Daniel Hook  is CEO at Digital Science and in his free time continues to work in theoretical physics.

What did you train in? What are you doing now?

I spent 11 years studying physics and theoretical physics at Imperial College London.  Originally, I joined the Physics with Theoretical Physics BSc program in 1996, I carried on to do a 1-year MSc in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces in 2000.  I then studied part time for a PhD in Quantum Statistical Mechanics with Dorje Brody finishing in July 2007, submitting just before the RAE deadline. I’m now CEO of Digital Science, a technology company that aims to improve the research ecosystem by providing better tools for researchers, administrators, librarians, funders, publishers and corporates.  While the leap from theoretical physics research to trying to improve how research is done is an improbable one, I will attempt to explain (below) how that happened.

How do you introduce yourself (I am a physicist/entrepreneur/…)

I always claim that Theoretical Physics is not a job that you do but rather it is the person that you are.  As such, it’s difficult to answer this question since I’ve always felt I’m both physicist and entrepreneur – I certainly bring a lot of aspects of theoretical-physics thinking to how I approach business.  Introducing myself as CEO, entrepreneur or academic all seem to be disingenuous to one or other of the communities of which I consider myself to be a part, so I usually introduce myself as “someone who helps software start-ups to support researchers”.

How did you your career progress from a PhD in theoretical physics to leading Digital Science?

That’s a long story, but an abbreviated version goes something like this. Carrying on in theoretical physics after a PhD usually means 5-10 years of postdocs in several geographic locations; the often-taken alternative being working for a bank as a quantitative analyst.  Neither alternative seemed to be very attractive to me, or to my office mates at the time, so we founded a software company called Symplectic together. We liked academia, but had noticed that the software that academics had wasn’t too good, so we started working with a variety of parts of Imperial College to develop better software to support academics.  In particular, the Faculty of Medicine was very collaborative and together we developed a piece of software that would later become Symplectic Elements, our research information management platform. By 2009, we had started to sell Elements outside Imperial College and had been noticed by Nature Publishing Group, who were already planning to launch Digital Science at the time.  Symplectic became one of Digital Science’s first investments in 2010.

By 2013, I was spending about equal parts of my time working on Symplectic and helping to establish the Research Metrics group at Digital Science, which wasn’t really fair to either company.  As a result, in the middle of the year, I moved to become Director of Research Metrics at Digital Science and Symplectic promoted Jonathan Breeze to become the new CEO of the company. Two years’ later, Digital Science’s founding Managing Director, Timo Hannay, decided to launch his own start-up SchoolDash and I was asked to lead Digital Science as his successor.

How did you co-found Symplectic? Do you have any advice for young scientists who would follow your career path?

Co-founding Symplectic, as I’ve mentioned, was in part a decision based on the idea that the four of us who co-founded the company didn’t want to leave academia, but also didn’t see a route to do theoretical physics in a way that worked for us. We also wanted to give back to an environment that we loved and where, through our PhD studies, we had seen lots of things that could have been done better with a good software solution.  Luckily, in a lot of theoretical physics research, you usually need to learn some level of coding. In those early years between 2002 and 2008, the four of us wrote about 12 pieces of software from a web content management system to an examination management system. It was a great way to learn the tools of our trade and to learn how to run a company.

I would not recommend following my career path to anyone – it was very much a personal choice and one that, by luck, has turned out to suit me.  That said, undergraduates and PhD students are often taught a definition of success that is very narrowly defined – specifically in the academic context.  What I have learned from my non-standard path is that success can be many things and that ultimately it is about finding a way to make a difference in a way that is personal to you.

Why are you still involved in active research?

As I said earlier, I don’t believe that theoretical physics is just something that you do.  I really love doing research and I’m very lucky in that the type of research problem that interests me is the type of problem for which I only really need a pen, some paper and perhaps a computer.  At the same time, I happen to think that if you’re going to write tools for researchers you can only do that well if you understand what challenges researchers actually face on a day-to-day basis. As such, I think it’s important that I continue to do research to be constantly reminded of what the challenges are and what doesn’t work as well as it could.

I should also say that I’m very fortunate to work with some really great collaborators who put up with my very busy travel schedule and who continue to work with me after all these years.

What is your vision for the future of science communication?

This is a really complicated question.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this problem and I’ve given a few talks on it in the past couple of years. You can find one of them here.  If you can’t sit through the whole 55 minutes of the video, then I can try to summarize my position as follows.  I think that:

• Communication must become more open and more collaborative – I think that material will be shared earlier in the research process with a greater range of people and that there will be credit and incentives that help this to become a reality;
• The mechanisms that capture the research outputs of experiments or other data gathering activities will become smarter, more nuanced and more complete in the contextual data that they capture – current equipment and approaches are far too narrow and focused, and don’t capture nearly enough context around the experiment;
• Communication will become more iterative – we can already see this starting to happen in that researchers now release datasets independently of a publication; there are often versions to the dataset as more data are collected and added to the public release; preprints are also changing our relationship with versions of record and the concept of priority in research.
• We will move away from the scholarly article.

Ultimately, what makes the scholarly article and the monograph the two preferred forms of communication are three key factors:  Firstly, the fact that they are published on a specific date. This allows them to, secondly, have a physical form, which happens to be fundamentally the same as one that we learn to interact with from a young age. Thirdly, that physical form encapsulates an elegant structure of information that quickly gives us contextual information about what we’re reading.

In short, we are conditioned to hold something in our hands that feels like a book. With research literature that is only possible because a particular version is published on a particular day.  As Geoffrey Builder has observed, by just looking at the front page of a paper, any researcher can identify where the authors, affiliations, title, abstract, main text, journal name, page number, date and DOI are located in the layout without seeing even a single word.  Indeed, in many cases researchers can identify the name of the journal from layout alone.

However, the past few years have seen the nature of research results in many fields change completely.  An increasing number of researchers now have vast amounts of data that they need to share in order for their research to be reproducible; they have developed software; their data needs to be consumed as a video or audio file or using a specific viewer in order to interpret it.  On top of this, many researchers are beginning to see significant value in sharing negative results to increase the efficiency of the research system. None of these aspects can easily be fitted into the standard, flat, paper-based article or monograph.

As a result, I see the principal research outputs becoming the research objects rather than the papers.  I see a deep need to change research evaluation and incentives to take this shift into account. I see research communication becoming more like computer software in the sense that it should be highly versioned, highly collaborative and quite open.  I believe that “co-authorship” of research objects will be fluid and changing in time. I think that research reviews may be created by AIs at our request – relating research objects that interest us and pulling together the thinking of multiple researchers to meet our current need for information.

Even if my predictions are not accurate, it seems clear that there are many opportunities to rethink how publication works and that there are a number of transitions that are likely to take place in the next few years.

Athene Donald is a professor of soft matter and biological physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

What did you train in? What are you working on now?

I was educated in Cambridge in the so-called Natural Sciences Tripos, ultimately specialising in Theoretical Physics. That meant a broad course in the first year – physics, chemistry, materials science and maths – that narrowed down by the third year. I could easily have studied some biology in the first year, but as I had been so put off it at school by the fact it seemed to consist simply of memorising facts, it never crossed my mind to do so. So my formal biology education simply consists of two years at school, not even an O Level.

Although I specialised in Theoretical Physics I soon realised I did not want to spend my life only doing theory and went on to do an experimental PhD (‘Electron Microscopy of Grain Boundary Embrittled Systems’). Although electron microscopy – as well as other microscopies – has formed the core of my research, I have switched the kinds of materials I look at considerably during my career. After a first post-doc continuing on metals I switched to polymers and, over time, moved to biopolymers (first polysaccharides and much later proteins) and ultimately cellular biophysics.

