Tag Archives: Boston

Boston Career Expo Journalist competition runner-up: Marta Wegorzewska

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marta

{credit}Bill Everding{/credit}

Marta Wegorzewska recently received her PhD in Immunology from the University of California, San Francisco. She is passionate about science communication and educates women about pregnancy on her blog, StorkPhD. She is originally from New York City and enjoys running half marathons and spending weekends exploring the outdoors with her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. 

A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?

The Penguin of Reason

I rub my bloodshot eye as I sip the coffee that fuels my addiction. The sun rises as I read through my thesis for final edits. Suddenly, a penguin walks through the door of my room wearing a sombrero. He says, “Marta, pack your bags. You are going to Boston.” In my sleep-deprived stupor, I obey his order.

The penguin traveled to San Francisco to inform me that I am one of the five budding science communicators chosen to be a journalist for the Naturejobs Career Expo. I am going to Boston to be a journalist. I wanted to scream it for everyone to hear. I grab my freshly pressed suit and MacBook Air, and I follow the penguin out the door of my apartment for Boston.

As the cab makes its way to the airport, a moment of silence invites feelings of self-doubt. The reality of my task in Boston starts to settle in. Suddenly, my excitement is overcome by a fear of failure. What if I don’t meet expectations? What will people think when they find out I am a scientist and not a journalist? Am I capable of doing this? Continue reading →

Boston Career Expo journalists

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Naturejobs Boston Career Expo

I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who sent in applications to be a Naturejobs journalist for the Career Expo in Boston on May 20th.

As part of the competition, we asked you to submit 600-word articles answering one of the following questions:

  1. What advice would you give to a friend who is having trouble dealing with a devil-in-disguise boss?
  2. You are invited to travel back in time and ask anyone a question. Who would it be and why?
  3. You’re working with the world’s worst slacker, and on top of that, they’ve stolen your glory. How would you deal with them?
  4. A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?
  5. You are given a million dollars to launch your favourite scientific business idea. What is it, and what would you do with the money?

As a journalist, it’s important to understand the outlet you are writing for and in particular its audience. Your audience at New Scientist, for example, would be different to those at The Times or the Economist. Once you are clear on what the audience wants, you then need to work out how to deliver your message in  way that will resonate with readers.

The Naturejobs blog reaches an international audience of scientists from both academia and industry and aims to provide practical content to help readers deal with situations in both environments. We like to add a personal touch by inviting writers to share their stories with us, so that you, the reader, can relate to their experiences.

The objective of this competition was to see if you, our readers, had worked this out. We had some great entries, and will share the 5 winning ones plus 5 runners up with over the next fortnight. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

AstraZeneca to cut 2,200 R&D jobs

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As part of a major restructuring programme, pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced yesterday it would be cutting 2,200 jobs from its research and development (R&D) workforce.

The bulk of job losses will affect employees in its neuroscience arm as the company looks to outsource more of its R&D via external collaborations. It will set up a ‘virtual’ neuroscience research unit comprising 40 to 50 AstraZeneca scientists working with partners in academia and industry, such as the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The unit will be based in Boston, United States, and Cambridge, United Kingdom, while R&D activities will cease at two sites that are focused on neuroscience: Södertälje in Sweden and Montreal in Canada.

In a statement, AstraZeneca’s president of R&D, Martin Mackay, said: “We’ve made an active choice to stay in neuroscience though we will work very differently to share cost, risk and reward with partners in this especially challenging but important field of medical research.”

Sustainability is a fast-growing field, says study

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The number of scientists publishing research relating to sustainability is doubling every eight years, according to research from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Indiana University in the United States.

Research into sustainability has become a field of science in its own right, say the study authors, and is growing exponentially despite the economic downturn of the late 2000s.

sustainability-kaur.jpgThe field has a wide geographic spread and is prominent in locations with political and economic power. “The world’s leading city in terms of publications in the field is Washington DC, outpacing the productivity of Boston or the Bay Area,” explains study co-author Jasleen Kaur (right), a PhD student in Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Informatics and Computing.

Bob Peoples, director of the American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute, based in Washington DC, was surprised that the city was top when it came to productivity, but said the high concentration of government bodies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) could be a factor.

In Europe, productive cities include London, Stockholm and Wageningen. Other regional centres that produce a high number of papers include Nairobi, Cape Town, Beijing, Melbourne and Tokyo. Smaller universities and laboratories are strong in the field as well as national research centres.

But is the growth of the field in itself sustainable? Peoples believes so – and says it will translate into new job opportunities. The green chemistry industry, for example, “is forecast to grow to $100 billion by 2020,” he says. “That’s a 48% annual growth rate. This will certainly correlate with jobs since it requires different skill sets and training.”

Scientists interested in moving into sustainability research should build a multidisciplinary set of knowledge, contacts and tools, he advises. For green chemistry in particular, topics that researchers need an awareness of include mechanistic toxicology and life-cycle analysis as well as chemistry.

The productivity findings, published later this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from an analysis of more than 20,000 academic papers published between 1974 and 2010.

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