The challenges of being a non-university researcher: recruiting students

Tags

altac, funding, graduate students, recruitment

I’ve written before about how the UK’s system of funding research puts too much emphasis on students (and also doesn’t work particularly well). And as someone who’s never worked directly in a university (hooray for government, NGO, and museum science!) student recruitment has been a particular frustration of late.

As an undergrad, I was fortunate enough to have someone take a chance on an unproven wannabe scientist, and grateful that someone did again when I started my PhD (for the record, I looked at my CV this morning when I sent it in to my PhD program: no research experience before my 2-year masters, no publications, 1 conference presentation, no grants/awards. Goodness me those were the days). I recognized early on that the traditional metrics by which we often assess and recruit graduate students are biased. And I see this now, nearly 2 decades (!) later now that I am what might be called a “Principle Investigator”.

Early on, I told myself I would do my best to pay things forward, as they had been done for me as a grad student, and one of the areas this includes is in student recruitment. The problem, though, is that being not based at a university, the opportunities for ANY student recruitment are limited and hampered, let alone when one is trying to subvert the very system one relies on.

The Natural History Museum is a research institution (so we can hold grants from bodies like UKRI and ERC, for example), but does not have degree-awarding powers, so we have to rely on finding a university co-supervisor who either a) aligns with the project, and has capacity/interest to take on another student, or b) is happy to be totally uninvolved save for the university admin and box ticking that a graduate degree requires. Neither is terribly abundant or preferable, in my experience.

And this is before we hit on funding. Many universities have their own funding (through teaching assistantships, a central graduate studies pot of money) which can take some of the financial burden off the supervisor for funding the whole cost (a PhD student in the UK has total costs of ca. £25,000/year, including salary and some basic research costs). I’m purposefully ignoring DTP-esque funding here because a) it’s an awful system, b) it rewards the same biases I first noticed decades ago, and c) it still relies on finding that university-based (co)supervisor, who will be limited in the number of DTP applications they can be involved in.

I find this particularly frustrating because I know several amazing people who’ve approached me to join my “lab” (an entity that doesn’t really exist) and who I would take on in a heart-beat. I can’t chat about grad school meaningfully with prospective students at conferences because so much of the process is out of my hands and seemingly uninfluenceable. I can’t pay forward the chances folks gave me, and that’s gut-wrenching.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s lots about being a non-academic scientist that I adore, and I wouldn’t change my current job (much) for the world. But when we think about how the next generation of scientists is being recruited, trained, and funded, and by whom, I wonder if we should be thinking a little bit differently.

Free project ideas in ecology & conservation

Tags

free ideas, free projects, research, science

I have a long list of projects I’d love to get to at some point (on top of the ones that I’ve already started…). Some are just neat ideas I’ve had, others are part of a long-term research agenda. And then there are the fleeting thoughts or reactions to other work that make me think: hey, it would be cool if someone did that (the important bit is that the someone doesn’t necessarily have to be me).

For a while, I’ve dispensed these on twitter with a non-sequential list of “free project ideas” so I thought I would collect them all here, and add a few others from my list that I genuinely don’t think I’ll have time for. Feel free to take these and run with them. Some are possibly dead ends. Some could be nice analyses in “Big Journals™”. But I will leave these outcomes as an exercise for the reader.

If you want, I could potentially help out (depending on what other projects I have on), but either way, I’d appreciate letting me know and hopefully being acknowledged. So without further ado…

 

Alex’s Non-sequential List of Free Project Ideas (last updated 07 March 2020)

free project idea #85: a survey of the 2019 issues of n journals in <field of study>. What proportion of figures were in colour, and what proportion of those are colour-blind and/or B&W printing friendly? How many journals have those suggestions in their authors instructions?

free project idea #18: geographic diversity of authors of the last 11 iterations of the annual conservation horizon scan that appears in TREE, with matching exercise from authors of unrepresented countries/regions

free project idea #43: frequency and causes of runt eggs in bird clutches.

free project idea #31: survival analysis of government ministers (within & among jurisdictions) in relation to progress in environmental & social policies. Does high ministerial turn-over correlate to stagnation of legislation?