How do you introduce yourself (e.g. I am a physicist/biologist/…) ?

A physicist working at the interface with biology. For my postdoctoral years, however, I was working, not in a physics department but in materials science and, in the USA for four years, that was within the Engineering Faculty.

What motivated you to move away from active research?

It was not a conscious decision! Back in the 1990s I was invited to serve on one of the very first government-organised so-called Foresight panels, looking at the future of the Food and Drink industry (at that time my biopolymer research largely related to food rather than biology per se). The broad range of people on that committee, and how they came together, fascinated me and I realised committee work was actually rather interesting. Over time I served on many different sorts of committees, internally within the university, with research councils and more and I found it taking up increasing amounts of time but also, on the whole, rewarding.

What really pushed my research over the edge was in 2010 when I took on two roles (neither to do with interdisciplinarity!): I became the University’s first Gender Equality Champion, which gave me the opportunity to work with the senior management to try to implement real policy changes and interventions to level the playing field for all across the university; and I became chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee, dealing with 5-19 education at the time that Michael Gove as Secretary of State was introducing enormous changes to the curriculum. Neither role had any formal associated time commitment, but  they inevitably grew to fill (and more) the time available.  Both rewarding, both taught me a lot about different issues and ways of interacting with people from very different backgrounds. I continued in both those roles until 2014 when I became Master of Churchill College.

What did you find most difficult when you first had contact with other disciplines?

As I indicated, I had essentially no formal biology training and the world of genetics – and the language – had anyhow changed radically since my education. So the initial problem I faced was in understanding the language. When I was first involved in a collaboration with a plant scientist in the area of starch I suspect we both spent about a year just understanding what the other was saying and what our disciplines could and could not offer each other. To my mind, what is absolutely crucial in this formative stage, is finding the other person congenial enough you want to spend the time working together through this potential barrier.

And what did you find most helpful to familiarize yourself with new concepts and jargon?

Time! There is no short cut to getting to grips with a subject unfamiliar to you. I think it is also important to realise that working at the interface with another discipline does not mean you need to know everything about the other discipline. Recognizing what you absolutely do need to know but also there is plenty that, at least at that point, is not necessary so you can home in on the essentials, is crucial. Otherwise it can just seem an insurmountable problem. Of course over time what is vital to know may expand, but by that point it may seem less formidable a challenge. I think having someone you feel comfortable asking naïve questions of is also important; this comes back to having a good relationship with your collaborators. If you don’t feel relaxed about asking something basic the collaboration is probably not going to flourish. Of course sometimes collaborations will be with multiple individuals, possibly multiple disciplines, and then the tactics may need some modification.

Tell us about your experience the first time you went to a conference outside the field you trained in.

A general sense of confusion is what I remember most clearly. The diagrams – of protein structures – seemed mysterious as their presentation was so different from how a physicist would have approached the problem – and that left me with a profound sense of being out of my depth. If the basics seem incomprehensible it is hard to extract much useful information, however willing one may be. Coming into a new field also means that you probably don’t know anyone else in the room and that sense of isolation can be quite intimidating. Once you have some results (even if only a poster) it provides an entrée, so that other people will come up and introduce themselves. But that first step into the unknown can be daunting.

What would be your advice to a PI leading an interdisciplinary group?

Remember everyone comes with different experiences, skills and jargon. Somehow your job is to keep that constantly in mind like an orchestra conductor, to make sure people respect each other’s skills and make the best use of these they can. It is important not to let someone who is an expert in one area make another student whose skills sit elsewhere feel stupid or group dynamics can go sadly awry.

Is there any anecdote you would like to share?

Moving away from the heart of a discipline can make colleagues very uncomfortable. Working with starch, not the typical sort of material a physicist in the 1990s would have thought ‘respectable’, meant I came in for a lot of flak from my seniors. Being told ‘things have come to a sad pass when people at the Cavendish study starch’ by one of these was depressing. Added to this is the fact that, as a woman, people’s biases probably gave them a lower opinion of me anyhow at the time. Hence I was accused at a conference of doing ‘just domestic science’ – and that after I’d given an invited paper. It was sometimes hard to feel positive in an atmosphere like that. Again, having people around you who you trust and can rely on is vital to provide the balance to any such hostile colleagues.

