Holiday Questions in Natural History

Posted on July 13, 2014 by Athene Donald

Last week I escaped to the Shropshire hills and blissfully allowed my brain to stop turning over matters concerning committee-work, exams, grants and other responsibilities past, present and future. Instead I have been exercising my limbs up and down the slopes of the Long Mynd and surrounding countryside and refreshing myself in local hostelries, albeit largely with substantial quantities of iced lime and soda to cool me down and replenish my liquid levels after hefty hot walks: the weather was generally kind and the countryside gorgeous and enticing me to walk further than I would have expected my stamina could take me.

The area was delightfully quiet with no major roads. Noise mainly seemed to come from the tractors busily cutting the hay and baling it (or whatever the correct term is for those cylinders tightly wrapped in black plastic; bales from my youth were rectangular), the mechanical growls sounding across the valleys. Gliders circling on the thermals above the Long Mynd also produced an eerie hum as they passed overhead (naively I had thought gliders were silent). But there were also the sounds of chattering swallows as they swooped around farm buildings, the frequent call of chiffchaffs from the hedgerows, the mew of buzzards above the fields and the incessant bleating of (nearly full-grown) lambs who’d temporarily lost their dams.

When indoors my reading matter was also pleasantly irrelevant to my normal daily round. But it seemed particularly appropriate to spend evenings enjoying Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field by John Lewis-Stempel, describing a year on a Herefordshire working farm’s pastures and meadows, situated somewhere not very far south from where I was staying. His descriptions of the meadowlands of the title in the summer months absolutely chimed with the appearance of the fields across which we were walking. Resorting to a scythe (an instrument I dimly remember seeing once in use in my far-distant childhood) when his mechanical equipment for cutting failed, may seem extreme, but he was clearly very much at one with his fields and lingered on descriptions of the wildlife he found therein.

I can feel smug that, without binoculars or even particularly trying, I saw or heard 45 different species of birds (list appended below for the curious) during my walks, a figure I felt that compared extremely favourably with the 55 he listed seeing on or above his fields over an entire year. Nevertheless I also recognized that whereas, erstwhile twitcher that I am I may feel smug about my ornithological identification, my knowledge in just about every other sphere of wildlife is pathetic. The butterflies/moths that I saw were not the ones I recognize from my urban life. They seemed predominantly to come in various shades of brown – sometimes with a tad of orange – but whether a variety of argus, fritillary, brown or something completely different I cannot tell (there was also a splendid caterpillar crossing the Long Mynd trail that seemed to feel no need to avoid our boots).

Likewise I realised my knowledge of the life of trees was sadly lacking. Why, in the village of Norbury, was there a venerable yew located in the churchyard cited on a nearby helpful board as being 2700 years old and still going strong, yet the striking double avenue of beeches up nearby Linley Hill were likewise cited as dying off at a mere 300 years of age. What limits the lifetime of a tree (aside from beetle infestation or other disease or indeed a lightning strike)? Do trees simply die of ‘old age’ and if so why the differential factor of 9 between yew and beech? Can someone please enlighten me as my scientist’s mind is curious!

I was also struck by the birds I did not see, or saw only in tiny numbers. I saw a single curlew with beak delicately probing at a recently cut field of hay but not a single lapwing (aka peewit) which surely would previously have graced these fields in large numbers. I heard a solitary yellowhammer with its once-familiar call of ‘a little bit of bread but no cheese’ that I used to hear regularly even on Hampstead Heath. Skylarks were thin on the ground too although the meadow pipits seemed to be thriving. And in the hedgerows there were chiffchaffs a-plenty calling but of its close relative the willow warbler not a single cadence did I hear; this is a phenomenon I have noticed around Cambridge too.

