The road to research independence may be bumpy. These lessons can help

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From ScienceMag:

Achieving independence is a rite of passage in an academic career. But for many early-career researchers, when and how it occurs can feel elusive. It doesn’t help that institutions, funders, policymakers, and even scholars often have different interpretations of what it means.

For some, independence can refer to gaining the knowledge and skills to conduct research autonomously at the end of doctoral training, says Dangeni, a higher education postdoctoral researcher at Anglia Ruskin University. For others, researcher independence can be developing an academic identity or publishing papers and securing funding, she adds.

To shed light on what it really feels like and how it evolves over time, Dangeni and five other higher education scholars who have trained and worked around the world reflected on their own paths to independence. Using an evocative approach that involves visualizing their experience as rivers, they found their journeys shared key common traits, they report in a paper published last month. For all of them, developing independence has been “a bumpy road,” says lead author Yusuke Sakurai, an associate professor at Hiroshima University. And to push ahead, they’ve had to demonstrate agency and seek validation from others in their community, he adds.

Science Careers talked to Dangeni and Sakurai about how the study may inform the journeys of other early-career researchers. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Can you explain the “river of experience” method you used in the study? Do you think this could serve as a useful reflective tool for early-career researchers?

Dangeni:  This approach consists of drawing a certain journey as a river, with each bend of the river representing a significant moment, person, or factor that impacted your journey. It’s a powerful approach to unveil unspoken thoughts and feelings. When you draw this river out, maybe something just comes out subconsciously, and when you dig into it through questions from others, you will realize there’s a hidden impact or factor. So I would say that it’s a really helpful tool to start reflecting on your own journey, but it’s more important to talk it through with either your supervisor or your peers to gain deeper insights.

Q: What insights does this study offer for early-career researchers seeking to develop independence?

Yusuke Sakurai:  First, things do not always go smoothly. You will come across difficulties and challenges. Sometimes you are making progress and sometimes you run into roadblocks and cannot push things forward. Knowing that beforehand is quite important for doctoral students and early-career researchers to be emotionally ready. And then, at the same time, they have to take control of their own experiences. So they should develop an ability to analyze and reflect on the academic skills and knowledge they already have and those they still need to develop. They should strategically and proactively think about their own career development. Finally, they should seek opportunities to get validation from others in their field to grow their self-confidence and sense of competence. Of course, sometimes it’s difficult, like when a publication or a grant is rejected, but getting positive comments from your supervisor or being invited to contribute to a project can also be empowering. As a doctoral student, simply talking to like-minded researchers at conferences about each other’s research contributed to my sense of independence by making me think, “Oh, yes, I can be a researcher in the future.”

Q: What facilitates or impedes independence?

Y.S.:  It’s quite difficult to judge if specific factors are hinderers or promoters. Supervisors, for example, are really helpful to achieve conference presentations and publications. But at the same time, too much support—or too little—can also be an impediment. This and other things can be a double-edged sword. That’s why taking control of their own experiences to the extent possible is so important for doctoral students. When submitting a draft manuscript to their supervisor, for example, you could acknowledge that supervisors are busy by saying there is no need for immediate feedback and that you can continue working on other tasks in the meantime. This kind of communication may help maintain a healthy and supportive working relationship while making sure you keep making progress

D.: It would be helpful for Ph.D. researchers to have tailored discussions with their supervisors throughout their training about how they see themselves and their future careers. Universities should also support early-career researchers by offering them space and opportunities to develop themselves, regardless of whether they want to pursue a career in research or elsewhere.

Q: How did the idea for this study come about?

Y.S.: Myself and Dangeni are members of a special interest group focusing on researcher careers within the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction. In 2024, we all gathered for a workshop on researcher independence. In the literature, researcher perspectives spanning doctoral, early-career, and midcareer stages seemed to be missing. So, in our project, we took a very exploratory approach, trying to reconstruct the concept of researcher independence across career stages from our lived experiences.

D.: This whole idea started with the publication of a book by Elliot et al. on how to support researcher independence, which was quite a heated discussion topic back then. Now, we’re all social scientists in the study, so maybe we’re more familiar with working by ourselves than researchers in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] areas, who might work more extensively with others in a lab. But STEM researchers, too, are expected to experience and practice researcher independence. So, many of the things that we shared in our study, like the bumpy road or the importance of validation, might come in at different stages depending on your discipline. But there might be some similarities.

Q: What was a particularly low time for you on your journey toward independence, and how did you navigate it?

D.: In my river, I draw taking a professional development adviser role right after my Ph.D. as a bend, because there were not many available researcher roles at that time. As an international scholar, I also needed to obtain a stable visa. I enjoyed it very much, because it gave me intense teaching hours, and I managed to seek out different opportunities. But it was quite challenging to maintain my researcher identity, because no research engagement came with this role. I had to continue doing research in my own time, actively pursuing publications and attending carefully selected meetings and conferences to stay in touch with my research community. I was able to come back to research full-time 2 years later with a postdoctoral position. But looking back, the experience was really challenging in terms of my time management and my physical and mental well-being.

Y.S.: Like Dangeni, a major turning point for me was right after finishing my Ph.D., which I did in Finland. I returned to Japan, but the competitiveness for research positions was such that I had to find an alternative route to survive in academia while searching for a better fit. I first took a fixed-term position, in which I was mainly in charge of administrative and management work as an assistant professor. Four years later, I got a teaching and research position in language education; however, the heavy teaching and other responsibilities limited the time I could devote to research. Altogether, it took me 7 years to land back on my ideal pathway with my current role. To get there, I had to be strategic, recognizing that having weak personal connections back in Japan was a roadblock to my career progression and actively going to national conferences to create my network.