free project idea #72: apply this paper to the entire British Isles seabird colony database, and overlay hydrocarbon development, shipping routes, offshore wind farms, and protected areas. See where the gaps & important areas are (or at least where to focus yet more tracking work).

free project idea #58: reanalyse seabird stable isotope data for a year (between 2006-2016) without ignoring model/data assumptions and see how the interpretation changes. We’ve learned a lot, but older papers still cited as gospel.

free project idea #29 – review of how we calculate, and then incorporate detection probability in bird population surveys, from the field collection through to the modelling side. Does this change conclusions (aka does it matter) and if so, can we retrospective account for it?

Free project idea #37: sentiment analysis of visual depictions in the media of global heating, as manifested in stories about heatwaves, or very above seasonal temperatures. They’re not happy events:

free project idea #6: look at the accuracy & recentness of data used in Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) and Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs). Some are quite old (>30 years!) & in need of updated assessments.

free project idea #61: what drives intraspecific variation in breeding phenology among north Atlantic auks? Why do UK puffins hatch before Canadian puffins have even laid their egg?

free project idea #23: run sustainability models (e.g., potential biological removal) for species that are permitted to be culled/were covered under the former Natural England general license. How does this compare with other sources or mortality?

free project idea #78: how do seabird foraging metrics (max speed, distance, etc) from tracking data relate to incubation shift? A phylogenetically controlled study that makes predictions about untracked species could be useful for designating marine Important Bird Areas.

Reflection in science

Tags

slow science, writing

And no, not as in the mirror kind.

In what’s becoming (or seeming to become) an increasingly frenetic research environment, where turn-around times at journals, strict (and too short) deadlines on studentships, and the drive (either from perceived need or desire) to “get papers out” are often thought of as the default. I’ve noticed it lately as I supervise students and collaborate on projects, and as a result, my list of “current projects” falls into a highly bimodal distribution: 1) languishing for months, 2) needed my attention yesterday.

It seems astonishing that this cultural emphasis has shifted to much (or perhaps just how I perceived it shifting) in the 8 years since I obtained my PhD. This also makes mentoring students today all the more challenging, because their experiences are already diverging from my own (and we all know the “I got a tenure-track professorship before I’d handed in my PhD and with only a paper in a mid-tier specialist journal” argument gets really old really fast).

Now, I am wary of this becoming a “when I was your age” post, written from the opulent luxury of a permanent job in my field. Jobs are seemingly getting harder to get, grants are most certainly more competitive, and the mighty Journal Impact Factor and h-index are (foolishly, in my view) used by those who make decisions about hiring, promotion, and funding. To say nothing of the biases some of my friends & colleagues experience (where it seems that nothing is ever enough to merit X). And this is all made easier by the electronic modes of communication (physically posting 3 copies of a paper to a journal, who posted it to reviewers took longer… and yes, I have indeed experienced it!).

From a PI perspective, this all manifests in how I prioritise the science I work on – student manuscripts, and funded work to the front. Which has relegated a great deal of “my science” to the back-burner. Projects from my postdoc that I had to shelve, important, but “low impact” research that I think needs done, and work that I would love to do, but is more often funnelled into student projects (which is a mixed blessing in the UK). In the past I’ve been too eager to say yes to things that were tangential to my focus or interests.

Sure, part of this is down to career progression as well as temporal effects (herein lies one of the main challenges of longitudinal studies!). But I wonder if two tools I’ve used frequently in the theatre might help, or at least not be a complete waste of time.

 

The first is an analogy to workshopping. In theatre, a playwright can often take a partially finished work to a theatre troupe and they work together in a methodical way to try different things out. It could be everything from new lines of dialogue to whole new directions of entire acts. The workshopping I’ve been involved in typically lasted 2-3 days and always resulted in a stronger work.

Some departments do something similar with a periodic external audit or “departmental review”, where outside peers assess criteria, speak with department members, and present a series of recommendations for making the department better.