The most magnificent spectacle was, however, of a bird that used to be all but extinct in the UK. 10 or 11 red kites circling was an amazing sight. These birds are huge and beautiful but they were all but hunted out of existence over many centuries. Recent reintroductions have seen them prosper: I believe they are now even breeding on the outskirts of Cambridge (although the nearest I have seen them is from the A1 near Peterborough). Nevertheless to see so many of them up close and personal is striking. These birds no doubt were once affected, like so many birds of prey sitting at the top of the food chain, by organochlorides such as DDT; now they are flourishing.

In contrast many of the once-common insect-eating birds are now being hit, according to a study published in Nature just this week (written up in the Guardian which was where I read about it whilst on holiday), by neonicotinoid insecticides, which have already been implicated in the drastic fall in bee numbers. Part at least of the decline of starlings (which I noticeably did not see during my week away), sparrows and swallows seems attributable to these chemicals. The decline in other species such as lapwing, skylarks and yellowhammers are probably due to changes in farming practice (and, by implication, EU subsidies) destroying their nests before their young are fledged.

So, as ever, when I go on holiday my mind does not switch off from scientific matters completely, it merely changes a gear or two. A previous trip to the seaside seemed to present more physical science challenges than this week of walking in Shropshire, but there are always questions to ask. On this occasion the frustration the unanswered questions provoked was made the worse by the complete absence of any internet access due to the poor reception on my mobile. Now I’m back in Cambridge perhaps I really should sit down and consider what determines the lifetimes of trees and the identification of the panoply of butterflies that flitted past my tired legs.

Birds seen or heard during the week:

Wood pigeon, song thrush, blue tit, great tit, long tailed tit, marsh tit, coal tit, greenfinch, goldfinch, chaffinch, linnet, redpoll, bullfinch, skylark, meadow pipit, greater spotted woodpecker, redstart, spotted flycatcher, dunnock, blackbird, house sparrow, nuthatch, chiffchaff, blackcap, yellowhammer, swallow, house martin, swift, red kite, buzzard, kestrel, carrion crow, rook, raven, jackdaw, magpie, jay, curlew, mallard, wren, robin, pheasant, wheatear, grey wagtail, pied wagtail.

 

 

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Metrics, Fulfilment and Career Trajectories

Posted on July 4, 2014 by Athene Donald

“More effort should be done on understanding people paths. We are too much focused on processes and structures.” JP Bourguignon #esof2014

I was struck by this quote I saw on Twitter from the ERC President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, because of course we don’t do this at all well. Too often at a departmental level we look at people almost as a commodity, there to deliver excellence – in teaching and research – rather than as individuals to support and allow to flourish.

I assume Bourguignon was discussing the value of ERC Starter grants as a means of giving an initial boost to those outstanding researchers just starting on their personal, independent research trajectories. The success rate for all the ERC grants is only around 10%, many are inevitably going to end up disappointed, but departments need to offer all the support they can to those setting out to find the right way forward for them. Not everyone needs to be a research superstar and not everyone travels in a straight line zooming up through the hierarchy. And all these other people’s aspirations and strengths should be taken into consideration, whether someone is destined to stay in academia or not. We need scientists in the big bad world just as much as in the corridors of academe. And we need to find better ways of assessing who might be best suited to staying in academia which don’t simply rely on outdated ideas and crude metrics of dubious value.

I recently came across an article in Science*, written nearly a year ago by Sandra Schmid who heads up the Department of Cell Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, explaining how they were going to change the way they carried out recruitment in their department. Instead of simply relying on volume of publications or impact factor of journals in which these had been published – in other words those most simple of metrics which removes the need for much thought or judgement – this particular department was going to go for a more subtle approach. This will be an approach that also downplays other aspects that all too readily are used as a proxy for looking at the individual themselves, such as whether the person had been trained in some big name’s group. Instead, a letter covering the following four aspects was to be the submitted material at the first stage (i.e. before interview):

  • their most significant scientific accomplishment as a graduate student;
  • their most significant scientific accomplishment as a postdoc;
  • their overall goals/vision for a research program at our institution; and
  • the experience and qualifications that make them particularly well-suited to achieve those goals.

