Podcast appearances and mentions of julie gould

Successful job candidates aren't necessarily the smartest or most confident people in the room, Ilana Wisby tells Julie Gould in the first episode of a six-part weekly podcast series about hiring in science.Wisby, a physicist and former chief executive of Oxford Quantum Circuits, which builds quantum computers from its base in Reading, UK, says recruiters use interviews to gauge a candidate's values, their emotional intelligence, and their growth potential. Asking someone how they received difficult feedback, she adds, is a test of their humility and willingness to admit mistakes, and what they learned from them.The episode begins with Linda Nordling, a freelance science writer who led coverage of Nature's 2024 global hiring in science survey, talking about some of the surprising things that caught her eye in the data.Future episodes include insights from a careers coach about industry hiring trends, and how an academic research institute based in London is centralizing its postdoc hiring process. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the sixth and final episode of The Last few miles: planning for the late stage career in science, Julie Gould unpicks some of the generational tensions that can arise in academia when a colleague approaches retirement.Inger Mewburn, who leads research and development training at the Australian National University in Canberra, tells her: “There's a fine line between being around and being valued, to being around and kind of being a pain in the ass and no one will tell you to go away.”Gould also talks to scientists who, despite reaching retirement age, continue to engage with younger colleagues, enjoying positive interactions at conferences and co-authoring papers.They include Heather Middleton, who started trawling England's Jurassic Coast in her 60s, looking for specimens that might lead to a deeper understanding of palaeontology. Middleton, who is approaching her 80th birthday, taught science in schools and colleges, and in retirement balances her fossil-hunting, (and the collaboration opportunities it brings), with family holidays, grandchildren, friends and Tai Chi. "It's a great balance, which I hope other retiring scientists will be able to enjoy such opportunities that I've had," she says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this edition, Paul Pennington talks to Julie Gould from RLS UK and Dr Steven Bell from the University of Cambridge about Restless Legs Syndrome. Meg Burgess from Prostate Cancer UK joins Paul to look at the theme to this year's Mens Health Awareness initiative. Joe Marley from the charity, Alcohol Change UK highlights the focus of the 2024 Alcohol Awareness Campaign and in the final interview, Paul talks to Lynsey Conway from the UK Gout Society.        

What are the signs that you're transitioning from the middle to the late stage of a career in science? Is this transition something you can plan in advance, and if so, what does this look like?Working backwards from your planned retirement date can help you to re-evaluate your priorities and predict the challenges the next few years might bring. But in many countries there is no set retirement age, so it can be difficult to know when to start preparing.Scientists from across the globe talk to Julie Gould about their different approaches, from reviewing timelines and forming succession plans to returning to the lab.Inger Mewburn, who leads research training at the Australian National University in Canberra, and Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and former president of Princeton University in New Jersey, highlight the importance of thinking about and planning for the future.This is the first episode of the six-part podcast series: The last few miles: planning for the late stage career in science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Draw a Scientist is a test developed in 1983 to explore children's perspectives of scientists and how stereotypical views can emerge at an early age, influenced both by popular culture and how STEM subjects are taught in schools.In April, 50 images from Nature's weekly Where I Work section, a photo essay which depicts an individual researcher at work, went on display in London's Kings Cross district.The photographs were chosen to reflect the diversity of scientific careers, and in the words of senior careers editor Jack Leeming, to demonstrate that “scientists aren't all wacky lab-coated, round-goggled people from the science fiction film Back to the Future.”In this Working Scientist podcast, Julie Gould visits the exhibition with a group of 12-13 year-old female pupils from London's Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, where she repeats the Draw a Scientist test, based on their perceptions of scientists. The children draw two pictures, one before and one after viewing the 50 photographs. Gould then asks them how their perceptions have changed, based on what they have seen.As one pupil put it after seeing the exhibition, which closes later this month: “You can be a scientist in almost any part of the world. You could be involved with flowers, with the ocean, with weather, with space. You can do anything.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

María Teresa Dova describes how an early career move to CERN as the first Latin American scientist to join Europe's organisation for nuclear research ultimately benefited both her but also the researchers she now works with back home in Argentina.The move to Geneva, Switzerland, where CERN is based, required Dova to pivot from condensed matter physics, the subject of her PhD at the University of La Plata, Argentina, which she gained in 1988. But any misgivings about the move to Europe and switching to a new field were quickly banished by her excitement at working on the L3 Large Electron Positron Collider project, she tells Julie Gould. Dova returned to Argentina two-and-a-half years later, launching the experimental high energy group at La Plata and driving other important collaborations, including the inclusion of Argentina in CERN's ATLAS particle detector collaboration. She describes how it happened. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A 2021 report by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean revealed that only 18% of public universities in the region had female rectors. Vanessa Gottifredi, a biologist and president of Argentina's Leloir Institute Foundation, a research institute based in Buenos Aires, says this paucity of visible role models for female scientists in the region means that damaging stereotypes are perpetuated.A female, she says, will not be judged harshly for staying at home to handle a family emergency, but will be for being pushy at work, unlike male colleagues. “Women need to hear that they are good, more than men do, because they tend to convince themselves they're not good enough,” she adds.In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about female scientists in Latin America, Gottifredi, who worked abroad for 11 years before returning to Argentina, tells Julie Gould how she aims to empower female colleagues, based on what she witnessed elsewhere. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fernanda Staniscuaski earned her PhD aged 27. Five years later she had a child. But in common with many scientist mothers, Staniscuaski, a biologist at Brazil's Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, saw funding and other career opportunities diminish as she combined motherhood with her professional life. “Of course I did not have as much time as I was used to have. And everything impacted my productivity,” she tells Julie Gould.The Brazilian biologist founded the Parent in Science advocacy movement after talking with other scientist parents. In the fourth episode of this six-part podcast series about Latin American women in science, Staniscuaski lists the movement's achievements so far, and the challenges that lie ahead.In 2021 Parent in Science won the science outreach category in the Nature Inspiring Women in Science awards, in partnership with the Estée Lauder Companies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2013 physicist Carolina Brito co-launched Meninas na Ciência (Girls in Science), a program based at Brazil's Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul.The program exposes girls to university life, including lab visits and meetings with female academics. “There are several girls who have never met someone who has been to university,” says Brita. “It's beyond a gender problem.”Jessica Germann was one of them. The 19-year-old is about to start an undergraduate physics degree. She tells Julie Gould how writing a school essay about particle physics and a fascination for YouTube science videos helped in her career choices.This episode is the second episode in a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about Latin American women in science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For a three-year period as a postdoctoral researcher, molecular biologist and visual artist Daniel Jay was given both a lab and a sudio to work in. In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist about art and science, Julie Gould asks why, decades later, Jay's experience is still unusual. Why do scientists with expertise in, say, music, sculpture, pottery or creative writing have to pursue these interests as weekend hobbies, with science “paying the bills?”Jay, who is Dean of the graduate school of biomedical sciences at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, says today's early career researchers want what he calls a “post disciplinary society,” offering the freedom to pick and choose different areas and competencies.Lou Muglia, a medical geneticist who is now president and CEO of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a private foundation located in North Carolina, co-authored a 2023 paper in PloS Biology on art-science collaborations. Muglia says many early career researchers today don't see themselves running a traditional lab, but are as excited about communication and the arts as they are about their science. Many funders now recognise this. Academia should too, he argues.Callie Chappell, Muglia's co-author and a professional artist who researches biosecurity and innovation at Stanford University, California, says: “I would argue that science is actually a type of art. “To do science, you have to be creative, you have to blend different ideas, you have to communicate those ideas by creating something. In many ways that's what artists do.” Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Data form the backbone of the scientific method, but it can be impenetrable. In the penultimate episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art-science collaborations, Julie Gould talks to artists and data visualisation specialists about how they interpret and present data in art forms ranging from music to basket weaving.Keep things simple wherever possible, agree Duncan Ross, chief data officer at the Times Higher Education publication, and James Bayliss, an interaction and visualisation analyst at Springer Nature. “My go-to tool is a pen and paper or coloured pencils,” says Bayliss. “Start slow and don't get too complicated too fast.”Akshat Rathi, a senior climate reporter at Bloomberg News, describes how he used data to visualise the devastating impact of a 2015 earthquake in Nepal for an article in the business title Quartz.And Nathalie Miebach, a basketware artist who created a reed sculpture based on daily weather data she had collected in Provincetown, Massachusetts, says that translating data into artwork brings up all sorts of biases and expectations.Finally, Rebecca Fiebrink, a classically-trained musician with a PhD in computer science who now works as professor at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts, London, agrees. “Any kind of data analysis itself is creative, right?” she asks.Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