What if we had something similar, but for research programmes? I don’t mean in a harsh “you’re awful, why did you bother doing that” sense, but rather in the theatrical spirit of coming up with a focused and better piece. This is perhaps a more formalized, structured, and intervening way of mentorship (which itself is lacking at the PI level). I’d love to spend 2-3 days with someone without a vested interest in my research to plot strategically which grants to pursue, which to pass, which projects to drive forward, and which new areas of research to look into because at the moment it feels a little too hodge-podge for my liking.

 

The second is the somewhat controversial concept of Slow Science, which advocates for more thinking and a more deliberate, slower pace to scientific production. The challenge is that this call is often made by those not facing the same pressures as students or postdocs looking to secure employment (and to whom so many PIs are inexorably linked), and that long-term funding (more than on a 2-4 year basis) isn’t really forthcoming. Perhaps it would also be helped along by the first exercise, if we assume that “time for science” is finite and at a set level, the more projects in which one becomes involved, the less time each project receives.

My most recent experience with this was 3 (!) years ago when several of us absconded to a friend’s parent’s house in the Swiss Alps for 2 weeks and immersed ourselves in a series of related projects, interspersed with lovely cheese, bizarre German boardgames, and of course hikes in the mountains. I felt truly immersed in what we were doing, and for the first (and only!) time since my PhD focused solely on a group of interrelated publications (and which resulted in all 6 being published, with the overwhelming majority of work taking place on this retreat).

 

But as I said, these ideas may well be luxuries given that my students and collaborators are facing different pressures and have different priorities. In the meantime, I’ve already started trying to refocus some efforts, and have actively discussed a “reset” with a few close colleagues (we’ll find out soon if the grant application that would allow this reset was successful!). And by carving out dedicated time for research (right now, 1 day a week plus an annual writing retreat for 2-3 weeks), I hope to get things back to where I want them: less frenetic and more focused.

Prioritizing the flood of ideas

Tags

#NewPI, funding, languishing projects, students

If you’ve been involved in research for more than a couple of years, chances are you quite quickly start to accumulate a list, even if only in your mind, of Things It Would Be Neat To Do. These could be things that you identify as gaps while pursuing your main research theme, or ideas that spark out of a paper you happened to leaf through while waiting for a meeting to start.

And typically starting around the later years of a PhD, and through postdocs and early career positions, the flood of ideas for things to do keeps, well, flooding. You see gaps, methods that need improving, sites that need investigating, and questions that need answering. And very quickly you realize that you do not have time to do it all.

And so it begins: the search for minions!

Or rather, students, collaborators, or others upon whom you can foist your ideas, your existing data, your passion, in the hopes that they will take the torch and run. At some stage, the list becomes too large for your head, and perhaps like me you make a nice text document on your desktop called “Project Ideas.txt”, and just keep adding to it as the ideas pop in, with the hopes that when a prospective minion comes along, you’ll have just the project for them.

But good heavens is that ever difficult. Perhaps I’ve had a skewed view, having never actually worked in a university, but I have tried several mechanisms to try and get homes for existing datasets, or convince others that the project ideas I’ve had are worth pursuing and met with exceptionally low success.

A few years ago, I tried setting up a page here called Languishing Projects, and every 6 months or so I would update it, send around some tweets or emails, and I might get one or two queries. Usually, though, the query didn’t go anywhere because the querier wasn’t at the right career stage (I had several emails from first or second year undergrads – and not to say that those cohorts aren’t suitable for research, but as they would have been in different cities than I, I couldn’t provide them with the mentorship and guidance needed for projects done at that career stage).

It seems ironic, but I just couldn’t give away data.

Now, some of you would surely suggest simply posting the data somewhere like figshare and someone, somewhere would use it. This wasn’t practical because I wasn’t the sole owner of these data, and in many cases, the data would have needed some significant attention before I would want them released into the wild.

A particular challenge I’ve found is funding and recruiting to studentships. I do marvel at PIs who seemingly receive countless emails asking about being a student in their lab – I can’t remember the last time I had one, let alone one that was in my field (again, though, I’m not at a degree-granting institution). And in the few cases where I’ve been able to find a partnering faculty member, the number of applicants, despite quite broad advertising, has been quite low. And university faculty also have their own flood of ideas, so why would they want to take on yet more?