I can see the attraction in this approach because it weakens the power of the purely metrics-driven judgement and takes individual circumstances better into account. It may also reduce the tendency to hype or go for a hard sell that some people find so much easier than others. It should, in principle, allow someone to explain how a particularly innovative approach to some problem has yet to lead to multiple Nature papers (but perhaps they’re on the way), or what they learned from some experiment that failed. Whether it actually leads to ‘better’ hiring decisions will, of course, remain to be seen but it may facilitate hiring individuals who are not just clones of those already in post.

BIS/HEFCE’s call for submissions regarding the use of metrics in any form in assessment has just closed. I am unclear whether a digest of these is actually going to be used to inform REF2020, other aspects of BIS funding or simply as background insight into how quantitative data could or should be used. Whatever, it is probably helpful that the community’s collective views (and I suspect unease) are collated. I am, however, nervous that what a university may say in such a response may not exactly tally with how individuals in that same university actually go about making decisions themselves. Individuals and organisations who have signed up to DORA (Declaration of Research Assessment), for instance, rejecting the use of journal impact factors as a judging criterion, may still implicitly be using them (possibly even barely consciously using them) when it comes to decision-making. If I write, as I just did quite deliberately above, a reference to Nature papers you all know what I mean. I am using Nature as a shortcut to express a ‘good’ paper and in a post like this that’s not a problem. But if I continue to scan an application – be it as a CV or in a more thoughtful, extended cover letter – to look for demonstration of publication in such a journal I am not living up to my signature on DORA. I fear many are still too wedded to such actions and, as with any kind of unconscious bias, we have to bring it explicitly into the open.

So, to return to people paths, what can we all do in our institutions to get away from the mere ‘processes and structures’ that Jean-Pierre Bourguignon referred to? We have to look at each student or postdoc as an individual, with their own strengths and weaknesses. Firstly we need to recognize that some people may have projects that go badly through no fault of their own (bad choice by the supervisor included, but also failure of equipment or delayed supply of samples). If they can explain why, explain what they did to circumvent their problems or how they tackled finding an alternative project to get their teeth into, that may actually be a better recommendation than someone who had an exciting but ‘easy’ set of experiments handed to them on a plate because someone else previously had done all the hard legwork.

Additionally, not everyone will simply travel linearly but some may take time out for all kinds of personal reasons, or decide to move in and out of university research. But we also have to recognize that at every stage people need support, encouragement, advice and, sometimes, a good kicking if they are to fulfil their potential. And finally, we have to appreciate that fulfilling that potential does not always mean sticking around in academia in the vain hope that a job will come up. Those of us sitting in academia will probably only be making decisions about jobs in academia (clearly the thrust of this post) but that’s a tiny part of the world. There are so many places where smart scientists can deliver novel ideas and academia is just one small part of the ecosystem our multitalented early career scientists should be exploring.

*Incorrectly cited as Nature when first posted, corrected (thanks to eagle-eyed Stephen Curry) an hour later.

 

Posted in Academia, Careers | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Moving on from Tokenism

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Athene Donald

Last week much was made of the fact that, finally, all the UK’s FTSE100 companies have at least one female Board member with Glencore, the last to make the grade, appointing the Canadian Patrice Merrin as a non-executive director. Vince Cable, who has been pushing for this for some years, declared this a ‘historic day for the FTSE’. But does one woman on a board, or indeed on any committee, make any difference? What burden of expectations are put on such an individual if somehow they are supposed to represent half the population and/or turn around a company’s attitude and fortunes by doing things the ‘female’ way?

The trouble is, thinking in terms like this rather miss the point. Of course it’s important that Boards have female members, and not just one of them per board. But it is dangerous to think that each board has to have a woman because she’ll bring a woman’s perspective. And if she does also that the board will instantly listen to what she says and act upon it. Neither of those statements can be taken as likely to be true. Having a female board member is maybe a step forward but it is only the beginning of the story not the end.

