I’m a white, cisgendered, heterosexual male. I was born in an affluent Western country and lucky enough to get an elite education. I have all the attendant privileges and instinctive reassurance that comes from those accidents of birth and genetics, but in one quite profound respect I’m minoritised: I have spent 19 years – more than two-thirds of my adult life – as an immigrant.
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One of the hardest things with active parenting is that you’re usually robbed of the hours when you’re at your most alert and creative.
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Did you know that there are actually guidelines for determining authorship on scientific papers?
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Group leaders nowadays bear a huge individual responsibility for raising money. But what if it was departments, and not group leaders, that were the unit of selection?
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There’s a reason why the chainsaw is such an apt symbol for the current assault on American science: because you can cut a tree down in minutes, but growing it back takes decades.
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In January 2023, the journal eLife – long at the vanguard of the progressive movement in scientific publishing – took the radical step of adopting a “publish, review. curate” model. Here, with some background framing, is what it feels like to use it.
Continue readingMore than ever, I feel that the story of my generation of scientists is one of a migration out of academia and into different avenues where those scientific skills can be put to fresh use. It’s an adventure, a leap, a journey, and one that Jess tells better than most. This posting not only contains some great reflections on the jobseeking process for academics striking out into the private sector, but also has some super nuggets of practical advice.
Medical Communications (MedComms) might just be the best industry career option out there for scientists who most enjoy the writing/communicating/organising parts of the job, and on 22nd November 2024 the EMBL Fellows’ Careers Service hosted a webinar about it. The panel members were:
