I keep being annoyed at myself for not being 'as productive', as I could. Comparing myself to more productive colleagues. This is obviously wrong and doesn't make much sense when you reflect on it, but it does not stop me from doing it. There are many examples of blogs and microblogging from many colleagues in academia noting the same feeling.
I wanted to write about it - and I will be honest - I started this blog post back at the end of June and did not manage to hit the 'publish' button until at the end of September. This was not for lack of time, but lack of wanting to write about it. I think, however, it is important to talk about it. To normalise the fact that we all work at different paces, for different reasons, and there isn't one single 'measure' that reflects the work we produce. Somehow, in academia the work you produce defines you. This is not how it should be. You - we - are not the work we produce, we are human beings. But academia does not recognise that we can be different, work at different paces, choose to have priorities outside our profession: it only rewards those who can dedicate all their life to work. Of course this is not always the case, there are thankfully examples of colleagues who have championed diversity in the workplace, a healthy work-life balance, a culture of change. Those are the minority though. I am active in several committees at work as in learned societies, because I want to see those different perspectives championed. I don't want to work in a culture where only a 60-hour week will do. To me it matters that I can bring a different experience. I know that experiences shapes the way I see the world. At times it is hard though, taking time is not the easy way.
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A couple of weeks back I talked about my new venture as a member of a Special Topics Network on Thermal Fertility Limits. This is a network of researchers interested in delving deeper into the mechanisms behind fertility failure following heat stress. I attended the first of three online meetings of the network and, after so many months at home with little interaction from a research perspective, it was so interesting and refreshing. We discussed a range of ideas around the topic and, as you'd expect, we had more questions than answers. We started off by asking: what do me mean with fertility? Do we intend viable eggs and sperm? Number of hatched young? Clutches of eggs? Then we moved on to thermal stress. Heat stress comes in lots of different forms, which one should we study? Long-term heat stress or short intense bursts? Should we be looking at a constant temperature, steady or sudden increase? If an animal/plant suffers damage, should be looking at irreversible damage or measure time to recovery? Are there sex differences (some initial evidence suggests there are)? Does it matter at what developmental stage heat stress happens? For insects, which undergo metamorphosis, early stages are usually immobile and less likely to be able to buffer damage caused by heat stress. Could this affect the lifespan of the individual post sexual maturity? There seem to be almost endless possibilities for student research! If you are interested please do get in touch to discuss this exciting and timely topic. I will be writing more as the network develops, meanwhile we will stay in touch and meet regularly. At the beginning of this year, I was invited to join a Special Topics Network of colleagues (mainly, but not exclusively, behavioural ecologists) of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology to work on the evolutionary ecology of thermal fertility limits. The network is chaired by Claudia Fricke, Tom Prize, Rhonda Snook and Amanda Bretman, and I was very excited to join this initiative.
I have previously noted that males and females show different sensitivity to temperature stress. This may tell us something about how species will be affected by climate change and how we might buffer or tackle these sensitivities. I am very keen to explore this further. As I mentioned previously, I have been isolating at home for over half a year now, and therefore I was disappointed that I would not be able to join the inaugural meeting of the Special Topics Network set to take place at the end of March 2020 in Germany. However, due to the current lockdown in place in most of Europe and the rest of the world, the inaugural meeting was hosted online. Three separate online sessions were hosted to allow all participants to have a say on how the network should be shaped, and what we would like to achieve, so more to follow soon! As some of you already know, I have been self-isolating to a large extent for health reasons since the end of last summer, in 2019. That's a very long time to be working from home and, as the current situation stands, this is set to remain for the foreseeable future. [It's also the reason why I have slowed down the blogging during this time]. I have found ways to make this work and so I thought that creating a post with the various ideas and practicalities that have helped me, might provide useful to some. I have written about this for the Methods in Ecology and Evolution blog, but I will give a brief overview here too.
