In recent years, equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) have become buzzwords in the world of research, with funding agencies and institutions making efforts to promote these core values. While there has been growing awareness of the importance of EDI in research, we still have a long way to go. The current system does not work...

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We are really excited to have Sarah Ruediger join the regular Black Hole crew. Sarah is a postdoctoral fellow who is transitioning to a group leader position at University College London this coming June.  She is an outstanding neuroscientist (with first author papers in Nature, Nature Neuroscience and eLife) with a long list of fellowships and scholarships who has undertaken...

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This is a guest post from Hongyu Zhang. Mr. Zhang is a doctoral candidate in the department of geography at McGill University. He holds an MSc in geography from Western University and a BES in geomatics from the University of Waterloo. Before joining the Platial Analysis Lab, he was an engineering support specialist at Geotab. His...

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This is a guest post from Sarah Ruediger. Dr. Ruediger is currently completing her postdoctoral research at the University of California San Francisco and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She studied molecular biology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and completed her doctoral training at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research. Her research...

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Earlier this month, I was pleased to see a paper published in PLoS Biology written by a large group of international researchers in the early stages of their careers about how we can improve research culture and practice. While I was one of the participants/authors, the real credit for driving the project goes to Brianne...

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Our long-term readers will have noticed that the frequency of column entries here on The Black Hole has dropped in recent months. We’d love to imagine that the number of issues facing early career researchers has also dropped, but it seems that it is a lack of time rather than a lack of content driving the...

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Over the last couple of months, I have been sent a steady string of emails with reference to various funding sources internal to our university, but the vast majority of them come with a substantial string attached – “funds must be spent by July 31, 2022.” On one hand, it is great that additional funds like this exist, but on the other, the push to spend rapidly prompts a number of issues around equality and…

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Over the last 11 months chairing our departmental research committee, I’ve gained a much broader understanding of the administrative workload that goes into decision-making at universities. Inevitably, this experience is unique and many universities will do things differently, but there are some insights that I feel readers will be interested in hearing and I would be equally keen to hear how other institutions approach similar issues. With increasing demands on our time, it is important…

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Editor’s note: We are delighted to have a guest series from Lynn Walder, an executive administrator with more than 20 years’ experience (including 10 years focused on biotech), and a passionate advocate of the executive-level business administration function. In this article, Lynn discusses how a business administration partner can deliver what she calls ‘stratactical’ value across an organization. In my experience, the challenges a chief executive officer at a biotech company faces are no different than what…

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Between raising two children under the age of five, weathering a  pandemic and becoming increasingly motivated to reduce my carbon footprint, I have travelled a huge amount less than normal over the past two years. Concomitant with this, the ways in which research findings are communicated has changed with the rise of social media, preprint servers and the suite of metrics to evaluate science and scientists. The landscape has completely shifted and, perhaps unsurprisingly, we’ve…

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