In my first month as assistant dean, two people cried in my office. Both times I froze. Their problems were so much bigger, messier, and more complicated than anything I’d had to tackle as a faculty member. I had pursued a doctorate in geology rather than medicine largely to avoid sensitive conversations with people—rocks don’t talk back. Yet here I was, essentially a midlevel manager, overwhelmed and feeling like I was starting over. But looking to my past helped me find my way forward.
This wasn’t the first time I had doubted myself. I remember sitting in class the first year of my Ph.D. program, listening to a discussion of a paper I had read but not understood. Another student asked an intelligent and insightful question, sparking a lively debate. I followed none of it. I wondered how I could possibly write a paper myself, when I couldn’t even understand one I had read.
Determined to find my way, I started to emulate grad students I admired, asking them an insane number of questions. I put my trust in my adviser, even when I thought she was wrong. Two years later, I finished the first draft of my first paper. Distilling an unwieldy pile of data and ideas into one concise piece of work was deeply satisfying.
After I finished that first paper, I was hooked. I wanted to keep chasing that intellectual satisfaction, so I decided to give academia a try. But once I became a faculty member, I felt at sea again. I was unprepared to support students facing complex problems such as mental health and familial crises. Designing new courses overwhelmed me, and I struggled to connect with my students.
But I got my bearings the same way as before: by leaning on my peers, now other professors. I quickly learned that although new courses were fun to daydream about, they were an inordinate amount of work to prepare, and my time was better spent improving courses already in my load. I also learned to crack jokes in class, because even if students didn’t laugh, humor kept them engaged. By the time I was an associate professor, I felt like I knew what I was doing.
When my dean offered me the role of assistant dean, I didn’t want to take the job—I had finally figured out the one I had! But I knew I probably should accept it; my dean and provost had their reasons for asking me, and I trusted them. I didn’t even know what deans really did, so I went home and searched for the answer on Reddit. I discovered many others had asked the question, but no one seemed to know. Three months later, I took up the part-time role, juggling my research with my new responsibilities.
At first, I stumbled my way through technological hurdles and interpersonal dilemmas. I was now supervising faculty members who were also my friends, a tricky balancing act. I second-guessed myself constantly. But for the first time, I was confident that I would eventually feel comfortable in the role. I’d been through similar big jumps before, and always come out OK.
I now knew any career growth would come with self-doubt and uncertainty—and that as I’d done before, I needed to learn from my peers and mentors. So, I asked for help constantly and leaned on other deans’ advice. After a few months, I’ve figured out what deans do: We’re untrained therapists, helping people solve their own problems. I’ve learned to listen, point people to resources and university policies that could help, and to reassure. I soon stopped having to escalate every question to my dean, and then came a week where I felt comfortable handling every question and problem that landed on my desk.
There’ll still be hiccups, like the time I got a call from payroll—on Labor Day, ironically—because I had forgotten to approve time sheets, prompting me to rush home so staff would be paid on time. Regardless, I know how to find my way forward, by tapping the insights and experience of others. I wish I could tell my grad school self it’s OK to feel out of your depth; even deans can feel that way.
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http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-01-15 14:53:492026-01-15 14:53:49As a new assistant dean, I felt out of my depth—until I looked to my past for guidance
As artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT gain footholds across companies and universities, a familiar refrain is hard to escape: AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI might.
A paper published today in Nature suggests this divide is already creating winners and laggards in the natural sciences. In the largest analysis of its kind so far, researchers find that scientists embracing any type of AI—going all the way back to early machine learning methods—consistently make the biggest professional strides. AI adopters have published three times more papers, received five times more citations, and reach leadership roles faster than their AI-free peers.
But science as a whole is paying the price, the study suggests. Not only is AI-driven work prone to circling the same crowded problems, but it also leads to a less interconnected scientific literature, with fewer studies engaging with and building on one another.
“I was really amazed by the scale and scope of this analysis,” says Yian Yin, a computational social scientist at Cornell University who has studied the impact of large language models (LLMs) on scientific research. “The diversity of AI tools and very different ways we use AI in scientific research makes it extremely hard to quantify these patterns.”
These results should set off “loud alarm bells” for the community at large, adds Lisa Messeri, a sociocultural anthropologist at Yale University. “Science is nothing but a collective endeavor,” she says. “There needs to be some deep reckoning with what we do with a tool that benefits individuals but destroys science.”
To uncover these trends, researchers began with more than 41 million papers published from 1980 to 2025 across biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, materials science, and geology. First, they faced a major hurdle: figuring out which papers used AI, a category that spans everything from early machine learning to today’s LLMs. “This is something that people have been trying to figure out for years, if not for decades,” Yin says.
The team’s solution was, fittingly, to use AI itself. The researchers trained a language model to scan titles and abstracts and flag papers that likely relied on AI tools, identifying about 310,000 such papers in the data set. Human experts then reviewed samples of the results and confirmed the model was about as accurate as a human reviewer.
With that subset of papers, the researchers could then measure AI’s impact on the scientific ecosystem. Across the three major eras of AI—machine learning from 1980 to 2014, deep learning from 2016 to 2022, and generative AI from 2023 onward—papers that used AI drew nearly twice as many citations per year as those that did not. Scientists who adopted AI also published 3.02 times as many papers and received 4.84 times as many citations over their careers.
Benefits extended to career trajectories, too. Zooming in on 2 million of the researchers in the data set, the team found that junior scientists who used AI were less likely to drop out of academia and more likely to become established research leaders, doing so nearly 1.5 years earlier than their peers who hadn’t.
But what was good for individuals wasn’t good for science. When the researchers looked at the overall spread of topics covered by AI-driven research, they found that AI papers covered 4.6% less territory than conventional scientific studies.
This clustering, the team hypothesizes, results from a feedback loop: Popular problems motivate the creation of massive data sets, those data sets make the use of AI tools appealing, and advances made using AI tools attract more scientists to the same problems. “We’re like pack animals,” says study co-author James Evans, a computational social scientist at the University of Chicago.
That crowding also shows up in the links between papers. In many fields, new ideas grow through dense networks of papers that cite one another, refine methods, and launch new lines of research. But AI-driven papers spawned 22% less engagement across all the natural sciences disciplines. Instead, they tended to orbit a small number of superstar papers, with fewer than one-quarter of papers receiving 80% of the citations.
“When your attention is attracted by star papers like [the protein folding model] AlphaFold, all you’re thinking is how you can build on AlphaFold and beat other people to doing it,” says Tsinghua University co-author Fengli Xu. “But if we all climb the same mountains, then there are a lot of fields we are not exploring.”
“Science is seeing a degree of disruption that is rare,” says Dashun Wang, who researches the science of science at Northwestern University. The rapid rise of generative AI—which is reshaping research workflows faster than many scientific institutions can keep up—only makes the stakes higher and the future shape of science less certain, he says.
But the narrowing of science may still be reversible. One way to push back, says Zhicheng Lin, a psychologist at Yonsei University who studies the science of science, is to build better and larger data sets in fields that haven’t yet made much use of AI. “We are not going to improve science by forcing a shift away from data-heavy approaches,” he says. “A brighter future involves making data more abundant across more domains.”
Further down the line, future AI systems should also evolve beyond crunching data into autonomous agents capable of scientific creativity, which could expand science’s horizons again, says study co-author Yong Li, who studies AI and the science of science at Tsinghua.
Until then, Evans says, the scientific community must reckon with how these tools have affected incentives across the board. “I don’t think this is how AI has to shape science,” he says. “We want a world in which AI-enhanced work, which is getting increased funding and increasing in rate, is generating new fields—rather than just turning the thumbscrews on old questions.”
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-01-14 11:58:452026-01-14 11:58:45AI has supercharged scientists—but may have shrunk science
When I enrolled in an MBA in 2020, my colleagues were puzzled. The COVID-19 pandemic had just struck, and my group’s work designing ways to provide virtual medical care had suddenly become extremely relevant. I was getting grants, and my team had rapidly increased in size. So why was I choosing now to study business, my colleagues asked—was I leaving academia? But I wasn’t trying to escape. I wanted to learn how to lead.
I had launched my research group a year earlier, believing my dual training as a physician and engineer had prepared me for anything. I could diagnose disease, design medical devices, and translate ideas between clinicians and coders.
But within months, I realized there was one language I didn’t speak: management. Budgeting was challenging, meetings ran long, and communication between members of my lab, who came from a range of disciplines, was often messy. Our progress felt slower than it should have been. I had built a lab full of talent, but not yet a structure that could harness it.
The MBA felt like stepping into another world. In medicine and engineering, problems are solved by data and precision; in business, they’re solved by people and culture. Early on, one of my business professors said something that has stayed with me: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I’d heard it before, but sitting among entrepreneurs rather than scientists, it finally clicked. A research strategy means little if your team members don’t trust one another, communicate openly, or share a sense of purpose.
When I returned to the lab after each MBA module, I began to apply what I was learning in an attempt to reshape that culture. I started by opening up our channels of communication. Previously, I had run siloed meetings with different specialists, thinking medical experts wouldn’t care about the intricacies of our engineering projects, for instance. But I realized there was merit in having everyone together, so all team members could see how their work fit into the larger vision.
I also built what I now call “waterfall mentorship,” to ensure support flowed more freely. Before the MBA I was the sole mentor for everyone, which created a bottleneck. Junior researchers would wait days for my feedback and midlevel team members had no formal role in coaching others. Under the new system, each team member helped mentor those below them, down to the most junior researcher, who mentored their peers.
