From ScienceMag:

The day the paper was published should have been a moment of pride. Instead, it felt like a quiet erasure. There it was: the data set I had helped shape, the computer scripts I had debugged and refined, the analytical framework I had spent months developing—all neatly embedded in a peer-reviewed journal article. But my name was absent. The feeling of exclusion was painful enough—but what stung more was that I had seen it coming, yet had felt powerless to stop it.

In 2020, during my doctoral studies at a major European university, a more senior Ph.D. student asked for help coding the analysis for his thesis. We had several in-depth discussions about the work, and he promised me co-authorship if the results were published. He even suggested the outcomes might fit into a chapter of my own dissertation, and that he would inform my supervisors once the work matured. I believed him.

Over the next year, I invested hours of focused effort into writing, modifying, and validating the scripts that underpinned the analysis. But crucially, the collaboration remained informal. Most conversations happened over voice calls. Any emails I sent went unacknowledged. There was no official record of our agreement or the work’s scope. In hindsight, I now see that this lack of documentation was not an accident—it was deliberate.

A few years later, I learned the research was being prepared for publication. But my enthusiasm quickly turned to dismay when I realized the student I had helped—who was lead author on the paper—had no intention of including me as a co-author. When I spoke up, he claimed responsibility for coding the analysis, and said there was no written proof that I had worked on it.

One co-author acknowledged my contribution and attempted to intervene. My supervisor supported me, too. But the student still refused to include me. Eventually, I decided my efforts were better focused on my current work, and I gave up fighting.

My name was nowhere on the published paper—not even in the acknowledgments.

The betrayal had real consequences. Believing the work would lead to a joint publication, I had spent valuable time on it during my own thesis writing, delaying my Ph.D. by at least 6 months. Even worse was the emotional toll: frustration, helplessness, and a deep sense of injustice.

My story isn’t unique. Authorship discussions too often rely on informal agreements, and many early-career scientists are unaware of standard authorship criteria. Even when research groups do have formal guidelines about who should be a named author, they’re often not discussed until after a manuscript is already in draft, and students may be too hesitant to assert their rights in hierarchical lab cultures.

After my experience, my colleagues and I began to think about strategies to stop others being unjustly denied authorship. Eventually we came up with a set of procedures we now follow for every project in our lab to make sure all contributors receive fair recognition. We create a shared document outlining roles and authorship expectations right from the start, and agree on milestones when authorship will be further discussed, such as at key analysis phases or before manuscript drafting.

I also try to lead by example, discussing authorship openly with students and junior colleagues, and ensuring they receive the appropriate training in research ethics. I make sure they keep records of their contributions and read journals’ authorship guidelines, and that they are aware of institutional support they can turn to if they encounter problems, such as research integrity offices or ombuds.

We’ve been trialing this new approach for a few months now, and the feedback from other lab members has been really positive. I’d encourage everyone to consider doing something similar. Authorship is more than a line on a CV—it is an ethical necessity. Every cleaned data set, debugged script, and refined figure deserves acknowledgment. And every early-career researcher deserves the confidence that their work will not just be used—but respected.

Read More

From ScienceMag:

My hands trembled as I held a lukewarm cup of coffee, scanning the packed conference room. It was the end of my first year as a Ph.D. student, and the biggest meeting I’d attended so far. I stood alone, watching the crowd. I longed to join in, but every attempt felt like hitting an invisible wall. Conversations moved too fast to follow. After a few awkward nods and half-finished sentences, I gave up and retreated to a corner in silence. That evening, in my hotel room, I wondered: “Why did something so simple feel so hard? Is there even a place for me in academia?” It was a familiar feeling. But only much later, after an unexpected diagnosis, did I understand why I felt so out of sync, and start to imagine a different way forward.

I’d worked hard to get here. As an undergraduate, I lived like a hermit, studying nonstop to earn the grades I needed. I enjoyed solving problems and working through data. The intellectual side of academia suited me. But I struggled with the social side—the conferences, meetings, hallway conversations. In grad school, the demands only intensified: Networking was no longer optional, group discussions required quick responses, and visibility mattered. Nonetheless, I pushed on. For a while, small successes kept me going: positive feedback, publications, and even a prestigious fellowship. I figured I needed more practice, more exposure, more effort. But beneath the surface, cracks were beginning to form.

By my third year, I hit a wall. Research still offered comfort, but the relentless social difficulties left me too depleted to focus. Success seemed to depend on skills I struggled to master. I spent hours frozen at my desk, overwhelmed with anxiety. Over time, exhaustion eroded my confidence and motivation, and I withdrew from colleagues, friends, even my research. I carried this weight alone, afraid that speaking up would confirm my worst fear: that I didn’t belong.