Q: Have you experienced psychological distress in your search for independence? Do you have any insights on how to deal with this?

Y.S.: The workaholic tendency in Japanese academia was a culture shock for me upon returning from Finland, as they continue exchanging emails during the weekends and in the evening. This affected my sense of independence, because that was not really my way of working and I found the pressure difficult to manage. But over time, I learned to ignore the emails that can be replied to on Monday even though you got them on Saturday, and that increased my sense of control over my work.

D.: Because developing into a fully-fledged researcher is such a long and gradual journey, full of ups and downs, I feel that our well-being is constantly affected. People talk about resilience a lot. Sometimes I agree, but sometimes I feel that overresilience can also be very problematic. Based on our study, I’d recommend not being too harsh on yourself, as we have limited time, limited resources. We have to be very strategic about what we can do and what we cannot, prioritizing certain activities or leaving them for a later stage in our career. The many shared experiences in our journeys show that we’re not alone, but we need to find out whom we should seek help from and which direction we should take to develop ourselves.

Q: Is there such a thing as true independence?

D.: That’s such a tricky question. It’s inevitable to have to constantly validate your sense of independence through feedback from others. And for moving up to the next career stage, we are evaluated through outputs like funding and publications and other very specific criteria, so researcher independence is conditional in a way. But mapping out what it means to you and identifying certain areas that you would like to develop is a really good way to start taking control of your independence.

Y.S.: It’s quite difficult to define what perfect research independence is, as people have different ambitions and expectations. You have to make your own decisions about how you want to develop your career and what kinds of achievements you want to make. Having said that, you must also think about producing a variety of outputs and having a lot of support from different angles. Well-roundedness, I feel, might be important to nurture independence in a research career.

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New documentary follows researchers’ increasingly fraught career path

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From ScienceMag:

The fruits of scientific discovery are ubiquitous, from the medicines that treat disease to the satellites that enable navigation—but only in rare circumstances, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, do scientists get thrust into the public spotlight. Much of the work behind scientific discovery remains stubbornly invisible to many of the people it ultimately serves. That gap inspired biophysicist Aaron Mertz and immunologist Shruti Naik to create The Endless Frontier, a new documentary that follows three U.S. researchers at different stages of their careers as they attempt to navigate an increasingly uncertain funding landscape and mentor the next generation.

The Endless Frontier makes its world premiere today in Washington, D.C., followed by a screening in New York City next week and additional festival appearances. The filmmakers plan to make the documentary available to a wider audience through a streaming platform. Science recently spoke with Mertz to discuss why he and Naik—the film’s executive producers—wanted to pull back the curtain on scientific careers, how they selected the researchers featured in the film, and what the current moment means for the future of U.S. science.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: What drove you and Naik to develop a documentary about scientists?

A: It was the pandemic, when a lot of news stories started talking about how scientists were working to combat this very strange disease that was moving into the United States. Shruti and I realized that people didn’t actually understand what we as scientists do.

We’re all working on behalf of the public good to discover new knowledge and new applications. We have a very long and intensive training process, and we realized that that process is entirely opaque to most members of the public. Even though scientists were getting a lot more airplay in the news then, people didn’t understand how their careers actually looked. We thought a feature length film could be a way to show audiences what a laboratory and the whole long training process is like.

Q: How did the title come to be?

A: The final title is The Endless Frontier, referencing Vannevar Bush’s landmark 1945 report to President [Harry Truman]. He was the principal science adviser for our country, and that report laid the groundwork for the establishment of our National Science Foundation. We believe that quote captures the nature and goals of science very well, because we believe science is endless.

One of the issues that I want to combat through this film is the framing of how science is talked about in our country and world. Science to kids is mostly presented as a textbook with a closed cover or a homework assignment with an answer key—a finished endeavor.

But science is endless. It’s a work in progress. Scientists always learn how to revise our thinking based on new data that comes in, so this idea of “the endless frontier” captures the spirit of the scientific endeavor that we want to portray.

Q: This film focuses on three scientists’ stories. How did you decide which scientists to feature?

A: We wanted to present a range of scientific fields, geographies, and career stages. We selected Andrea Graham, an ecologist and immunologist at Princeton [University], and Paul Barber, a marine scientist at UCLA [the University of California, Los Angeles]. And we didn’t want to show that science only happens on our coasts, so we have a fantastic researcher, Jacob George, a neuroroboticist at the University of Utah.

Q: These are scientists in very different fields. What kinds of experiences unite them?

A: A couple of narratives unite them. One is just what being a scientist is like—working in a laboratory, never knowing what the answer is, and using experiments and data analysis to find it. This process of iteration is a uniform narrative across all three, and across all scientists.

Also, the training process involved in scientific careers unites them because all of them have trainees with whom they work. And that long process is not something that people tend to understand. Even my own family didn’t fully understand why I was in school until I was 30. This is one story that unites all of them and unites all scientists.

Another storyline that emerged is all the upheavals in federal support for science. They were already united by this challenge of securing grants to carry out their research and hire new team members and maintain their research portfolios, and those challenges became even greater in early 2025. We were able to capture that narrative by listening to them talk about their struggles to get funding and the strong possibilities that they’ll have to shut down certain parts of their research portfolios and possibly terminate a lot of training positions within their labs.

Q: What do you hope the viewers of the documentary will walk away thinking?