And then there’s the funding. The way the UK funds postgraduate research is, in my view, quite silly. Students don’t apply to PIs, but to thematic or regional Doctoral Training Partnerships, and those admitted to these DTPs then must be wooed by PIs with projects in the hopes that the student will finally settle on theirs. There’s nothing wrong with a little competition, but it means that if a prospective student contacts me, and I think they might be a great fit for a project I have, they can be rejected by the DTP and that’s the end of that. The success rate, particularly for some (like the London DTP) is more akin to a major NERC or NSF grant, <7% last year.

To say nothing of funding for postdocs.

I think that part of the difficulty is that while I work on seabirds and islands, many of the project ideas are desk- or collections-based. This is advantageous on one hand because they involve very little cost, but at the same time, most students in ecology & conservation are in it (largely) for the field work. Which costs money. Sigh.

So as I often, too, I took to Twitter to ask folks how they dealt with the flood of project ideas. The response were basically to prioritize those that had either students or money associated with them. Not great for me, since mine had neither. And without either of those, partnering with a university PI becomes increasingly difficult (because, well, students and money are hard to find, it seems).

But rather than have this a whinging tirade, my question, dear reader, is what do you do with the projects for which you have no time? The bits of data that could be something if they just had some time put into them (time that none of us have)? Are you resigned to letting them slide off this mortal coil?

And lastly, many of my languishing projects or Ideas That Have Little Chance Of Being Realized are perfectly suitable for honours or UK/Australian MSc/MRes degrees, and some could be bundled up into a nice PhD. So if you fancy collaborating, or have a steady stream of students in need of projects, let’s chat!

A new adventure

Tags

alternative academic careers, jobs, natural history

When I first visited the American Museum of Natural History during my PhD, I was amazed at many things. The room of extinct specimens, the diversity of species represented, the wide array of collections (skins, skeletons, eggs, nests, fluid-preserved, mounts), and the fact that friendly curators basically let me loose in the rooms and I could explore. All for free. It was transformative.

Years later as a postdoc, I visited yet more large museums (the Royal Ontario Museum and Canadian Museum of Nature, to be precise), and found the same thing. And at smaller collections, too, like the New Brunswick Museum, or The Rooms Provincial Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador.

And then four years ago I found an excuse to visit THE Natural History Museum when I moved to the UK. The veritable Mecca of ornithological natural history and museum research. I managed to visit, for research or to drop off specimens collected from my various field travels, a couple of times a year.

Now, I’ll be visiting almost daily.

I’m absolutely thrilled to let you all know that I’ve been appointed the Senior Curator in Charge of the Bird Group at The Natural History Museum, starting this autumn.

I’ve spent nearly four years at the RSPB, and in that time have learned a great deal, done some interesting work, and visited some fascinating places. But the opportunity to work at the NHM in this role was simply too good to pass up. I’ll continue to not be an academic.

The NHM houses 750,000 skins covering 95% of extant bird species, >200,000 egg sets, 17,000 fluid-preserved specimens, 16,000 skeletons, 6000 mounts, and 4000 nests. It also has one of the most extensive (and historically valuable) ornithological libraries in the world, and hosts >1000 visitor-days a year. And like my experiences in New York, Toronto, Gatineau, Saint John, and St. John’s, it has a dedicated team of five fantastic curators who have made my previous visits there welcoming, productive, and exciting.

The bird collection is based at Tring, in Hertfordshire, on an estate donated by Lionel Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild, in the 1930s, which is where I’ll be based, but with regular time spent at the NHM’s larger site at South Kensington in central London, which is where all the fantastic analytical equipment, and other taxonomic groups are based.

My role is a mix of curation and research, and will no doubt feature #OtherPeoplesData, and the challenges of museum documentation as well as my own collections-based and field research. I’ll also be promoting the use of the ornithological collections by other researchers at the museum and from outside, too.

So now begins the transition, the frantic packing as we relocate, and the impending excitement of the next adventure.