Myfanwy Evans is an Emmy Noether Research Group Leader at the Institute for Mathematics, Technische Universität Berlin. Her research is in the field of geometry and topology in soft matter physics.

What did you train in? What are you working on now?

My undergraduate degree was in science, majoring in mathematics. My PhD was already in an interdisciplinary setting, officially part of “Physical Sciences”. It involved mathematics, physics, with some chemistry and biology on the side. Ever since my research has been swinging between mathematics and physics, depending on my collaborators and students at the time. My current research is focused on a theoretical framework to understand tangling in soft matter systems. It uses geometry and topology to investigate how filaments can tangle in a variety of settings, in the view of making a connection with protein and polymer physics.

Do you think of yourself as a mathematician or physicist?

Both and neither! Much of the content of my research is geometry, but the style in which I do it is more physics. However, I like to define my research via the problem that I am trying to solve rather than a specific discipline and I don’t like to be restricted by the methodology or traditions of a specific discipline.

What motivated you to move to this field of research?

I had already started in this general area as a PhD student, and it really grabbed me as an interesting topic. I finished my PhD with far more questions than answers, and this has snowballed into an array of research topics that I am still working on today. My motivation to continue in this direction is driven by my own curiosity, and a kind of religious belief that the results I am getting are so beautiful that they must be important.

What are the main challenges and the main advantages of working in an interdisciplinary team?

The main advantages are that everyone can bring something unique to the table, and the breadth of expertise opens really interesting research directions. I find that the students feel less constrained by their prior knowledge and disciplinary expertise, and are able to work on broad problems from many perspectives, learning a huge amount along the way. The main challenge is keeping the research also relevant to specific fields, in particular for PhD students who wish to stick to a more traditional discipline. Finding the right place to publish, that means reaching the right readership, is always a key problem too.

Do you find it particularly difficult to obtain funding? Or to get your research published?

I think that interdisciplinary research has become a big focus of many funding agencies, and in general I don’t find any major obstacles in obtaining funding from the standard sources. I find the same with scientific publications, where new interdisciplinary findings are often published. Of course, there are exceptions and I have a handful of examples of journals claiming that the research is “not physics” or “not mathematics”, without refereeing the scientific content. But these are few and far between.

Beatriz Roldán Cuenya is the Director of the Interface Science Department at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany.

What did you train in? What are you working on now?

My undergraduate training was in Physics with a minor in Materials Science in Spain. Subsequently I did my PhD in Solid State Physics in Germany and from there I transitioned to a postdoctoral position at a Chemical Engineering Department in the United States. Currently, I am working at the interface between physics and chemistry investigating thermal and electro-catalytic processes taking place over nanostructured materials. My group’s research program takes advantage of in situ and operando microscopy and spectroscopic characterization methods (including synchrotron-based techniques) for the understanding of correlations between material properties such as chemical reactivity and specific structural, electronic and chemical characteristics of the system.

What did you find most difficult when you started working in an area out of your comfort zone?

Missing basic chemical concepts and nomenclature that a physicist does not acquire during his/her undergraduate training, but are essential for the understanding of chemical processes taking place at gas/liquid/solid interfaces. This motivated a slow literature review since I had to stop often to go back to basic undergraduate books before being able to dig deeper into the current literature. However, the strong mathematics background that is inherent part of a physicist’s training was very helpful when dealing with some of the topics in the department of Chemical Engineering I transferred to.

And what did you find most helpful to familiarize yourself with new concepts and jargon?

Reading the related literature, specifically review articles, while having side by side undergraduate chemistry books.

Tell us about your experience the first time you went to a conference outside the field you trained in.