A: The audience will see that there are real human beings behind research. Science is not done by robots—yet. Science is done by human beings who are passionate about making a difference in our world, and they need investment in their work for our society to continue to be at the cutting edge of health care, of technology, innovation, and economic prosperity. That investment in basic science research is a very strong way to keep our country strong.

Q: After making the film, are you feeling optimistic or pessimistic about the future of U.S. science?

A: In the short-to-medium term, I’m optimistic about science because politics goes in waves and we have elections every 2 and 4 years. I’m hopeful that there will be more national support for science in the medium term.

What I worry about is the long-term implications and repercussions of everything that’s happened in the past year. I think it will take more than half a term or a full term to undo damage that was done to science in our country, with all the uncertainty surrounding grant support for research.

What worries me most is that rising generations right now won’t look at science careers in the same way as they did previously because the prospects for a career in science are not as great as they once were. I think rectifying the situation will potentially take up to a generation: Even a few years of stalled or canceled grants for trainees will mean that people don’t pursue these careers.

So I’m pessimistic in the long term, even though all the changes that have happened have been in just a short period.

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To succeed in my Ph.D., I had to rethink my mother’s story

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From ScienceMag:

I went into my Ph.D. with one goal: I would not end up like my mother. When she became pregnant with me while pursuing a mechanical engineering Ph.D., her adviser cut her funding and she was forced to leave the program. What happened was of course not her fault, and later she went on to successfully complete a Ph.D. Still, I saw it as a cautionary tale. I was determined her story would not become mine. I would make sure to find a supportive supervisor, and I would never do anything that could give the possible impression I didn’t deserve my place. I didn’t realize my focus on protecting myself could go too far—and that I’d completely misunderstood my mother’s story.

It was my mother who first inspired my interest in science. In raising my brothers and me, she developed a passion for science education. Once we were all in school, she began her new Ph.D., studying methods for teaching engineering concepts. I grew up testing out her classroom experiments, helping transcribe recordings, and ultimately attending her successful thesis defense.

For my own doctoral pursuits, I knew from my mother’s first Ph.D. experience that I would need a supervisor whose support I could rely on, even in difficult times. I turned down offers from otherwise appealing programs because of misgivings about potential advisers. I also wanted to be sure any program I joined would give me a chance to rotate through multiple labs and gain a deeper understanding of each lab head’s supervision style before choosing my ultimate Ph.D. adviser.

Despite my precautions I could not quiet the nagging worry that any vulnerability I showed could be used against me. If a pregnancy cost my mother her adviser’s support, why not a failed experiment, or an illness? As I went through my lab rotations, I was guarded and cautious. Rather than ask for help, I chose to figure things out myself, even if it took me much longer. When well-meaning colleagues offered constructive feedback on my work during lab meetings, I felt myself become defensive, seeking to validate that I was “on track.” I evaded meetings with my rotation advisers, dreading that they’d tell me they were dissatisfied with my progress.

This pattern came to a head when I found myself struggling to understand a paper I was to present for a journal club. Instead of either choosing a different paper or seeking help, I froze. When the moment came to give my presentation, I claimed I’d been too busy to prepare. What I intended as a face-saving excuse was received as disrespect, and the professor told me I was his worst student ever.

I feared I was repeating my mother’s story—my academic journey ending because of a single deviation. But as the shock wore off, I recognized uncomfortably that my defensiveness had contributed to the outcome. Instead of protecting me, the walls I’d built were getting in the way of the very things I had come to graduate school to do: learn and grow, with guidance from my mentors.

I also realized I had misinterpreted my mother’s story all along. She had started her Ph.D. halfway around the world, far from her support system, and after her setback, she restarted in a new field and persisted to earn her degree. She chose bravery over caution in order to achieve her goals. The lesson was not to guard against every risk, but to press forward anyway, even when it meant being vulnerable.

From that point on, I tried to do the same. When my rotation period wrapped up, I chose a supervisor who had been open and kind. I still carried the fear that anything personal I revealed could somehow be used to undermine me. But as I settled into the lab, I slowly let my guard down. During one meeting with my adviser, I brought up my mother. He in turn opened up about his mother, whose schooling had been interrupted as a child. Because of her experience, she had become a fierce advocate for my adviser’s education and his brothers’, the same way my mother had always been for me. Now, as my graduation date nears, instead of treating my mother’s story as a cautionary tale, I aim to be exactly like her.

Do you have an interesting career story to share? You can find our author guidelines here.

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A fun way for scientists to reach out—as a pen pal

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From ScienceMag:

Experimental Error logo
Experimental Error is a column about the quirky, comical, and sometimes bizarre world of scientific training and careers, written by scientist and comedian Adam Ruben. Barmaleeva/Shutterstock, adapted by C. Aycock/Science

I’m a huge fan of scientific outreach. I feel like part of my duty as a scientist is to interact with the public as much as possible to help demystify and humanize science, especially in a time when science needs all the help it can get.

So, when I learned about Letters to a Pre-Scientist (LPS), I knew right away it was something I wanted to try. The program pairs each scientist with a middle school pen pal. Scientists are encouraged to write something fun and interesting, and according to the LPS website, the students have a blast opening their letters together.

I hadn’t had a physical-letter pen pal since I was 9 years old and some kind of service matched me up with a boy in Melbourne, Australia. He and I exchanged letters for about a year. The only parts of that correspondence I remember are his use of the word “lollies” and my probably confusing hand-drawn map of Delaware. But this time, I was sure, would be more impactful.

