In May 2019 I was lucky enough to visit the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) Darwin's group. This is a large research group headed by Johanna Mappes. I met Johanna last summer at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology congress, where she was giving one of the plenary lectures. Her lecture was fascinating. She described the work she and her collaborators had done on aposematism using the wood tiger moth, Parasemia plantaginis, as a model species. The work on colour morphs, the interaction with the environment and predators is really interesting, but the fact that Johanna has established various moth populations from different geographical locations in the lab, is what got me interested.
As you might have read from a previous post, I am looking at micropyle diversity - micropyles are small holes in insect eggs which allow the sperm to enter the egg and fertilise it. Micropyles vary a lot but little is known about this variation and I am trying to find out more with a combination of comparative analyses and experimental work. With the help of Sarah Aldridge, we visualised the wood tiger moth's micropyles clearly. I am hoping to investigate variation of micropyle numbers in the various moth populations that Johanna and her collaborators have established in the lab. So if you are a student, and this sounds interesting, please get in touch! And finally of pulla - this is a type of delicately sweet bread, usually in the shape of a bun, that Finnish people love eating alongside their coffee. Having lived in Finland for a couple of years with young children, I immediately got hooked and now it is a staple in our household. I find that baking and cooking are great ways to reliving memories!
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Here I share my journey of going back to science. If you have missed Part 1, do read how I made my initial moves onto the academic ladder after a prolonged career break. Once I had spoken to my mentor, and after being in touch with a recipient of one of those awards, my drive to come back to science was reignited. You will find that contacting awards recipients is actually encouraged and recommended - most funders' websites also have previous recipients pages and frequently asked questions. If you have a question for which you cannot find the answer, the administrators on the grants/awards are usually really helpful and very knowledgeable, so I'd recommend writing to them directly. Once I had identified a potential organisation (in my case the Daphne Jackson Trust), I made contact and was asked to submit a proposal. Well, that took quite a lot of thinking and time. Since my PhD, I had moved city (and country, but that is another story) and had no direct links to my previous supervisor anymore. So I looked at my local university and was lucky enough to find that one of the academics there worked on a topic I had worked on during my PhD - albeit on a completely different study system! I got in touch with him, sent him my CV, we Skyped a few times and talked about possible ideas. These few lines here took a few months in reality! However, by the time we had been writing a proposal, an opportunity came up at my local university - and that is where luck was on my side. This was an entirely new scheme designed for researchers who had undertaken a prolonged career break. I applied and was awarded the first Back to Science Fellowship, together with another fantastic scientist (needless to say, we have shared the journey and are still in touch). From my initial meeting with my mentor, it took nearly 22 months to make it back into science, and I still think that luck played a big part. But isn't that how academia works?! I really hope that sharing the ups and downs of my journey will be useful to others who embark on a similar path. It's doable, you just need support along the way. More and more organisations and learned societies are recognising the challenges that different people encounter in academia. To share my experience, I joined the first peer-mentoring scheme run by the British Ecological Society. I hope that initiatives like this will be something that all learned societies will offer in future. |
AuthorGraziella Iossa Archives
August 2023
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