GUI/GOOEY is an international online exhibition that explores digital and technological representations of the biological world.In the fourth episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Julie Gould talks to some of the artists and scientist whose collaborations created exhibits for the event, which ran from March to June 2023.Its curator Laura Splan, an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, says GUI/GOOEY reconsidered how technology affects our understanding of nature and our constructions of nature. She is joined by Diana Scarborough, arist-in-residence in bionanotechnologist Ljiljana Fruk's lab at the University of Cambridge, UK.Scarborough describes a project involving Anna Melekhova, an inorganic chemist based in Fruk's lab, which was influenced by an ancient method used in Mayan art to stabilise pigments using clay.Scarborough says the film she produced to communicate Melekhova's science depicted a “luminous jelly,” included soundtracks from space, and a conversation generated by ChatGPT to symbolise the new material coming to life. “I was fascinated by the movement of this nonliving material. It looked really as though it is a living organism. I could very easily imagine alien species looking like this,” says Fruk, who also talks about how she and Scarborough first started working together.Will Etheridge, a PhD student in Fruk's lab, also attended the first screening. “It just represented this kind of embryonic substance that was just coming into being and questioning its own existence,” he says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series, Julie Gould explores the history of science and art and asks researchers and artists to define what the two terms mean to them.Like science, art is a way of asking questions about the world, says Jessica Bradford, head of collections and principal curator at the Science Museum in London. But unlike art, science about interrogating the world in a way that is hopefully repeatable, adds UK-based artist Luke Jerram, who creates sculptures, installations and live artworks around the world.Ljiljana Fruk, a bionanotechnology researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, says artists can be more playful and work faster, whereas scientists need to repeatedly back up their work by data, a more time-consuming exercise. They are joined by Arthur I. Miller, a physicist who launched the UK's first undergraduate degree in history and philosophy of science in 1993, and Nadav Drukker, a ceramic artist and theoretical physicist at King's College London.Future episodes in this series will focus on how scientists collaborate with artists and why their partnerships are so important. It will also feature researchers who, like Drukker, juggle research careers alongside creating art. Each episode concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As a child of the Space Age, Jeffrey Gordon dreamed of becoming an astronaut and discovering life on Mars. Instead he found fascinating life forms and interactions closer to home, inside the gastrointestinal tract.The microbiome researcher, winner of the 2023 Global Grants for Gut Health Research Group Prize, tells Julie Gould about his research focus and the workplace culture in his lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri.Gordon also describes the “magical meeting,” that forged a longstanding collaboration with physician Tahmeed Ahmed, executive director of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), and their investigations into how immaturity of the gut microbiota contributes to malnutrition.The two researchers explain how the prize money will help to further strengthen an ongoing two-way knowledge exchange between the US team and their colleagues in Dhaka.This episode of the podcast is sponsored by the Global Grants for Gut Health, supported by Yakult and Nature Portfolio. Learn more about the current call for grant applications and how to apply at this link. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of This is Physics, Physics Magazine speaks with two researchers and a chef who have spent the entire polar night at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. The two researchers work with telescopes observing the cosmic microwave background.Podcast host Julie Gould speaks with the following guests: Thomas Leps, BICEP/NSF/University of Minnesota; Allen Foster, SPT/NSF/Case Western Reserve University; Kelly Murphy, breakfast/pastry sous chef, NSF.Music credit: Symphony Antarctica (excerpts from The Seasons: I. Summer and IV. Spring; Telescopes to the Stars: III. Cosmic Strings and IV. Quiet Nights), by Valmar Kurol and Michael Stibor. The symphony is the duo's fourth album inspired by Antarctica. Kurol is a director of the Antarctican Society.Image credit: Artsiom P/stock.adobe.comProduced by Julie Gould.

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.In this final episode, Gianpiero Petriglieri focuses on the emotional aspects of leadership — describing it as a love for an idea, and for a group of people whom you're trying to both protect and advance.Petriglieri, who researches organizational behaviour at INSEAD Business School in Fontainebleau, France, says that being in the physical presence of an effective leader should ideally make you feel calm, clear about priorities and cared for.Julie Gould also talks to Robert Harris, a past president of ORPHEUS, the Organisation for PhD Education in Biomedicine and Health Sciences in the European System; he's also a research-group leader at the Centre for Molecular Medicine, part of the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden.Good leadership is all about effective communication and being able to inspire and empower others, he says. To do that, you need to ask the right questions, and make suggestions, rather than giving orders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.In this penultimate episode, stem cell biologist Fiona Watt tells Julie Gould that one of her leadership mantras is: “There is nothing wrong with being wrong,” and that science is in good shape if it can acknowledge this.Watt is director of EMBO, the European molecular biology organization, based in Heidelberg, Germany.Her leadership positions before joining the organisation in 2022 include leading the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at King's College London.In this role she was able to indulge an interest in improving scientists' working environments as part of a redesign project of its labs, offices and core facilities. In 2018 Watt was appointed the first executive chair of Medical Research Council, the UK funder.She compares her own hands-on and largely self-taught leadership skills (helped by a strong network of female colleagues earlier in her career) with opportunities for young aspiring lab leaders today.These include EMBO's lab management course, which provides researchers on the cusp of independence with a trusting environment to learn about the common challenges group leaders are likely to face.Watt also tells Julie Gould about the role of science leaders in articulating the need for government funding for science, but says that spending decisions should sit with them, and not with politicians. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series, all about leadership.In this episode, Hagen Zimer tells Julie Gould about the qualities and skills you need to be a science leader in industry and how he approaches his role as managing director of TRUMPF Laser, a global company based in Schramberg, Germany, that manufactures lasers and laser-processing machine tools.Zimer says that effective leaders are good listeners who display high levels of empathy, so that they can understand individual colleagues' fears and concerns. They also need to be authentic, he adds. If not, teams will not believe what they are being told.Zimer says that early-career researchers with leadership ambitions should ask themselves whether they see themselves taking the lead role in a play. “If you are in the leading position, you cannot hide any more. You are at some point also alone.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you learn leadership skills as a researcher, and how well is science served by its current crop of leaders?These are just two of the questions asked of scientific leaders from a range of different sectors and backgrounds in this five-part Working Scientist podcast series all about leadership.In this episode, Spanish neuroscience and mental health researcher Gemma Modinos talks about her own leadership journey as a group leader at King's College London and former chair of the Young Academy Europe.Modinos compares “command and control” leadership styles with more collaborative approaches and says aspiring science leaders should not neglect leadership training as part of their career development.Learning how to say no effectively and allocating time to meet looming deadlines is another key skill, she tells Julie Gould.But should all early career researchers nurture leadership ambitions? No, says Modinos. “Not everyone has to strive to become a PI, or to be involved in chairing an organization, or being president, or being in boards,” she says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pubcasts. This episode is called: Big Catch, Undecided Risks: Perspectives of Risk, Reward, and Trade-Offs in Alaska's Salmon Enhancement Program This latest entry in our series of Pubcasts, audio-book style recordings of peer reviewed scientific research, is an article about the human dimensions of hatcheries and stocking in Alaska's salmon enhancement program. This paper was written and recorded by Hannah L. Harrison (www.twitter.com/@fishpeopleplace) and Julie Gould. Pubcasts are hosted by the Conservation of Change Lab (www.conservationofchange.org) as a part of Coastal Routes Radio, and are an ongoing project to experiment with science communication and making research more accessible and digestible to both scientific and general audiences. We were inspired to start Pubcasts via our own love of podcasts, demystifying science and the role of researchers in science, and the power of the human voice. We hope you enjoy. You can find more Pubcasts from the Coastal Routes project at www.coastalroutes.org/pubcasts. You can read the online version of this paper here: https://afspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nafm.10830

In 2016, Salome Maswime's five-year mid-career award from the South African Medical Research Council gave the clinician and global health researcher some much-needed funding security, enabling her to recruit staff and offer bursaries to graduate students as she established her own research group. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) offers something similar through its Mid-Career Advancement programme.Maswime and Leslie Rissler, a biologist and NSF programme director, tell Julie Gould that research outputs can easily suffer when scientists entering the mid-career stage suddenly get swamped with administrative and teaching duties, which is why the awards were set up.In the final episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast, Gould also hears the pros and cons of making the mid-career stage better structured to support the development of skills and competencies, as it is in Brazil. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How are mid-career scientists' research efforts affected when they take on administrative and leadership positions? What is their advice about navigating workplace politics? And do their employers treat them better, or worse, than their junior colleagues?These are just some of the questions early-career researchers wanted mid-career colleagues to answer in the penultimate episode of Muddle of the Middle, a Working Scientist podcast about the mid-career stage in science.Julie Gould also asks her five interviewees what they'd tell their younger selves about this often-neglected career stage. Their answers range from finding out more about team-building and conflict management, not to stress about being disagreed with, remembering to be generous and having fun along the way. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Life satisfaction can hit rock bottom in midlife before bouncing back as our ageing brains start to feel less regretful about missed opportunites, says Hannes Schwandt, a health economist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.Kieran Setiya, a philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, adds that the mid-career stage can be dominated by having to juggle both urgent and important tasks, some of which have no definite endpoint. These can quickly mount up and become overwhelming, with non-work-related pressures swallowing up increasing amounts of time, he adds.In the fourth episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast series, host Julie Gould wonders whether this mid-career stage is like a second puberty, a time of confusion and frustration. “It might be worth reaching out to some of those people who have gone through it and come out the other side,” she suggests. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trying to achieve balance in your personal and professional lives is misguided, four researchers tell Julie Gould in the third episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part podcast series about the mid-career stage in science.Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says that the aim should instead be to avoid allowing periods of imbalance to last longer than necessary.Cara Tannenbaum, a physician and a director at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, agrees, saying that the key is to focus on personal fulfilment, and that some aspects of your life will often have to take a back seat.Inger Mewburn took a data-driven approach to managing her time (and her manager's expectations) after experiencing two breakdowns in her mid-career stage.Mewburn, director of research training at the Australian National University in Canberra, now uses a software program to track and prioritize tasks, schedule meetings and negotiate with her supervisor things that she can stop doing.Chemical engineer Andrea Armani, a vice-dean at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, cautions against accepting all invitations at the mid-career stage, noting that at one point she was sitting on 30 committees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this conversation with Chris and Julie Gould, sibling business partners for a real estate wholesaling company, we get to hear all about how implementing Profit First can change your business and your personal life for the better.They share how they experienced the feeling of almost living paycheck-to-paycheck despite having good numbers and the stress of the lack of clarity–that is until they heard of Profit First.Now they enjoy financial comfort in their personal lives, running a business independent from its visionary, focusing on new ventures, and diving deep into creating more clarity in their business to make better data-driven decisions. Check it out on this episode of the Profit First Podcast!Key Takeaways:[0:57] Chris & Julie Gould and on Working With Family [6:44] On their Wholesaling Company[10:53] On Profit First[15:27] On the Stress Before Profit First [17:00] How It Felt to Implement Profit First for the Business[19:23] Profit First and Owner Compensation[25:04] How Profit First Helps Make the Business Be More Independent From Chris[29:38] On the Growth of Profit First and Their Business[32:21] What Was The Best Thing You've Done With The New Profit Distribution?Quotes:[12:12] “Before we implemented the Profit First system, there's this question that we ask a lot: ‘Are we actually making money?'”[14:37] “[Before implementing Profit First], it's almost like living paycheck to paycheck, even though the numbers are a lot bigger .”[15:04] “A huge part of looking toward Profit First, and implementing more infrastructure in the business, we're depending more on data than gut-feeling. We have numbers in front of us.”[18:42] “It's not worth it to NOT implement Profit First.”[25:36] “I think a big part of being able to separate and pull [Chris] out of the business was having Profit First to lean on.”[35:5l; 9] “You live your whole life thinking there's not another way, and someone pops up and is just jlike, ‘Hey, it doesn't have to be like that at all.'”Links:Level 10-https://level10official.com/Profit First Real Estate Investors FB Group-https://m.facebook.com/groups/ProfitFirstREI/Simple CFO-https://simplecfo.com/ Tired of living deal to deal? If you are a real estate investor or business owner who is tired of living deal to deal, and want to double your profits, head over here to book your no-obligation discovery call with me. Either myself or someone from my team will hop on a short call with you to get clear on your business goals, remove any obstacles holding you back, and map out a game plan to help you finally start keeping more of the money you work so hard to make. - David 

In 2012, more than a decade years after graduating with a bachelor's degree in French, mother-of-six Bethany Kolbaba Kartchner switched to science, rising at 4 a.m. to study for an associate's degree in biochemistry at Maricopa Community Colleges in Tempe, Arizona.In the second episode of Muddle of the Middle, a six-part podcast series about the mid-career stage in science, Kolbaba Kartchner, who is now a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. tells Julie Gould how she interacts with her fellow graduate students and manages her busy personal and professional schedules. Leslie Rissler swapped academia for a post at the US National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. This involved moving in 2015 from Alabama, where she had worked as a professor of biological sciences. The change coincided with a divorce and undergoing a bilateral mastectomy. They are joined by structured-light researcher Andrew Forbes, who, 10 years after co-founding a company, took a role in academia and is now a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is 40 too young for a scientist to describe themselves as mid-career? If the term can't be defined by age, does it refer to landing tenure, to achieving a level of autonomy or to serving on multiple academic committees?Working scientists who no longer define themselves as ‘early career' tell Julie Gould what this often-neglected career stage means to them in the absence of an agreed definition from funding agencies and scientific governing bodies.This is the first episode in Muddle of the Middle, a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about the mid-career stage in science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Researchers with the two collaborations that discovered the Higgs boson—ATLAS and CMS—relive the 2012 announcement of the discovery. They also talk about what it's like to work on Higgs experiments and what they would still like to learn about the mass-giving particle.Podcast host Julie Gould speaks with the following guests: Joseph Incandela (University of California Santa Barbara/CERN), Jon Butterworth (University College London/CERN), Flavia de Almeida Dias (University of Amsterdam/CERN), Sahal Yacoob (University of Cape Town/CERN), and Victoria Martin (University of Edinburgh/CERN).This podcast is part of a series of pieces that Physics Magazine is publishing to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery. See also: News Feature: The Era of Higgs Physics; Poem: Higgs Boson—The Visible Glyph; Research News: A Particle is Born—Making the Higgs Famous; Q&A: The Higgs Boson—A Theory, An Observation, A Tool; and Collection: The History of Observations of the Higgs Boson.Music credit: Jarabi (Passion), performed by Derek Gripper, composed by Toumani Diabaté. Image credit: stock.adobe.com/master_andrii.Produced by Julie Gould.

In the inaugural episode of This Is Physics, the Physics Magazine podcast, LGBTQ+ physicists talk about how their sexual or gender identities affect their careers and suggest actions that could improve the current climate. Podcast host Julie Gould speaks with the following guests: Tim Atherton (he/him), a soft matter physicist at Tufts University, USA; Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (she/they), a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire, USA; Yasmeen Musthafa (they/them), a Junior Scientist at TAE Technologies; Ramon Carrillo Bastos (he/him), a condensed-matter physicist at the Autonomous University of Baja California, Mexico; Jan Eldridge (she/her), an astrophysicist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.This podcast is part of a series of Physics Magazine pieces on the experiences of LGBTQ+ physicists. See also: Viewpoint: Making Physics Inclusive to LGBTQ+ Folks, Q&A: Seeking Diversity When Faced with Adversity, and Opinion: Wanted: LGBTQ+ Allies.Music credit: The Sandhunter, by Maeve Gilchrist, performed by Maeve Gilchrist (harp) and Nic Gareiss (percussive dancing).Produced by Julie Gould.

Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands has a long history of partnering with local technology giants such as Philips Electronics and DAF Trucks, with support from city leaders.University president Robert-Jan Smits tells Julie Gould how mutual trust and a respect for academic freedom have helped academics and industrialists to forge successful collaborations since 1956, when the university was founded.In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about porosity, the movement of people between academia and other sectors, Julie Gould is also joined by Fiona Watt, director of the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg, Germany, and Dario Alessi, director of the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy at the University of Dundee, UK. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Scientist-entrepreneur Javier Garcia Martinez recalls combining an academic role at the University of Alicante, Spain, while getting a catalyst start-up called Rive Technology off the ground.The experience, he says, taught him that a so-called barrier between academia and other sectors is no more than a state of mind. “To me, it feels all part of the same thing. It's our own mindset that puts different activities in different silos,” he tells Julie Gould. Martinez adds: “I was studying, discovering better catalysts, you know, in my academic lab, also in my company, and at the same time talking to customers, to investors, to raise money, and to put that into a commercial plan.”In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about porosity, defined as the movement of people between sectors, Gould also hears from drug-discovery researcher Martin Gosling. He combines an academic post at the University of Sussex, UK, with a role as chief scientific officer at Enterprise Therapeutics, a biotech company that he co-founded in 2015.She also talks to technology-transfer professional Nessa Carey, biochemist Dario Alessi, who leads the signal-transduction-therapy industry collaboration at the University of Dundee, UK, and Chaya Nayak, head of Facebook's open research and transparency team. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Researchers looking to switch sectors are often plagued by uncertainty. Many take years to make the move after weighing up the pros and cons of quitting academia.As academic research careers become increasingly precarious, Nessa Carey, a UK entrepreneur and technology transfer professional, tells Julie Gould that today's scientists are better at planning for the future than were previous generations.US science journalist Chris Woolston, who reports on Nature's annual careers surveys, says the findings from 2021 show that researchers in industry are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs, enjoy high salaries and be optimistic about the future than their colleagues in academia.The second episode of this six-part podcast series about porosity, the movement of people within academia and beyond, also includes perspectives from Shambhavi Naik, whose career has straddled academic research, journalism, start-ups and policy roles in Bengalaru, India. Gould is also joined by Søren Bregenholt, chief executive of the Sweden-based biotech company Alligator Bioscience, and Helke Hillebrand, director of the graduate academy at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Reverse mentoring, peer-to-peer, group sessions. Choose one or more to tackle a tough career transition.Andy Morris, employability mentoring manager at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, describes himself as a professional Cupid, connecting students who are seeking careers in industry with mentors who can help them achieve their goals.He tells Julie Gould how the employability mentors he works with in industry differ from the employer mentoring offered to researchers when they join an organization or take on a new role.Lucia Prieto-Gordino joined a mentoring programme after becoming a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London in 2018.“You unavoidably encounter situations that you have never encountered before. And your mentor is there to help you navigate those situations with their experience,” she says.And Carol Zuegner, an associate professor of journalism at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, describes the reverse mentoring sessions held with former students to help her navigate the digital age. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Many mentoring relationships were disrupted by the pandemic, particularly ones that relied on regular face-to-face contact.How did these established mentoring relationships survive the switch to virtual meetings?In the third episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series, Julie Gould also explores the challenges of being a mentor beyond those presented by the pandemic.Alongside the emotional investment and the absence of much formal training in mentoring techniques, there are also logistical and time management pressures.Jen Heemstra, a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, tells Gould: “My role is to be a bit like an athletic coach. I want to help everyone be able to perform at their best. And different people have different modes of motivation.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Postdocs and other career researchers need better trained lab leaders, not just nicer ones, Julie Gould discovers.Calls to change the research culture have grown louder in 2020 as COVID-19 lockdowns led to extended grant application and publication deadlines.As the world emerges from the pandemic, will researchers adopt more respectful ways of communicating, collaborating and publishing?Anne Marie Coriat, head of the UK and Europe research landscape at the funder Wellcome, tells Julie Gould about the organisation's 2019 survey of more than 4,000 researchers. The results were published in January this year.She adds: "We know that not everything is completely kind, constructive, and conducive to encouraging and enabling people to be at their best. "We tend to count success as things that are easy to record. And so inadvertently, I think funders have contributed to hyper competition, to the status of the cult hero of an individual being, you know, the leader who gets all the accolades."But what else is needed, beyond a kinder culture? In June 2020 Jessica Malisch, an assistant professor of physiology at St. Mary's College of Maryland, co-authored an opinion article calling for new solutions to ensure gender equity in the wake of COVID-19. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/15378 She says "We can't rely on kindness and good intentions to correct the systemic inequity in academia.Katie Wheat, head of engagement and policy at the researcher development non-profit Vitae, tells Gould that researchers who feel that they're their manager or their supervisor is supportive and available for them during the pandemic have better indicators of wellbeing than those who are not getting that support. "A PI might also be in a relatively precarious situation, reliant on grant income for their own salary, and for their team's salary. "You can be in a scenario where the individualistic markers of success put everybody in a competitive situation against everybody else, rather than a more collaborative and collegial situation where, where one person's success is everybody's success." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Experience as a postdoctoral researcher might not fast-track your career outside academia, Julie Gould discovers.Nessa Carey, a UK entrepreneur and technology-transfer professional whose career has straddled academia and industry, including a senior role at Pfizer, shares insider knowledge on how industry employers often view postdoctoral candidates. She also offers advice on CVs and preparing for interviews.“It is very tempting sometimes for people to keep on postdoc-ing, especially if they have a lab head who has a lot of rolling budget and who likes having the same postdocs there, because they're productive and they know them,” she says. “That’s great for the lab head. It’s typically very, very bad for the individual postdoc,” she adds.Carey is joined by Shulamit Kahn, an economist at Boston University in Massachusetts, who co-authored a 2017 paper about the impact of postdoctoral training on early careers in biomedicine1.According to the paper, published in Nature Biotechnology, employers did not financially value the training or skills obtained during postdoc training. “Based on these findings, the majority of PhDs would be financially better off if they skipped the postdoc entirely,” it concludes.Malcolm Skingle, academic liaison at GlaxoSmithKline, adds: “You really will get people who have done their PhD, they’ve done a two-year postdoc, they think they’re pretty much going to run the world and single-handedly develop a drug.“They have got no idea how difficult drug discovery is, and their place in that very big jigsaw.”“And why don’t postdocs get great salaries straightaway? Well, actually, they haven’t proven themselves in our environment, where, if they’re any good, then their salaries will go up quite quickly.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Julie Gould investigates how brain drains and demographic time bombs are forcing some countries to rethink the postdoc.The problems facing postdocs who are more than ready for life as an independent researcher are well documented. A lack of faculty positions forces many to spend years moving from one temporary contract to another, often internationally.But moving abroad can rob many countries of talented researchers, particularly if they leave for good, says Melody Mentz-Coetzee, a senior researcher at the University of Pretoria’s centre for the advancement of scholarship in South Africa.Her country faces exactly this problem — a situation she dates back to the late 1970s and early 1990s. “At this point, we started to see a lot of talented researchers being trained abroad, and many of those never returned home: the so-called brain drain in Africa,” Mentz-Coetzee tells Gould.“Many institutions face a severe shortage of highly qualified staff, many of whom are older, close to retirement. So you do have this kind of a ‘missing middle’.”Mentz-Coetzee describes an initiative across ten Carnegie-funded postdoc fellowship programmes on the African continent to help tackle the problem.Shambhavi Naik, a former postdoc who turned to journalism and is now a research fellow at the Takshashila Institution’s technology and policy programme in Bengaluru, explores why talented graduate students who opted to develop their careers in India, rather than move abroad, are overlooked for faculty positions. Their motivation to stay at home is a wake-up call for science in India, she argues.And Shirley Tilghman, emeritus professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey, says the problem is a cultural one, and could be addressed by the development of staff-scientist roles to oversee technological change in the scientific enterprise.“It’s about changing the mindset of each individual principal investigator, who kind of wants to circle the wagons and say, ‘Don't mess with my stuff’. And that’s the culture we have to change,” she says. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is a postdoc and why undertake one? Julie Gould gets some metaphorical answers to a complicated question.“A postdoc is a scientist with training wheels,” says Jessica Esquivel, a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab, the particle physics and accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. “It is a space where we can fumble, really start to flex our muscles in building innovative experiments and learn skills that we didn't necessarily get to beef up while we were in graduate school.”In the first episode of a six-part podcast series, Julie Gould seeks to define this key career stage by asking postdocs past and present why it attracts so many different job titles (37, at the last count), and how many years one should ideally devote to postdoctoral research before moving on. Also, what should come next, given the paucity of permanent posts in academia? Should you do a postdoc if you are planning a career in another sector?“The only thing that you absolutely need a postdoc for is to go onto a tenured track faculty position,” says Bill Mahoney, associate dean for student and postdoctoral affairs at the University of Washington Graduate School in Seattle.Shirley Tilghman, emeritus professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey, returns to a metaphor coined before COVID-19 lockdowns changed New York’s heavily congested LaGuardia Airport. “Passengers were always finding themselves flying over LaGuardia, over and over and over round in circles.”“Postdocs were experiencing essentially the same phenomenon, which is that they were longer and longer and longer in postdoctoral positions waiting for their turn to finally have a chance to land.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to the first podcast of Creative Spirits Unleashed, the podcast for people who want more from life than just work. Our first guest has two encore careers and is a master of work/life balance. Julie Gould is the principal of J. Gould Consulting in Washington, DC, a consulting firm for affordable housing and the genius behind the camera of Bright Eyes Photos, capturing magic moments of your beloved pet. Julie's specialty is capturing the essence of what matters in her every endeavor. Our conversation ranges far and wide, from how to say no to seeing the catch lights in the eye of your pet - or the people in your life.

