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Post-Doc Symposium 2019 Programme

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The organising committee are delighted to present the 2019 Post Doctoral Symposium Programme, embedded below. Once again there was a vast range of high quality abstract submissions, and we’re pleased to bring you 12 very diverse talks from across the faculty!

In addition to our keynote speaker, Professor Ana Maria Cuervo from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the US, we will be joined by a guest speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Phimister, the deputy editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The winner of the best paper competition was Dr. Martina Miotto. As she had been selected to give a talk in a main session and instead will now deliver the longer prize talk, the first runner up from the competition, Dr. Anastasia Hepburn, will now give the first talk of the day.

The symposium takes place on Friday 21st June in and around the David Shaw Lecture Theatre.

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What You Need to Know About NUAcT

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The first round of recruitment for Newcastle University’s new Academic Track scheme opens on Monday 14th January 2019, just the other side of the weekend. A replacement – or more accurately an extension and rebrand – of the NURF scheme, NUAcT is part of the overhaul in the university’s research strategy and seeks to “bridge the R&D skills gap” and grow researcher power in Newcastle by 20% over the next ten years.

On Thursday 10th, Prof. Brian Walker (PVC for Research, Strategy and Resources) led an informative meeting with a booming attendance down in the Herschel Building to lay out the plans and answer – quite clearly and reassuringly, at times – questions about the scheme’s detail. Essentially five-year internally-funded research fellowships, the NUAcTs are poised as an early career career-development-type award with a focus on research, mentorship and that all important “transition to independence”.

Most of what was said at Prof. Walker’s open forum can be found in the proposal which is, unfortunately, no longer available. However, the NUAcT website covers much of the same information. Over five years, 100 ‘fellows’ will be supported across the whole university, increasing the principal investigator complement by 8%. Unlike other universities, these fellowships will recruit up to twice-yearly over the five year period (much like the UKRI Future Leader Fellowships) and make NUAcTs “part of the brickwork” of Newcastle, but the expectation is that recruitment won’t be spread evenly over five years but be front-heavy, with half appointed in the first two years.

As with the NURFs, the key focus of the NUAcT fellowships are to support research to improve the competitiveness of excellent candidates for external fellowship awards; that said, the default position of a NUAcT is progression to an open-ended faculty post – provided the formal review at 3-4 years goes to plan. Therefore the NUAcT is looked at least as a singular stream and more of a brand: “The NUAcT ‘umbrella’ will encompass current NURFs and also those holding equivalent externally funded fixed term fellowships as well as a newly appointed cohort of NUAcT Fellows.” Similarly, allocation is described in three strands: the open ‘big splash’ recruitment, targeted recruitment to NUCoREs, and equivalent entry for UKRI fellows.

Prof. Walker was keen to stress the flexibility of the scheme throughout the forum. NUPAcTs, the Partnership Academic Track scheme, clearly encourages industrial or commercial collaboration; EDI is set to play a key role to widen participation and plug the leaky pipeline. The support was a clear take-home message: not just start up money (£50k for lab-based, £20k if non-lab based) and a PhD student for a leg-up on the research front but also mentorship and development support, with a line manager and peer programmes to make “rounded academics”. Though teaching is not the focus of the fellowships, it’s clear teaching and engagement are to be core parts of that career development depending on the individual fellow’s prior experience and faculty-level teaching needs.

So what about recruitment? The original introduction of the NUAcT scheme concept in 2018 came with an air of “external applicants only” and so Prof. Walker was keen to stress that this was certainly not the case: there will be no preference or advantage to either internal or external candidates, with no letters of support or advanced negotiation required prior to application. The application process is less “grant application” by the sounds of it too, with no costings required up-front. We’ll know more on Monday when the application form goes live.

Appointment factors were also touched on by Prof. Walker. As is the trend with all career development fellowships nowdays, there are no limits on time-served and instead it’s the usual ‘track record for career stage’. Of course, alignment to Newcastle’s research strategy and vision will be the most paramount criteria, and a need for “breaking down the -ologies” was stressed; multi-disciplinary will be the key-word, as will an air of independent thinking – “potential for successful transition” is the phrase used, as well as “potential to be a strong role model for EDI”. Progression centres primarily on the fulfilment of these criteria after 3-4 years, with career breaks and such taken into account at all points. While Prof. Walker insisted that the NUAcTs will sit alongside normal advertisement and recruitment of lecturers, it is known that FMS no longer actively recruit lecturers, in favour of the NURFs. The expectation is that the overall lecturer (plus NUAcT post-progressors) pool will increase within all three faculties, indeed nearly doubling in FMS by 2028.