Finally, we began to treat our projects more like commercial startups. Previously, I’d approached them like traditional academic research: Define a hypothesis, secure funding, execute the plan, publish the results. But this often meant we could spend months building something only to discover, too late, that clinicians found it impractical or patients found it confusing. The MBA taught me that successful innovations are built around clear customer needs. We began to enlist our “customers”—doctors and patients—early on, testing our technology with them and adjusting it based on their responses.
Many in my group were initially skeptical of the changes. There was a lot of eye rolling. But the benefits quickly became clear. People spoke up sooner when something wasn’t working. Breakthroughs happened thanks to the fresh perspective nonspecialists could offer. Lab members felt a stronger sense of shared ownership and responsibility for each other’s growth. And we ended up building technology people actually wanted to use, not just something that looked good in a grant proposal.
Not everything translated perfectly from business school to academia, of course. Unlike a business, we’re not focused on making a profit. But what I took from the MBA wasn’t a corporate playbook—it was a mindset. It taught me to view the lab as a dynamic organization whose success depends as much on trust, motivation, and leadership as on technical expertise.
After I finished my MBA, a faculty colleague followed suit—and now one of my postdocs has also enrolled. Not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to do a full program. But there are plenty of opportunities for scientists to become better leaders, from microcredentials to courses run by grant agencies. It is unrealistic to expect new principal investigators to instantly know how to run a lab. I certainly didn’t. But with deliberate effort, we all have the capacity to improve.
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-01-08 14:33:012026-01-08 14:33:01What business school taught me about running a research lab
Just 2 months into my Ph.D., I was on the verge of quitting. I felt out of my depth, and my broken English left me struggling to keep up with my colleagues. At lab meetings, the conversation progressed so quickly that by the time I understood a question, the discussion had already moved on. My difficulty following my supervisor’s instructions led to me using the wrong volume of water in a sample, ruining an experiment. In a presentation, I talked about “gene dilution” instead of “gene deletion,” the silence that followed making me blush with embarrassment. I didn’t know how I was going to make it through my studies. But amid my struggles, a caring colleague said something that would forever shape my approach to science and mentoring.
I’d moved to Hong Kong from my hometown in mainland China full of excitement. I remember stepping off the overnight train onto the humid streets of the city with a small bag, a notebook of English phrases, and a single conviction: I was here to become a scientist.
But I immediately felt out of place. The laboratory was intimidating, full of shiny instruments I had only ever seen in textbooks. On my first day, my supervisor handed me a pipette and asked me to set up a reaction I had never done before. I pretended to know what to do, then slipped into the corner and watched a senior student until my shaky hands could finally imitate her movements. I often stayed in the lab until midnight, afraid of being left behind.
Most of all, I struggled with the language barrier. I was used to classes taught in Mandarin, but in Hong Kong—a highly international city—everyone spoke English in the lab. After the presentation that left me red in the face, just as I was contemplating leaving science, a senior lab member pulled me aside. “You are not here because of your English,” he reminded me. “You came here because you can think.”
His simple words gave me the courage to continue. I started to carry a tape recorder with me to every class and meeting, replaying presentations late at night to fill in the gaps. My English progress was slow but steady. By the time I defended my Ph.D., I could express my ideas clearly, and I had come to see my accent not as a hindrance, but as a part of my identity that I was proud of. My confidence had skyrocketed.
After continuing my training in Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States, I eventually returned to China to run my own lab. My students all spoke Mandarin, and I assumed they wouldn’t struggle as much as I had during my Ph.D. because they didn’t face the same language barrier.
But gradually I saw that they still experienced many of the same doubts I had faced at their age. They grappled with anxiety about career development, confusion about identity, and doubts about the value of knowledge in an era of rapid technological development. I realized my job was to teach them to think critically, solve problems creatively, and, most of all, give them the confidence to succeed in science and in life.
One afternoon, I saw a student struggling with a Western blot. The bands were smeared and uneven, and her shoulders drooped, just like mine used to. I remembered my clumsy hands on the pipette, my own confusion between “gene deletion” and “gene dilution.” I told her what my lab partner once told me: “You are not here because your experiments always work. You are here because you can think.” Her smile told me she was buoyed by these words.
Today, what I value most in my job is the transformation I see in the students who arrive timid and uncertain, but who leave with enough confidence to challenge me, their professor. Every time I walk into the classroom, I see a younger version of myself—hesitant, afraid, and eager to belong—and remember the bridge I had to cross to get where I am today. For me, helping others cross that bridge is the true reward of scientific life.
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-01-01 14:41:182026-01-01 14:41:18I almost quit my Ph.D. A lab mate gave me the confidence to continue
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’ve never been much of a video game person. As a kid in the ’80s in a Nintendo-free household, my only digital entertainment was a system called the Magnavox Odyssey 2 that my parents must have purchased sometime before the evolution of Permian mammals. Not only did you have to literally wire the console to the back of the TV every time you wanted to play, but the “games,” such as they were, mostly consisted of arrangements of five or six squares doing battle against arrangements of five or six other squares.