In defence of gulls, skuas, and giant petrels

Tags

conservation, giant petrels, gulls, skuas

I’m a lariphile. I love gulls, skuas, and their ilk. I think they’re gorgeous, intelligent, highly adaptable, and I will always have a soft spot for them in my heart. It will not likely come as a surprise to know that this is a minority view.

Gulls, skuas, giant petrels and other predatory seabirds (i.e., those that eat other birds) are often maligned, both in terms of management and in culture. They’re called flying rats, flying garburators, disgusting, and lacking in any redeeming qualities. So what? They can’t understand us, so presumably are immune to humanity’s slanders and insults. We, however, are not.

A Brown Skua (Stercorarius antarcticus) on Gough Island

Gulls, skuas, and giant petrels are seen as horrendous things that eat cute fluffy things which we see as being “better” (in an anthropomorphic sense) than these cruel predators. Newsflash: all birds are predators. None of them can photosynthesize, so they gotta eat. Fish, krill, squid, berries, dead things… you name it. Why then do we cast aspersions upon these species, but not the puffin when it eats herring, or the albatross when it snares a flying fish? Because flying fish and herring are cute and fuzzy and easily portrayed as defenceless individuals by nature documentaries.

Take the BBC’s Planet Earth 2 series, wherein skuas are shown haranguing Chinstrap Penguins on Zavadovski Island. A friend, mostly tongue-in-cheek, asked if the skuas had any redeeming qualities. Why should their foraging mode impact our evaluation of their “worth”?

Lest we believe this is an issue for far-flung islands of the Southern Ocean, consider the plight of gulls in North America and Europe (particularly the UK). They’re seen as pests, a nuisance, and in many areas were historically subjected to extensive “control” (i.e., culling). The result? European Herring Gull is now listed as Red in the UK’s Birds of Conservation Concern. I helped co-edit a special issue of the journal Waterbirds focusing on gulls, and in paper after paper we see the same thing – precipitous declines in both American Herring Gull and Great Black-backed Gull over the last 30 years.

Four Great Black-backed Gulls (Larus marinus) on Gull Island, Newfoundland

On Gull Island, Witless Bay, Newfoundland, for example, there were <30 pairs of Great Black-backed Gulls when I was there in 2011-12 (compared to 115 in 2000-01). In the last 15 years, the islands in Witless Bay have lost >50% of their breeding gulls (read our paper here).

So why aren’t we doing anything about it? Gull control still takes place (though now on a smaller scale than in the 80s and 90s), but if there was “control” of a rapidly-declining albatross, the conservation world would be up in arms. Because gulls are also seemingly ubiquitous in urban environments, they’re also seen as being common (so much so that multiple species are lumped into the highly inaccurate term “seagull”).

After a kerfuffle about a debate on gulls in Aberdeen that took place in the UK House of Commons, I suggested that the following question be a highly relevant one (for conservation and policy) for wildlife management/conservation students:

When it comes to gulls in the UK, it’s a question of how does one manage a threatened species that could easily get multiple ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders)?

And this is highly relevant today, right now, because what we’re doing at the moment clearly isn’t working for the conservation of these species, or the public’s perception of them.

A Southern Giant Petrel (Macronectes giganteus) on Gough Island

Just another example of how species’ ecology and behaviour influences our perception of their conservation need.

In praise of researching (and publishing) “local” conservation science

Tags

conservation, local, publishing

If you’ve published a scientific paper in a journal, you’ll know that part of the challenge is making it relevant to a broad audience. Why should a conservationist in Outer Mongolia, Zambia, Murmansk, or Baton Rouge care about your study? Chances are they study )or are concerned with/interested in) different species in different places. The pressure, therefore is to wrap much of our conservation science in global policy and priority frameworks: the Aichi Targets, multilateral environmental agreements, globally threatened species, or highly imperilled habitats. Which is good and fine and has resulted in lots of policy relevant science and conservation action.

