Working Scientist

In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about career planning in science, Julie Gould discusses some of the setbacks faced by junior researchers, including political upheaval, financial crises and a change in supervisor.

Shortly after embarking on a PhD at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, Katja Loos’ supervisor relocated to the University of Bayreuth, taking his team with him. But weeks later he d...

In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series about science career planning, Julie Gould investigates "planned happenstance," a theory which encourages workers to embrace chance opportunities during their working lives.

Holly Prescott, a careers guidance practitioner at the University of Birmingham, UK, suggests a slightly alternative approach, whereby a professional reflects on their experiences to decide what they would l...

In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning, Sam Smith, a behavioral oncologist at the University of Leeds, UK, reflects on his plan as an early career researcher to relocate to the United States and become a professor. Did thing work out as planned?

Instead of chasing job titles at defined points in his career to help him achieve his goal, Smith says he focused on ...

Uschi Symmons says that attending a workshop about individual development plans (IDPs) during her molecular biology postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia blew her mind. Going away and crafting her own IDP helped her to identify technical skills she lacked, and consider alternative career options beyond academia.

But one limitation of IDPs is that they don’t always take personal lives and values into acco...

Many junior researchers see career planning as a luxury item, feeling unable to spare time in their busy personal and professional lives to plan their next move or work out longer-term goals.

In the first episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning in science, Fatimah Williams, founder of Professional Pathways, a training and coaching company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says: “People get l...

Women are woefully under-represented in Nepalese science, says Babita Paudel. She blames a combination of gender stereotyping, a paucity of female role models and mentors, poor networking opportunities, institutional discrimination, and a societal pressure that pushes them towards other professions. 

To tackle the challenge, Paudel developed the Women in STEM Network Database, a resource aimed at building a strong mentori...

JoAnn Trejo co-leads the Faculty Mentor Training Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) medical school, where, thanks to her efforts, the number of tenure-track faculty members from under-represented groups shot up by 38% from 2017 to 2022. 

Trejo, a pharmacologist whose research helps to develop drugs to treat vascular diseases, says her mentor colleagues understand that their mission and responsi...

Joslynn Lee seeks to bring Indigenous values and heritage into her chemistry and biochemistry teaching at Fort Lewis College. The institution in Durango, Colorado, is a Native American-serving non-tribal institution where 30% of its student population identifies as Indigenous, Native American or Alaska Native.

Lee’s efforts to bridge the Native American worldview with Western science stem from childhood walks with...

Arezoo Khodayari and Laurie Barge started a mentoring collaboration more than a decade ago, providing students at California State University Los Angeles (Cal State LA) with paid research opportunities at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in nearly Pasadena, where Barge is based. 

Khodayari, an environmental scientist at Cal State LA, a minority-serving institution where mo...

Vukosi Marivate helps to build scientific communities and networks for African researchers in machine learning and artificial intelligence. These include Deep Learning Indaba, an events and awards programme inspired by the isiZulu word for gathering. Marivate, a computer scientist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, says Indaba came about to “bring together the African community to strengthen machine learning, so that we...

A paper co-authored by Tatsuya Amano was rejected recently without review because its level of English did not meet the journal’s required standard. His research suggests that 38% of researchers who are not fluent in English have experienced similar rejections.

Amano, whose first language is Japanese, describes how dismantling language barriers will result in improved knowledge sharing, and in the long run, better research.

J...

Rana Dajani studies epigenetics of trauma in vulnerable communities around the world. A molecular biologist based at the Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan, her research explores what genes are turned on and off through trauma and if they are transferred to future generations.

In the second episode of an eight-part podcast series to accompany Nature's Changemakers in science Q&A series, collection, Dajani, a dau...

In her role as director of Bioprotection Aotearoa, a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence, Amanda Black works with local communities to protect the country’s natural and food-producing ecosystems.

Black says the Indigenous values that she applies in her role include te pono, which stands for truth, honesty and integrity, te aroha, encompassing respect and reciprocity, and te tika, a term that m...

Nature's 2022 special issue on racism in science spawned a follow-up Q&A series with researchers who champion inclusion in their workplace or community.

Now eight of the 21 Changemakers who have appeared in the series so far revisit their stories in a podcast series that also explores their career journeys and the impage of their research.

Kendall Powell, the senior careers editor who launched the article s...

In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about hiring in science, Julie Gould asks what it takes to be the perfect candidate for a science job vacancy.

Lauren Celano, a careers coach who co-founded Propel Careers, based in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2009, defines a high-calibre candidate as someone who hits up to 70% of the technical things being asked for in a job spec, plus being a strong team player with good communica...

In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about hiring and getting hired in science, Julie Gould investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by recruiters to draft job ads, process applications and shortlist candidates. She also asks how recruiters feel about jobseekers using it in their applications, and whether or not they can even tell.

Jen Heemstra, a chemistry researcher and lab leader at&nb...

Three researchers and a career coach discuss if there as much scope to negotiate salaries in academia as there is in industry.

In either setting, they say, negotiation should not be a battleground. Hiring managers should not take advantage of a beloved future colleague who may have zero experience of negotiating anything, says David Perlmutter, a communications researcher at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, who writes about hir...

Should you tailor your job interview style based on the age, gender and cultural background of the person asking the questions?

Margot Smit and Dietmar Hutmacher compare their approaches to hiring and how generational influences might shape how they respond to candidates.

Smit, a plant molecular biologist who became a group leader at Tübingen University Germany, in late 2023, and Hutmacher, a regenerative medicine researcher at Q...

Julie Gould compares hiring practices across industry and academia by seeking perspectives from Tina Persson, an organic chemist-turned-careers coach based in Malmö, Sweden, and Lauren Celano, a recruitment consultant who founded Propel Careers, based in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2009.

Persson, whose coaching business is called passage2pro, tells Gould why it typically takes longer to hire scientists in academia. Margot Smit, a ...