Taking the Chair

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Athene Donald

I was interested to discover recently that candidates for the headship of a certain Cambridge college were required to chair a mock Governing Body meeting (this was not part of my own selection process at Churchill I should say). I can see why a college would think this was a good idea. The ability to chair is a crucial one, one that seems never to be taught – except by example, good or bad – but which can make so much difference to a committee’s outcome.  Furthermore, I am led to believe that in some colleges there are an awful lot of committees; indeed I heard the number 26 quoted by someone for their own particular college recently (this happened to be an Oxford one), a number which I personally find astonishing. So, ensuring that the person you are about to commit yourself to for a number of years is competent to keep good order, ensure good results and do it all graciously and with a smile may make excellent sense.

I am reminded about this, not because I’m suffering from sleepless nights as I contemplate the array of committees I will soon be chairing in Churchill, but because of a question that was put to me over Twitter: what to do when two members of a committee take up 95% of the airtime? My own response was that it was down to the Chair to shut them up and keep firm control on the discussions to prevent such a monopoly, but I was then told that one of the offenders was actually the Chair. That does cause problems. I have sat on committees like that, or rather on a committee where the Chair alone took up a disproportionate amount of the time so that no one else got much of a look-in.

This behaviour reduced the committee in question to something of a rubber-stamping farce, because what decisions can be taken beyond those the Chair themselves push if the others present can never get a word in edgeways? After a few meetings like that the dynamics are so flawed that, at least in the case I recall,  everyone else just gave up. We may have sat through the meetings but we had zero expectation of anything useful being done. Maybe we were all wimps and should have staged a coup, but there were reasons why that would have been difficult. I have written previously about how I handled the Chair of a committee who persistently referred to us as ‘gentlemen’ and how, with a little bit of help from my (male) friends on the committee he was stopped in his tracks. Not a coup, but certainly a triumph in a minor skirmish which made the remaining meetings somewhat more pleasant at least for me and the other women around the table (of whom there were several). However, if the Chair is the prime offender when it comes to monopolising the discussion I’m afraid I have no simple solution to offer and would be pleased to hear suggestions from readers in the comments!

The Twitter question came my way at just about the time that Mary Beard was giving her lecture on the Public Voice of Women at the British Museum in which she discussed how, from the times of the Odyssey on, there has been a tendency to shut the women up, In classical times this was not of course in committee meetings but simply any ‘public space’. She alluded to the ‘Miss Triggs‘ Punch cartoon I often use in my own talks about the challenges faced too boringly often by women at committees. (If you don’t know it, the text reads ‘That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.). The need for good chairing is all the more important if the committee has members who are prone to talk over others, of either gender, or who just don’t know when to shut up (see what I said about ‘Standing up to the bullies’ previously).

Sorting out the ‘Miss Triggs’ issue is easier for any committee member to do than shutting the Chair up. Anyone can say, if someone else tries to nick the idea that was originally hers, that they feel Miss Triggs had said that already and it would be good to allow her to expound on it. If the Chair hasn’t the nous or grace to do this then it is helpful if one of the saner members of the committee chip in on this front. But it is harder to shut up the drone (wherever they sit round the table) who just meanders on or the overpowering egotist who can’t imagine that anyone else could either a) have anything useful to say or b) not automatically agree with them. That really has to be the Chair’s responsibility which is why it is so hard when the Chair is the prime offender.

By this stage in my life I have chaired a good many committees of many different complexions. One of the reasons I think using a mock committee meeting as part of a selection process is not entirely satisfactory is that often one has prior knowledge of the committee members. You are likely to know who is the bore, who the extrovert, who the smart-ass and who the salt-of-the-earth you definitely want onside. You most certainly are likely to know their attributes (by which I mean their role, discipline, seniority or who they are representing), at least if you’ve done your homework. With any luck you know their name too (or have made sure there are those things I always think of as Toblerones on the table to remind you who is who). So, walking into a room cold with none of these facts at your disposal and then being asked to lead a discussion of the siting of the new bicycle shed or the wisdom of accepting a donation from an alumnus who made their money in armaments may be much trickier than the reality would in fact be.

