Some time ago I described my first steps in setting up a research group at a UK university. After one year it is time to evaluate some of the developments made so far. In general, I am quite happy with the progress. Certainly it has not been a very high-flying year scientifically. However, when you can forget for a moment the pressure to deliver, running your own little research group is actually very much fun. I will point out some aspects which have been particularly important this year.

Bringing in money
The first thing is to break the negative spiral resulting from insufficient research budgets. Without ’seedcorn’ money, it will be difficult to do research and therefore to attract more funding. There are some opportunities for getting this kind of funding especially for new academics. This year I have been successful in getting money from the Royal Society (£15,000, Research Grant) and from the EPSRC (£125,000, First Grant), mainly for equipment. To give an impression of the success rate, 2 out of 7 First Grant proposals were funded in this panel. So even in this special round for starting academics, 72% did not get the money needed to start up their first research project. It cannot be underestimated how crucial these small amounts of money are for taking off during the first years. Also not unimportant is the fact that bringing in money turns out to be one of your most important deliverables which will be highly evaluated by your university, most of times above publications or teaching.

I haven’t written much for this blog for a while now. The reason is that I had some serious lecturing duties this semester, which runs for 12 weeks until next week. If you are an academic in a university, you almost certainly have to do a fair bit of teaching. So I thought it might be appropriate to give you a flavour of what that means in practice (just in case you were considering an academic career yourself).

Obi-Wan Klaasnobi

This semester, I teach an introductory astronomy course for first-year students from all over the university although most of these students are from physics and chemistry. The middle third of it (about planets), I have taught for the past 10 years. This year, I took over the first and third parts as well. On the face of it, it does not sound like a lot: two unique lectures a week (repeated once) for total of 24 lectures (48 including the repeats). However, this does not mean that I just spend 48 hours teaching this course.

Last week, my wife accused me of being rude. Not so much to her – although it’s quite possible that I am, she’s probably got used to it by now – but to others. This sort of happened because our son, Guus, is going to nursery school soon and we were interviewed by the head of the nursery school. She extolled the virtues of their bulletproof entrance door, which (according to her) had become a necessity since Dunblane. In case you don’t remember, “Dunblane” refers to a town in Scotland where in 1996 a mad man entered a school and shot dead several kids. Terrible obviously. However, I couldn’t help myself and started arguing that this was silly and that surely because this happened once in Britain, this was extremely unlikely to happen again, let alone at the particular nursery school that my child was about to attend. Her answer: “Belgium”. Clearly referring to another more recent occasion where a child was hurt. At this point, I decided to give up, judging that further discussion of probabilities or, say, Bayes theorem or shot noise wouldn’t really go over very well.

So here we are. Made it, got through the rat race, and found a safe haven in a Physics Department in a different country. They even offer state-of-the-art lab space and a small startup package (not sufficient to do anything substantial in photonics). So where to begin? Here is a brief description of my first steps as a university lecturer, which has little to do with science as I knew it.

1. Know the right people

Being in a new institute in a new country without any equipment, my first strategy is to get known and make friends among institute directors and clean room managers. It is amazing how friendly most people are toward new academics. The well-trained scientific paranoia however stirs in the back of my head. What do they want of me, why are they giving me free access to clean rooms and laser equipment, who do I have to put on my papers later on? For now I forget this voice in the back of my head and hope for the best, as there is nothing to loose and a lot to gain.

ResearchGATE works to the benefit of science

Every discovery or invention is based upon previous discoveries or inventions. This is what makes communication so essential for science. ResearchGATE empowers science by connecting the scientific community. Our platform enables researchers to communicate faster, better and easier. This will accelerate the distribution of knowledge – and create new ideas.

ResearchGATE works to the benefit of every scientist

Being connected with co-researchers is a great advantage for every scientist. You can present your profile and your work, manage and extend your professional contacts, join or found groups, ask or answer questions, share or search papers and much more. This collaboration makes everybody’s work much more effective. And it’s free, safe and without spam.