I begin with the mandatory online training sessions. For example, the students will get to see a one-sentence description of your work before sending their first letter. The training helps you write that sentence—and then learn why what you wrote would baffle and dismay the students, then walk you through the editing process. At the end, my sentence reads, “I help keep people healthy by making sure the blood and urine tests they might get at the doctor’s office work well.” I give myself full marks for keeping it comprehensible, but a failing grade at being the kind of scientists who can truthfully write something more exciting, such as, “I study the effects of radiation on chimps in flight simulators!” (Note that this is not what another scientist wrote. This is the plot of the 1987 film Project X starring Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt.)

There’s a lot more guidance, too, which one might imagine is a good idea when matching children with adult strangers. Most of it is straightforward and expected: Do not ask for their home address, do not contact them outside of this program, never feed them after midnight. Other recommendations come from the LPS team’s years of experience supporting these interactions. Your letter should be understandable; photos, doodles, and little freebies such as stickers are encouraged. Avoid sending lab data or a manuscript preprint. Each of your four letters has its own deadline and theme, such as writing about your career path or how you overcame challenges. This lets the kids compare similar responses from their scientists, with the side benefit of giving you some direction when you’re staring at a blank page and thinking, “Uh … what do I even say to a middle schooler? Something with the word ‘rizz’? Is ‘six seven’ still funny?”

After all of this preparation, it’s disappointing when LPS fails to assign me a pen pal. Apparently this year the number of interested scientists exceeded the number of available students—both a bad problem and a good problem for the program to have—and we didn’t all make the cut.

But then, in January, it happens. A seventh grade teacher in Santa Ana, California, who has participated in the program in the past returns from maternity leave and wants her students to join, giving some of us an opportunity for an abbreviated correspondence: two letters instead of four, but we’ll get our pen pals after all.

During an introductory Zoom call, the teacher explains that her students generally come from disadvantaged backgrounds, with many living in multifamily units and some without homes. They love receiving letters from their scientists, she says. We should be role models, we should help them feel confident, and one time a scientist included glitter in their letter, and that was cool. No pressure. And, she begs, if you handwrite your letter, “please never cursive.”

I feel excited when my pen pal’s first letter arrives. She sounds fun. She wants to be a nurse, and she likes soccer and escape rooms! She asks whether I ever get disgusted doing my job, and I admit that I do, but I think everyone does. She asks whether I went to college, and I say yes, though I deliberately gloss over “and also 7 years of grad school,” because why scare her off now?

I work on my letter for a long time, going back and forth about a photo to include. After considering what kind of picture might fulfill all of the criteria—interesting, something she’d like to see, no personal info, no graphs—I say screw it and go with a classic cat pic. “I also have two cats,” I write. “Their names are Coconut (on the right) and Muesli (on the left). They’re brothers.”

Am I writing this insultingly simplistically? Or am I overthinking it, because cute cats are cute cats?

After I describe my science work and close with a few questions for her about pets, siblings, and the weather in Santa Ana, I print the letter, then toss in a few animal stickers that my son received on Valentine’s Day and that he probably won’t miss. Why not?

Her next letter arrives a few weeks later. I learn that she likes disc golf, and that she has two pets, though one of them lives in her house but the other is in heaven. I decide not to ask any more about pets.

I tell her how I became a scientist, how I failed an important exam once in college, and how I learned to dissect mosquitoes. I really don’t know what to say. But just in case, I add one more cat photo, of Coconut wearing a hat my daughter crocheted. Science!

I finish with three more questions for her, though after I mail the letter I realize this was my last one—LPS is over for the year, and I don’t think we’re exchanging another round of letters. I will never know her favorite ice cream flavor.

I’ll also never know whether my letters make any difference to her career path, or whether she ends up becoming a nurse. But the whole process reminded me how easily we can influence the next generation of scientists through something as simple as a few letters. There’s something deeply intentional about a physical letter that just can’t be replicated any other way. I realized as I was writing this that the Melbournian wasn’t my only pen pal—in sixth grade, our teacher arranged for us to exchange letters with active-duty soldiers in the Gulf War. The letter I received didn’t make me pursue a career in the military, but I remember the special feeling that an adult, busy doing Important Adult Things halfway across the world, took the time to write to me. Thirty-five years later, I still have the letter in my desk.

As the LPS website explains the point of the organization, “Talent and potential are equally distributed in society, but opportunity is not.” That’s why I sent a Letter to a Pre-Scientist, and that’s why I’m looking forward to hopefully doing it again next year. If there’s a middle schooler I can reach with a bit of writing, one more positive association with science I can cast out into the world, I want to do that.

And just like the internet, I have no shortage of cat photos.

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I may not ‘look like’ a professor, but now I know I belong

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From ScienceMag:

Minutes before my very first lecture to first-year undergraduates, I stood outside a locked lecture hall fumbling with my bag, trying to get in and set up before the students arrived. A passing staff member reassured me: “Don’t worry, you aren’t late. The professor will be here soon to set up the room.” Those words confirmed my worst fear: I did not look the part. Doing my best to keep a level voice, I replied, “I am the professor, could you please help me open the door?” This wasn’t the first time in my career I have been assumed to be less than what I am. But it was a pivotal moment, and it forced me to confront a question I had been avoiding: Why did I keep feeling I had to prove I belonged?

As a petite, 34-year-old Indian woman working at a U.K. university, I do not fit the usual archetype of authority. I am frequently mistaken for an undergraduate, a research assistant, or a Ph.D. student. At times, students or university security have simply called me “Miss.” Outside academia, I am fast approaching what is commonly labeled “advanced maternal age.” Inside it, I am treated as too young to possibly be an assistant professor.