However, despite the fact I have chaired many different groups, I have never formally had any instruction in what to do. Maybe other institutions run courses on the topic but as far as I’m concerned it’s just one of those many things for which I have been thrown in at the deep end. The first time I chaired a grant-giving committee I took advice from a more senior colleague as to how she ran similar meetings, and very good advice she gave me too: let everyone have their say and then draw the discussion to a conclusion. Never jump in too soon or people will be left dissatisfied.

But letting everyone have their say is exactly where things can go wrong, with meetings dragging on way beyond the stated end time and a sense of frustration and restlessness pervading the room. So, in my experience, I do tend to shut people up when things show signs of getting out of hand or when someone is showing a bulldog-like tenaciousness about some point in which they are in a minority of one. I also, always, have an eye on the clock: keeping your committee past their lunchtime or denying them a ‘comfort break’ at an appropriate moment will not lead to optimum discussions in my view. The troops get restless.

But letting everyone have their say, making sure Miss (or Mr)Triggs is not derailed, talked over or never allowed even to open her (his) mouth must be a key goal for a Chair. If the usual suspects are the only ones who get to speak then the only outcome will be what amounts to the status quo or a sectional interest of dubious worth. If good decisions are to be made the input of all who wish to contribute should be valued and heard even if, for any particular question, not everyone necessarily has the same expertise. A committee in which a small minority is allowed to dominate time and time again is not a committee whose decisions are likely to be wise.

 

Posted in Equality, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

There’s More to Us than Lab Coats

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Athene Donald

This book review first appeared in Times Higher Education on February 27th 2014

Are We All Scientific Experts Now?
By Harry Collins
Polity, 168pp, £35.00 and £9.99
ISBN 9780745682037 and 82044
Published 28 February 2014

“Thanks to climate change scams, swine flu and a whole host of own-goals, the status of the white-coated prima donnas and narcissists has never been lower in the public esteem…After a period of priestlike authority, the pointy-heads in lab coats have reassumed the role of mad cranks they enjoyed from the days of Frankenstein to boys’ comics in the 1950s.” So wrote The Daily Telegraph’s Gerald Warner four years ago in the wake of the sacking of David Nutt as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Is that really how the public see scientists? Or, as Harry Collins puts it, are we all scientific experts now?

Collins is a sociologist of science, or rather, as he likes to put it, he works in the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge. Indeed, he is one of its early proponents. The idea of “priestlike authority” he would equate with what he calls “Wave One” in his field, when scientists were believed to be infallible authorities working on ideas that could be directly tested in the laboratory.However, unlike Warner, Collins saw the “priests” being defrocked back in the 1960s and 1970s, as studies started to show that scientists were actually rather human. They swore, they made mistakes, they didn’t always agree with each other, and a lot of their lives were spent in mundane tasks such as making coffee and filling in requisition forms for test tubes and gasket seals. These apparently unexpected truths were revealed in Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s classic book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) and elsewhere.

This seeming humanisation of scientists meant that, to many researchers, they were no longer seen as special, and over the next 25 years of “Wave Two” they (including Collins himself) downplayed the expertise of scientists in one way or another. This was one part of the “science wars” story that claimed that scientists had no firmer a grip on facts and truth than anyone else: since science was a social activity, results could be coloured by who presented them and so could not represent ultimate truth. One outcome was the recognition that many different groups of people, scientists and non-scientists alike, should contribute to decisions. This has become widely accepted in the years since, although these decisions may often be skewed by political demands to as great a degree as the science itself, a point Collins completely overlooks here.

Collins sought to explore the idea of expertise further and, based on the time he spent embedded in a gravitational waves research group, he introduced what he termed “interactional expertise”, believing he could effectively masquerade as a gravitational wave researcher without ever having studied the underlying science. As he puts it here: “Interactional expertise is acquired by engaging in the spoken discourse of an expert community to the point of fluency but without participating in the practical activities or deliberately contributing to those activities.” Developing the question of what expertise is, and the different flavours it comes in, occupies a substantial part of Are We All Scientific Experts Now?: a close-focus discussion of different sorts of expertise, ranging from that of the “beer mat” expert to those who genuinely can contribute to new knowledge, in other words, practising scientists.