So it all felt a bit my-lane-yet-not-my-lane when I learned that someone has created and released a video game based on science careers. (That’s science careers, lower case, not Science Careers the fabulous publication.) The game, The Scientist Battles, draws from challenges, obstacles, and lessons learned during the early career of a real-life biomedical researcher named Shaun. During a period of post-Ph.D. unemployment, Shaun—who asked that I not disclose his last name—decided to teach himself to code. As a fan of gamer streaming platforms, he thought he might as well enjoy it. But his work on the game was also an opportunity to explore and process his ambivalence about pursuing a job in scientific research.
“When I first started this project, I think it was more of a fun thing,” Shaun told me. “It felt pretty cathartic.” Shaun, now a postdoctoral fellow at a large research university, worked on the game for 2 years, layering it with his own rather universal frustrations—failed research, rejected manuscripts, and colleagues who never seemed to face failed research or rejected manuscripts.
At this point, you may be wondering what in the world a video game based on lab research looks like. With Shaun’s help, I downloaded the game from Steam, where its tagline is “Science used to be your purpose, but now it is your prison.” Dammit, Shaun, I feel seen.
Those who know anything about video games might call it a narrative-driven 2D top-down side scroller with a light role-playing element. It’s kind of like The Legend of Zelda—if Link’s goal were less about saving the kingdom of Hyrule from the evil Ganon and more about academic burnout and the importance of self-care.
The game begins with our hero, in a lab coat and jeans, narrating, “I’m so exhausted. Four months of nonstop work, and nothing feels finished.” This sets the tone for the game: Although there will be standard video game–style combat, puzzles, and missions, the protagonist isn’t a mighty warrior or a fearless knight. He’s an early-career scientist, facing the difficulties many of us share. He’s you and me.
Not really knowing what I’m doing, I wander the avatar to a potted plant in the corner of the lab, mistaking it for a side quest. Nope. It’s a plant. Then I realize the game is directing me to begin an experiment on the lab bench, which makes sense, because that’s where you begin an experiment, not by wasting time with an irrelevant distraction. This already feels oddly like my actual lab experience.
I start to explore the game’s environment, which has a desk, a couple benches with pipettes, a centrifuge, and shelves of reagents. I choose a bench with what’s either a flow cytometer or a label printer, and I press “A” to interact. The narration explains that it’s now 3 days later, and “that did not work out, but what can you do.” I don’t know what I did. Or didn’t do. Which, again, feels oddly like my actual lab experience.
My next option is to “repeat the experiment.” And then again. After the third failed attempt, the character has an out-of-body experience and enters into conversation with a voice in his head, and it’s revealed (spoiler alert) that you are now trapped inside your own consciousness. Your consciousness apparently emits sounds that resemble a microwave. (Shaun told me he recorded real sounds in his postdoc lab to make the game feel more authentic.) It’s further revealed that you want to break out of your altered state. But only part of you wants to escape. Part of you wants to stay. To win the game, you need to “explore the parts of yourself that don’t want you to leave.”
This is the moment when I know, beyond a doubt, that this game was created by someone who has been to grad school.
After a bit more guided game play, I acquire a scalpel, a small chemical vial to use as a bomb, and a “pipette knife”—part pipette, part knife, 100% lab safety violation. My first lab room contains two spiderlike enemies, and when I stab them with the pipette knife, they turn into emeralds that I collect to purchase upgrades.
This part of the game feels less like my actual lab experience. I don’t recall my thesis adviser saying, “Hey, when you’re done editing that grant application, can you please stab those two spiders? And if they turn into gems, just, you know, hang onto those.”
Then, because I’m not very good at video games, another spider touches me until I die, and I become translucent and reappear at the entrance to the lab. It’s as though the spider is saying I failed my oral exam and need to repeat a year of my Ph.D. program. But maybe I’m reading too much into this.
Without giving too much away, as the game evolves, a backstory emerges. Lab equipment becoming unavailable when your time-sensitive samples are ready becomes a major plot point, and I have to say, the simplicity of that relatable holdup feels more devastating than any fatal spider bite.
Another mission requires you to collect 20 stacks of data before you can submit your publication to a scientific journal. “If only it were this easy in real life,” the game laments. Amen.
And you’ll never guess what happens after you collect 20 stacks of data. That’s right: You’re told immediately that you need to collect 40 stacks. And after you collect those? Sixty more stacks. And then your past self—a recurring grayscale figure in the thick of scientific anguish—assures you that the manuscript just needs a couple more tweaks.
I feel the spiky-haired protagonist’s pain as more past self scenes replay, such as when said manuscript is rejected by a top-tier journal, and his boss sounds so optimistic about gathering extra data to resubmit it to a second-tier journal. It’s like watching a horror movie, except instead of “Don’t go in there!” I’m yelling, “Supplemental data will delay your publication without guaranteeing the desired outcome!”
