Life as an Early Career Researcher is rather uncertain. The conditions for most postdocs aren’t really great and the availability of professorships isn’t increasing at the same rate as the number of PhDs entering the academic career path – we talk about this, regularly.

So it makes sense to seriously consider other career options, and we do so every now and then, too.

For this episode, I talk to Dr. John Stowers, engineer, neuroscientist, and founder of “LoopBio”, about the transition from postdoc to technology business founder!

In March, Bart visited the bi-annual meeting of the German Neuroscience Society (NWG) in Göttingen. And he took his brand new digital audio recorder with him! So this is the first time we can present impressions from the field!

Bart interviewed professor Karin Nordström, graduate student Robert Kossen, and a former researcher and now entrepreneur John Stowers about what brings them to the conference, and when and why students should begin attending.

Filipa M. Ferreira, MSc, is a PhD candidate in neuroimmunology in Zurich, Switzerland. She studies the onset and development of multiple sclerosis (MS). Filipa is also involved with the
Young Scientist Network (LSZYSN) of Life Science Zurich, a student organization that brings together life science companies and early career scientists.

Filipa informs early career scientists about the jobs they can find outside academia, about the skills they need to develop, and about opportunities for entrepreneurship during and after the PhD.

In her week at @SfPRocur, Filipa wants to make clear that there’s no such thing as an ‘alternative’ career in science. “A conscious decision to stay in academia is as brave as the decision to leave it.”

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Tabitha Moses is an MD-PhD student specializing in translational neuroscience at Wayne State University in Detroit, USA. Her work focuses on substance use and mental health in underserved and stigmatized communities.

She is also interested in understanding the different views of physicians and activists about the rights of people with disabilities, such as deafness or autism. Through her research, she hopes to make long-term changes in our understanding and policy about these issues.

During her curation on @sfprocur, Tabitha will talk about the ways she is involved in changing society. She wants to show that there is always an opportunity to work for the change you want to see in the world, no matter who you are or what your career looks like at the moment.

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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.

In 2017, Hugo Bettencourt was finalist of the Portuguese section of the science communication competition ‘FameLab’, and appeared at the Noite Europeia dos Investigadores 2017. Here, he talks about this experience.

FameLab is an international science communication competition initiated by the British Council. Hugo explains the application process, and what is expected from the presentations. He also shares some of what he learned in the special science communication workshop for finalists. At the end he had a great experience and made some friends. And it even got him some additional gigs as a science communicator.

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