PhD programmes in "the rainbow nation" mostly lead to academic careers, but reform is needed to boost collaboration and integration, higher education experts tell Julie Gould.It's 25 years since since South Africa's first free elections swept Nelson Mandela to power as president.But higher education in the "rainbow nation" (a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe the post-apartheid era), could do more to encourage integration and collaboration between black, white and international students.Jonathan Jansen, a professor in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University, tells Julie Gould that despite seismic political change in 1994, education, research, and economics have not kept pace with the country's democratic transformation.Liezel Frick, director of the Centre for Higher and Adult Education at Stellenbosch University, says that around 60% of students are part-time, with many having staff positions at universities.Doctoral education still clings to a research-focused "Oxbridge model," she adds, and unlike programmes in North America does not offer credits for coursework and elective classes. "What is different is that we do not have an over-production of PhDs. A lot of PhDs still get absorbed into the academic sphere," she says. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The thesis is a central element of how graduate students are assessed. But is it time for an overhaul? Julie Gould finds out.How do you decide whether or not somebody is a fully trained researcher? Janet Metcalfe, head of Vitae, a non-profit that supports the professional development of researchers, tells Julie Gould that it's time to be "really brave" and look at how doctoral degrees are examined.But what role should the thesis play in that assessment? Does it need overhauling, updating, or even scrapping?Inger Mewburn, who leads research training at the Australian National University in Canberra and who founded of The Thesis Whisperer blog in 2010, suggests science could learn from architecture. Student architects are required to produce a portfolio, creating a "look book" for assessors or potential employers to examine as part as part of a candidate's career narrative. For graduate students in science, this could include papers, journals, articles, presentations, certificates, or even video files."The PhD is meant to turn out individual, beautifully crafted, entirely bespoke and unique knowledge creators," she tells Gould. "And we need people like that. We need creative people with really different sorts of talents. We don't want to turn out 'cookie cutter' researchers."David Bogle, who leads early career researcher development at University College London, tells Gould that UCL's three-pronged mission statement includes impact."We want our research to make an impact, and in order to support and reinforce that it is now mandatory to include a one page impact statement at the front saying 'this is the difference it will make in the world,'" he tells Gould. "Any impact — curriculum, society, business, anything. It might not end up making that difference, but we want people to think about it."What about the pressure to publish? In October 2019 Anne-Marie Coriat, Head of UK and EU Research Landscape at the Wellcome Trust in London, argued in a World View article published in Nature Human Behaviour that PhD merit needs to be defined by more than publications.She tells Gould that the experience of getting published is a good thing, but making it mandatory is not. "Learning writing skills is a hugely important part of PhD training. Should it be a requirement that all students publish in peer reviewed journals in order to pass the PhD? My answer is absolutely and emphatically no." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Scientific research is not the endeavour of a single person. It requires a team of people. How can this be better reflected in graduate student training, asks Julie Gould.Is science ready for "Team PhD", whereby a group of students work more collaboratively, delivering a multi-authored thesis at their end of their programme? Jeanette Woolard, who recently secured a £4.5m Wellcome Trust grant to fund a four-year collaborative doctoral training programme in her lab at the University of Nottingham, UK, believes it could happen one day."The team driven PhD is not distant dream. It's soon-to-be a fulfilled reality," Woolard, professor of cardiovascular physiology and pharmacology, tells Julie Gould. "If you give it enough of an incentive and wave the flag hard enough for team science, it will come."Woolard's Wellcome grant allows four graduate students to have their own research focus but to work collaboratively. "Each of the individual candidates are still pursuing an individual PhD and they will each write up an individual thesis at the end of their four year period of study," she says, arguing that the scientific community and students themselves aren't yet ready for programmes that culminate in a team focused thesis. "I think individual students still either like the idea or deserve the opportunity to defend their own piece of work at the end of their studies."The new programme at Nottingham, she says, provides them with "the most collaborative environment possible, where they have the opportunity to work together as much as they can, to utilise as many skills as are available, and to really experience a dynamic, collaborative team-driven environment. "Ultimately that's what there are going to experience especially if they go into industry or pursue excellence in academia. Our best outputs now are judged as being multidisciplinary," Woolard adds.A team thesis may be some way off in science, but what about other disciplines? Jill Perry is Executive Director at the Carnegie Project. She tells Gould how the project is helping to redefine the education doctorate in the US. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Julie Gould asks six higher education experts if it's now time to go back to the drawing board and redesign graduate programmes from scratch.Suzanne Ortega, president of the US Council of Graduate Schools, says programmes now include elements to accommodate some of the skills now being demanded by employers, including project and data management expertise. "We can't expect to prepare doctoral researchers in a timely fashion by simply adding more and more separate activities," she tells Gould. "We need to redesign the curricula and the capstone project," referring to the PhD as a long-term investigative project that culminates in a final product.Jonathan Jansen, professor of education at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, calls for more flexible and modular programmes and describes as an example how MBA programmes have evolved from a full-time one year course to include part-time online only programmes and a "blended" combination of the two approaches. "It's about trying to figure out in terms of your own lifestyle what kind of progarmme design works for you," he says. "One size does not fit all."But Jansen's colleague Liezel Frick, director of the university's centre for higher and adult education, says it's important to remember the ultimate goal of a PhD. She tells Gould: "I get the point around flexibility but it's still a research focused degree. You still have to make an original contribution to your field of knowledge. Otherwise it becomes a continuing professional development programme where you can do odds and ends but never get to the core of it, which is a substantive research contribution."David Bogle, a doctoral school pro-vice-provost at UCL, London, says it's important to remember that graduate students are part of a cohort and community who should be respected and rewarded, not looked down on and treated as second class citizens. "At the moment there's a certain amount of 'I'm the supervisor. You should be looking to me as the primary source of inspiration,' when in fact the inspiration comes from peers, professional communities, training and cross disciplinary activities."This is the second episode in a five-part series timed to coincide with Nature's 2019 PhD survey. Many of the 6,300 graduate students who responded call for more one-to-one support and better career guidance from PhD supervisors. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Students need to be clear about their reasons for pursuing a PhD and the career options open to them, Julie Gould discovers.In 2015, labour economist Paula Stephan told an audience of early career researchers in the US that the supply of PhD students was outstripping demand. “Since 1977, we've been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening."We are definitely producing many more PhDs than there is demand for them in research positions,” she said.In this first episode of this five-part series about the future of the PhD and how it might change, Julie Gould asks Stephan, who is based at Georgia State University, if her view has altered.Anne-Marie Coriat, head of UK and EU research landscape at the Wellcome Trust in London, says students need to be clear about why they want to pursue a PhD. "Look at what you're getting into, try and understand that, and then network," she says.Forty per cent of respondents to Nature's 2019 PhD survey, published this week, said that their programme didn’t meet their original expectations, and only 10% said that it exceeded their expectations — a sharp drop from 2017, when 23% of respondents said that their PhD programme exceeded their expectations.Despite a global shortage of jobs at universities and colleges, 56% of respondents said that academia is their first choice for a career. Just under 30% chose industry as their preferred destination. The rest named research positions in government, medicine or non-profit organizations. In 2017, 52% of respondents chose academia and 22% chose industry. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tom Baden's work into the neuroscience of vision has earned him the inaugural Nature Research Award for Driving Global Impact.Tom Baden, professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex, UK, is the first winner of an award to recognise early career researchers whose work has made, or has the potential to make, a positive impact on society.Baden's research on zebrafish and mice showed that eyes have vastly greater computational powers than people previously thought, rather than being faithful recorders of the real world.The judges of the award, run in partnership with Chinese technology company Tencent, said Baden's research could have a significant impact on both diagnostic and therapeutic ophthalmology research.In addition to his research, Baden tells Julie Gould about his interest in open hardware and 3D printing and its potential to make well equipped labs more affordable for developing countries.Baden is also cofounder of Teaching and Research in Neuroscience for Development (TReND) in Africa. This nonprofit, which launched in 2010, runs research courses in sub-Saharan Africa and helps to place scientists who’d like to teach there into the region’s universities.The group also collects unused lab equipment from facilities in the United States and Europe and redistributes it to laboratories across Africa. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Two projects aimed at boosting female representation in STEM have won the second Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Science and Innovating Science, in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies.Jean Fan spent a year volunteering at a science club for high school students during her PhD programme at Harvard University and was struck by how many of them dismissed the idea of becoming scientists themselves."A lot of my students would make remarks like 'I'm not quite a maths person,' or would not see themselves as future scientists," she tells Julie Gould."I really wanted to leave them with some type of gift to encourage them to continue developing their interest in science."As a result Fan, who was the sole female graduate student in her PhD bioinformatics programme, launched cuSTEMized, a non-profit that uses personalised educational storybooks (which she writes and illustrates) to inspire girls about scientific careers.This week, at a ceremony in London, she won the 2019 Inspiring Science Award, one of two offered by Nature Research and the Estée Lauder Companies.The second award, Innovation in Science, goes to Doreen Anene, a PhD student at the University of Nottingham, UK.In 2017 Anene launched The STEM Belle, a non-profile based in Nigeria, her home country. The STEM Belle also works in Ghana and Pakistan. As its website says, The STEM Belle is "focused on levelling up the female representation in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics fields by attracting, retaining and advancing more girls and young women to STEM subjects and fields." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Moving to a new branch of science is scary, but learning new skills and collaborating with different colleagues can be exhilarating, Julie Gould discovers.In the penultimate episode of this six-part series about physics careers, Julie Gould talks to Stuart Higgins, a research associate at Imperial College London, who switched from solid state physics to bioengineering, and Anna Lappala, who moved from biochemistry to physics.How easy were these transitions, and what is their advice to others planning similar moves?Higgins says: "It's important to ask yourself why you want to make the transition. Do you want to apply the same skills or to learn new ones? Give yourself time to understand your motivation."Overall, the transition was "liberating," he adds, allowing him to ask "basic, silly questions" of colleagues, who were very supportive of his situation and the learning curve he faced.Lappala, a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, describes how she was initially terrified of people discovering she was not a "real physicist" and worked hard to learn about general physics, quantum field theory, and soft matter, among other things. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Media interest in particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider boosted Jon Butterworth's interest in public engagement, reports Julie Gould.Jon Butterworth developed a taste for public engagement after repeated media appearances related to his work on the ATLAS experiment, one of two Large Hadron Collider detectors at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab.Butterworth, a physics professor at University College London, describes life at CERN, and how it felt to be one of 5154 authors listed in the 2015 paper that produced the most precise estimate yet of the mass of the Higgs boson.As part of his public engagement activities, Butterworth was persuaded to auction an after-dinner lecture or school talk about the Higgs. The auction "lot" was part of a fundraising effort for his children's primary school in north London."Someone else at the school was Lady Gaga's designer and they brought along a pair of her boots," he tells Julie Gould. "My talk went for more than Lady Gaga's boots. I'm still doing it now. Interest hasn't died away."The key thing is you have to be genuinely excited about your project. We've lowered the bar so more physics stories get into the news."If you tell your mum and dad now that you're doing physics, you get kudos for it in the way you wouldn't have done before," he says.Tom Weller taught physics for eight years at a west London school following his second postdoc at Harvard University, a career change triggered in part by the enjoyment he derived from organising children's science parties. "They made me recognize how much I enjoyed explaining stuff that was fun and engaging," he says in the fourth episode of this six-part podcast series about physics careers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Industry has long courted physicists for their data science expertise, but will this change as more undergraduates acquire these skills?In 2013, Kim Nilsson co-founded Pivigo, a training company to prepare researchers for data science careers. She tells Julie Gould how and why she moved into business.Nilsson's Pivigo colleague Deepak Mahtani quit academia after completing a PhD in astronomy. What is his advice to someone looking to move into data science? "There are three main things you should do. Learn about the programming languages Python or R, read up about machine learning, and understand a bit about SQL," he says.Lewis Armitage's PhD at Queen Mary Unversity London took him to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. But he craved a better work-life balance and a move which played to his data science skills. Now he is a data analyst for consumer behaviour consultancy Tsquared Insights, based in Geneva, Switzerland. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Earlier this year Eindhoven University of Technology faced a social media backlash after announcing that from July 2019, all academic staff vacancies will be open to female applicants only for the first six months. Many people questioned the legality of the move.In this first episode of a six-part series about careers in physics, Cornelis Storm, who leads the theory of polymers and soft matters group at the Dutch university, tells Julie Gould why the "radical step," was sorely needed. He also describes why the physics department, and the discipline more generally, will benefit from being more diverse."For whatever reason there is a large group of people that are not considering a carer in physics." he says. "There's not a single piece of research that suggests men are better at this job than women."Astrophysicist Elizabeth Tasker, an associate professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, was hired through a similar policy, and tells Gould about her experience. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ben Britton's experimental micromechanics lab at Imperial College London currently includes four postdoctoral researchers, 11 PhD students, and four Masters students.Alongside computational analysis tools used to detect how materials perform (including Matlab as the group's main programming environment, chosen for its speed, global user base and visual interaction), Britton and his team use the online collaboration and communication tool Slack. He also uses the Slack bot Howdey to check in with colleagues each week.But why Slack? "There's not enough time in the day to micro-manage every individual person," he tells Julie Gould. "Part of being in an academic environment is about developing people, trying to encourage a working environment where people are free to share ideas, to fail, and also to have very open communication. Slack doesn't replace the in-person interaction but it supplements and enhances it." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Machine learning and data management skills can raise your scientific profile and open up career opportunities, Julie Gould discovers.As a biomedical science student, Jake Schofield felt frustrated at the length of time it took to repeat experiments, record results and manage protocols, with most of the work paper-based.In 2016 he and Jan Domanski, a biochemist with programming skills, launched Labstep, an online platform to help scientists record and reproduce experiments.Schofield, now Labstep's CEO, tells Julie Gould how launching a start-up and seeking investor funding has honed his business skills."Every step we've taken has been a huge learning experience," he says. "I wish there were more opportunities for scientists to try entreprenurial pursits. Scientific analytical problem-based thinking has so many parallels in the start-up world."Brian MacNamee, a computer scientist at University College Dublin, outlines the high value of data and its potential to solve science's reproducibility crisis, citing large sky-scanning telescope projects as an example."These projects are generating colossal amounts of data scanning large portions of the sky and that data needs to be categorised," he says. "Astrophysicists want to go to large data collections and look for the bits they are interested in. It's impossible to do that by hand. You need to put machine learning systems into those pipelines to categorise and compare data."Other researchers are not reading a paper and trying to figure out where the gremlins are inside a data set. They can open the dataset up and find it themselves." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mona Nemer tells Julie Gould about her role as Canada's chief scientific adviser and how she aims to strengthen science in the country."We're bordered by three oceans," says Mona Nemer of Canada, where she has been chief scientific adviser since September 2017. "On one side we are close to Europe, on the other we are close to Asia. It's a great country to study the Arctic, climate research, oceanography, but also astrophysics, information technology and health."Nemer describes her role as "convener of the dialogue between the broader science community and government," providing scientific advice to current prime minister Justin Trudeau and his ministerial team, and making recommendations on how to improve Canadian science. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Simon Hettrick tells Julie Gould about the role of research software engineers, what they do and how you can become one.In the third episode of our six-part podcast series on workplace technology, we learn more about the importance of coding for scientists followed by an introduction to the work of research software engineers.Simon Hettrick, deputy director of the UK Software Sustainability Institute, tells Julie Gould about the typical career path of a research software engineer, and how their skills can support researchers with limited coding skills.Harriet Alexander starts the programme by telling Nature technology editor Jeff Perkel about her role as an instructor for Software Carpentry, a global non-profit organisation which teaches research computing skills to scientists. Who typically attends a Carpentry course and what do they learn during a workshop?Alexander, a postdoctoral fellow in oceanography bioinformatics at the University of California, Davis, also tells us about the recent course she ran in Antarctica. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Learning how to coding brings career benefits and helps science by aiding reproducibility, Julie Gould discovers.Jessica Hedge tells Julie Gould about how she learned to code as a PhD student, and the freedom and flexibility it provides to manage large datasets."I never saw myself as a coder and it took me a long time to realise I had to pick up the skills myself," she tells Julie Gould in the second episode of this six-part series about technology and scientific careers. "A colleague was using Python and R and I saw the potential." What is her advice to other early career researchers who are keen to develop coding expertise?Also, Brian MacNamee, an assistant professor in the school of computer science at University College Dublin, talks about the college's data science course and how it can benefit both humanities and science students.Finally, Nature technology editor Jeffrey Perkel describes how coding can help with computational reproducibility. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Julie Gould asks how early career researchers can develop their careers in the face of funding's "boom and bust" cycle and the short-termism it engenders.Governments are swayed by political uncertainty and technological developments, argues Michael Teitelbaum, author of Falling Behind?Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.In the US, for example, space research funding dramatically increased after Soviet Russia launched the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957, ending after the 1969 moon landing.Similar booms followed in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, says Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York.But he argues that they are unsustainable and can have a negative impact on the careers of junior scientists and their research. Will Brexit trigger a funding downturn, and if so, for how long? Watch this space, says Teitelbaum. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In April 2018 the UK's funding environment was transformed with the launch of UK Research and Innovation, an umbrella agency which oversees more than £6 billion (US$7.4 billion) of research funding per year, led by Sir Mark Walport, formerly the UK government's chief scientific adviser.In episode four of this six-part series on funding, Julie Gould discusses the changes with James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, UK. Wilsdon describes how the new funding landscape compares to the previous structure of seven research councils, how UKRI can support interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research, and what this new funding landscape means for early career researchers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Expert advice on how to get the details of a grant submission right, and planning for "curveball questions" if you are asked to deliver an oral presentation:Peter Gorsuch, Chief Editor at Nature Research Editing Services, tells Julie Gould about the all-important details to include in your grant application.Jernej Zupanc, who runs visual communication skills training for scientists, talks fonts, colours and other ways make your application easier to navigate.Anne-Marie Coriat, Head of UK and Europe Research Landscape at Wellcome Trust, London, describes how to prepare for an oral presentation, including answers to some difficult questions.Paid content: European Research CouncilRomanian researcher Alina Bădescu describes her experience of successfully applying for an ERC grant. Bădescu, an associate professor at the Faculty of Electronic, Telecommunications and Information Technology, University of Bucharest, also talks about the second-stage interview process run by the ERC at its HQ in Brussels. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this first episode of a six-part weekly series about funding, Julie Gould outlines the US National Institutes of Health's (NIH) grant review process and the extent to which reviewers evaluating the same applications agree or disagree. Is the current system the best way, she asks Elizabeth Pier, lead author of a March 2018 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Low agreement among reviewers evaluating the same NIH grant applications.Paid contentThis episode concludes with a slot sponsored by the European Research Council. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, its president, outlines the organisation's role and remit as a grant funder. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Chris Woolston and Julie Gould discuss the findings of Nature's 2018 salary and job satisfaction survey, which found that despite some common concerns about pay, promotion prospects, bullying and discrimination, 75% are happy with their career choice and would recommend it to others.Also, ahead of the 2019 Nature Careers Events Guide publication later this month, Julie talks to Jamie Krueger about her drive to make conferences more accessible for mothers and other researchers who juggle caring responsibilities alongside work.Krueger, a neuroscience graduate student at the University of California Davis, had her daughter three years ago and the 2019 Guide includes an interview with her.Earlier this year she chaired a panel discussion at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, California. Its focus was female scientists who began their careers and family in parallel.See also: Satisfaction in science See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Association of Hungarian Women in Science (NATE) has won Nature Research's inaugural Innovation in Science Award, one of two global prizes launched in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies and presented at a ceremony in London held on 30 October 2018.In this podcast Julie Gould talks to NATE president Katalin Balázsi about the organisations's achievements and its success at inspiring women and girls to develop careers in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Balázsi was one of ten women scientists who founded the association ten years ago. A follow-up podcast interview with Mirjana will go live soon.Many of the women helped by NATE juggle their careers alongside family commitments. Nana Lee, a mother of three and an assistant professor in biochemistry at the University of Toronto, concludes this episode with some advice on how to strike a balance between the two competing pressures.A companion prize, the Inspiring Science Award, was presented to Mirjana Pović, an astrophysicist at the Ethiopian Space Science and Technology Institute in Addis Ababa.See also:Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Science and Innovating ScienceHungarian association wins prize for promoting participation of women in scienceMeet the space researcher smoothing the path for women in science across AfricaNew awards aim to celebrate women in science See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Lego Grad Student is the alter ego of an early career researcher whose schadenfreude-laden Twitter posts "capture an adult's distress in adult education." He tells Jack Leeming how a childhood love of Lego was reignited after a painful dissertation catch-up with his supervisor. Jack asks about his anonymity, his advice to other graduate students, and if his 63,000 @legogradstudent followers need to worry about the real-life person behind the poignant posts. Julian Kirchherr applied his experiences of running a start-up to his PhD, which he completed in less than two years. His book, The Lean PhD, describes how the principles adopted by many start-ups to get "minimal viable products" to market quickly can make PhD programmes more time-efficient and impactful. Kircherr discusses his ideas with Julie Gould.In early October more than 800 early career researchers attended the annual Naturejobs Career Expo in London, the last to be held before the UK is due leave the European Union in 2019. Julie talks to four PhD students about their career aspirations, and if Brexit is influencing their plans.See also:How to build a better PhDGraduate survey: A love-hurt relationshipTeach undergraduates that doing a PhD will require them to embrace failure See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

