Life as an early career researcher in academia is full of uncertainties: Low pay, high expectations to sacrifice personal life and international mobility, short-term contracts, and high competition for funding and long-term positions characterize the path from PhD to professorship. Is it all worth it? Do I have the skills for an industry job? What would I want to do outside academia? The answers depends on who you are and what your personal situation is.

That sexual harassment, bullying, but also academic misconduct such as advisers plagiarizing their student’s work, happen in academia has never been a big secret. Rumors and scandals over the mistreatment of students, grad students, postdocs, and so on, have been accompanying my whole career. So called ‘whisper networks’ warn each other to stay away from certain professors.

And, where power differentials between members of a community are so large, abuse of power is probably not completely preventable.

One of the most daunting things I faced when preparing my first communication attempts was not WHAT I was going to talk about, but HOW?!

It helped me A LOT to understand that there are 4 CORE ELEMENTS that pretty much every communication piece needs. With those in mind, I could start figuring out what my main message should be. It made starting to write / script / create SO much easier.

In this episode, Bart and Dennis discuss the use of animals in research, and a new statistical method that may allow publishing previously unpublishable research results.

I spoke with Dr. Deboki Chakravarti about transitioning from a PhD to science communication. Dekobi recently received her PhD in bioengineering for her research on fighting cancer. But she had already decided to leave academia and instead move into a career as science communicator. Leveraging her experience as a YouTuber, Deboki did an internship with Scientific American.

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Open science for some people it is just science done correctly. For others it is the revolutionary change in the whole academic culture. These different perspectives are highly dependent on your views on the role of science in society, who your advisers were which fields your were in, which career stages you reached, and where you live and work.

In this episode I talk with Dr. Jon Tennant about open science. He is a paleontologist who is now predominantly active in building an Open Science community. He has published several articles on open science and initiated the Open Science MOOC, among many other activities.

Resources:

• Jon Tennant on Twitter
• The Open Science MOOC origin story “What Collaboration Means to Us: We are more powerful when we work together as a community to solve problems”
• Open Science MOOC
• Open Science MOOC Slack Community
• Welcome to the world of Open Science
• Open Source: The definition and the Four Freedoms

Dr. Dennis Eckmeier is a neuroscientist who ended his 13-year research career in 2018. He taught himself audio-visual communication during a year-long ‘self-financed sabbatical’. He is now available for hire  as a neuroscience consultant (including writing and editing) and science communicator.

Dennis founded Science for Progress in 2017, following his involvement with the March for Science in Lisbon, Portugal. His main goal is for society and governments to make good choices regarding policies that concern academia, or are more generally informed by science. To achieve this, he wants to support science communication projects and efforts to improve academia, and inform the public about policy-relevant science.

Dennis is also still passionate about neuroethology, the neuroscience of natural animal behaviors.

During his week on @sfprocur, Dennis will talk about Science for Progress, his experience as a researcher, and his work in podcasting and web video creation.

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In this episode Bart and Dennis talk about He Jiankui’s experiment, who announced the birth of the first genetically modified babies.

Dr. Bart Geurten is a neuroscientist working as staff researcher at Göttingen University, Germany. There he learned how to work with genetic tools in the fruit fly. He is also co-host of the Science for Societal Progress podcast.

During his week as curator on @sfprocur, Bart will write about live as a postdoc, career and family issues.

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Pseudoscience is like a thorn in my brain. Besides being potentially dangerous when people rely on “alternative” “medicine” instead of finding actual help, sometimes it just bothers me when somebody is wrong on the internet. So it was time to relax a bit about it.

For this episode Bart and I tried something new. On Sunday, July 7th, we went on YouTube and played a game! We read pseudoscience stories to each other, trying to make the other guy laugh about it! And among the people who sent us their pseudoscience stories, we randomly chose a winner who got a t-shirt from our merchandize store!

Besides the edited podcast episode, you can also watch it on YouTube: