Working Scientist

Uschi Symmons says that attending a workshop about individual development plans (IDPs) during her molecular biology postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia blew her mind. Going away and crafting her own IDP helped her to identify technical skills she lacked, and consider alternative career options beyond academia.But one limitation of IDPs is that they don’t always take personal lives and values into account, says Symmons, who is now a programme manager at the European Innovation Council, the EU funding agency for breakthrough innovation, based in Brussels. In her case she needed to accommodate family priorities also, alongside her own career ambitions.In the second episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on career planning, Julie Gould assesses how IDPs compare to more formal coaching sessions with careers guidance professionals, who either work on a one-to-one basis or in small groups to help researchers plan their careers.“I act as a kind of mirror,” says careers coach Sarah Blackford. Blackford and other career coaches who feature in the episode say they ask clients open questions and then reflect back they’ve told her about their skills, ambitions, priorities and personal circumstances. The next step, Blackford adds, is to help them develop an action plan to identify their longer-term goals.Each episode in this series concludes with a sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) with the support of the China Association for Science and Technology.The ISC is exploring perspectives on career development in a changing world through conversations with emerging and established scientists on themes such as policy, AI, transdisciplinarity, mental health and international collaboration.

Many junior researchers see career planning as a luxury item, feeling unable to spare time in their busy personal and professional lives to plan their next move or work out longer-term goals.In the first episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning in science, Fatimah Williams, founder of Professional Pathways, a training and coaching company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says: “People get lost because they’re either just kind of getting head down, getting the work done. They’re not popping up every so often to say: 'Am I where I want to be? Do I have the skills to get where I want to go? Do I have the relationships to get where I want to go next?' ”Williams is joined by careers consultant Sarah Blackford. Blackford, whose clients include European universities and research institutes, describes some of the career planning frameworks that can help identify longer-term goals, including her own PhD Career Choice Indicator.Cynthia Fuhrmann, who leads the Professional Development Hub, a US-based initiative to help early career scientists, says career planning falls into three phases. This involves building awareness of yourself and your needs and priorities, and then investigating different types of career paths, before finally preparing for roles you might be interested in.The episode concludes with Julia Yates, an organizational psychologist at City St George’s University in London. Yates outlines her own research, which looked at less formal career planning strategies employed by recent graduates as they searched for jobs.

Women are woefully under-represented in Nepalese science, says Babita Paudel. She blames a combination of gender stereotyping, a paucity of female role models and mentors, poor networking opportunities, institutional discrimination, and a societal pressure that pushes them towards other professions.  To tackle the challenge, Paudel developed the Women in STEM Network Database, a resource aimed at building a strong mentoring community of female scientists across the Himalayan kingdom. Paudel also runs workshops, training sessions and seminars to help equip women with technical skills, research methodologies and leadership training.   Her advice to female colleagues? “If you face barriers, also break them, not just for yourself, but for the next generation of women in STEM. Your journey can inspire change that that also you need to think.  And most importantly, enjoy the process. Science is about curiosity, discovery and innovation. So stay passionate, keep learning and trust that you are making a difference.”  Paudel, who is based at the Centre for Natural and Applied Sciences in Kathmandu, is the final researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work. Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series' aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature's Black Employee Network.  

JoAnn Trejo co-leads the Faculty Mentor Training Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) medical school, where, thanks to her efforts, the number of tenure-track faculty members from under-represented groups shot up by 38% from 2017 to 2022.  Trejo, a pharmacologist whose research helps to develop drugs to treat vascular diseases, says her mentor colleagues understand that their mission and responsibility is training the next generation of scientists and providing opportunities for them. She describes the people who supported her at the early career stage, and the impact they had. “When I reflect on my life and I think about how a poor Mexican American farm worker kid from an impoverished background, became a scientist professor, it’s actually extraordinary,” she says. Trejo is the seventh researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work. Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series' aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature's Black Employee Network. 

Joslynn Lee seeks to bring Indigenous values and heritage into her chemistry and biochemistry teaching at Fort Lewis College. The institution in Durango, Colorado, is a Native American-serving non-tribal institution where 30% of its student population identifies as Indigenous, Native American or Alaska Native.Lee’s efforts to bridge the Native American worldview with Western science stem from childhood walks with her nálí (paternal grandmother), who pointed out the medicinal properties of plants, and an undergraduate professor who was interested in Lee's background and how Indigenous values and culture could be applied to organic chemistry. Lee, an associate professor whose research focus includes the microbial makeup of acid mine drainage in the mountains and rivers surrounding Durango, is the sixth researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work.

Arezoo Khodayari and Laurie Barge started a mentoring collaboration more than a decade ago, providing students at California State University Los Angeles (Cal State LA) with paid research opportunities at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in nearly Pasadena, where Barge is based. Khodayari, an environmental scientist at Cal State LA, a minority-serving institution where more than 75% of students identify as Hispanic, says their partnership came about when they co-hosted a student intern who was seeking to turn her summer research project at JPL into a master's thesis. Barge's JPL lab explores the potential for the emergence of life on other worlds, more than a decade ago.The pair realized they could create more projects that are focused at the intersection of astrobiology and environmental science. ​​​​​​Khodayari, a first generation college student who grew up in Iran before moving to the US aged 24 for a PhD at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, describes her passion for teaching and research, and how the two scientific disciplines are a good fit. They combine a focus on ecosystems and habitability of planets, she says.

Vukosi Marivate helps to build scientific communities and networks for African researchers in machine learning and artificial intelligence. These include Deep Learning Indaba, an events and awards programme inspired by the isiZulu word for gathering. Marivate, a computer scientist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, says Indaba came about to “bring together the African community to strengthen machine learning, so that we can contribute, shape and ultimately be our own owners of these coming technologies.”Marivate also co-founded the startup Lelapa AI, inspired this time by the Setswana word for home. An early project for the company, which aims to be a home for the top AI talent and researchers in Africa, was to build natural language processing systems for Africa languages. There are more than 2000 of them, he says.The computer scientist, based at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, is the fourth researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work.

A paper co-authored by Tatsuya Amano was rejected recently without review because its level of English did not meet the journal’s required standard. His research suggests that 38% of researchers who are not fluent in English have experienced similar rejections.Amano, whose first language is Japanese, describes how dismantling language barriers will result in improved knowledge sharing, and in the long run, better research.Journals, he argues, can help by taking steps to distinguish the quality of science from the quality of language when assessing manuscripts. And conference organizers can adopt a range of measures to support presenters and attendees whose first language is not English.The biodiversity researcher is one of eleven scientists leading TranslatE, a project which strives to make environmental science more accessible to non-fluent English speakers.AI and translation tools can bring huge benefits to researchers like him, he says, but they won’t all have been trained on many of the world’s estimated 7000 different languages, deepening inequities in science. Cost is another factor, particularly for those in global south countries. “People from high income countries may be more likely to benefit from those emerging AI technologies,” he says.

Rana Dajani studies epigenetics of trauma in vulnerable communities around the world. A molecular biologist based at the Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan, her research explores what genes are turned on and off through trauma and if they are transferred to future generations.In the second episode of an eight-part podcast series to accompany Nature's Changemakers in science Q&A series, collection, Dajani, a daughter of refugees, talks about some formative influences and how she now collaborates with Jordan’s Circassian and Chechen populations, who were violently evicted from their homelands almost two hundred years ago. “I had a treasure trove in my backyard to discover novel gene risk factors for disease that nobody else had discovered, because of their very unique gene pool,” she says.Changemakers launched last year as a follow-up to the journal's Racism in Science special issue.Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series' aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature's Black Employee Network.