing enthusiasm.” – Not said by either Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln.

“The things I remember best from college were the questions I got wrong on the exams.” – Kathryn Yatrakis, dean of academic affairs, Columbia College.

These are two of my favourite quotes from Stuart Firestein’s (professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, NY) new book, Failure: Why science is so successful.

Science’s history is littered with failures. Without them, science woudn’t have advanced to the point it’s at today. And yet a negative connotation goes hand-in-hand with it.

In this final Naturejobs podcast of 2015, I speak to Firestein about what failure in science means, what the negative connotations are, why they exist, why they impact young scientists and what they can do to overcome them.

#Scidata15: Make the most of your research: Publish better data

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Primary research papers are the currency of academics, but they’re also part of a much wider body of knowledge that is restricted by a lack of transparency.

Guest contributor Lakshini Mendis

naturejobs-blog-Scidata15-ResearchData-for-Publications

{credit}Image credit: SCIENTIFIC DATA/LUDIC GROUP{/credit}

Historically, a great deal of trust has been placed in statements made in research papers for which the underlying data have not been shared. The invention of the laser was described in a paper containing just three data-points, for instance, and Watson and Crick first described the structure of DNA in a paper without any data at all. But with about 1,500 papers retracted since 2012, and 26.6% due to misconduct, scientific papers are now firmly under the microscope.

Improving the availability and readability of original research data would go a long way to improving matters. And as scientific publishers largely determine how research data is disseminated, their involvement will be central to any change. Speaking at Publishing Better Science Through Better Data in late October 2015, Dr Joerg Heber and Dr Andrew Hufton, editors at Nature Communications and Scientific Data respectively, emphasised that to make the most of research data it must be more open.

Overcoming the data-sharing challenge

According to Hufton, the status quo is for researchers to only share data with others directly. As well as being inefficient, data associated with published work disappears at a rate of about 17% a year as a result of researchers failing to properly catalogue findings. There is now, therefore, a move from scientific publishers to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and re-useable – or, to use an acronym as those of a scientific persuasion are so often inclined to do, FAIR. Continue reading →

A science masterclass

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Young researchers discuss science and careers with Nobel laureates at the 2015 Lindau Nobel meeting.

Image credit: Sam Falconer

Every year, Nobel laureates and young researchers come together in Lindau, Germany. It’s a unique opportunity to glean some advice for a successful career in science. The 2015 meeting cast a spotlight on super-resolution microscopy, as discussed in depth in the Nature Outlook: Science Masterclass, as well as fields as diverse as memory formation and the Higgs boson.

The first meeting was held in 1951, just two years before Francis Crick and James Watson revealed their structure of DNA. Since then, Nobel laureates from all walks of science have graced the small island with their presence, and 2015 was no different.

Elizabeth Blackburn, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres, was one of only three female laureates to attend the meeting. Other attendees included Richard Roberts (shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Sharp for their discoveries of split genes), Francois Englert (shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Higgs for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that gives mass to subatomic particles), Bruce Beutler (shared one half of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jules Hoffmann for their work on the activation of innate immunity) and Susumu Tonegawa (winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for unlocking the genetic secrets behind antibodies’ diverse structures).

This particular Nature Outlook was supplemented with a series of videos highlighting some of the scientists’ work. On the blog, we’ve shown Saul Perlmutter’s work on the expanding universe, Stefan Hell’s work on breaking the diffraction barrier, Robert Wilson’s work on the cosmic microwave background and an insight into Elizabeth Blackburns interest in telomeres.

But of particular interest to the Naturejobs blog are three short videos that discuss certain elements of careers in science. Equal opportunities: Women in science, explores laureate Ada Yonath’s career, and why the gender gap in science persists. Young scientists also came together to discuss whose responsibility it is to disseminate science and finally, what does an early career scientist’s future look like, given the uncertainty in the job market?

Further reading/listening from the Naturejobs blog:

Podcast with Martin Chalfie, Venki Ramakrishnan and Arieh Warshel, on what it takes to be hired into their labs.

Podcast: Academia to industry, and back again, with Eric Betzig

Mentoring: A perspective from Nobel laureates

Mentoring: Before they were laureates

Mentoring: Where do laureates go for advice?

Lessons from a laureate