Sure enough, spoiler alert again, it does not go well. While our hero is knifing spiders, another lab publishes the same data first. “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!” he screams, and man, I get it.
The game’s narration is peppered with lines that hit close to home: “It’s starting to feel like it’ll never be enough.” “Why do I feel like everyone else is soaring, while I’m just struggling?” “I just want to be … something.”
Just when I can’t imagine what challenge our hero will face next, he asks a couple colleagues how things are going in their labs, and guess what, things are going surprisingly well for colleagues A through C. The game’s enemies then switch from spiderlike thingies to shadows of faceless successful peers, and once you’ve successfully dodged enough of them, the game explains how their triumphs engender in you a feeling of constant helplessness. Which is how I actually feel at one point when I’m stuck on a particularly difficult level of the game, so I use the ultimate cheat code: I email Shaun and cajole him to tell me how to defeat it.
After a few hours of battling enemies both external (usually various iterations of the spiders, sometimes armed with spider lasers) and internal (feelings of inadequacy, impostor syndrome, and even a scientist’s most formidable foe, drowsiness), I defeat the final boss using a fun little twist that I won’t disclose. You’ll just have to spend $4.99 and play the game yourself.
Ultimately, The Scientist Battles is quite a thoughtful little game, and unlike most of the genre of science fiction, it’s clear this was produced by an actual scientist who has struggled with actual science setbacks. “I think this game was really helpful to help process these things,” Shaun told me, “and just make me feel less bad about myself.”
I think we all have those outlets, and if not, we need them. Shaun made a game. I write this column. I’ve known scientists who write poetry, draw comics, make jewelry, or perform improv comedy, all thematically related to their experiences in the lab.
If you’re experiencing the sort of angst that Shaun’s character feels, pick your favorite genre and create something. Then, if you’re bold enough, share it.
And upgrade your pipette knife early. You’ll thank me later.
https://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/experimental_error_720x720-SfHlte.jpeg720720Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2025-12-31 11:40:272025-12-31 11:40:27Can a video game mimic the highs and lows of life as a scientist?
“I’m an NIH-funded researcher, drowning in uncertainty.”
That was the headline of a powerful essay we published in February, a few weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term in office. The essay was written by an early-career faculty member who shared how hard it was to watch the changes that were taking shape at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), not knowing how they would affect her lab, research, and career. “Will my grants ever be reviewed? What can I research?” she asked.
As the year progressed, we published other anguished essays by researchers navigating changes to the U.S. political and funding landscape, as well as issues that can apply regardless of time or place—including essays that explored the advantages that come with being yourself at work, the similarities between bike riding and graduate school, and the downfall of focusing too much on prestige.
They were all published as part of Science’s ongoing Working Life series, which explores key lessons scientists have learned as they pursue their careers. Here, in chronological order, are the most read Working Life essays of the year.
As a professor at a teaching-focused university, Salahuddin Mohammed realized success isn’t solely about high-impact publications or prestigious grants.
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2025-12-22 11:36:352025-12-22 11:36:35Academic betrayal, tapping into silliness: Science’s top personal essays of 2025
A Dutch university has successfully closed the gender gap in Ph.D. students graduating with honors—with potential lessons for other institutions looking to correct gender imbalances in academia.
Outstanding Ph.D. students in the Netherlands and a handful of other countries can be awarded their degrees cum laude. But after the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) realized women were half as likely as men to receive this award, it quietly overhauled its policy, requiring thesis committees to recommend students for the award rather than their thesis advisers. Last week, TU/e released data in the Dutch newspaper Trouw showing the new policy has worked.
The results are “heartening to see,” says Kuheli Dutt, assistant dean of community engagement and student relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose own work has revealed differences in letters of recommendation for men and women on the postdoc job market. Although the cum laude award is not widespread internationally, the results suggest the university was able to mitigate bias by introducing a process with more transparency and careful deliberation of candidates’ merits, she says—something other institutions could learn from.
The university realized its cum laude awards were a problem in 2018, when the Dutch newspaper NRC published an analysis of the gap at a range of Dutch universities. It showed that 7.7% of men Ph.D. students at TU/e were awarded cum laude, compared with 3.3% of women students. Processes to recommend students for the award differ between universities, and TU/e administrators noticed institutions with a smaller gap tended not to give this power solely to the student’s head adviser, who is usually a senior member of their department, says René van Donkelaar, dean of TU/e’s doctoral school.
So TU/e changed the procedure, asking each member of the thesis committee—made up of academics from other institutions—to note whether they thought a Ph.D. thesis was suitable for the award. The adviser as well as a university cum laude committee could then agree or disagree with the assessment.
TU/e’s data show an immediate swing in the awards. In 2018, 2.6% of women graduating with Ph.D.s received the award; in 2019, this shot up to 10.1%. Numbers for both men and women have varied in subsequent years, but are generally close to parity, with women receiving slightly more awards than men in some years.