For those of us women from the Global South who manage to gain a foothold in Western academia, getting there is only half the battle. Once there, we face barriers that are hard to name. Like many researchers, I negotiate insecurities about research outputs, teaching style, and contributions to my institution and the broader academic community. But I also spend energy proving I belong, energy others get to spend on the science itself.

In my first year, I said yes to extra lectures beyond my allocated workload because I believed doing more was the only way to justify being there. Somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting for others to underestimate me. I started to do it myself. I found myself constantly questioning my own legitimacy and calculating how much of myself I really could bring into the lecture hall, into meetings with students or new collaborators, or even to projects I lead.

When a late-arriving student at an orientation meeting asked, “Sorry, who are you exactly? Are you a Ph.D. student or something?” I was compelled to list my credentials (degrees across India, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and more than a decade of study), as if they could shield me from the assumptions already in the room. Although they seemed to silence the students’ doubts, they didn’t stop those in my own mind.

Now, approaching the end of my second year as an assistant professor, I have realized something unexpected: The real work is not convincing myself I belong, as though this were a confidence problem I could fix with enough willpower. Instead, the challenge is rewiring my own perspectives and my responses to the subtle and persistent messages telling me I’m not what a professor looks like. That includes unlearning my own reflexive responses to those messages, such as apologizing for my own presence, or preemptively using self-deprecating humor.

This takes a lot of vigilance. I have to keep reminding myself that belonging doesn’t need to be constantly earned. When in a recent administrative meeting someone asked whether I was a part-time staff member, I felt for an instant the familiar pull to justify or even apologize. But I caught myself before I acted on it. I said I was faculty and moved on.

Small gestures carry me forward. I keep a note of gratitude from a third-year student on my bedside table. The student wrote that they had not realized how powerful it was to have a mentor who looked like them. I now understand that my presence is not about my journey alone. It is about holding the door open for others.

When a senior colleague nominated me for a teaching excellence award last summer, my first instinct was that there must be some mistake. I am still fighting that reflex, but I am slowly making progress. Now, instead of rushing to justify my presence at the beginning of a lecture, I just set up my computer, look out at my students, and begin. Halfway through this year’s course, two students walked up to me and told me they loved my lectures. I thanked them, and this time, I let myself believe them.

Do you have an interesting career story to share? You can find our author guidelines here.

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How a lab accident changed my approach to science

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From ScienceMag:

I had just wrapped up my experiments for the day and taken off my lab coat when upsetting news popped up on my phone: A lab explosion at a university in China had killed one student and injured three. I felt awful for the people involved and their families—and I couldn’t avoid painful memories. Years earlier, I had caused a lab accident myself while I was a master’s student in China. I was lucky I didn’t kill someone. It haunts me to this day.

Back then, I was always in a hurry. I wanted to get results fast, publish papers, and outperform my peers. I took on as many projects as I could, aiming to impress my supervisor and earn a strong recommendation letter. Speed and output felt like the only way to get into a top North American Ph.D. program. I rushed through lab work, too—causing an accident that forever changed my attitude and approach to research.

It happened on a Sunday night. I was running a reaction, trying to gather data for a lab meeting presentation the next day. I had run the protocol, which involved a high-pressure reactor, so many times I barely paid attention. Waiting for the reactor to cool completely before opening it was standard practice, but I considered it a waste of time. So, I forced it open long before it had cooled down.

Acidic liquid shot out. It hit a senior lab mate, who was working on her own experiment just a few meters away. The scalding liquid burned her neck and collarbone. She gave a shocked yelp, and clamped a hand to the wound. I stood there, frozen, the reactor valve still in my hand.

We rushed her to the campus clinic. The nurse cleaned the burn carefully and applied a thick ointment. She told us the scar would fade with time, but it might never fully disappear. I apologized over and over, my words shaky and meaningless. My lab mate just nodded, quiet and pale, and I knew I had broken more than a lab protocol. I had also broken her trust.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I replayed the moment over and over—the stupid decision to skip the cooling time, the hiss of the liquid, her cry of pain. Guilt overwhelmed me. I’d messed up experiments before—ruining data or breaking glassware—but this was different. I hadn’t just ruined work. I’d hurt a person, a colleague who’d helped me learn the ropes of the lab, who’d never hesitated to answer my questions.

In the days after, I couldn’t bring myself to step foot in the lab. I asked my supervisor for a week off, and spent those days alone with my guilt and regret. Ashamed that I had valued speed over the safety of the people around me, I thought about quitting lab work.

When I returned to campus, my supervisor called me into her office. She made it clear I needed to strictly follow protocols for any hazardous experiments.

From then on, I made a point to stop rushing. I read every protocol at least twice. I set timers for cooling and wait times, and I let them run to the very end, even if it meant missing a deadline. I checked every valve, every seal, every setting. Safety wasn’t just a list on the wall anymore. It was a promise, to my supervisor, to my lab mates, to myself.

Slowing down was essential from a safety perspective. But I found it changed my science, too. For the first time, I was fully present in the lab and focused on the work, not just the finish line. I started to catch small errors I might not have noticed otherwise. For instance, before the accident I had made a careless calculation that led me to use the wrong reagent ratio when synthesizing a key catalyst. Unaware of the mistake, I used this flawed catalyst for an entire month, generating unreliable data. Only after the accident, when I slowed down and began to pay full attention to every detail, did I finally notice and correct the error.