It was exciting because there were a lot of new things to learn, but also somewhat frustrating since there were at times gaps of knowledge that prevented me from understanding a significant fraction of the content presented.

What are the main challenges and the main advantages of working in an interdisciplinary team?

The main challenge I found was to convince the scientific communities you are interacting with, in my case, physicists, chemists and chemical engineers, that you can contribute meaningful new research ideas and findings to their respective fields even without a formal undergraduate training in such field. It was also difficult to recruit students from the different disciplines, the physicists in my department were scared to join the group because I did “too much chemistry” and the chemists were concerned that they could not follow the math or that they did not have sufficient background in specific topics such as quantum mechanics or electrodynamics.

The advantage was that once you managed to build an interdisciplinary team, the boundaries soften and the student and postdocs end up working in a much richer environment where accelerated knowledge transfer is favoured. We managed to become a self-sufficient group by teaming up chemists that were in charge of sample synthesis and for example electrochemical characterization, chemical engineers contributing to our reactor design and thermal catalysis work, and physicists providing microscopy and spectroscopic tools for the characterization of our catalytic materials.

What would be your advice to a PI leading an interdisciplinary group?

To try to get joint appointments in the different departments of interest to foster student recruitment and the exchange of ideas with other faculty colleagues. If possible, this should include teaching some advanced courses or given some introductory presentation as guest lecturer in the partner department.

Do you find it particularly difficult to obtain funding? Or to get your research published?

Actually yes, this was the case at first. When I was an assistant professor in Physics in the United States it was difficult to convince the external reviewers in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering departments that even though my background was different, I still had the required expertise to bring to success a given interdisciplinary project. I found that chemists are more comfortable reviewing/funding chemists and same for physicists, especially when you attend mixed review panels at science foundations. However, as an assistant professor in Physics my first grant came from the American Chemical Society (Petroleum Research Fund) and the second, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, was granted by the Materials Research Division in the sub-area of Solid State Chemistry.

I faced the same difficulties when trying to publish in chemistry-oriented journals while submitting papers with a Physics Department affiliation. Nevertheless, with time and as visibility improved I managed to establish good connections in both communities and get invitations to present my work in both communities, which will in return facilitated publication in the top journals of both fields.

Is there any anecdote you would like to share?

I recall the frustration of being a female assistant professor in physics struggling to convince editors in chemistry-related fields to send out your work for external peer-review. I learned the hard way that when a more senior collaborator in the “correct” scientific disciple was added to the co-author list the paper would be easily sent out for review and subsequently published, while when similar quality work was submitted directly by myself it was almost never considered by the top journals. That is a serious issue since it might end up encouraging junior people with innovative ideas not to stand up on their own but seek for “strong senior supporters” to champion a given paper to get into the system (a given journal database) with the end result being that the real contribution of the junior person might be questioned.

Cosima Schuster is program director in the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the fields of statistical physics, soft matter, biological physics and nonlinear dynamics.

What did you train in? What are you working on now?

I trained in solid state physics as a theorist. Now I work in research administration as a program director in the field of condensed matter physics as well as  statistical and biological physics.

Do you think of yourself as a physicist or a funder?

I work for a self-governing organisation for science and research which funds excellent science without regard to extra-scientific factors, in a strict bottom-up competitive approach to ensure science-driven decisions. Hence, I consider myself not a funder, but an administrator who needs a good knowledge of physics.

What motivated you to move away from active research?

I feel more comfortable working on several topics with a broad range of interests than to work hard on specific questions.

What did you find most difficult when you first had contact with other disciplines?

You have to learn a new language with a lot of new definitions.

And what did you find most helpful to familiarize yourself with new concepts and jargon?

First, you need to be aware that there are different definitions and concepts. Second, you have to listen to the experts.

Tell us about your experience the first time you went to a conference outside the field you trained in.

I recall a conference in pure mathematics, where I understood nothing.