UK careers consultant Sarah Blackford describes how a "SWOT analysis" of your skills can identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in your career roadmap. Sarah's sound advice might well have been followed by biotechnology engineer Samuel Juillot and materials engineer Arnold Oswald. In April 2018 the two friends opened Eurekafé in Toulouse, France. Their crowdfunded cafe of curiosities is aimed at the city's scientists and the general public, offering science-related events and exhibits alongside snacks and drinks. They tell Julie Gould how the idea came about. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Julie Gould discusses problem solving, research integrity, and the importance of feedback in PhD programmes at the 2018 ORPHEUS conference, held in Iceland. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is a good meal without good spices? And what is a good trip without good meals? Hear all about Spices of the World on TRAVEL ITCH RADIO Thursday, April 26, when Roger Noriega and Maggie Linton interview Julie Gould, senior brand manager for Spice Islands, a division of B & G Foods. Listen live at 8p EDT on iTunes or BlogTalkRadio.com or check out the show at your convenience on the TRAVEL ITCH RADIO Facebook page or BlogTalkRadio.

Julie Gould speaks to Professor Athene Donald about the expectations and responsibilities of PhD researchers' careers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Andy Kirk talks to Julie Gould about the importance of data visualisation for scientists. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Steve Blank speaks to Julie Gould about the Lean Start-up model for entrepreneurs. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Euan Adie from Altmetric and Alex Hodgson from ReadCube talk to Julie Gould about the future of digital scientific publishing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This podcast first appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 144 on December 12th 2013 In this podcast I explore how our noses work through the science of smell. “Follow your nose” “Stop being Nosy” I’m sure there are more phrases withThe post Science of Smell appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on the Pod Delusion, episode 214 on November 22nd 2013. This podcast is an audio adventure from the Abu Dhabi Science Festival 2013 The Abu Dhabi Science Festival 2013 is organised by the Edinburgh International Science Festival group,The post Abu Dhabi Science Festival 2013 appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on the Pod Delusion, episode 211 on November 1st 2013. Mozfest 2013 was held at Ravensbourne and spanned all 8 floors, each one hosting a variety of web-based activities. In this podcast I focussed mostly onThe post Mozfest 2013 appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 135 on October 10th 2013 This is a podcast about binaural beats. Binaural beats are created when two ever-so-slightly different frequency tones are listened to in the left and right ear. ForThe post Binaural Beats appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on the Pod Delusion episode 207 on October 4th 2013 This podcast gives a bit of a flavour of the makers and shakers that attended Over The Air 2013. I attended OTA on behalf of TheThe post Over The Air 2013 appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast first appeared on I, Science on February 8th 2013 In this podcast I am at the pre-opening event of the “Extinction: not the end of the world?” exhibition at the Natural History Museum. I speak to some of the scientistsThe post I, Science – Extinction explained appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This package originally appeared on the Pod Delusion episode 192 on June 21st 2013 On June 13th, the US Supreme courts gave their final verdict on the Association for molecular Pathology vs Myriad Genetics case. The story started in 2009, when the ACLUThe post Patenting nature appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 128 on June 20th 2013. Ever wondered what’s going on inside your gut? For this podcast I spoke several people, as the amount of research in the field of microbiomes and micrbiotaThe post What’s inside your gut? appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

