The Black Hole

Guest writer Sarah Masefield explains why she created the “How to Thrive and Survive in your PhD” project to help postgraduate researchers connect and help one another.

Once you know what type of brand you are aiming for, you can identify the values that your team should embrace.

This past year has accentuated issues that needed to have some light shone on them and we should be very careful not to push them back in the darkness.

Having a distinct brand that is integrated with your research program’s culture allows your team to define its strengths and intended contributions to a field.

While the advantages of preprint servers are numerous, researchers need to be very clear about the fact that these findings have not been formally assessed by the scientific community.

Branding is the exercise of summarizing an organization’s culture to attract a particular type of employee, collaborator or funder.

There is an opportunity to learn from dramatic changes in behaviour that have been imposed on us.

The academic community is at risk of losing a large percentage of researchers, unless institutions and funding agencies start implementing proactive solutions.

There’s evidence that increasing diversity within science might directly enhance the scientific enterprise, but in order to do so, we need to acknowledge our implicit biases.

We would like to see major organizations make their reviewer comments available to other funding organizations for grants that “just missed” getting funded.

The idea of successive iterations across stages of development is not incongruent with the concept of mastery, and one might expect that further iterations drives greater competence.

The current system of academic science is not organized to support all scientists equally.

Many of the mental health challenges universities are trying to address tend to be exacerbated by the pride of academics themselves.

For those of us that held strong at the onset of the pandemic, this is when the wave of despondency generally hits.

Some people need to be pushed to achieve their best work, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Both David and Jonathan hope that many new and good things can come from this period of lockdown.

Three scientists share their thoughts on how the scientific community can help combat racism in all its forms.

The scientific community often relies on impromptu interactions to spur where the next set of experiments might go.

We must identify and resolve the gaps in our current scientific training, and revisit and refine the incentive structures we’ve created around our scientists.

A potentially interesting approach would be to consider substantially less standardization in the metrics that assess academic institutions.