Episode 6: The Person Who Can Help You Is in the Next Room

Every research culture has a version of the same problem. The people with the least power are the ones who most need to be in the room, and they are the first thing cut when the diary is full. This episode is about what a university does about that. Dr Livia Lantini coordinates UWL's Early Career Researcher Network, which began as a conversation with the head of school: Professor Phil Cox asked why there wasn't something for people at the start of their careers, and she went and built it. It started in the School of Computing and Engineering, then spread. Six schools and colleges are in it now. Professor Fabio Tosti directs the Faringdon Research Centre, and his answer to how it came to lean on early career researchers is that it never didn't. He was one himself when the centre was founded; Livia joined it as a PhD student. His statistic, offered reluctantly — he says he doesn't much like going by statistics — is that more than seventy per cent of the people contributing to Faringdon's research are formally early career researchers. Not assisting on it. Contributing to it, in leading positions, across the centre's disciplines. The most useful advice in the episode is also the least glamorous. Livia's recommendation to any institution is to put people in a room and let them talk, because the person who could help you most — as a collaborator, as a mentor — is often sitting next to you or one door along, and neither of you knows what the other does. They have watched projects start exactly that way, between two people who met at an ECR meeting. "Sometimes being an academic is a solitary journey," Nino says, and nobody rushes to disagree. Then there is the sharper version of the same argument. Representation is the thing people forget, Livia says: if you are not there and you hear it secondhand, you are not learning, you are not growing, and you are not representing your view. Fabio makes it structural. He has just been inaugurated as president of one of the EGU's divisions — a union whose annual assembly in Vienna draws more than twenty thousand scientists across five days — and the first item on his agenda there is the same as the one at UWL. If there is no representation of the young generation, there is no continuation. When a mandate ends, somebody has to already be ready to take it. There is a definition worth stealing, too. The UK convention for "early career" is seven or eight years past the PhD. UWL made it ten, because people arrive from industry, or take time out for parental responsibilities, and a clock that starts at the viva punishes both. The other rule is a ceiling rather than a floor: senior lecturer at most. Not because associate professors stop needing support, but because the ECR groups are led by ECRs, and learning how to lead is the whole point. One group leader in another school, on being promoted, handed the role to someone more junior on purpose — and then taught her how to do it. The ending is the reason to listen. Livia describes being a postdoc with no permanent job, a first teaching load, no idea how to manage her time or how to apply for a grant. She was lucky enough to be able to walk up to Fabio and ask. Not everybody has this luck. The network exists so that the answer to "I don't know how to do this" can be a group of people who say: we got you. Also in this episode: the Faringdon Journal Club as collective supervision, where PhD students argue with senior academics at the same level; why getting a PhD student into a meeting with a council or an international partner is worth more than a report about it afterwards; diversity as a team-building problem rather than a compliance one; and whether a sector being told to do more with less can afford to treat early career researchers as the overhead rather than the answer. Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, University of West London, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page. #EarlyCareerResearchers #ECR #ResearchCulture #AcademicMentoring #HigherEducation #CivilEngineering #NonDestructiveTesting #EGU #WomenInEngineering #Research #Podcast #UWL #UniversityOfWestLondon