But conservation also operates on a much smaller, more local scale, and with individuals on the ground in communities who can influence local, regional, and national policies and conservation actions. And this requires the science underpinning these actions to be, at least in part, local in nature. Sure, we all know that global warming is driving our planet further down the 6th Great Extinction, but most people will only take action when they see this manifest in their own backyards. Why have the doves returned a month early? Where did all the swifts go? Weren’t there fish in this lake?

And this is where “local” conservation science comes in. And it’s some of the most rewarding science with which I’ve been involved, even though it can be some of the most difficult science to publish. Providing the evidence base for local problems gives scientists and conservationists a better bargaining chip when holding governments to account, to speaking with the public and with media. A local story is usually more relatable than one from a seemingly abstract land far away.

Local conservation needn’t be novel, ground-breaking, cutting-edge, or revolutionary. It’s purpose is rather different, though from an implementation perspective just as important (if not more so). But this very nature makes it a more difficult problem for academic researchers to tackle as it’s unlikely to be of global significance, gain copious citations, or end up in a journal with an impact factor >4. It therefore often falls to scientists in government agencies, independent researchers, and non-governmental organizations to contribute to this science.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a couple of these kinds of studies, and have a few more in the pipeline. We showed migratory patterns and geographic distribution of a Flesh-footed Shearwaters in the northeast Pacific Ocean (Bond & Lavers 2015), and described the current status & threats facing Streaked Shearwaters in the Korean peninsula (Hart et al. 2015). In these papers, we learned a heck of a lot about the species involved, and hope that these will become go-to papers when someone compiles details into whole-species assessments of status, distribution, and threats.

Overall, the key to success with local conservation science is the involvement of local people. The paper on shearwaters in Korea was only possible because of people in Korea. The same is true of the other (as yet unpublished) bits of work I’m involved with. These local connections make the work more likely to be well received (if received at all) by the people who matter (those who will enact policy or implement conservation interventions on the ground). The days of colonial science, where outsiders (often from the UK, US, or other countries with an advanced state of scientific inquiry) come in, do something, leave, and then issue what amount to scientific edicts (which are often promptly ignored) are over (or at least should be).

But, for me, the bottom line is that I find this kind of science fun. It’s adding a piece to a puzzle, and I find it very rewarding, especially when it’s highly driven by local collaborators (I usually just provide some stats, and editing… they do the real work of data collecting, and then working with the community to influence change). And at the end of the day, I like to think that it has some benefit for the species and sites we’re trying to look after.

On finding an error in my own published paper

Tags

correction, publishing, scoters

Dan Bolnick (on Eco-Evo-Evo-Eco) and Meg Duffy on Dynamic Ecology have both posted stories of how they were confronted with, and subsequently addressed, the need to retract or correct their published papers. This fall into the “scientists are humans; humans make mistakes; therefore scientists make mistakes” logical tenet, and they both addressed it wonderfully. Sadly, that’s not always the case.

So to further demonstrate that scientists, as all humans, make mistakes, here is my tale of finding a fairly significant error in my first ever paper.

In my undergrad, I spent a spring at the Point Lepreau Bird Observatory in southern New Brunswick. Yes, past the nuclear exclusion zone and next to a 19th-century lighthouse was a little hut with electricity, a portable heater, radio, and view of the majestic Bay of Fundy. As a one of the more southerly points in the area, it was also a hotspot for migratory birds, mostly seaducks, on their way north to breed. My job: figuring out how many scoters (3 species of mostly-dark seaducks: the Black, Surf, and White-winged Scoters) passed the site in April and early May. I was also generously allowed to analyse the previous 8 years’ data (and have since heard through the grapevine that a student may be updating this work soon!).

The Point Lepreau Bird Observatory in 2004.

I was, at the time, terrible at data analysis and statistics. I had more pivot tables than I knew what to do with, graphs were made in Excel, and I think I used JMP for the various ANOVAs.

But I, and my supervisors, were able to churn out some basic stats on the timing of migration, the peaks, and come up with a crude estimate of how many birds passed the point each year. I would almost certainly analyse the data completely differently today (and I hope the aforementioned student does!). After some fairly minor revisions, it was published in 2007 in Waterbirds, and I was elated – my first publication!