“I think it’s an example other universities should follow,” says University of Manchester sociologist Jessica Gagnon, who researches diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math. Attempts to close diversity gaps often stall at the phase of data collection, she says, so it’s inspiring to see an institute putting in place corrective policies. “We’re stuck spinning our wheels at the first step of finding out there’s a problem.” But this is just a start, she adds; if advisers were playing such a significant role in the cum laude gap, it’s worth exploring whether students are being treated differently in other ways.
With declining funding for science in some countries—including the United States—competition will increase, says Julie Posselt, a higher education researcher at the University of Southern California. “And usually when competition increases, so does inequality.” That makes it crucial for institutions to find ways to address imbalances, she says. The results from TU/e suggest the question of who evaluates performance is critical—and shows it’s important to dissect existing processes to see what could be going wrong.
TU/e has changed several other gender-related policies, including the introduction of fellowships initially open only to women applicants in faculties with a severe gender imbalance. This makes it difficult to tease apart exactly what caused the cum laude gender gap to close, says Thijs Bol, a sociologist at the University of Amsterdam whose work has explored the causes of the gap. It’s possible that more women professors or a greater awareness of biases at the university played a role, he says.
TU/e published its data after the University of Twente (UTwente), also in the Netherlands, announced on 7 November it had culled the cum laude distinction altogether because there, too, men were twice as likely to receive it. “We thought it was a sad decision,” Van Donkelaar says, because excellent students deserve the recognition. But the distinction was inherently subjective, and the process of awarding it had “several other imperfections,” says UTwente spokesperson Laurens van der Velde. Bol agrees. Subjectivity leads to “perverse effects, particularly for minorities,” and it would be better for Dutch universities to follow UTwente’s example and ditch cum laude, he says. “I would rather invest that time in making better procedures for things we actually do need competition for, such as research funding and positions.”
Since 2019, the Institute of Biology and Chemistry of Proteins (IBCP) in Lyon, France, has retrofitted the building for greater energy efficiency, raised freezers’ temperatures 10°C, and reduced the need for autoclaving by 1 month’s worth of cycles per year. The institute increasingly orders consumables in bulk, recycles polystyrene packaging, and gets small lab equipment repaired rather than replaced. Every year it also organizes a contest for researchers to clean out their freezers so it doesn’t have to buy new ones. Thanks to these efforts and more, IBCP reduced its carbon footprint by about 13% between 2019 and 2023, though it has seen a recent spike because of new teams’ arrivals. And most of these changes have been spurred by a dozen volunteer scientists concerned about the environmental impact of their work.
These grassroots efforts are part of a larger movement across France. At its forefront is Labos 1point5, a collective of some 600 researchers who believe science should lead by example when it comes to reducing society’s carbon footprint. Pressure for change is also coming from above, with the French government in recent years requiring all universities and research organizations to prepare a road map for curbing their greenhouse gas emissions by 2% to 5% annually—and recognize researchers working on reducing science’s carbon footprint. “The whole system really needs to change,” says IBCP researcher and Labos 1point5 member Sandrine Vadon Le Goff.
As Labos 1point5 guides participating departments and laboratories toward greater carbon frugality, it’s creating a national experiment into what works—and the potential trade-offs. Any moves that might impact productivity, for example, can create pronounced tensions for those earlier in their careers, who face intense pressure to generate traditionally valued research outputs to establish themselves. “Young researchers are both particularly interested [in climate change action] and particularly vulnerable,” says André Estevez-Torres, a biophysicist–turned–sustainability scientist at the University of Lille who leads the Labos 1point5 research network. Amid practical on-the-ground measures, he adds, the real progress lies in the scientific community starting to think about and discuss these issues.
Among other efforts, the collective has developed a free online tool that any French researcher can use to compute their lab’s carbon footprint; they are currently working on an international version to be released in 2026. To date, more than half of France’s 2000 research departments have voluntarily used the tool for several years in a row, Estevez-Torres says. Harnessing these data, Estevez-Torres and his colleagues calculate that more than half of the carbon footprint of most French research laboratories comes from manufacturing, transport, and technical services associated with lab supplies and equipment—far above other common considerations such as traveling to conferences, commuting to work, and heating buildings.With a snapshot of their lab’s footprint in hand, researchers can use another tool provided by Labos 1point5 to simulate the impact of reduction scenarios. Almost 7 years into its existence, Labos 1point5 has prompted more than 800 simulations to be run across France, with the most tested measures being buying less material, extending the life span of computer hardware, and replacing airline flights to close locations with train journeys. A couple years ago, Labos 1point5 also launched a network and online platform for labs to share their implementation progress. To date, 90 laboratories have reported putting in place 346 emission-curbing initiatives including recycling plastic waste, defaulting to vegetarian buffets, and reducing travel.
