Careers and research culture

Welcome to the latest edition of The Biochemist, which is focussed on the topics of Research Culture and Careers. These are two critically important aspects of the biosciences field that impact us all, whatever our career stage. Both are major threads embedded in the Biochemical Society’s strategy, which underpins the working of the Society as a whole.We probably all have our view of what culture is but what about “Research Culture”? The Royal Society states that “Research culture encompasses the behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms of our research communities. It influences researchers’ career paths and determines the way that research is conducted and communicated”. The importance of Research Culture to the scientific community, in general, is highlighted by the efforts made by the Wellcome Trust in its seminal survey from 2020 (to which I contributed as a participant in a co-creation workshop) entitled “What researchers think about the culture they work in” designed to understand research culture from the point of view of the individual researcher. This was highlighted at the time in an article in The Biochemist. The major UK research funder, UKRI, also continues to undertake extensive work in this area (available through the Research and Innovation Culture section of their website), and external to the UK, bodies such as Science Europe are also very active in this area. Finally, as many of us know only too well, the assessment of “People, Culture and Environment” will make an important contribution to the 2029 Research Excellence Framework.As highlighted above, Research Culture covers a wide range of different areas, and in this issue, there are important contributions in several of them. There is a feature about the internationally funded Research Mental Health Observatory project describing how this has built a community focussed on discussing mental health, well-being and healthy academic working environments. There is an article describing practical efforts to address barriers to inclusion in STEMM subjects faced by the LGBTQ+ community through the attendance of a group of scientists at a Pride event in the Southwest of England. Disabled scientists are a further section of the community that has perhaps been poorly served to date, and there is an article (with a link to a set of guidelines on laboratory disability access) describing how accessible laboratories and specific workplace adaptions can enable this community to contribute more fully to scientific research. Finally, there is an article describing how science communication has developed and can be used as a tool to further the development of an inclusive research culture that benefits not only the scientists themselves (who can come out of their “ivory laboratories”) but also the wider community. An engaged general public, with a better understanding of scientific research, is likely to be more supportive of science in general, something that we would all wish for.Career development is something that concerns us all throughout our working lives and is in many ways inexorably linked to research culture. We all had to start out somewhere and we all have, for the most part and with differing levels of success, developed. We may have developed within the same field in which we started, for example as an undergraduate, through a PhD, post-doctoral positions and on to an academic career (as I have done). Otherwise, others will have used their bioscience training to take them on the non-academic path. There are differing routes to achieving both, and there is no shortage of advice available. Choosing the non-academic route is a valid direction to take, given the increasingly competitive nature of the academic sector and the number of graduates and postgraduates that the sector produces. In this issue, we publish articles that combine aspects of research culture with career development. One of these based on a report from the National Centre for Universities and Business highlights the importance of researcher mobility, particularly with respect to movement between academia and industry, as a tool to build a more diverse biosciences workforce. This is also the topic of the interview with two awardees of the Biochemical Society Industry and Academic Collaboration Award, Professors Maddy Parsons (2019) and Matthew Dalby (2020). In this interview, they describe how their academic research interests have dovetailed with those of industrial partners in a way that has allowed them to develop their careers with feet in both camps. The outreach article describes the path followed by a recent PhD graduate who decided mid-PhD (as do many) that research was not for them and pivoted into a career in Science communications. The Day in the Life article describes the diverse roles of a Researcher Developer based at the Centre for Research Development at Kings College London. It is clear from these articles that all these people have used a wide range of transferable skills learnt during their education to forge successful careers outside of the pure academic sector.This issue also contains two student focus articles as well as some meeting reports and an article describing the Biochemical Society’s support for lifelong learning, a hugely important area for us all.I hope you enjoy reading this volume. If you feel that you would like to contribute to the magazine in future, then please feel free to contact me.