Eventually, the stress became unmanageable. I stepped away from my Ph.D. to seek professional help. That decision led to an 8-week hospitalization and a 6-month leave, a break in my academic journey that I could never have imagined. Initially, I saw it as a personal failure. But with time and space to reflect, my perspective began to shift and I realized how much energy I’d spent trying to navigate a world that didn’t quite fit me.

When a psychiatrist asked me whether I’d ever considered that I might be autistic, I was stunned. But as I started reading, it began to make sense: the social struggles, the sensory overload, the need for clear structure. A few months later, I received an official autism diagnosis. Finally, I had an explanation. Still, one question remained: Could I continue in academia? The thought of returning felt daunting. But I wasn’t ready to give up.

Instead, I began to make subtle yet meaningful adjustments. Many emerged through trial and error, guided by reading and learning from other neurodivergent researchers. I began to schedule recovery time after work and started to wear noise-canceling headphones to manage sensory input. To create structure and make progress tangible, I broke down larger tasks into smaller ones and tracked them visually with hand-drawn graphs. I abandoned behaviors, such as forcing myself to follow conventional work routines, that only increased my stress. Slowly, I discovered what helped, and built a rhythm that feels sustainable.

These adjustments haven’t solved everything. Now, in the fourth year of my Ph.D., I still leave some meetings feeling invisible, and old doubts occasionally resurface. However, I’ve learned to meet them with understanding rather than harsh self-judgment. My struggles aren’t signs of incompetence, they’re reminders that academia wasn’t designed for people wired like me.

The most significant change hasn’t been to my workload or environment, but to the connection with myself. The traits I once tried to suppress shape how I think, work, and move through the world. I’ve stopped believing I need to blend in to belong. Instead of trying to squeeze myself into a space, I’m gently reshaping it to fit me.

Read More

From ScienceMag:

View more

I’ve had a few funny science professors. I mean, they’re science professors, so the bar for “funny” isn’t exactly sky-high. But in the context of, say, an organic chemistry lecture, every wink, flippant remark, pop culture reference, or moment that the professor said a swear word became Showtime at the Apollo, and for a few seconds, the class would perk up. I may have forgotten most of the behavioral zoology I learned, but I’ll never forget the ornithology professor who told us how he learned to be careful asking at the front desk in a bookstore, “Do you have British Tits?”

I always wanted to be that funny science professor. When I eventually taught science courses myself, I’d try to work humor into my lectures and workshops. The laughter wasn’t necessarily the goal; it’s just that humor has the benefit of instant, unmistakable feedback. You can hear your students laugh. You can’t—unless someone gasps, slaps their forehead, and starts scribbling furiously—hear your students learn. So I’d walk away from each class feeling like the day’s success depended as strongly on whether the students laughed as on whether they learned.

At the same time, I found myself stuck in a state of half-guilt, wondering whether my efforts to be the affable science professor represented nothing more than a self-serving, self-gratifying way to feel beloved, and not just—or maybe even contrary to—an effective pedagogical technique. I’d especially question this choice when a student who seemed to be enjoying themselves in class would fail a quiz, or demonstrate in a paper a complete lack of understanding of a topic about which we’d just finished joking—and, I had incorrectly assumed, learning.

I haven’t taught science courses in a long time, but I started to think about this again when a new paper was published last month on the preprint server bioRxiv, titled, “Are they funny? Associations between instructors’ humor and student emotions in undergraduate lab courses.” After analyzing lectures from 48 courses and interviewing 462 students, the researchers concluded that “students who perceived their instructor to be humorous reported greater pleasant emotions and fewer unpleasant emotions.” Or, to present the same conclusion differently from the way it has to be written in an academic journal article, laughter—wait for it—feels nice.

The paper also concludes that humor is subjective, which I think we all know in a theoretical sense, but regularly forget in a practical sense. The researchers recorded hours of lectures, reviewed their transcripts, and noted the bits they thought were attempts at levity. But when they asked the students to rate the humor in the lectures, they found a significant gap between what the researchers, and the students, found funny.

Maybe that disconnect exists at least in part because the students had the simple advantage of being there. It’s not a stretch to say a transcript of a recording of a lecture strips out the crucial holistic feeling of sitting in the lecture hall. It also ignores the other pressures in the students’ minds, under the assumption that the joke itself is everything: A room full of undergraduates panicking about an upcoming exam, or pissed off about last night’s overlong problem set, might think lightheartedness comes off as oblivious.

Or maybe, most importantly, students might miss a joke if they’re busy trying to digest the science.

The study doesn’t ask, or attempt to answer, the question I wrestled with: It examines the relationship between humor and students’ emotions, but it stops short of associating these emotions with academic success, instead citing earlier work that associates “instructor immediacy behaviors” (e.g., making jokes) with “academic engagement.” If giving the students a pleasant classroom experience is the goal, it goes without saying that their teachers should strive to make them smile. The study I’d like to see, however, would ask whether the students learn more when they’re happy. Laughs per minute versus points per exam. A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender asks, “Why the long face? Is it because of divergent evolution that prioritized molar surface area to support the fibrous diet of herbivores? Explain in a short paragraph.”

For reasons that will never make sense to anyone, especially my wife who reads Marie Kondo, I still have my old college notebooks. I opened them recently, and while I reminisced—“Look at all the science I used to know and now have completely forgotten!”—I tried to find any correlation between the material I remember best and the professors I had found funniest. The result, of course, is that I remember as little about the professors as I do about the classes, because I’m old, and I took most of the notes while on 2 or 3 hours of sleep. What I did find, however, were lots of jokes—not in the notes, but in the margins.

Apparently my way to maintain a pleasant classroom experience was to self-medicate, drawing little cartoons, making wordplay, huh-huh-ing about science or math terms with inappropriate connotations (ah, the classic integral of e to the power of x). No one ever saw these; they were purely my way of keeping myself entertained—which means I must have derived a benefit from keeping my brain at a baseline level of entertainment. Or maybe I’m just easily distractable, and the reason I don’t remember the science isn’t because I’m old, it’s because I spent the lectures doodling jokes.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to repeat the published study, in a very limited way, with N = 1: my 11-year-old. He started to tell me about one of his science teachers who constantly made jokes, so I asked him, “Do you think that gives the students a more pleasant experience?”

He thought for a moment. “Yeah,” he answered, “because otherwise the teacher’s just yapping.”

The effectiveness of humor in pedagogy may be no more complicated than that: Students appreciate comedy in science class because, for just a moment, we instructors stop yapping. Maybe that’s the lesson here: Science is difficult, lectures can be boring, and even if we can’t turn every class into a headliner set, we can at least remember that our students would appreciate it if we add something, even a small something like a joke, to periodically pause our yap.

And if you’re looking for a way to reward yourself when the class is over, you can go home and try one more feature of comedy clubs: a two-drink minimum.

Read More

From ScienceMag:

I was less than a year into my Ph.D. when I learned my scholarship had been canceled. I was heartbroken. Studying in Germany was meant to be a fresh start, a chance to escape the stigma I’d faced back home in Costa Rica since testing positive for HIV. After years of struggle, I finally felt my dream of a scientific career was back on track. But securing medical insurance for my treatment had proved difficult, which eventually led the scholarship organization to cancel my funding. I was forced to return home.

I’d always wanted to be a scientist. As a child, I spent hours catching insects in the garden and watching nature documentaries. I made it into a prestigious science-focused high school in the capital, and then into an undergraduate microbiology program.

But something else was unfolding beneath the surface. I’d long known I was gay, and at university I found a community and came out. I dated and explored my identity. But in my final year, I started to lose weight and developed a swollen lymph node. My doctor told me it could be cancer or HIV. I was terrified. A part of me even hoped it was cancer, because society tends to view cancer survivors as brave, whereas HIV-positive people are still heavily stigmatized.

Eventually, the diagnosis came: I was HIV positive.

The response from many of my colleagues was deeply hurtful. Some said that, as a microbiologist, I should have known how HIV spreads and been more careful. At the time, I was a student in a bacteriology lab located in the same hospital where I was receiving treatment. The infectious disease doctor managing my case regularly visited the lab, and to see him in that context was unsettling. One day, a colleague casually mentioned they had processed my laboratory samples. I felt exposed, unsafe, and overwhelmed.

Telling my family was excruciating. My relationship with my father fell apart. Some friends disappeared, too. One said I was a burden on the health care system; another called me a bad person. The stress led to a mental health crisis and a psychotic episode, and I had to take time off from my studies to recover.

But I didn’t give up. I completed my degree and began working as a research assistant, even as my mental health struggles continued. I was hospitalized again and eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. The stigma only deepened. Now, I wasn’t just HIV positive, I was “crazy,” too.

Eventually, I decided I needed to get away. In Costa Rica, most microbiologists work in hospitals, places I could no longer bear to be in. After years of trying, I was awarded the scholarship in Germany. It felt like a new beginning: It was a relief to simply exist, without having to talk about my diagnoses. But the private health insurance provided by the scholarship organization excluded HIV treatment—and I couldn’t get public insurance without a job, which was incompatible with my study program. The organization said it could not fund me without coverage. I was devastated. I thought I’d lost everything I had worked so hard for. I felt ashamed: ashamed to explain to my supervisor why my scholarship had ended, ashamed to tell others what had happened, ashamed of having to return home. At some point, I began to believe I was simply a failure.

Fortunately, I still had people to support me. My former supervisor connected me with researchers in Italy, who offered me a Ph.D. position—this time with full insurance. From the beginning, my new supervisors knew about my HIV status, and I soon told them about my mental health. They regularly checked on my well-being, even coming with me on an initial visit to a psychiatrist. It meant the world to know that some people believed in an HIV-positive scientist with a mental health condition. I began to believe that speaking about my scars might help, that it could foster understanding, and perhaps even awaken empathy in others. If we don’t talk about HIV or mental health, the stigma will never end.

I completed my Ph.D., and am now living my dream as a postdoc. My mental health is stable, and I have not had a crisis in a long time. I’ve been undetectable for nearly a decade. Living with stigma is hard—but life didn’t end. I’m still here.

Read More

From ScienceMag:

The first time I saw my byline on a news story published by my scientific society, I jumped up and down. I had never felt so much pride and ownership about something I did, and for a moment I was free of the habitual self-doubt that had plagued me as a Ph.D. student. But a few months later, when I told my lab group I was writing for the society, there was an uncomfortable silence. To fill the pause, I blabbered about how little the role meant to me. “It’s really not a big deal,” I told my labmates. Later, my reaction bothered me. Why did I act embarrassed about something that had finally given me the passionate spark I had been looking for in science?

My decision 4 years earlier to pursue a Ph.D. was a lot more practical and exploratory than I let on. The work permit the U.S. government had granted me after I finished my bachelor’s degree was coming to an end, and I had two options: stay at the biotech startup where I’d worked for a few years, which had offered to sponsor a new visa application if I signed a 5 year contract, or go back to school. At 22, I hadn’t yet figured out what I wanted to do with my life, so I opted for school.

I started feeling like a fish out of water early on. Everyone around me seemed to be driven by their burning love of science. I felt out of place, uninspired, and incompetent. “It’s just imposter syndrome,” everyone told me. For years, I believed them, thinking that with more experience and confidence, things would change.

But as time went on, the feelings only got stronger. In my fourth year, I started reading blog posts and watching videos in all flavors of “How to know if you should quit your Ph.D.” One YouTuber asked, “Does the idea of someone taking your Ph.D. away make you angry or relieved?”

I thought about the question. The idea didn’t make me angry, despite how much work I’d already put into my dissertation research. “Relieved” was more like it. But at the same time, I knew that I had too much fight in me to leave my program. “That’s fine, I’ll get my degree,” I told myself, “then quit science and pursue something else entirely.”

Partly in search of this “something else,” I began writing. At first, I mainly used it as a creative outlet. But eventually, it led me to explore science communication. I connected with an editor at my scientific society’s magazine, who gave me an opportunity to write articles about newly published scientific papers.

Suddenly, the world of science became much more appealing. In reading and writing about research that had nothing to do with my own, I felt curious, enlightened, and empowered—all the things I didn’t feel as a scientist. The work fed the side of me that, as my mom would say, was always interested in “way too many things.” I began to entertain the idea that my problem wasn’t imposter syndrome—maybe I truly was a fish out of water, and all I needed to do was leave my life on land.

I decided to tell my academic mentors about my new passion. I’d hoped that my discovery would elate them as much as it did me, and that they would bless my desire to explore new waters. Instead, like my labmates, they could not understand why I would want to pursue anything other than research. They blamed imposter syndrome and offered their support. “You can do this,” they told me.

Truthfully, I did worry about what my life would look like if I left the world of scientific research. My family might be disappointed and I might face visa obstacles. I shared those concerns with a writing mentor, who at one point had also been an international student. “Follow your heart, and the rest will follow,” she told me.

I knew in my heart that I wanted to pursue science communication after I graduated. And once I chose to trust that feeling, I found that I no longer struggled to breathe. I still felt out of place in academia. But I now knew where I belonged and how to get there. That gave me the confidence to not only complete my Ph.D., but also tell my colleagues that I was moving into science communication without feeling awkward or embarrassed.

So, if you’re feeling like a fish out of water, remember that there are little ponds and streams all around you. All you have to do is trust that feeling and—sometimes—jump.

Read More