Although in principle many researchers agree with reducing emissions, lab discussions can run into a host of practical and financial issues, as well as sensitive workforce and scientific considerations, and even philosophical and political ramifications. For example, replacing disposable plastic consumables with glassware begs the question of whether there will be funding to hire someone to wash it, Vadon Le Goff says. And although certain single-use consumables can be reused, many scientists worry adjusting long-standing protocols could affect results.
Lab and department heads can also be recalcitrant, fearing tensions among team members about which activities should be prioritized or restrictions in pursuing quality research, says population geneticist Audrey Sabbagh, an associate professor at Paris City University who joined Labos 1point5 in its early days. She advocates for a change in perspective. “Can we consider research that is not ethical from an environmental point of view to be excellent?” she asks. “It makes us rethink what quality research is.”
Future goals for Labos 1point5, which is preparing an application for a new, 5-year round of research funding next year, include shedding light on the structural and psychological roadblocks to labs taking bolder action. For example, labs could consider the broader societal impact of their research, intentionally slowing down the production pace of some research to spread its carbon footprint over several years or favoring research topics that contribute more directly to solving the current socioecological crises, says Mathieu Bouffard, a temporary lecturer in planetary science at Nantes University who created a group for young researchers within Labos 1point5.
Even without going that far, engaging in efforts to make science more sustainable can carry some risks for early-career researchers. Some institutions have created new positions in sustainable science, but opportunities remain few and far between. Bouffard investigates his field’s environmental impact in side projects, but he is unsure how valued his interdisciplinarity will ultimately be. “Will this work against me or in my favor? It’s not easy to say.” He also recognizes other trade-offs. “All the time that we are going to spend doing something else than research [such as climate advocacy] means getting less publications.”
For many of the scientists involved, the grassroots movement has helped reduce their discomfort with the environmental costs of pursuing their research by adopting greener practices, says Antoine Hardy, a sociologist at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation in Paris who studied the unfolding of the Labos 1point5 movement for his doctoral work. But the professional pressure is such that it can be difficult for early-career researchers to join Labos 1point5, he notes. Today, young researchers remain few among the collective and participating lab volunteers, despite more than 1300 signing an open letter supporting the group’s vision and some 4500 doctoral students participating in its online trainings.
Advocating for changes that your colleagues may not necessarily welcome can put you in a vulnerable position, says astrophysics postdoc and Labos 1point5 member Jack Berat. Apart from needing the approval of their supervisors to get involved, “we cannot commit to the transformation of the research group” when working on a short-term contract.
Equity is another consideration Labos 1point5 highlights to participating labs. For example, some labs have implemented carbon quotas for travel but exempted junior researchers, recognizing the importance of having in-person interactions as they are establishing their careers, Sabbagh says. “It is when we are young researchers that we most need to travel to engage in collaborations and make ourselves visible.”
Within individual labs, progress will likely require iterative experimentation. IBCP, for example, has started to run participative workshops so people can “present their problems and their obstacles,” says IBCP research engineer and Labos 1point5 member Virginie Gueguen-Chaignon. “It allows us to … arrive at imperfect proposals, and then we improve them little by little.”
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2025-12-19 10:39:272025-12-19 10:39:27To reduce science’s carbon footprint, researchers in France reinvent work practices
I expected the news to bring relief. Instead, when I learned that the mentor who had made unwanted sexual advances toward me 25 years ago had died, I found myself sifting through far more complicated feelings. There was sadness—not because his actions were excusable, but because for me he hadn’t always been the person who harmed me. At one time, I had trusted him and believed he was someone who saw potential in me. Even now, I can recognize the small ways he supported my early steps in science. Holding those truths alongside the memory of what he did has never been simple, and his death only brought that complexity into sharper focus.
I had joined his lab as an undergraduate intern, determined to prove I belonged there. Surrounded by tools I didn’t yet know how to use, I felt both thrilled and intimidated. What grounded me was the trust I felt as I was welcomed into that space—trust that I would be given the training I needed and space to grow. I didn’t realize how fragile that sense of trust could be until the night it broke.
On my 21st birthday, my mentor, who was decades my senior, invited me to his home to celebrate. I was encouraged by the gesture, taking it as one more sign that I was on the right path. When he handed me a cocktail and queued up Basic Instinct, I told myself this was informal mentoring, the kind I assumed others experienced but rarely discussed. But midway through the movie, he moved closer and put his hand on my thigh. I froze. People often imagine that these situations trigger immediate resistance, but paralysis is its own instinct, one that leaves you feeling betrayed by your own body.
When he leaned in and tried to climb on top of me, something finally snapped. I ran down the stairs, out the door, and into the night. I barely remember the walk home, only the pounding of my footsteps and frantic rhythm of my heartbeat.
Afterward, I said nothing. I told myself that speaking up might threaten his career, or mine, or both. I worried no one would believe me. I rationalized that perhaps my experience had been a misunderstanding, that it was an isolated moment, that speaking up would cause more trouble than good. But silence doesn’t erase harm. It simply buries it and the weight of keeping it buried becomes its own burden.