Scientists are treated, throughout this book, as a monolithic grouping, which is obviously a vast oversimplification. The idea that there is only one way of doing science, which we can call “the” scientific method, is a view to which historians of science no longer subscribe. Furthermore, scientists are much less a race apart than Collins would imply; I believe it is dangerous to treat us as such and is likely only to reinforce the oft discussed but somewhat imaginary and unnecessary fault line between science and the arts. Nevertheless, the virtues ascribed to scientists in Wave One of the sociology of scientific knowledge by researchers such as Robert Merton, of being “universalistic”, working by “organised scepticism” and driven by “disinterestedness”, probably do apply across the spectrum of science.

Where I think this book is strongest and the message most important is where Collins takes his ideas about different levels of expertise and translates them into the context of recent controversies. Was former South African president Thabo Mbeki creating a “fake scientific controversy” (to use Collins’ useful terminology) with his selective use of discredited science to drive his country’s attitude towards HIV/ Aids treatments? Did journalists let parents and children down in driving the scare over the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination based on one man’s flawed research? What about the apparent “tricks” alluded to in the “Climategate” emails leaked or stolen from the University of East Anglia – were the scientists behaving honestly?

The answer in all these cases, Collins says, is clearly yes and his analysis is useful. It would be good to believe that the media will learn that what they claim is evidence of “balance” in reporting some stories serves simply to perpetuate untruths that the collective scientific community – those who can claim the highest level of expertise and who are speaking with more or less a single voice – have examined and rejected.

This viewpoint may also explain why, in general, scientists are reluctant to appear on programmes such as BBC One’s Question Time: since they do tend to like to be precise, the requirement to give soundbites and lessthan-nuanced responses to questions that are often beyond their area of expertise is unlikely to be appealing. And even when a microphone is thrust under their nose to respond to a question that is in their field, they are still likely to want to hedge their response to reflect genuine uncertainties. This isn’t a case of being slippery; it is a case of being frank within their confidence levels. Unfortunately, that isn’t always how the media report such uncertainty.

This is certainly a book for those who are interested in science and its role in society, rather than for practitioners themselves. For the former group I believe it ought to convey important messages. It is intended to be provocative and its introductory chapter infuriated me until I realised that Collins was putting forward straw men that the rest of the book was going to shoot down. He has come full circle in his arguments and, after many years (and several books), he has accepted that we are not all equal when it comes to science. Scientists do have, by virtue of their experience and training, a special place when it comes to knowledge, and Collins is now prepared to admit it. This could be seen as a recantation of his earlier, and much more negative, position. Indeed, he is quite disingenuous in the way he presents his position here, burying his own earlier scepticism about what expertise scientists possess.

This book doesn’t address the issue of how science should interface with policy and politics, although that is the context of many of Collins’ examples (turn to Roger Pielke’s The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics if you want to grasp that particular nettle). It will doubtless fail to disabuse doubters such as Warner, and indeed many in the media, of the notion that scientists are knowingly engaged in a giant climate change scam. But for others who are curious about how scientists tackle problems and why they do often have the answers, it should prove illuminating.

 

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What Does it Take to Get to the Top?

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Athene Donald

Readers of my blog will not need to be reminded that the numbers of women successfully climbing through the ranks to the top of the academic tree are small. The same is true of administrative staff: many women set out, few reach the pinnacles. In other words, just like in so many other parts of the workforce, universities are losing talent. Talent they can’t afford to lose and, one can argue, talent the UK can’t afford to lose either. HE contributes well over £3bn to the UK economy each year and set up one new company per £24 million of research funding during 2010-11. This far exceeds the record of US universities (one new company per £56 million). So, it’s a healthy sector and is generally regarded as punching above its weight. But could it do better?

In a letter published today in the THE, we – collectively from the University of Cambridge, with over 50 signatories to the letter including me – are saying yes, we could and must do better. We need to consider much more broadly what ‘success’ means and move away from focussing so narrowly on easy-to-measure metrics which don’t capture the breadth of what we do and what we need to do. Do h indices and size of grant income sum up the totality of what an academic has to offer to their colleagues? Absolutely not. Yet too often promotion panels fixate on these metrics and ignore the wider picture.  The recent report from the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee highlighted this, remarking

Interestingly, the skills that are normally considered essential to leadership are undervalued in academia.