One of the challenges was that the counts were done in 15-minute stints (15 on, 15 off), so in essence I had to double all the counts with the assumption that the number and composition of birds was identical in the counted and uncounted periods.

Except I forgot to do that.

Is that one Black Scoter?

Or two?

I got an email from a member of one of the naturalist club’s members (the observatory was run by the Saint John Naturalists Club at the time) in 2009 pointing out that he thought my numbers were too low. I dug into the terribly formatted awkward files, and realised what we had done (or rather, not done).

I was devastated.

I immediately wrote my supervisors, contrite, and apologetic. We quickly prepared a correction (which essentially doubled the population, so not that insignificant), and emailed the editor who agreed a correction was in order, which we subsequently published.

Unlike Dan or Meg’s stories, this wasn’t a high profile paper, but it was my first one, and one of the very few for which I have a printed issue of the journal on my shelf. But everyone understood it was an honest mistake, and we did what we could to fix it.

I’ve opined before about why there are so few retractions or corrections in conservation biology/ecology, and I don’t see this changing, or being any different. But in the meantime, if anyone finds an error in any of my other published papers (I’m sure there are some floating around), I will happily try to set the scientific record straight.

Why the #LGBTSTEMinar succeeded & was needed

Tags

conferences, LGBTQ

I’ve just returned from a conference, but it was unlike any other conference I’ve attended. The attendees weren’t drawn together because we share similar research interests, or work in similar places, or are from similar institutions. We had physical chemists, medical physicists, medical geneticists, engineers, mathematicians, and conservation biologists from academia, industry, and NGOs. What drew us together was that we were all (or >90% of us were) LGBT* scientists attending the LGBT STEMinar

I’ve written before about the need for LGBT scientists to make links, the challenges we share, regardless of discipline, and how conferences can help that. Which is why, when Beth Montague-Hellen raised the idea of a conference targeted specifically at LGBT scientists, I was quite keen to see how it would turn out.

The actual event in Sheffield on Friday blew me away.

There were more than 80 LGBT scientists attending from all over the UK (and one from Sweden!), plus a few expats living in the UK, such as myself. In addition to amazing high-quality science, it was a chance for us to, frankly, be ourselves. Never have I been to a conference with such a wonderful sense of humour, camaraderie, and palpable excitement among those attending. We didn’t have to worry about awkward coffee break small talk about partners, reactions of colleagues, or be guarded about which pronouns to use. All of these coping mechanisms that hide our true selves are exhausting, and the sense of liberation around the room was infectious.

We opened with Dave Smith’s talk ’No Sexuality Please, We’re Scientists’, based on some of the research he did (and that I highlighted) a few years ago, on the lack of visible LGBT science role models. It was an excellent primer for the day to come, and a video will be up on Youtube in the near future is on Youtube.

What followed were around 15 oral presentations from other scientists, ample time to socialize during long coffee breaks / lunch, and an opportunity to view about a dozen posters.

The day wrapped with an inspiring talk by Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, who highlighted the challenges many LGBT folk in STEM still face – the feeling that by being ’out’, it might impede career progression. But the message that I took away was much bigger. A number of surveys have revealed that even though departments of workplaces may be accepting, though not overtly so, LGBT staff and students still feel a lack of support. It’s not good enough to be accepting, we have to be encouraging.

I’m of the belief that by being an out visible LGBT scientist, it will, in however small a way, be useful for others to see. Not everyone is necessarily comfortable with this role, but I’ve chosen to own in a bit. And since I started blogging about being an out gay academic back in 2013 (though I’ve been out in my personal and professional life for more than a decade), several other LGBT scientists have gotten in touch to discuss the challenges we face as a group, or their own personal journey. I don’t necessarily have all the answers, but the starting point for the conversation is further ahead than many, or all of their straight mentors.

So bringing together all these LGBT scientists who would otherwise not encounter each other (or at least not in nearly so large a number) is a Good Thing.