I am now a Ph.D. student in Canada, and this slow, careful rhythm has stayed with me. I still set the timer and let it run, check every step twice, pause, and breathe. As I have learned: Science is not only about data, results, and speed. It is about care, responsibility, and respect for the people beside us.

Do you have an interesting career story to share? You can find our author guidelines here.

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Wikipedia’s gender gap has flipped for one group of scientists

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From ScienceMag:

Women have long been underrepresented in science—and on Wikipedia. But one corner of academia may have quietly reversed part of that trend. Among biology faculty at top U.S. research universities, women are now more likely than men to have Wikipedia biographies, according to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The latest data likely reflect, at least in part, the work of organized editing campaigns aiming to include more women on the website.

“It definitely speaks to all of the amazing crowdsourcing and outreach that’s come out of our community around the gender gap,” says Kelly Doyle Kim, who studies Wikipedia’s gender gap at the Wiki Education Foundation and was not involved with the work. She says she was surprised by the findings, particularly because previous studies in other STEM fields found women academics were less likely to appear on Wikipedia than men with similar publication records.

The study authors were also surprised. “I thought that women were going to be underrepresented,” says David Alvarez-Ponce, an evolutionary genomicist at the University of Nevada, Reno and co-author of the study. “But it turns out that we found the opposite.”

Alvarez-Ponce and his colleague embarked on the study after seeing the news 2 years ago that women had finally reached 20% of biography subjects on the English-language Wikipedia, a number editors and volunteers had spent years trying to raise. The scientists wondered whether the statistic held true for women in their field, too. They manually searched for Wikipedia entries for all 5825 tenure-track and tenured faculty who were affiliated with biology departments at 146 universities as of 2024, collecting data including page length, number of edits, and annual page views. The gender of the faculty members was surmised using listed pronouns or photographs.

The team found that 9.4% of women in the data set had Wikipedia biographies, compared with 7.5% of men. The gap widened among more senior faculty—women who are full professors were almost 7% more likely than men who are full professors to appear on the site.

These trends are recent, though. By analyzing when the Wikipedia pages were created, the team found that men biologists were more likely to have biographies until 2018. Between 2019 and 2021, women and men had similar chances. Then, in 2022 the pattern reversed and women were more likely to have a Wikipedia page than men.

The researchers suspect that organized editing campaigns likely helped drive the shift. Nearly half of the women’s biographies created since 2015 were written by editors affiliated with Women in Red, a volunteer effort aimed at addressing Wikipedia’s gender imbalance.

The new study also found that women’s biographies tended to be longer than men’s, even after normalizing for publication output and career stage. But women’s pages were viewed and edited at similar rates to men’s pages once those factors were taken into account.

The findings don’t mean broader inequities in academia have been solved, Alvarez-Ponce cautions. Women remain underrepresented in senior STEM positions and often face barriers in funding, recognition, and promotion. Plus, these results for the field of biology may not extend to other disciplines.

Still, he says, “Wikipedia is a very important source of information for many people across the world, especially young people. It’s a way in which people can be exposed to role models.” For researchers interested in representation, he adds, the platform offers something rare: a massive, publicly accessible record of whom society chooses to document and whom it overlooks.

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I felt confined by my disciplinary training. Making art freed my scientific ideas

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From ScienceMag:

I sat on a park bench, watercolor palette and sketchbook in hand. I built up the layers of my painting slowly, capturing the bustling street scenes around me. A wash of cerulean for the sky. A mix of burnt sienna and buff titanium to frame the outlines of the New York City skyline. I moved my brush by instinct, based on whatever inspiration struck me in the moment. I took up sketching during the COVID-19 pandemic and have no formal training in art. So I have no preconceived notions about what my art should look like or how I should be doing it. It’s the opposite of the attitude I had once brought to my scientific research. But I am now thinking about science differently. Making art has inspired me to approach research on my own terms, freeing me from the invisible constraints of my disciplinary training and my assumed role in academia. I am now forging a more creative path.

Several years before the pandemic hit, I started a faculty job in a medical school where I was expected to use my Ph.D. training in biostatistics to analyze health-related data sets. I was told it would be nice to get my own grant funding, but not necessary. I could work as a co-investigator to support other investigators’ grants. I did not have to set the research agenda or generate hypotheses; physicians and epidemiologists would come up with important scientific questions, and I would provide statistical support to help carry out the research.

This role appealed to me. I saw it as a way to work on my passion, biomedical research, without shouldering the stress of continually writing grants. It also fit with my Ph.D. training. My peers and I were regularly given data sets to analyze. We weren’t trained as biomedical hypothesis generators. Our task was to develop the best statistical model we could for the data at hand, to answer a predefined question.

As a faculty member, I initially relished being able to jump around to different projects in environmental health, dementia, substance use disorders, and chronic disease research. However, over time I began to feel constrained. It was as though I was doing science through a secondary filter, through the interpretative lens of another researcher.

Around that time I took up urban sketching as a hobby. In my art, I wasn’t following someone else’s lead or molding myself to someone else’s discipline. I chose what to depict, sketching on location to examine the scene from a mix of vantage points and letting the emotions wash over me. That creative process gave me a lot of joy. I began to wonder whether I could approach my science this way, too, developing my own research projects from the ground up, based on the questions and hypotheses that most grabbed me as a researcher.

I had doubts about whether I could generate ideas myself and get proposals funded as the lead principal investigator. Would my dabbling across many biomedical fields be a hindrance to winning grants? Would reviewers think I lacked focus or the right expertise to lead a project?

