Working Scientist

Learning to care less about how you come across in a conference talk, funding pitch or networking event frees you to communicate more naturally and confidently, says Susie Ashfield.In the second episode of a podcast series focused on six books about the scientific workplace, Ashfield, whose 2025 book, Just F**king Say It, includes real-life case studies of both good and bad communication, says scientist interviewees are often burdened by the “curse of knowledge.” This means they include too much detail instead of focusing on telling a simple story with a beginning, a middle and an end.Ashfield, an actor-turned-communications coach based in London, tells Holly Newson that presenters often fail to rehearse a science conference talk sufficiently. They also default to listing their academic achievements rather than focusing on the messages that their audience needs to hear. In the case of an investor pitch, this could mean focusing on a technology’s potential to save lives, not a detailed description of the underlying science, she argues.She also offers advice on how to approach networking, including tips on how to introduce yourself, keep conversations flowing, and how to politely move on to speak with other attendees. Finally, she offers advice on how to say no, handle difficult supervisors and pay negotiations.Explaining why she named her book Just F**king Say It, and why people should care less about how they come across, she tells Newson: “We are all desperately, concerned about what other people think of us. When we overthink how we walk into a room, we put levels of pressure on ourselves that just shouldn’t be there. The ethos is to just care less. Let it go. See what happens. Enjoy it.”

In the first episode of a podcast series focused on six books about the scientific workplace, Cordelia Fine tells Holly Newson why she wrote Patriarchy, Inc: What we Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work.Fine, a psychologist and workplace gender-equity researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers a blueprint for a fairer society that does not single out women as “a problem to be fixed.​​​​​”Describing the gender pay gap as largely a “motherhood pay gap,” she outlines how employers can support staff who return to work after a career break, without fostering resentment among colleagues. She also explains why many workplace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including unconscious bias training, are ineffective and can sometimes be offensive to the groups they aim to support.Fine also draws on historical examples of women being pushed out when men enter professions in larger numbers, and the effect this can have on the workplace culture.

In his role as research director at NielsenIQ, a consumer intelligence company based in London,  Josh Balsters helps global brands drive product innovation.Balsters relies on expertise he gained in psychology and neuroscience, both during his PhD and as an assistant professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. But when he made the decision to quit full-time academia in 2020, Balsters struggled to tell his colleagues because he worried that he had let them down.“There’s a feeling...that you’ve taken up a space, taken an opportunity away from somebody else who would have wanted it more,” he says. “I felt much more comfortable talking to people who had done it, who had already left.” Ashley Ruba took a different tack. After completing her PhD in psychology at the University of Washington, Seattle, she spent three years as a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before doubling her salary in an industry role.  After sharing her story on social media, Ruba was bombarded with messages from early career researchers who felt they couldn’t share their misgivings about remaining in academia with colleagues. “It seems like there’s a lot of shame, a lot of fear,” she tells Adam Levy in the final episode of Off Limits: an eight-part podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace. Previous episodes have covered religious faith, alcohol dependency, bereavement, fertility challenges, and coming out as a transgender scientist. 

Alison Behie was approaching 40 when she underwent multiple rounds of IVF, enduring the mental and physical turmoil of miscarriage and uncertainty along the way. How good is the academic workplace at supporting women like Behie, a biological anthropology researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra? “The primary feeling was just this guilt that I had prioritized trying to get where I was in my career over my family. That’s not a way anyone should ever feel,“ she says. Behie is joined by Karen Jones, whose research focus at the University of Reading, UK, includes women’s career advancement and gender equality in higher education. Jones says the precarity of research careers is often most pronounced at the point when many researchers are contemplating parenthood, telling Levy: “It’s not uncommon for people to be employed on one temporary contract after another possibly for several years. And this often coincides with the age at which people are making decisions about having a family.”  Finally, Wendy Dossett, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Chester, UK, describes the pressures facing women in academia to juggle career and family ambitions, saying: “I suffered a bit from the assumption that I must be a child-free career woman, when, in truth, I was a broken-hearted, childless woman.” Off Limits is a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace. 

In the sixth episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the academic workplace, three researchers describe their personal experiences of loss and how their respective institutions handled it, both practically and emotionally.Krista Harrison, a geriatrics researcher at University of California, San Francisco, recalls colleagues being very supportive when she suffered a spate of deaths in her family. But overall she needed advice, direction and resources and, ideally, a year off from having to think about writing grants. She set up a grief group and wrote articles calling for academia to shift norms and expectations around loss and bereavement leave.In 2023 a colleague of Katie Derington, a cardiovascular researcher at University of Colorado Anschutz in Aurora, died of a chronic illness after being hospitalized for around a month. At the time of her death she was co-author on a series of papers with Derington and other colleagues.Derington describes having to contact her colleague’s grieving widower to complete documentation related to the team’s soon-to-be-published article. This icky” experience also prompted her to write an article ​​​​​​​calling for academic publishers to show more compassion to bereaved authors.But how do you juggle mourning a colleague with a lengthy to-do list at work? Putting off an administrative task for a couple of months is okay, Derington says. There’s very, very few things in academia that are truly the fire is on the house.”Shannon Bros, an emeritus ecologist at San Jose State University in California, says support from counselling team colleagues would have helped when her department chair died of cancer. But seeing people having a good time on campus provided an epiphany. I looked around and went, ‘How many times have I walked anywhere and not seen people in pain? It changed me.​​​​​​​’”