ResearchGATE is designed for the upcoming age of Science 2.0

The tools offered by ResearchGATE are custom-made for researchers. No other platform provides such a wide range of web 2.0 applications exactly matching the needs of the scientific community. New features are constantly added, always state-of-the-art and no-frills. This makes ResearchGATE the best social network choice for scientists.

In French, explaining science to a broad general audience is called “vulgariser”. To me, this French verb has a very negative connotation. The word implies popularizing science is something dirty. Surely something that should be avoided at all times. If a scientist wants to stay clean, he’d better stay away from translating his abstract ideas and complicated experiments into the daily lives of ordinary people.

Yet, not communicating to the big, scary outside world is simply not an option. It is the outside world that is paying for those fancy lasers, microscopes, and high energy particle accelerators. It is the outside world a scientist might encounter over a beer in a pub after a day of breathtaking maths. And, very important, the majority of our beloved mothers belong to the outside world as well. I assume, perhaps naively, that even the most narrow-minded geek will agree with me that at least the last category, our moms, deserves some insight into our daily work.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Dutch science was without doubt world-class. The first Nobel Prize for chemistry went to the Dutchman Van ‘t Hoff. The first three recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics were either Dutch (Zeeman and Lorentz) or were partly educated in the Netherlands (Röntgen).  All of them were born in upper-middle-class families.

Interestingly, none of these famous scientists went to the Dutch grammar school (“gymnasium”), which was the traditional, elitist place for secondary school education. Instead, most early Dutch scientists received their education at the so-called HBS, a public school type that was supposed to be more or less open to everyone. Not surprisingly, it was also at the HBS that the first woman, Aletta Jacobs, was allowed to attend classes. The HBS became a way for upper-middle-class families to give a proper education to their children. Practicing science was a superb opportunity for those children to get highly respected jobs in society.

Entrepreneurship is a personal character that is mostly used for businessmen, but can also be found in scientists. In fact, as creativity is an essential ingredient for a successful scientific career, I may even claim that there sit more entrepreneurs in a research institute than a company, but I do not insist.

Some business-psychologists describe entrepreneurs as fire-starters because they love to initiate new projects and are always eager to bring a new idea, which they never lack, into reality. But, unfortunately, as soon as the project is in action the joy is over for the fire-starter. Soon it happens that he makes himself busy with a new idea and abandons the older one, even though the harvest time of the previous project has just started.

It is not easy to deal with a fire-starter in a scientific group. She is impatient and self-centered. He wants to pick up ten watermelons with one hand. He works at his own fast pace and expects all his colleagues to work full-time for his project. She often breaks the safety rules and does not clean up the shared working tables. He gets de-motivated and inefficient if he is forced to fulfill any other task than working on his brilliant new ideas.

My first university course was in elementary calculus. The course itself was foremost a repetition of what we had already learned in secondary school and was therefore in itself not very interesting. However, those first days did learn me a lot about physicists. I was surrounded by nerds, geeks, whizzkids. Badly shaved guys, elegantly dressed with shorts, white sport socks, and sandals. Since most of them used to be the best of their class, they (and I am afraid I should include myself in this category) thought they were to a large extent omniscient. During the calculus course, they considered everything to be self-evident, exclaiming phrases like ”of course, tell me something new”. It was absolutely not accepted to admit not to understand something. Our ego’s created a non-critical atmosphere, in which questions were looked upon with suspicion. Indeed it was very unscientific.

Young researchers always are worried about their career and this makes them mostly confuse in their research field. There are bunch of stuff that they should take care of them, publication, new finding, skill, being update, searching next job, getting match with new team and even new research field or culture, etc. If you look back then you can see each of them is a big barrier for others.

Recently most researchers try to have a good CV with fastest and shortest way as possible to survive in research community. These make them to spend most of their times to take care f publications and connections and as soon as they come up with first simple idea in their research, which has basic property of a publication, directly they will publish it and move on. There is no time for challenging, improving or getting deep because they should take care of other things as well. Now these days when you are searching about a specific subject you will find a lot of research work but most of them just repeating each other again and again and some times you can see they are doing same mistake and nobody even consider that clear facts.