I have come across a fair number of women who absolutely aren’t interested in ‘women’s’ issues. At worst, this may be because they feel they never got any help themselves so why should they help others (or even that they don’t want other women around them to dilute their own visibility and impact); more common these days is that they don’t think there should be any special pleading for women. But there is much more to having women on boards/committees than simply that they are women and might occasionally be expected to ask ‘hey, have you thought about how this policy affects other women?’. Thinking about gender has to permeate all that an organisation does. Women should sit on boards and committees because there are some very smart women out there who have much to offer (or would have if they hadn’t been squelched comprehensively on the way up by one means or another) but they shouldn’t be expected to carry the burden of ‘women’s issues’. These must be everyone’s concern.

If we move away from the FTSE world and into universities, the EU has made this point very clearly in its rules for Horizon2020, something Curt Rice has recently written about. Every application (and this also applies to the ERC, where the Gender Action Plan discusses issues more specifically) has to discuss how it deals with three aspects of gender:

• Gender balance in research teams;
• Gender balance in decision-making;
• Integrating gender/sex analysis in research and innovation content.

The first two perhaps relate are somewhat comparable to the question of women on boards and are appropriate aspirations. In a field like physics, it is often hard to see how the last is relevant: cold atoms don’t have a gender, nor does a differential equation. But, as you move towards biology the gender of the animal from which cells or tissues are taken, for instance, does turn out to matter in some classes of experiments; and, if you are considering human health it is increasingly clear that clinical trials carried out on male patients may be most misleading regarding how females respond. If you aren’t sure about this, look at the Gendered Innovations website where specific examples are given. The reality is that scientists (typically male) have spent many years not realising that such matters ought to be worried about, probably thereby putting some women’s lives at risk since they can react differently to medication. It needn’t have been a woman who pointed this out, but it most certainly did need someone to do it. Repeatedly. And now it is enshrined in the principles of project funding. Journals are following suit. It’s high time because without this information much biomedical research is liable to be less than helpful if not actually seriously flawed. That is possibly something that FTSE companies working in the pharmaceutical sector should also be focussing on, whether or not they have women on their boards. These and other topics will be discussed at this week’s EU Gender Summit, both science and policy aspects. I am sorry not to be there.

I think for all of us there are many things that seem ‘normal’ – until someone highlights them – but which are actually deeply biased. Having women around who may have relevant (and possibly negative) experiences may help to bring things out in the open. And such things still persist. To take a specific example of how maternity leave is handled. The ERC explicitly extends periods of eligibility for its different grants by 18 months per child; RCUK has recently published a useful overview of how they collectively handle maternity, paternity and parental leave. But some other funders, smaller medical charities for instance, are still only just getting to grips with this issue. A Cambridge colleague who came to me for advice regarding her own post-maternity-leave funding was able to send the RCUK statement to her funder who has agreed to an effective extension of her window of eligibility. Possibly this is being done as a one-off; I hope the charity will move to make it ongoing policy.

We ought to be moving rapidly to a place where everyone, male and female, is alert to all such issues and it isn’t simply the few women who sit at the top table who could or should speak out. So, let’s stop focussing on the tokenism implied by celebrating the fact that every FTSE100 Board has a woman on it and start actually ensuring that every woman has an equal chance, with her male colleagues, to end up sitting on that board.

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Well-rounded Students – What does it Take?

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Athene Donald

WS Gilbert thought it was ‘comical…that every boy and every gal… is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative’ in the words expressed by that bored sentry PC Willis. The politics would be different now, but we in England and Wales still seem to live in a system where every boy or girl, at least those who aspire to A levels and beyond, are forced either into either the square box that is Arts/Humanities/Social Sciences (AHSS) or the circular peg-hole that is STEM at 16, if not before. Why? No other developed country does this. There is some movement towards at least offering new courses in mathematics of some kind for non-STEM students to take beyond 16, although we have yet to see how this works in practice. This would at least raise the take-up beyond the miserly 13% of the cohort the country currently sees take mathematics post-GCSE.

