People, not projects

My time as a postdoc in the U.S. contrasted sharply, and poorly, with my experience as a graduate student in the UK. It began with a stint at Harvard Medical School, where I spent 2 years working by myself on a project in direct competition with a larger collaboration involving two famous labs, but using much of the same resources (including frogs). It was a situation which many academics have since independently (and using precisely the same words) told me sounds like “an extreme, but typical, Harvard Med experience”.

People did not talk to one another about their science; in fact, they seemed afraid to (perhaps in case their coffee was poisoned). I was bewildered; after my PhD experience at the University of Cambridge, I didn’t understand why a competitive environment also necessitated extreme suspicion of everyone around you, especially people who didn’t even work on similar projects. I had spent 4 years chatting endlessly with others about my work, and listening to theirs. I had naïvely assumed that this collegial experience I had in graduate school was representative of the academy as a whole. This was to be the beginning of a continuing education in how misleading anecdotal experiences in academia are.

I realized that I was on a dead-end track (along with the NIH research project grant supporting me) and moved to a second postdoc position at Tufts. Even in a more collegial environment, I began to realize that the academy suffered from systemic flaws. The system seemed focused entirely on getting data to write papers to get grants to get more papers. Why, I wondered, is there so little attention to who we are allowing to participate in research, and where they end up?

While carrying out my day job as a postdoc (left-right patterning in frogs), I started to become more interested in studying the scientific enterprise itself. One piece of advice often given to aspiring academics is to “find a problem no-one else is working on and establish yourself in that field”. I was surprised to discover how low the fruit was hanging in the questions I could ask about people in science. For example, we have no idea how many postdocs there are. In any country. In the U.S., the NSF is unable to count them, seemingly because many institutions are unable to. The NIH keeps no track of how many its taxpayer dollars supports. I wondered, how can we possibly know if our system of training works if nobody knows who is being trained, and where they end up?

I began to shift my research interests from frogs to early career researchers (a transition I always joke is easier than people think, perhaps to be described in a future post). I helped organize a conference seeking to give voice to the perspectives of this population in the academy, which eventually became a non-profit, Future of Research, that I had the great privilege of serving as Executive Director for 3 years. In that time I worked on investigating the problems facing people, and particularly the next and forthcoming generations of researchers, and how to solve them. I sat on a number of committees, steering groups and other bodies working with other stakeholders to bring up and fix these issues.

However, it became very clear to me that there is an endless cycle of pearl-clutching committees and reports, constantly pointing out what is clearly wrong with how people are trained, treated and tracked in our profession, but failing to bring about much change. It is not because of the lack of data about the problem (which I first assumed was the case) but, ultimately, a lack of will on the part of the stakeholders to take responsibility for people in the system. This is because it is a system that works for the group of people who are also the ones in charge. There was no sympathy for the people in the system, nor responsibility to the people funding the system who ultimately lose out when this talent is not used to its greatest potential. Simply put, it is in no-one’s financial interest to prioritize supporting researchers over supporting projects, and the grants that fund them.

There were only so many times I could be told to my face that change wasn’t going to happen because of the lack of the will, and not the means, to do so. I parted ways with Future of Research in June 2019, and was somewhat unclear as to how to move forward in what had become a personal passion, trying to help the people in research.

Over the last few months, I have begun to create a consultancy that works with individual organizations who accept that they have a problem because of the issues facing the next generations of researchers, and want help to solve it. It has already been much more personally rewarding to work with people who want to have their problems solved, let alone admitting they have one.

I am still extremely focused on the people in this system, and so in this blog and my advocacy work I will continue sharing data about the reality of the academy, and the gaps in our knowledge about it, and to lend my expertise and experience to those who are working to help the people in this system. To that end, I will post regularly about research taking place about people in the academy; various efforts that you can get involved with that I am following among my network; and also hopefully answer your questions about the people who go through the academy. Please, if you have thoughts or questions, feel free to get in touch - you can email, tweet, or chat on Facebook or LinkedIn.

There is plenty of attention on projects in science - see all the focus on papers and grants. But look around, and notice how little you see about the people who work on them.