I decided to give it a try anyway. It has been exciting to thread my own ideas together and come up with a project that feels my own. The effort has paid off: I recently got my first major research grant funded through the U.S. National Institutes of Health, a milestone that has boosted my confidence to continue to pursue my own ideas. Putting the proposal together also helped me see that there is value to my broad research background. By dabbling across fields, I have developed a unique view and am able to combine different fields using my own creative lens.

Before making art, I was mentally tied to a narrower perspective: the idea that “this is my scientific training, and this is how I am supposed to use that training to solve scientific problems”—a box I was not even aware of being inside. By breaking out of that box, I found a new joy in research.

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Microbiologist wins Georgia primary for U.S. House seat

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From ScienceMag:

Only a handful of members of Congress have doctoral-level scientific training, and even fewer highlight those academic credentials on the campaign trail. But that’s what Jasmine Clark did in winning a Democratic primary election yesterday in Georgia—all but ensuring that, in January 2027, she will become the first Black woman with a science Ph.D. to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“The majority of her ads showed her in a lab coat and described her as a scientist,” says Emory University microbiologist Eric Hunter, her former Ph.D. adviser. “That approach could have backfired, but instead it resonated with voters.”

Clark, 43, who earned her microbiology degree in 2013 from Emory, is no stranger to taking political risks. In June 2025, while serving her fourth, 2-year term as a member of the Georgia state legislature, she decided to challenge longtime U.S. Representative David Scott (D), a revered figure in his heavily Democratic metro Atlanta district. In announcing her candidacy, she promised to be “a voice for science and truth in the face of Republican disinformation.”

Along with a war chest that far exceeded Scott’s and a crowded field of newcomers, Clark’s campaign benefited from Scott’s death on 22 April at the age of 80. Yesterday, with Scott’s name still on the ballot, she garnered 56% of the vote against her five remaining opponents.

“She was a bright, smart woman who was excited about science,” recalls Hunter about Clark, who joined his lab in 2007 after doing a first-year rotation in the school’s microbiology department. Although she did well, Clark recalls, “she was upfront about not seeing herself pursuing a career as a researcher. Instead, she said she wanted to share her knowledge with others and become a health educator.” She’s done that since 2014 as an instructor at Emory’s nursing school, teaching anatomy and microbiology to students hoping to enter the program.

Her own political education began when she headed up the Atlanta chapter of the nationwide March for Science in April 2017 to protest the policies of the then–newly elected President Donald Trump. Drawing on the concentration of research institutions in and around Atlanta, Clark assumed a role that “propelled me into a whole new space,” she told The Emory Wheel, the university’s student newspaper. In November 2018, she defeated a Republican incumbent to win a seat in Georgia’s state legislature.

“I have a Ph.D. in microbiology, which makes me very different from my colleagues at the statehouse,” she told an Atlanta radio station shortly before this year’s primary election. “And I’ve been using my scientific background to fight for policies that make sense for Georgia.”

She hopes to do the same at a national level when she gets to Washington, D.C., she added. “What RFK Jr. [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] has been doing is very concerning to me. So I’m running to protect our public health system.”

Although she must win the general election in November, the odds are heavily in her favor. Clark faces Republican Jonathan Chavez, who lost to Scott in 2024 by almost 45 percentage points. Failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris won the district by a similar margin in 2024, as did Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in 2022.

Her ability to influence national policy will be shaped by whether Democrats regain control of the House in November. But whatever the outcome of that election, Hunter thinks Clark is well-equipped to do battle with the Trump administration and congressional Republicans.

“This is a person who’s served in a Republican-dominated [Georgia] House and is well aware of what she’ll be getting into,” he notes. “Somebody has to be a voice of clarity and authority on science in Congress, and she’s quite dynamic.”

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Early-career researchers want empathy from their supervisors

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From ScienceMag:

It’s no secret that academic mentors are a common topic of conversation—and source of complaints—among early-career researchers (ECRs). With the power to sway careers, mentors can be a force for good, fostering a supportive environment that gives budding researchers room to grow. They can also be a source of stress, friction, and sometimes outright abuse.

In a preprint posted to bioRxiv this month, a group of ECRs sought to give voice to those whisperings, sharing what 2600 Ph.D. students, postdocs, and other ECRs in 65 countries say are supervisory practices they have experienced that have helped—and hurt. The team of four former Ph.D. students at the University of the Basque Country—Xabier Simón Martínez-Goñi, Agustín Marín-Peña, Mario Corrochano-Monsalve, and Adrián Bozal-Leorri—found that the top three complaints among respondents were that supervisors used dismissive or disrespectful communication, provided little or no feedback on performance, and ignored team members’ personal lives and well-being. A minority of researchers also had more serious complaints, such as verbal threats and sexual harassment.

One key way supervisors can provide support, according to the survey, is through meetings. The vast majority of ECRs found meetings to be important and useful—and only 7% of respondents thought they met too often with their supervisor. Meetings “serve as a key space for involving ECRs in research related decisions, reinforcing their sense of collaboration, shared responsibility and professional growth,” the team writes.

Science spoke with Martínez-Goñi—currently a postdoc at the University of Essex—about the survey and what it says about mentorship in academia. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: What’s the origin story of this paper?

A: The four of us co-authors met as students at the University of the Basque Country in the same department. During our Ph.D. journeys, we witnessed a wide variety of supervisory experiences and we realized that how supervisors mentor their Ph.D. students, postdocs, and other researchers has a huge impact, not only on their mental health, but also in how their careers are shaped. Most papers we could find at the time discussing good supervisory practices were written from the supervisor’s perspective. We wondered, “What would early-career researchers think about what traits make an ideal supervisor?” At some point we decided we should do a survey—ask people how they feel.

