I currently mentor junior colleagues from secondary school level (from underrepresented background), PhD students, and early career researchers, as part of mentoring schemes within and outside academia - as a STEM ambassador, and as a member of the British Ecological Society new Mentoring Programme. This programme in its first iteration, over a decade ago, has been instrumental in supporting my career in and out of academia. It therefore seems a natural progression to help others to forge their paths in science.
Returners to Science
I was senior mentor for the British Ecological Society Returners to Science mentoring scheme (2019-2021). This was a fantastic opportunity to share my experience of being out of academia (in my case for an extended period) and - being lucky enough - to come back to it. Mentoring has a crucial role to play in this - and you'll see it featured heavily on this website. We lack a range of role models which encourage people from different ethnicities, cultural backgrounds and with a wider range of experiences to take up, or continue a career in academia, and more generally, in science.
Women in Science
International Society for Behavioral Ecology Equality and diversity lunch, Minneapolis 2018
Having taken a break away from academia, changed career and now being a returner to academia, I am all too aware of the issues that women and underrepresented groups face in science in general and in ecology in particular.
Being an early career researcher in ecology is becoming harder. The challenges faced are job insecurity, lack of training to move into careers outside academia and work-life balance.
To tackle these challenges, I became the founding chair of the early career researchers committee at the School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK. We meet monthly and organise socials, workshops and events, such as the successful Research 101 event we organised to celebrate ECRs' contribution to research during Early Career Researcher week in June 2018.
Blogging and Rapid Ecology
Science community blogging can be a powerful tool to widen diversity and inclusion in ecology for this reason I joined Rapid Ecology, a blogging platform to give a voice to anyone interested to talk about ecological science. I often tweet about these issues, so please follow me on Twitter @g_iossa if you'd like to know more.
On the topic of interesting blogs to read, please take a look at these amazing blogs:
Terry McGlynn's Small Pond Science, on ecology and science community, specifically around issues of inclusion;
Athene Donald's blog, Occam's Typewriter, especially around women in science
All photos copyright by Graziella Iossa 2018-2024.