For someone who hasn’t had any brain afflictions, it’s rather difficult to image what it must be like to be dealing with one. These monsters inside people’s heads only show themselves as symptoms, which can be rather frustrating, especially ifThe post Monsters inside your head appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on the Pod Delusion episode 198 on May 31st 2013 After being absolutely awed at her book, I spoke to Mary Roach, author of Gulp: adventures along the Alimentary Canal about a particularly icky story onThe post A not so bedtime story… about faecal transplants appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

Would you eat meat that has been grown in a lab rather than taken directly from the animal? This is a question that I’ve been asking as preparations for the first lab-grown burger to be cooked are happening. Prof MarkThe post Would you eat laboratory-grown meat? appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 123 on May 16th 2013 For this podcast I spoke to Thomas Landrain, the founder of La Paillase, a DIY Biology lab in Paris. I wanted to share this piece on here becauseThe post DIY Biology with Thomas Landrain appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

As part of the MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College, we were asked at the beginning of January to create a product, any product, that was based on the first semester’s theory. I remember that day. It was, I must admit,The post Wimbledon 2013: The Philosophers Battle appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast was originally on Pythagoras Trousers episode 144 on March 14th 2013 Ichthyostega is believed to be the first creature that first moved from the swamps onto land. In order to accomodate the higher levels of gravitational pull, itThe post Ichthyostega appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 111 on February 21st 2013 This month, I’ve been learning about synthetic biology. With one of the biggest synthetic biology conferences happening at Imperial College in the summer this year, I wantedThe post Synthetic Biology appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

A few weeks ago, curiosity got the better of me. John Hutchinson, professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Vetinerary College in London, has a personal website called What’s in John’s freezer? A title like that just begs for an answer, andThe post Inside John’s freezer – the grand tour appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

Reading scientific papers has always been a challenge, especially in areas that I’m not very clued up on. Now that I’ve been out of the research bubble for a while, it’s become even more difficult. This is why our practicalThe post Mending a broken heart appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 106 on January 17th 2013 Predicting biodiversity is an interview with Blake Suttle about how we can watch the movements of plants and animals to be able to predict their movement inThe post Predicting Biodiversity appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 101 on December 13th 2012 This is an interview with Jenny Rhon about her research on Urinary Tract Infections. The majority of people have had a UTI, and have been to theirThe post Urinary Tract Infections appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 97 on November 15th 2012 This is an interview with PhD student Christopher Emmott about his research on different types of photovoltaic cell. Transcript: On October 22nd, Hurricane Sandy started developing fromThe post Photovoltaic cell appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 93 on October 18th 2012 Transcript: Many scientists spend their lives trying to uncover how things work. But some things are more difficult to understand than others; one of these is theThe post Anaesthetics and sleep appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

It’s not often that I am in the company of those who have written best-selling books about science, history, travelling and world culture. They are very rare people. But last week, during the British Science Festival in Aberdeen, I hadThe post In conversation with Bill Bryson appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 85 on June 18th 2012 In this report called Schroedinger’s Hat, I interviewed Professor Ulf Leonhart from St. Andrews University about his latest collaborative work on a device that has been dubbed Schroedinger’s Hat. AsThe post Schroedinger’s Hat appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 81 on May 21st 2012 This is an interview with Dr. Saverio Russo from Exeter University’s Centre for Graphene Science about his work on GraphExeter, a modified form of Graphene. Since 2010, when Dr.The post GraphExeter appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 73 on March 26th 2012 This is an interview with Dr. Peter Whibberley from the National Physics Laboratory, and went out on March 26th 2012. Earlier on in the year the International Telecommunication Union’sThe post Leap second appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 68 on February 20th 2012 In this report I interviewed Jessica Smith from the Alzheimers Society to take a closer look at the Whitehall II Study. The study looks at how the brain changesThe post Alzheimers appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast first appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 55 on november 21st 2011 This is an interview with Dr. Helen Czerski on the BBC television program 23 Degrees. At the time of the interview the show was still being filmed. TheThe post 23 Degrees appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

A shorter version of this podcast first appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 50 on October 17th 2011 I did an interview with Professor Ortwin Hess from Imperial College, London because I wanted to learn more about his involvement in the development of magneticThe post Magnetic cloaks appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.

This podcast originally appeared on Pythagoras Trousers episode 46 on September 19th 2011 This is an interview with Mark Post from Maastricht University in the Netherlands about synthetic meat that he has been developing. This was my first piece for Pythagoras Trousers.The post Synthetic meat appeared first on Julie Gould » Julie Gould.