For the Last Time I have written in the past about the challenges of doing something for the first time. For early career researchers, this could be anything from giving a conference presentation to travelling to another lab to learn ..read more

Does working from home (and hybrid working) improve productivity or the opposite? Two recent reports have come to slightly different conclusions, and I suspect this is not surprising because the answer almost certainly is ‘it depends’. Clearly if you are ..read more

Last week saw the annual media interest in A-Level results (at least in England). Commentators noticed, for instance, the substantial increase in STEM subjects, with over 100,000 students taking Maths. This figure was remarkable as it was the first time ..read more

Readers may think I’ve given up on my blog, but the reality is more prosaic: as my ten-year stint as Master of Churchill College comes to an end (at the end of September), I have been moving out of the ..read more

Recently I received an email from a young girl (aged 8 and a half, as she signed herself off, with overtones of Adrian Mole) complaining about the lack of representation of women in STEM. As she says ‘If you want to be in science you need to see yourself represented.’ – a view heard often, but it is interesting that a pre-teen has already worked this out and sees it as a problem. It is always a pleasure to receive a note of thanks for the work I do and have done around the whole question of women in STEM, and particularly so when it becomes apparent it is reaching readers of essentially all ag ..read more

One of the initiatives I started when I became Master of Churchill College was a series of public conversations with eminent women, many – but by no means all – academics. To start with I was quite nervous: would I run out of questions? Would my interviewee just answer in monosyllables (none of them ever did)? Would I put my foot in it accidentally by asking a question that felt too intrusive? Would I just fall over all my words and mumble? You can imagine the sorts of things that troubled me, but by and large none of them came to pass and I have enjoyed the interactions enormously. You can fi ..read more

I’ve recently returned from my annual visit to the High Polymer Research Group Conference, held at the picturesquely named village of Pott Shrigley at the Western edge of the Peak District. This is a conference about which I have written before, following its evolution from the scarey place full of established and unwelcoming male chemists I encountered as a young researcher back in the mid-1980’s, to a much more diverse and inclusive group of people working across the polymer domain. If you want to know about the science discussed under the theme of Polymers in the Age of Data, I refer you to ..read more

I’ve recently been reading How the Victorians took us to the Moon by Iwan Rhys Morus. It’s an interesting book, but what particularly struck me was the Epilogue, which has reflections on how the Victorian way of doing science in many ways persists to the modern day. Back then it was individualistic and imperialistic (one hopes there is less of that today), requiring self-discipline and charisma as well as innovation. As Morus puts it ‘Men of science of the right sort could be trusted with nature because they exhibited the right kind of qualities for the job. Increasingly, they were the produc ..read more

There are many strategies for dealing with an overfull inbox, not all of which are helpful to the person who sent the email. I have weeks where I feel more or less on top of things and other weeks where too many slip through the cracks. Then I find myself, weeks later, sending an email saying ‘I do apologise for not replying sooner but….’ After that beginning I can try to find some plausible excuse along the lines of the dog ate my homework. However, these days I tend just to say ‘I’m afraid it got lost in my inbox’, which is usually the truth. Along these lines, I was amused to read a decade ..read more

I’ve just started reading a book called The Spirit of Enquiry by Susannah Gibson, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, an interesting society of which I was once a committee member (as well as a prize-winner). I am struck by the fact that the building where my GP’s surgery now hangs out, was actually purpose-built for the Society, something I had not appreciated before. The room where I’ve sat around waiting for Covid vaccinations was once their Reading Room, at a time when that was quite a novel concept (the College Libraries were only available to current ..read more