Wendy Dossett tells Adam Levy why the stigma of having an alcohol dependence in academia can be a huge barrier to seeking help. “We’re supposed to be the brightest and the best, moving the frontiers of knowledge forward,” says Dossett, who has been in recovery for 20 years. “We’re not supposed to be struggling with cognitive issues, mental health problems, damaging ourselves in the way that somebody with an alcohol addiction is doing.”   Dossett, now an emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of Chester, UK, says that as an early career researcher she saw alcohol as the fuel to her academic life, driving her creativity and making the social elements of academic life easier to navigate. When, in her 30s, a colleague suggested she might need help, Dosett says she felt a “mixture of horror and absolute gratitude that somebody had the courage and care for me.” She went on to research the spiritual elements of recovery from addiction, which she says is less talked about in academia than, say, depression and anxiety. Victoria Burns, a social work scholar at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, founded Recovery on Campus Alberta after telling her Dean that she had an alcohol dependence. He told her she was the first academic to disclose in his 26-year career, prompting her to research other Deans’ experiences of faculty disclosing addiction and recovery. This is the fifth episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace, including religion, bereavement, activism and sizeism.  

Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist who studies attitudes towards religion in academic workplaces, says that scientists often feel they cannot be open about their faith at work.  In the fourth episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace, she tells Adam Levy: “I would love for academic scientists to recognize that religious scientists can be good scientists, to break down some of their own stereotypes, and to see religion as just one of those identities that sits along other sides, other identities, like one’s social class and background.”  Ecklund, who leads the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says that despite the reticence felt by many religious scientists, many of their colleagues are in fact quite open to their colleagues’ beliefs, based on her research. But some marginalized groups can face particular challenges. Maisha Islam, research culture lead at the University of Southampton, UK, shares her experiences of alienation as a British Bangladeshi Muslim woman. These range from a lack of accommodations to comments made by colleagues. “We almost put a target on our backs for having advocated for them in the first place. We are constantly pushing at closed doors,” she says.

Theo Newbold featured in a 2022 careers article about sizeism in science which discussed some accommodations that could make a difference in the workplace. Some follow-up comments on the discussion platform Reddit questioned whether Newbold and other interviewees in the article were suited to a career in academia.Newbold, a PhD student in plant pathology and diversity, equity and inclusion advocate at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, says the feedback made her feel “as someone who doesn’t want to be perceived as the complaining fat person.”They are joined by Katharine Hubert, who was diagnosed by Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, shortly after starting a PhD at the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2019. The two researchers discuss some of the workplace accommodations and attitudinal changes that could make academia a more welcoming environment.This is the third episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace.Previous episodes feature activist academics who join campus protests and civil disobedience activities. Future episodes will include the experiences of religious scientists at work, and bereavement.

In May 2024, Uli Beisel signed what she thought was a fairly innocuous petition. But it led to her face being printed in a national tabloid. This was after student demonstrators at the Free University of Berlin had occupied a lecture theatre in protest at the ongoing Israel assault on Gaza. The university called the police to clear the space.The open letter that Beisel and others signed didn’t take a position on the conflict, but instead called on university leadership to defend free speech and the right to peaceful process. But Uli — alongside several other of the 1000- plus signatories — was named and pictured in the Bild newspaper. There, she and others were labelled a “university perpetrator” complicit in “Israel hate”. Beisel, a human geography researcher at the institution, says the tone of some of the reporting made her fear for her safety on campus. She also worried about how colleagues and students would react. The university responded by offering legal advice and issued a statement that they valued our opinion, says Beisel. After the story appeared it was reported that Germany’s higher education ministry had looked into stripping some signatories of federal funding. In the second episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace, Adam Levy investigates tensions that sometimes surface when academics become activists. Beisel is joined by climate scientist Peter Kalmus. Kalmus dates his activism back to 2006 when he was midway through a physics PhD at Columbia University, New York, and had just become a father for the first time.  Speaking in a personal capacity, Kalmus, who is now based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, described the arrival of his older son as “a kick in the pants,” making him “think more broadly about the world and what the world was going to be like when he was grown up.” In April 2022 Kalmus and three colleagues padlocked themselves to a JPMorganChase bank entrance in Los Angeles, California, in protest at fossil fuel financing. The two researchers discuss how institutions can better support scholars whose concern for human rights and the future of the planet, often informed by their own research, leads to activism. Kalmus concludes: “I think we’re here to try to make a better world for everyone. Being part of this struggle is in some ways really joyful and really meaningful. I definitely do not want to sit on the sidelines.”