The Royal Society launches its new report ‘Vision for Science and Mathematics Education‘ today, describing how it would like to see STEM education develop over the next 20 years. I have been on the committee preparing this report over the last 2-3 years and it has been an interesting process. It’s not so easy to think 20 years ahead and to begin with the committee collectively was timid and incremental in its deliberations. I hope in the end we have produced something ‘visionary’, in so far as it describes a very different place from where we are now, even if much of it may superficially look like the blindingly obvious: a trusted teaching profession, assessment of the individual student separate from assessment of the school, good careers advice starting at primary school, access to specialist maths and science teachers in every school (primary and secondary school) as well as well-supported and trained technicians. And, in the context of my opening paragraph, the report advocates a post-16 environment in which every child, whether on a vocational or academic pathway, studies subjects from both the AHSS and STEM sides up till 18.

This is not the first time the Royal Society has advocated this. In 2011 I was involved in the launch of an earlier report which also pushed for a Baccalaureate approach post-16. It got limited airtime and made no significant impact on any policy-making emanating from the Department for Education (DfE). But the Royal Society is not alone in making this call: from the other side of the ‘divide’, humanities and social scientists also see the attraction and importance of this. Coincidentally, this was very clear this week when I participated in a meeting at the British Academy on ‘Broadening the debate: how the humanities and social sciences can help us address global challenges’. A joint meeting with the American Academy for Arts and Sciences, I was the lone scientist invited to speak (although there were quite a number in the audience, I was pleased to see). The panel I participated in was entitled ‘Why a coordinated approach to humanities, social sciences and natural sciences matters’ a topic I felt it was easy to embrace and which directly ties in with the Vision Report, for which I also managed to sneak in a plug.

But perhaps even more relevantly was the other panel of the day on the subject of ‘Promoting Opportunity through Education’. In this session Baroness Tessa Blackstone spoke forcefully about the dangers of early specialisation. Not the ‘gold standard’ that A levels are usually described, she saw them rather as a ‘5th rate tin standard’ due to their narrowness. She was the Higher Education Minister in the Blair administration at the time that Curriculum 2000 was introduced, which recommended that school children should do a broad mix of 5 AS levels followed by 4 A levels. What happened to this? According to Blackstone, what happened was that HEIs did nothing to change their offers to children. Why should schools go for this breadth, she asked, if it was only going to make harder the chances of their students gaining the requisite grades in the 3 A levels that HEIs continued to set as offers? However, the confusion that arose by rushing the introduction of the revised structures and qualifications in no doubt also played their part in preventing schools and students taking advantage of the changes to increase their breadth of study.

So, what would HEIs do now if the exams at 18 were reformed to something like a Baccalaureate system? Discussions with some HEI stakeholders have suggested they would welcome such a broadening, but perhaps that’s what they said last time. I wasn’t close enough to those conversations around 2000 to know what was or wasn’t said or by whom. I do know that any change in 6th forms would necessarily directly impact on what universities could or couldn’t assume incoming students knew. Changes would have to have full buy-in and, as far as I can currently judge from within Cambridge, admission via the IB (International Baccalaureate) which is the nearest approximation to what is being suggested, currently has a very high bar. This is likely to act as a significant barrier at the moment. Changes would need to be explicitly embraced by HEIs across the board, not only in terms of offers but also in terms of first year courses, if the Royal Society’s vision on this front is to be successfully adopted.

Nevertheless, I still believe wholeheartedly a broadening is the way to go because we should not expect students to make an essentially irrevocable choice between arts and sciences at a ridiculously early age. It seems to me – and this will certainly be being followed up – the Royal Society and the British Academy share a common perspective on this issue. Let us hope that those who really can effect policy change read the Vision report, in its entirety, and buy into the ideas presented about how the UK’s children should be educated. Let’s worry more about the education and less about the politics and ideology.

Note: Although I have been a member of  the Vision committee this post reflects my personal thoughts setting the work in context. A more specific post on the report itself by me can be found here.

.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Leadership by Gravitas or Passion?