One of the other most amazing things about this conference is how Twitter-driven it was. Many of us knew each other via Twitter, though had never met in real life. Before Friday, I had only met 3 or 4 other out LGBT scientists. I can now add so many more. More than a few people commented at the end of the day how many new Twitter followers they’d received simply though other attendees. I’ve added as many as I could recall to the QueerSTEM Twitter list, so follow along if you’re interested (or let me know if you’d like to be added!). The conference hashtag apparent trended during the day, and there were more than 500 tweets (which will eventually be organized into a Storify).

There were also many other LGBT scientists (both in the UK and elsewhere) following along on Twitter, and many expressed a wish to attend such a conference. My advice is to just do it. It’s a non-trivial amount of work to pull off, and is likely more challenging in Canada or the US owing to distances between universities, but it is so, so worthwhile. And Beth (and her wife Kate, and all other other helpers from Sheffield) pulled off an amazing day.

Following the official wrap-up function, several of us headed out for a drink and bite to eat. Now, everyone has their own journey when dealing with their sexuality, and had the conference happened during my MSc 10 years ago, I likely wouldn’t have been too $%!&-scared to attend. And many folks live or go to university or work in places where there aren’t that many other queer folk around so the idea of or ability to go out socially with other out LGBT people isn’t possible. So this was clearly a case where the non-science part of a conference could be equally important, and highlights, at least in my mind, the importance of being out and visible.

Lack of diversity in science is a hugely important issue, and our conference was by no means an exception. The vast majority of attendees were white, most were male. I have no idea how this reflects the population of LGBT scientists in the UK, or UK scientists in general, but as we move forward to discussing both visible and invisible diversity, it’s something that we need to keep in mind.

It looks like this might become an annual-ish thing, so I hope to see more of you at the 2017 LGBT STEMinar.

 

*A shorthand, I admit, for any non-straight person

Canadian government postdocs: revived (well, sort of)

Tags

government, postdoc, postdoctoral fellowship, postdoctoral research pilot program, visiting fellowships

I wrote before about the demise of the Visiting Fellowship program, which placed postdocs in Canadian government research labs, and used NSERC as a middleman (middle-agency?).  Recently, the employment practices around this arrangement, particularly whether postdocs were entitled to benefits.  An employment tribunal reasoned that they were, and the program shuttered (though all current VFs were fine through the remainder of their tenure).

Now, it comes to my attention that an open-ended competition for the Postdoctoral Research Pilot Program (PRP) has been posted on the Government of Canada jobs site.  My guess, and those of some informed government colleagues, is that this is the replacement for the old VF program.  But there has been no announcement, no information page, nothing.

Some other interesting queries… all government jobs are classified based on the broad category and salary scale.  Two important ones for our purposes here are RES and EG.  RES is a Research Scientist, and there are 5 levels (RES-5 being the highest). EGs are scientific technicians, with EG-7 being the highest level.  How are PRPs to be classified?  The old VF program scaled salary to n% of the entry level RES-1 (I think it was 85-90%).  If the new PRPs are to be classified (and they would be, as government employees), an entry RES-1 seems most likely.  This is huge, as the base salary in 2013 (the last year of the current collective agreement) is $53,161 (link; search for “SE-RES-1”).  That’s a big improvement on the $49k of the VF program.  It’s even bigger if it includes benefits, which are quite significant in a government job (pension, medical/dental, etc).  So the actual cost goes up considerably.

Where will this new money be found?  Previously, the VF program paid postdocs from their immediate supervisor’s operational budget.  I wonder if the benefits side of things will be similarly covered, or whether that comes from higher up in the department.  And what about unionization? RES positions are represented by PIPSC, and the current agreement is up for renewal.  Granted PIPSC isn’t known to strike as often as the other major federal government labour union (PSAC), but who knows what the future will bring.

One last, yet troubling, word.  The advertisement linked above excludes two of the most science-heavy departments: Fisheries & Oceans Canada, and Environment Canada.  Sources have told me that there continues to be no internal / government postdoc option in these departments, and no indication that one will be appearing soon.  With an already limited pool of postdoc funding, the loss of the VF program, and unavailability of the PRP in all departments puts further strain on PhD graduates in Canada, and especially those who want experience in the public service.