Jo-Ann Trejo co-leads the Faculty Mentor Training Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) medical school, where, thanks to her efforts, the number of tenure-track faculty members from under-represented groups shot up by 38% from 2017 to 2022. 

Trejo, a pharmacologist whose research helps to develop drugs to treat vascular diseases, says her mentor colleagues understand that their mission and responsibility is training the next generation of scientists and providing opportunities for them. She describes the people who supported her at the early career stage, and the impact they had. “When I reflect on my life and I think about how a poor Mexican American farm worker kid from an impoverished background, became a scientist professor, it’s actually extraordinary,” she says. 

Trejo is the seventh researcher to feature in this eight-part Changemakers podcast series. It accompanies an ongoing Nature Q&A series that highlights scientists who fight racism in science and champion inclusion at work. 

Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series’ aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature’s Black Employee Network. 

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Arezoo Khodayari and Laurie Barge started a mentoring collaboration more than a decade ago, providing students at California State University Los Angeles (Cal State LA) with paid research opportunities at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in nearly Pasadena, where Barge is based. 

Khodayari, an environmental scientist at Cal State LA, a minority-serving institution where more than 75% of students identify as Hispanic, says their partnership came about when they co-hosted a student intern who was seeking to turn her summer research project at JPL into a master’s thesis. Barge’s JPL lab explores the potential for the emergence of life on other worlds, more than a decade ago.

The pair realized they could create more projects that are focused at the intersection of astrobiology and environmental science. ​​​​​​

Khodayari, a first generation college student who grew up in Iran before moving to the US aged 24 for a PhD at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, describes her passion for teaching and research, and how the two scientific disciplines are a good fit. They combine a focus on ecosystems and habitability of planets, she says.

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A paper co-authored by Tatsuya Amano was rejected recently without review because its level of English did not meet the journal’s required standard. His research suggests that 38% of researchers who are not fluent in English have experienced similar rejections.

Amano, whose first language is Japanese, describes how dismantling language barriers will result in improved knowledge sharing, and in the long run, better research.

Journals, he argues, can help by taking steps to distinguish the quality of science from the quality of language when assessing manuscripts. And conference organizers can adopt a range of measures to support presenters and attendees whose first language is not English.

The biodiversity researcher is one of eleven scientists leading TranslatE, a project which strives to make environmental science more accessible to non-fluent English speakers.

AI and translation tools can bring huge benefits to researchers like him, he says, but they won’t all have been trained on many of the world’s estimated 7000 different languages, deepening inequities in science. Cost is another factor, particularly for those in global south countries. “People from high income countries may be more likely to benefit from those emerging AI technologies,” he says.

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In her role as director of Bioprotection Aotearoa, a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence, Amanda Black works with local communities to protect the country’s natural and food-producing ecosystems.

Black says the Indigenous values that she applies in her role include te pono, which stands for truth, honesty and integrity, te aroha, encompassing respect and reciprocity, and te tika, a term that means doing what is right, in the right way, for the right reasons.

The soil chemist is the first of eight scientists to feature in a podcast series to accompany Nature’s Changemakers in science Q&A series, which launched last year as a follow-up to the journal’s Racism in Science special issue.

Listen to launch editor Kendall Powell discuss the series’ aims and objectives with Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature’s Black Employee Network.

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In the final episode of this six-part podcast series about hiring in science, Julie Gould asks what it takes to be the perfect candidate for a science job vacancy.

Lauren Celano, a careers coach who co-founded Propel Careers, based in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2009, defines a high-calibre candidate as someone who hits up to 70% of the technical things being asked for in a job spec, plus being a strong team player with good communication skills.

David Perlmutter, a communications researcher at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, says recruiters today are seeking what he terms Renaisance people who are able to demonstrate eight or nine qualities and qualifications. Thirty years ago, there might have been just two requirements listed on a job ad. “We’re asking too much of them, so of course they’re coming up short,” he says.

Julie Gould tests Perlmutter’s hypothesis by comparing a 1995 job ad in Nature for a postdoctoral researcher with one posted this year, at the same organisation. The results are revealing.

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