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Athene Donald

A couple of years ago I blogged about my feelings about leadership and role models. The difference is clear and whereas then I felt OK about being considered one of the latter I had issues with regarding myself as a genuine leader. I was brought to reconsider the topic by a request to talk about leadership in academic science by the London Business School. They brought up an international party of executives to Cambridge for the day, and I kicked things off for them during their visit. They were from business, the law and the like. Neither academics nor scientists, a morning in the Cavendish must have been quite strange for them, as they wandered amongst the exhibits in the museum we house and had a quick look at some laboratory space with a student of mine.

My job was to try and explain my leadership style in bringing out the best in students within a system that is much less structured than their various worlds appear to be. I can’t tell my students what the rules are, because the rules of research mean don’t follow rules (although do follow protocols, prior art etc): the aim has to be to look at things from different angles. I can’t give precise suggestions for how to be innovative, because bright ideas don’t come from doing what other people have done before. But academic science has always thrived on the unconventional, the maverick and the wacky – a message that may not sit comfortably with all professional spheres.

I find it easier to answer questions about my personal style of working with PhD students than the more abstract idea of ‘leadership’ per se. But my thoughts on leadership were helped on their way by the gift of a book written by one of the London Business School experts. This was The I of Leadership: Strategies for Seeing, Being and Doing by Nigel Nicholson. Unable to compare this with any other book on leadership, because I’ve never read one (or on management come to that) I found it an interesting read not least because its basic message seemed to be it’s horses for courses. In other words, there is no single recipe for success in leadership. To take an example currently close to my heart, Winston Churchill was an excellent war-time leader but languished at other times and basically failed to deliver in his more peaceful briefs.

So from the book I got the messages that the goal must be to work out what needs doing and what your way of doing it is, find some trusted allies with whom you can discuss the challenges and your provisional solutions and get on with the job. Doing nothing may be the right thing at times; at other times it may be hopelessly wrong. It all sounds so simple! But simple or not, at least it feels more plausible as a way of tackling things than having to follow set patterns of behaviour regardless both of one’s own character and the particulars of the situation and the organisation in which one works.

In order to achieve one’s aims, naturally one has to carry other people along with you. Thinking about this takes me back to the issue of how, leader or not, one can be most effective on committees and I think the answer is the same: you have to work out your own way of doing this and it may depend on committee dynamics as well as your personality. What works in one place may not work in another. I am reminded of one committee of senior professors from around the country I attended when still quite junior. One member in particular stands out in my mind because his demeanour was so unlike mine was or ever could be. Completely confident in his own position, he talked very slowly, precisely and at great length, turning his whole body as he looked all round the table at each of us in turn as he spoke. I’m sure he felt this was an effective strategy that would make his words carry great weight. For me, all it did was irritate me intensely whilst simultaneously making me feel my own style must be woefully inadequate and unpersuasive.

With the passage of years I have come to realise how wrong I probably was in believing other people liked such a tendentious style. Furthermore, whilst eye contact is probably good, his style seemed so artificially contrived as to counteract anything positive that spontaneity might have achieved. Once again, it’s probably horses for courses. Some people may believe speaking ponderously implies gravitas, as the very words may suggest, but others may be less fooled by stylistic performance than by content. I still believe that rubbish is rubbish however delivered. My own style is always liable to be labelled with that inconvenient word ‘passionate’ (see here and the ensuing comments for a debate about this word as applied to female scientists), possibly even more dangerously ’emotional’, often ‘self-deprecating’ and ‘good-humoured’ (as the thank you card from a recently relinquished committee repeatedly described me in the kind words of expressed). I think there are worse things to be.

Whatever, I am who I am and my style has to be what works for me and I guess the same is true for everyone. Worry about the content first and foremost; make sure you’re articulate, coherent and audible as well as factually well-prepared and aware of other people’s sticking points. Beyond that, leadership by charisma or gravitas may be effective, but sometimes it may also be dangerous by being persuasive without content.

Posted in Leadership, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 1 Comment