Too true. So if an individual is perceived as good at teaching or pastoral care and therefore given a lot of it to do, if they invest time and energy into such matters because they feel it matters to them, then they may find they suffer when it comes to career progression. Yet these are matters vital to the health of a department and the development of students. The letter to the THE calls on the entire sector to reflect on whether the way we value success is good either for the sector or for those who choose to fill the less quantifiable but crucial roles. And it won’t have escaped the reader’s notice that these roles are filled disproportionately by women.

This letter has been prompted by a set of interviews we carried out in the university of 126 women identified by their peers as ‘successful’ , drawn from many different parts of the organisation and employed in a range of different jobs (and not simply academic ones, though that’s what I’ll concentrate on here). Many when approached were hesitant. ‘Me, why I don’t regard myself as successful‘ was a not uncommon reaction.  Sifting through the initial responses to tease out the most illuminating narratives, 26 of the women were chosen for in-depth interviews. These, along with an accompanying narrative written largely by Jo Bostock, a consultant who has been working with members of the University’s Senior Gender Equality Network, assisted by the Head of our Equality and Diversity team Sigrid Fisher, will appear in a book ‘The Meaning of Success‘ which has a publication date set to coincide with International Women’s Day next month.

What came across in these intriguing and open interviews, is that what matters to the individual is not necessarily what the system rewards. I was particularly struck by the person who said she didn’t care about the publication of a paper in a high impact factor journal as much as she cared that no one felt trampled on in order to achieve it; or the person who valued empathy and communication over a dictatorial attitude. But neither points are reflected readily in promotion criteria. Cambridge does value the so-called ‘general contribution’, which might include outreach or admissions, as well as teaching. However these are factors which can be hard to evaluate but surely should be thought about when it comes to considering what makes for the good leadership on which any university will rely.

Crudely speaking those who care most about the size of their h index, the size of their grant income, the number of papers in flashy journals and the square meters of space they occupy may be characterised as alpha males (though some of them may be female and many males do not fit that description). They will have striven to achieve these big numbers, seeing it too often as the be-all and end-all. You don’t often hear a woman say – of anything – ‘mine’s bigger’. But if the woman’s isn’t bigger, whatever it might be, she may suffer when she applies for promotion. So, across the sector, we have a process which is systematically likely to disadvantage the typical woman, however smart and valuable she may be. Losing their talent is not good news for the HE sector, particularly since the unfashionable tasks – outreach, teaching and the like are crucial. It won’t be good news for the students who are seeking inspirational and supportive teachers. It certainly isn’t good news for the women. Extrapolating from the data now accruing about board rooms and teams in general and the value of diversity there, losing the women is not likely to be good for innovation either and, so indirectly, the UK economy.

We need to think much harder about our systems. Today’s letter calls for the sector as a whole to engage in this conversation.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

Being Prepared

Posted on February 15, 2014 by Athene Donald

I was a Girl Guide once, briefly, but I don’t think that’s where I learned that it’s wise to travel well supplied. It just seems to come naturally to me to fear the worst and so carry enough on one’s person to meet any eventuality. So, even when just going out to a formal dinner, I will typically be carrying a hefty handbag with me and, if I’m away from Cambridge for a day or longer my rucksack will be bulging. People frequently comment on this: gosh that looks heavy they say. It may be because I look fragile and as if I might crumble under the weight, but I don’t think so.

Part of the trouble stems from the fact that women’s clothes rarely come equipped with a reasonable supply of useful pockets. Too often what may look like pockets in a jacket turn out to be mere illusions, simply flaps to fool you into thinking you will be able to stuff your wallet, your phone and your keys somewhere handy, as any man’s jacket would permit. But no, women are supposed to worry about the ‘line’ of their clothes and an unsightly bulge around the waistline would never do. Consequently, no deep pockets are provided and hence the need for a bulky handbag.