Q: Did you go into the study with a vision for the ideal supervisor?

A: I don’t think we had the image of an ideal supervisor. We clearly knew what we wouldn’t do as a supervisor, like mistreat people. But on the other side, I don’t think we had a specific idea in mind.

Q: What did you find?

A: The main results can be simplified into one word, which is empathy. If a supervisor is empathetic, this supervisor will understand personal situations of the early-career researchers in their group. They will understand that they have to be supportive, not treat people like production units of papers, but instead like colleagues who are at a different stage of their career. This shouldn’t be shocking. But it seems like sometimes we need to remind people that they need to be empathetic towards those working in their groups.

Q: What does that look like in practice? Are there specific ways supervisors can show empathy?

A: The results of this survey should not be taken like “this has to be done”—because each researcher is different, each situation is different, and that should be taken into account. But I would say that some of the traits that were most valued involved having a supportive supervisor, rather than a boss. Someone who understands the difference—who doesn’t just demand things, but has regular meetings and open discussions about workloads and personal situations, and is flexible about working pace and not fixed to working a specific way. Someone who gives advice, not only based on what the supervisor wants, but also what the early-career researcher needs.

Q: Graduate school is an interesting situation, because it’s an educational setting, and it’s also a workplace. How does that play into the idea of not wanting to have a boss?

A: As we understand it, there are countries that treat graduate students more like students, and there are countries that treat them more like workers. So that could affect how this boss-supervisor thing could work. But in our case, I would say that when talking about having a supervisor rather than a boss, we’re talking about having someone who understands that no matter if you’re a student or you’re a worker, you’re also a colleague that’s in the process of learning.

Q: At Science, we publish personal essays written by scientists. Last week’s essay was by a faculty member who wrote about his journey to figure out the best mentorship approach. Initially, he went into it thinking that when trainees came to him, he should have all the answers. Eventually he came to realize that if he took a step back and provided the structure for trainees to figure out the answers themselves, that that was a better approach. Do you have any thoughts on that?

A: I completely agree. As a supervisor, you are there to provide the platform for early-career researchers to advance, and you’re also there to mentor them. There may be people who require more attention in a specific area, but there may be people who do not, who are fine with having their own structures and are more independent. Each person is different, which means that what works for certain people or researchers may not work for other researchers, and that’s completely fine. Also, it can depend on the stage you’re at. Maybe your first year of a Ph.D. you need more guidance, more help to get settled. But then, as a more senior person, you may not need as much involvement. It’s a matter of understanding what the demands or requirements are for each one of the people in your team or in your group, and trying to meet those requirements.

Q: In the preprint you and your co-authors mention that many challenges only become visible once researchers are inside academic structures. I’m wondering whether you could go back to what you knew before entering grad school. Were you aware how important finding the right supervisor would be?

A: Not really. I’m happy in my personal case. My Ph.D. supervisor was great. But I think it’s important to be aware of mentoring when selecting a supervisor. You talk with people from different stages, different departments, different institutions, and you hear stories or see people that are struggling with supervisors. Sometimes it could be misunderstandings. This happens. But sometimes this could be because of inadequate mentoring.

Q: Do you have examples?

A: It could be a supervisor demanding people not take annual leave or breaks, like Christmas periods, just to stay working. People demanding that early-career researchers meet unrealistic deadlines, so they have to stay and work a lot of hours to meet those deadlines, unless they want to get fired or removed from their program. These power imbalances exist, and we believe that the well-being of early-career researchers should not rely on the goodwill of a PI [principal investigator] or supervisor—that there should be structures to ensure that this kind of abusive situations do not happen.

Q: Do you have recommendations for what institutions can do?

A: We came up with this idea of mentorship metrics. So for example, it could be an anonymous survey that could evaluate how a supervisor is treating or mentoring early-career researchers, to be evaluated by an external entity—such as a national funding agency, a research council, or an independent accreditation body. It could ask, “How did you feel with your supervisor? Do you feel there are things to improve?”

And then have some kind of actual implications for the findings to incentivize good supervisory behaviors, whether it is with increasing salaries, getting more specific funding, some kind of awards. And, on the other hand, also to take accountability when the supervisors are not doing well. It could be having some kind of courses on how to mentor. If it’s something that is recurring, maybe not allowing this person to supervise researchers for a specific span of time.

Q: I can imagine that that kind of feedback could be really helpful to ERCs and institutions, if it’s kept confidential. It could be a little tricky if someone has a small lab, like two people or something.

A: True. But you know what, even if there’s a single person or two people in the lab, then there should be ways for them to express how things are working. I think there should be mechanisms to protect these people and ensure that they can express themselves freely. For instance, institutions could aggregate data over a 3- to 5-year window or combine data from multiple small labs within the same department, so individual responses cannot be traced back to a specific group of people.

Q: What advice would you give to potential grad students weighing where to do their Ph.D.?

A: My main advice when people ask is usually that they look for a nice person, a nice supervisor, rather than focusing on the research line that they love. Because I feel that if you are happy in the working environment, you will end up liking what you’re doing. Particularly when you’re doing a Ph.D., considering the power dynamics at work between the supervisor and the student, I think it’s important to be happy and have a nice person as a supervisor. Find someone who you feel is a good person. Because you will be attached to that person for years. It’s a huge part of your life. And as a Ph.D. student, it’s not as easy as other jobs to quit and look elsewhere.

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