That burden intensified weeks later when he introduced me to the intern who would replace me, a young woman with the same eagerness and optimism I had. Seeing her shook something loose in me. I realized my silence, intended to protect myself, also shielded him from accountability. But even then, I told no one.
Years passed. I moved on to other labs, other institutions, other milestones. Outwardly, I was succeeding. But my silence traveled with me. It shaped how I approached mentors, how I navigated power dynamics, and how I hesitated before asking questions that might expose vulnerability. It also influenced choices I didn’t fully recognize at the time, like how I found myself gravitating toward advisers who were women, or men who felt safe—even if the research groups that excited me most were led by others. I told myself it was about fit, or personality, or timing, but underneath was a different calculation. The guilt persisted as well. I saw myself as someone who had failed to act.
In the meantime, as I moved into roles that involved mentoring students, I became acutely aware of the environments we create for trainees. I tried to be intentional about well-being, boundaries, and belonging, recognizing that mentorship is not simply about guiding someone toward a career, but about honoring the responsibility that comes with power. That meant checking in with students before problems arose, being transparent about expectations, celebrating their successes, and regularly inviting feedback. These practices are small, but they are deliberate, and they reflect a commitment to building the kind of scientific community I needed when I was young—one where safety is nurtured and trust is earned.
After all these years, I share my story in the hope that others, whether trainees or senior scientists, will reflect on moments when trust mattered in their own career journey, and on the responsibility we each hold in ensuring that the next generation enters a scientific world where safety is actively protected.
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2025-12-18 14:06:162025-12-18 14:06:16After an academic mentor’s unwanted sexual advances, I stayed silent for decades. Now, I’m speaking out
For 20 years, my life has been go, go, go. As a postdoctoral researcher and then a faculty member, I often found myself answering that one last email from a student while helping my children with homework or replying to a text from the lab while attending my son’s band concert. I was accustomed to arriving at my office each day before 8 a.m., coffee in hand, ready to tackle a long to-do list. I rarely had a lunch break, and when I did, it was spent at my desk replying to emails. My days were blurred by meetings, lab work, and deadlines, yet I still felt behind. That relentless pace seemed like the only way to be both a scientist and a parent—until a fellowship abroad showed me a new approach to research and life.
After receiving tenure in 2022 I considered taking a sabbatical. But I had 15 people in my lab, a partner who is also in academia with his own lab, and two children in elementary school. I felt I could not step away for a year. Then I connected with researchers in Uruguay seeking a collaborator experienced in my area, tick transgenics, and I got a short-term Fulbright fellowship to explore the opportunity. I envisioned my 3-month stay as an intense period of lab work, data collection, and scientific discoveries. The 5-hour time difference would leave me with enough hours to catch up with my lab and family back home.
When I arrived, I was dismayed to learn that the shuttle to the institute ran on a schedule that limited our work hours to 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Mornings started with shared maté and conversations about our weekends or evenings, followed later by an extended lunch break that was sacred. I felt impatient.
Yet my research progressed steadily. Outside of work, another kind of progress was unfolding. I was still working long hours because of my responsibilities as a lab head, graduate program director, and National Institutes of Health study section member, but the built-in breaks—which often included an evening snack or walk on the rambla—made all the difference. I still got my work done, and the slower rhythm also left space for deeper thinking, both in my experiments and in my life. I was learning the value of working with intention rather than urgency, and of leaving room for the parts of life that can’t be scheduled. A calmness set in. I found myself laughing more, sleeping better, and enjoying the life I have worked hard to build.
Midway through my fellowship my family arrived for an extended visit, and I took 3 weeks off for a once-in-a-lifetime journey. We wandered through bustling neighborhoods framed by the Andes, stood in silence under a desert sky heavy with stars, and felt the thunder of waterfalls drenching us in mist. I began to notice small things: my daughter’s fascination with seashells, my son’s growing ease with strangers and his first words of Spanish, the way my spouse and I laughed more instead of just discussing logistics.
When my fellowship ended 8 months ago, I returned with more than a set of data. I came back with a recalibrated sense of how I want to live and work. I no longer treat evenings and weekends as time to catch up on unfinished work; instead, I reserve them for my family and myself. Blocking my calendar so that no one can schedule a meeting during my off hours and letting my lab members know when I will be available has worked wonders. I’ve built small rituals into my routine—a morning walk, a lunch break away from the screen—and I keep a maté gourd on my desk as a reminder to pause and connect.
These modest changes have reshaped the texture of my days. I find myself more focused in the lab, more patient with my students, and more present with my family. Productivity, I’ve come to see, is not measured only by research papers and grants. It is also sustained by presence, rest, and the relationships that give meaning to the work.
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2025-12-11 14:14:492025-12-11 14:14:49I was a ‘go, go, go’ academic. A fellowship abroad transformed my approach
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