Mine is full of more than just the wallet, phone and keys of course. I always assume that something is likely to go awry and so come prepared with a small medicine chest of painkillers for that headache a long, tedious committee meeting can induce; and pills to stop a migraine attack in its tracks as soon as the aura hits (and sunglasses to reduce the risk of one starting). Then I also tend to have travel sickness pills because it’s more trouble than it’s worth to take them in and out (and I’d forget and never have them when needed if I removed them). A pack of tissues is also useful, since cycling tends to lead to a runny nose, and a tube of Strepsils to soothe the onset of a sore throat. I probably also have a supply of antihistamine’s in case a cat leaps onto my lap and sets my eyes streaming and my nose dripping. You’d think I was a hypochondriac judging by the number of pills I habitually have about my person, wouldn’t you!

Then I have the keys to my elderly mother’s house permanently in my bag, in case of an urgent summons; the last time that happened it was due to an overflowing cold water tank rather than a health issue, but I still need ready access. I also have a bicycle light, of course, since I’m based in Cambridge. Only one as the rear one is permanently attached but the front one needs to be removed and carried around. Occasionally I find it flashing quietly in my bag when it’s been accidentally pressed, something that is definitely bad for battery life. There is the fob for the college car park too, even though I practically never use it. A notebook, rather dog-eared but helpful for that urgent need to jot something down, plus accompanying assorted-colour pens. Before airlines got so neurotic about knives I used to have a Swiss army knife too, but it got confiscated and I didn’t replace it. It was useful to have the associated corkscrew permanently to hand though….Back in the days long past when drinking at lunchtime was still acceptable, I can remember impressing some industrialists by producing it at a meal when the wine was on the table but the waiter was late. Finally, while I’ve been lecturing this term I’ve been carrying around the remote/laser pointer for my laptop too, although that normally lives in my travelling rucksack.

So let’s see what else that rucksack’s contents are, intended for the overnight stay. Naturally, it is a rucksack designed for a cyclist, although I prefer to cycle with it in my bike basket rather than over my shoulders as I’m sure that’s better for my back. And I make sure I have as large a basket as I can find to accommodate this (it can even, upon occasion, take a suitcase, although I rarely feel I need to be so respectable as to use one of those and it is so much less convenient). Of course I have two charge leads, so I can charge both iPhone and iPad on a night away from home; a charger for my laptop which is always an awkward-shaped thing to squeeze in; and a USB mouse so that if I’m on a train and I have access to a table I don’t have to use the built-in trackpad which can be very irritating when the train bumps and jolts about. There are yet more pens in various pockets of the rucksack (including a highlighter) and emergency supplies of Elastoplast, a sewing kit, safety pins and small post-it notes. You’d be surprised how often I use all of these on my travels. There’s often a small packet of biscuits, courtesy of the last hotel I stayed in, and some herbal teabags and decaffeinated coffee for the hotel rooms which aren’t well supplied, plus a water bottle. Then there’ll be a polythene bag or two in case things get wet as I cycle to the station (and sometimes I’ve remembered to stash my waterproof trousers away in one of the pockets too). And all of that is before I include my toothbrush, hairbrush, contact lens solutions and other necessities for a night away.

Perhaps, now I think about it, it isn’t so surprising the rucksack looks rather heavy. At least an iPad is now generally sufficient to replace both the old-fashioned mound of paperwork for a committee meeting and the traditional A4 notebook to record interesting snippets from conference talks. But in general I will have both iPad and laptop since touch-typing on an iPad – for instance to write blogposts and deal with emails – is beyond me, although I’m pretty nifty on a proper keyboard.

So, if you see me looking weighed down, now you’ll know why. I’m prepared. For anything. Rain or shine, in sickness or in health, I’m ready to handle it all.

 

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Thinking about the Pipeline

Posted on February 8, 2014 by Athene Donald

A PhD should comprise both education and training. It should not be slave labour or done in blindness about where it might be leading. But I fear these statements don’t always apply. In the research grouping in which I sit at the Cavendish, which now has quite a large number of attached staff and research fellows, we try to provide a programme both of locally relevant pedagogy and more general talks about research skills: topics students might find helpful, regardless of what they end up doing next. So, when it came to my turn to give the week’s lectures to the 1st years I chose to include material concerned with preparing for life beyond the PhD. In other words, I used the well-known Figure 1.6 from the Royal Society’s 2010 Report, The Scientific Century, to provoke thought.

