I’m a former researcher into the microbiology of the mouth who now runs a skills development programme for other researchers.
I’ve been asked to come along to a Research Supervisors’ Symposium being held at the University of Gloucestershire to talk about some of the challenges facing supervisors in developing the contemporary researcher. I’ve entitled my presentation “developing the postgraduate researcher of the future” and the slide deck I will be using is included here. In…
It was January 22 and a little before 4.30am when the phone call came. It was my step mother ringing to tell me that my dad had died suddenly of a heart attack. At that moment my whole world collapsed. This is a personal post that has surfaced some painful emotions for me (see below…
A few months ago I agreed to give a presentation at the Vitae Researcher Development International Conference in September. It is scheduled for the half plenary session on the first afternoon and the title for my contribution is Future challenges in doctoral training. I have only 7 minutes to cover this topic so I am thinking about…
I’ve been thinking about the Open Research agenda again recently; it would be fair to describe me as an advocate and I’ve written about this topic before on this blog here and here. This post though is more about the research culture that is often at odds with openess and why I think that needs to change.…
Read more Open Access, or: The internet is not going away #openaccess
I haven’t written much on the blog lately not, I hasten to add, because I’ve had nothing to say but more that I’ve not really had time to stop and put my thoughts down in this medium. At the turn of the new year into 2017, I made a decision about my career. This came…
This post was inspired by a comment on the UWE DocSoc Facebook group that spoke of anxiety when it comes to writing blogs or online diaries. It’s a topic I am familiar with both as someone who writes this blog but also through my interaction with researchers on workshops about using digital tools. I suppose a…
At a recent Researchers’ Forum at UWE Bristol we explored the topic of researcher career development within the context of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). As the dust settles from the REF 2014 it appears to still be at the centre of many discussions in the university research environment. There is still a bit of uncertainty…
Context We are moving inexorably toward an open research environment where the outputs of research, the data that it was produced from and, to a degree, the design of the research itself, is becoming open, transparent and collaborative. Part of the challenge of adjusting to this openess is balancing preservation of data collected in terms of…
A few weeks back I gave a lunchtime presentation in a forum for those using/running social media channels at UWE. I was presenting the point of view of someone who supports the development of researchers and how social media is both part of my professional practice and something I think researchers should think about utilising…
Read more Social Media and the Science Communication Unit #digitalresearcher
Over the weekend, the Graduate School at UWE finally managed to run a Thesis Boot Camp (TBC). I say finally as it has been something that I’ve felt we needed to do for over a year since reading the blog post about it on the Thesis Whisperer and suffering a major case of FOMO. So I got…
