Dr. Cleyde Helena is a neuroendocrinologist from Brazil, who moved to the USA eleven years ago. She currently works as an Academic Account Manager, and she also consults about sales for protocols.io. She believes in the company and in their motto for increasing the quality and reproducibility of science.

You may already know her from our podcast episode on the Recovering Academic Podcast. In this podcast, she and the other two members of their team talk about the experience of leaving academia, and how to manage the career transition period professionally and emotionally.

Once a month I sit down with my friend and co-host Bart Geurten. We talk about things within and around academia, and exchange opinions on earlier episodes.

In this episode, we first talk about the concept of overlay journals in the context of the newly founded community based journal “Neurons, Behavior, Data Analysis, and Theory”. NBDT is a journal for computational neuroscience, and it’s community lead, completely free, open, and not for profit.

We then talk about the role researchers should play in the dissemination of science to the public. This discussion has been on the internet for a while. In one of her recent youtube videos, the German science communicator Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim picked it up. She says, scientists should be forced to write summaries for a lay readership for every one of their articles.

And in the main section we revisit my interview with Hélène Pidon on GMOs. We talk about the fears we think are behind the anti-GMO sentiments, and why the verdict of the EU court on gene modification was unscientific.

Dr. Mathis Riehle is Reader in Cell Engineering at the University of Glasgow. By documenting different things from a typical week of a Principal Investigator (PI), he will show how diverse the job of a scientist can be. His other passion are scientific sketchnotes that he takes while attending talks.

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While the number of PhD graduates per year is rising worldwide, the number of proper long-term or permanent positions in academia isn’t. This leaves PhDs with ever decreasing chances of staying in academia. And it means that increasing numbers PhDs stay postdocs for a decade or longer, only to have to leave after all.

Dr. Susan Leemburg is a neuroscientist from the Netherlands who lives in Switzerland. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Zurich, she is currently looking for a new position in academic research.

Susan is a volunteer with Science for Progress, and she has her own project Highlighter to showcase women in STEM in Switzerland. She also is passionate about informing people about animal experiments, and about do-it-yourself techniques in science research.

During her curation, Susan will be tweeting from San Diego, where she is visiting “Neuroscience”, the annual conference of the “Society for Neuroscience” (SfN) – the biggest neuroscience conference in the world, with over 30 000 attendees. She will tell us which topics got her excited at the conference. Other topics will be women in science, and animal experiments. And finally she wants to talk about DIY science/citizen science and how it’s not only just fun, but can be used to make the world better as well.

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Dr. Katharina Hennig recently received her PhD in physics in Grenoble, France. Her thesis focused on understanding the mechanics of cell migration. Moving through your body is a critical function of cells, for example during immune responses, and development.

Katha is convinced that even the smallest effort in sharing experiences, facts and advances in science with a broader audience can foster trust and excitement and might ultimately lead to a better reputation of research. This is why she uses her twitter account to share her experiences as a scientist, and to communicate science to a broader audience. She further illustrates biological processes and writes science-related stories which she publishes on online blogs and collect on her own website.

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This episode is the first ‘Q&A’ episode, where my new co-host Dr. Bart Geurten (see episode 8) and I talk about what’s new in academia. Our conversations are free form and may lead us astray here and there.

We discuss the concept of ‘merit’ in the natural sciences. And we begin with a quick recap on episode 9, where I talked to Dr. Björn Brembs about the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The JIF is a metric designed to measure the impact a journal had in the scientific community. There are many problems with how JIFs are generated. What is even worse is the misuse of this metric for estimating the scientific ability of a single author of one article published in a journal.

Gwen Frank has been a curator, before. This week, she returns to report from the Open Access Week!

The Open Access Week is an event series by OpenAIRE and FOSTER, who are giving webinars and tutorials all week long!

Check out the whole program for the Open Science Week!

Gwen Franck is a ‘Jack of all Trades’ for Open Science. From Ghent, Belgium, she works with EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries), partnering in OpenAIRE and FOSTER. She curates the related twitter accounts @openaire_eu and @fosterscience. She holds a masters degree in Medieval History and Political Sciences. Gwen is specifically interested in creating tailor-made materials and events in order to reach all researchers, not only those already very familiar with Open Science tools and workflows.

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Plant geneticists are not happy with the European judgement on gene editing

Dr. Hélène Pidon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research. She searches for genes that give plants resistance to diseases. She wants to use these genes to fortify cultivated Barley against these diseases, and thus reduce the amount of pesticides used to grow the plant. When the European Court of Justice ruled on the status of crops modified with gene editing methods like CRISPR, Hélène contacted me to talk with me about GMO crops.

Valerie Bentivegna studied bioscience engineering, and almost finished her PhD in cancer research. Born in the USA, she grew up in Belgium and studied in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Scotland. She believes that policies should be science based, and that science is important for the advancement of society. Scientists should get off of their high tower and speak to the public. She herself loves finding creative and innovative ways to engage young and adult audiences with STEM subjects. And she loves it more than research.

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