Just in case you don’t know which figure I mean, I reproduce it here.
Scientific Century fig 1-6

It is the final number on the right hand side that tends to focus the mind of even the most confident student. Of the pipeline that starts off in science a mere 0.45% ends up making the grade as professor. Clearly a large number of STEM graduates never intend to stick around in science per se, though they may well use many of the skills they acquire during their degree in subsequent employment in management, banking, primary school teaching or retail – to name a few common graduate destinations. As a result there is a large drop in numbers very early on. But what about those who stay on and do a PhD. What does this cohort think about their futures?

For some I fear the answer may be they don’t think about their futures. Period. Not at all. Nor do their supervisors encourage them to do so. Once upon a time it may have been adequate to start contemplating one’s future as the ink metaphorically dried on the thesis-writing, but those were the days when a large millstone of debt was not likely to be hanging around the neck of the student and maybe they felt they had time to ‘find themselves’. Certainly I have had at least two students who were quite sure what they wanted to do upon completion was to head off to Australia and tread grapes by way of sunny relaxation whilst still earning enough to fund a subsequent trip around the Pacific. Indeed one of these students thereafter settled in Australia. But such easy-going times are probably past.

The time to start thinking about what next is very early on in the PhD, in order to give oneself time to explore one’s skills, strengths and weaknesses. Time to ask awkward questions of anyone and everyone (but most particularly the careers’ folk who are likely to know far more about life beyond the university walls than most supervisors) and time to try out a few things on the side as your research slowly gets going. Maybe you can find an opportunity to teach, to write for some local science magazine or get involved with Skeptics-in-the-Pub or more conventional outreach activities. Time to explore if there are options to get a placement in industry or in policy (various funders provide funding for 3 month placements with POST, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology). Time, in short, to think whether or not academia is for you and if not whether you might get more satisfaction elsewhere.

The trouble is that too often the message is conveyed and received that anything outside academia is Failure, writ large. Wrong. Staying in academia when it isn’t right for you, staying simply because you can’t think what else to do, or staying because you feel frightened to try out something new is the failure. As a supervisor it is never pleasant to say to a student you’d be better off elsewhere but that is quite often bound to be the case. Not everyone is cut out for research and it would be very boring if they were; it would also leave great holes elsewhere in our economy! But, as one blogger implied recently maybe the system is failing when it doesn’t kick people out fast, not when it does.

Students need to have realistic expectations about what opportunities there may be. Supervisors have a duty to try to instil this and facilitate exploration of opportunities outside the lab. I fear neither party always does a good job of adhering to these statements and that is when things go wrong.  Doing a PhD may teach you all kinds of useful things but it should never be seen as an automatic passport to a permanent position. By default, by both parties burying their head in the sand, too often this unspoken assumption can go unchallenged and that’s when things can end in tears.

Maybe one of these days someone will sit down and work out how many students we actually should be training and for what purposes. There are many and diverse jobs that benefit from the skills of a PhD-trained individual, so consequently that would be a hideously complicated sum to attempt to do. There is no sign that the Research Councils (or other funders) think deeply about this as they assign money to this or that new fashionable field, Doctoral Training Centre or whatever, let alone looking across the STEM landscape and checking that the terrain is the right shape and doesn’t have pathological bulges or deep pits of absence. Without such horizon scanning, students and supervisors will continue to muddle along. But at the very least they should muddle along with some awareness that life outside academia should be scrutinised very carefully from an early point and that skills beyond the merely technical could usefully be acquired.

Some years ago the Athena Forum, which I was then chairing, produced a template for a bookmark with a set of ten questions designed to help postdocs think about their futures but it seems to me these questions are equally appropriate for students contemplating the great unknown. I reproduce them here:

  • Are you on the right career path?
  • Are you ready for the next step?
  • How’s your life/work balance?
  • Why do you enjoy what you do?
  • What are your strengths?
  • What motivates you?
  • What is your next step?
  • What skills and experience do you need?
  • How can you gain these?
  • Where can you go for objective guidance?

For students not to start seeking answers to these and related questions at an early stage is a recipe for subsequent disillusionment and job worries. These questions should be answered whether one is dead set on staying in academia or quickly realises that research is not one’s forte. Either way recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses and the skills that could usefully be acquired on the side can only be beneficial.

 

 

Posted in Careers, Science Funding | Tagged , | 35 Comments