The full post can be found on the Methods in Ecology and Evolution blog. 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! 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. When I first made the decision to come back to academia after my prolonged career break (five years), I almost immediately felt the need to write a blog about my experience. At the time though, my youngest was only about one year old and with two more children under the age of five, it just seemed too much of a commitment. The more I look back on my journey, the more I think it is useful to share the many ups and downs along the way. So here it is, I hope that my reflections will be useful to my mentees as to the wider academic world. At the beginning the task to get back onto the academic ladder felt like an impossible climbing feat. Everyone and everything else had moved forward in the intervening years whilst I had been away, not just in terms of career (research, teaching, funding and publications) but also spatially. My colleagues, my support network, had now moved to new institutions, almost invariably abroad. Where could I start to go back? I have been unbelievably lucky to have my mentor alongside me along the way. I have also been lucky to have a very supportive husband who also works in academia. So I think a key prerequisite is support around you and a good dose of luck to go with it. The first step was to talk aloud to other people about this possibility. After some initials conversations with my husband, I decided to fix a meeting with my mentor. Remember: meetings do not need necessarily to be in person, in fact, in my case, they are usually via Skype/phone or some other wonderful technology (Zoom and similar). At the meeting my mentor was extremely positive about my idea - that positivity really boosted my confidence. Believing in oneself and talking to others are other important steps on the journey back to academia. Once I made the decision to go back, the next hurdle was understanding how to go about it. Here my mentor had several ideas. The first was to identify funding and organisations supporting those returning to science after a career break, be it for caring responsibilities or other reasons. Second, she introduced me to a recipient of one of these awards who successfully returned to science (in her case via Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship and a stint as Daphne Jackson Fellow too). I was able to talk to her on the phone - that further ignited my confidence! On my next post I will talk about the following step on my journey. Are you a keen student interested in looking at the effects of climate change on insect species? Would you like to gain lab skills alongside field work experience? The School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln is offering competitive funding for 2 PhD scholarships and 4 Masters by Research (fee and research funds covered). I am offering a Masters by Research project looking at the sublethal effects of climate change, and specifically increasing temperatures, on insect reproduction. Much empirical work has focused on critical thermal limits, lethal temperatures beyond which individual survival is compromised. What about sub-lethal temperatures? These might be a much more important driver of climate change effects on species distributions. Sub-lethal temperatures have been shown to induce sterility: so an individual will survival heat stress but become sterile. Are there any costs to heat-stressed individuals for future generations? Do the sexes respond equally to heat stress? Much research is needed in this area. Deadline 28th June 2019. Further details and application details available at: https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/lifesciences/postgraduatestudentships/ A few months back, I was working on a manuscript (soon to be published) about work I have been doing during my Back to Science Fellowship. We ran different experimental treatments for our Indian meal moth cultures, heating them during their development and up to the point when, as adults, they were ready to mate. We found that sperm got shorter the higher the temperature we subjected the insect cultures to. This is interesting in itself because it is important to know how species will be affected by rising temperatures as the climate is changing. However, as I was reading the literature, I was surprised to learn that this pattern wasn't unique. I mean, I have been working on reproduction since my PhD, so I have done a fair bit of reading on the topic in general and yet, I had not noticed this pattern before. Let me explain. It is well known that male mammals are unable to produce sperm at body temperature, hence the reason why mammalian testes are usually located outside the body cavity - there are some exceptions to this pattern, for example in marine mammals, but these species have developed adaptations to cool the testes. However, what I was reading in the literature, was that when subjected to heat stress, male mammals and some male insects too, become infertile - and this is the interesting part - before the females do. So, you can mate females who have also been heat stressed to non-stressed males - and they can produce offspring but the reverse doesn't work, heat-stressed males are infertile. Somehow, spermatogenesis (the production of sperm) - and more generally gametogenesis (the production of gametes) too, as plants show the same trend - appears more sensitive to heat stress than oogenesis (the production of eggs). Then, in January, an opinion article came out that summarised exactly what I had been thinking. As I read it excitedly, I noticed that the authors had not picked up on the male/female differences on heat-stress sensitivity, so I wrote a comment. It is not only intriguing that males and females show different sensitivity to temperature stress, it may also tell us something about how species will be affected by climate change and how we might buffer or tackle these sensitivities. I am very keen to explore this further. So if you are a student, and this sounds interesting, please contact me. One of my favourite Christmas present this year has been Becoming by Michelle Obama. I am sure this has been a popular choice as a gift, and I can say I definitely enjoyed it. I thought I would devour it in a couple of sitting (as it happens when I like a book) but I found myself slowing down as I was reading it, just to savour every page. I liked its honesty and simplicity but I also found a surprising number of commonalities, which I would have not expected. After all, I have not much in common with the previous First Lady of the White House. However, it turns out that being a woman, having children and trying to balance life and career, presents you with very similar challenges, or so I felt. And therefore I started reading it with a different, renewed interest, not just because I was enjoying it, but because I thought I could find some wisdom to apply to my own life, and in my new endeavour, as senior mentor for returners to science. Am I good enough? Is a key question in the initial part of her life and book. This is something I feel so personally, as I always struggle with insecurity and impostor syndrome. I know these are common feelings for women in general, but especially for those (men and women) who work in the very competitive environment that is academia. I could really empathise with Michelle Obama's need for seeking other people's approval and recognition. Especially since coming back following a career change and an extended career break, I am constantly questioning whether I belong in academia. And yet I think that, having spent time away gives me and other returners to science, a different perspective, one that can bring different skills, opinions and experiences. A bit like a breath of fresh air. |
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