Prof. Walker also set out the governance of the scheme – Prof. Candy Rowe has been appointed as Director of NUAcT and Prof. Walker will be Chair of the Board – and overall is pretty detailed and optimistic. The value-added information from the open forum hosted on Thursday 10th was primarily in the encouraging tone and some stiff-upper-lip on the impact of Brexit (to paraphrase Prof. Walker, “we just have to crack on”). With the first round of applications and appointments due in the next few months, the proof will be in the pudding. Any questions in the meantime can be addressed to the NUAcT admin team – contact details on the website.

 

Note: this blog was edited on Friday 11th Jan 2019 to reflect the proposal document no longer being available online.

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Symposium 2018: This is how we did it, let’s do it all again

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With the 2019 symposium looming in the distance of summer, we thought we’d shed a little winter light on how we put together last year’s stunning programme, what we’ve learned, and what we have planned for Friday 21st June 2019.

We hope you enjoyed our fantastic programme of talks and range of posters in 2018 – all showcasing the excellent research of FMS! The organising committee were overwhelmed with the response: over 50 talk abstracts to choose from, and a dozen papers! We’re keen to share how we judged the abstracts, papers and posters, so that the competition becomes even fiercer in 2019, and so you know what it is we’re looking for and how…

If you have any feedback to share, please do so via the feedback form, or directly by contacting us through the links on the ‘contact us’ page – this can be signed or anonymous! Keep your eyes peeled for details for the 2nd Annual FMS Post-Doctoral Research Symposium!

 

Talk Abstracts

We invited you to submit abstracts for consideration as a speaker (ie. talk only), as a poster presenter (poster only), or both (talk or poster). It was decided that committee members could not be considered for oral presentations but were free to bring posters. A total of 54 abstracts were submitted from across the faculty from post-docs who wished to be considered for oral presentation.

A member of the committee then used the webform output to anonymise the abstracts and circulated a pdf of all 54 numbered abstracts bearing only the talk title, the abstract itself, the institute the speaker worked in, and some keywords. The committee then read the abstracts and scored them on a scale of 1-3 (with 3 being the best), recorded in a google sheet. All 54 abstracts were assessed by 8-11 committee members, and the scores averaged and standard deviations calculated.

So what were the committee looking for? Crucially for a cross-institute symposium, the abstract was read by representatives from all six institutes and so we were looking for talks which were of wide interest. By scoring and averaging the marks, we wanted to find the abstracts with the widest appeal. We were also looking for clear language with minimal, or well-explained, jargon.

 

Then, one morning, the committee met and decided upon the programme. We were very impressed by the quality of the submissions! We sorted the abstracts by average score, and then by standard deviation of the score; this way, we could easily see which abstracts were scored highest, and which our committee agreed/disagreed about. The highest scoring abstract from each institute was selected to make our first list of six speakers and we sorted these into the session themes. Then, to fill the remaining slots, we looked as a group at the second and third highest scoring abstracts, as well as some of the committee’s favourite or most memorable abstracts. We selected the second set of six abstracts focusing on: diversity of topics, diversity of institutes, and how they fit our session themes. Finally, we picked a ‘back up’ talk from each institute in case a speaker was no longer able to participate.

At this point, we were still working with anonymised abstracts, referred to only by number in the order of which they were submitted. Importantly, if members of the committee recognised content enough to identify the person involved, they recused themselves from the final decision on that abstract; we tried to be as fair as possible! Once we had selected 12 abstracts and were happy with the programme, we finally cross-referenced the abstract number with the submission form list! We made a deliberate effort to make the selection process as even-handed as possible and were delighted to see not only a range of fantastic research, but a range of researchers!

 

Best Paper Selection

We invited the FMS post-doctoral committee to submit their first author papers, with stringent criteria, for a best paper prize. The organising committee did not judge this prize, and therefore the committee members were able to submit their work. Behind the scenes, we designed a simple form for scoring of the papers, and assembled a crack team of special guest judges: Dr. Kevin Waldron (ICaMB), Dr. Paula Salgado (ICaMB), Prof. Sophie Hambleton (ICM), Prof. Simi Ali (ICM), Prof. Helen Arthur (IGM), Prof. Melissa Bateson (IoN) and Prof. Craig Robson (NICR). This academic panel assessed the paper in scores of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) based on:

  1. Quality of Writing: Is the paper well written and accessible to those within and outside the particular field of research? Could this be reasonably understood by a final-year undergraduate?
  2. Contribution to the Field: Does this paper contribute knowledge and understanding – in novelty or robust reproduction – to the particular field of research?
  3. Validity and Quality of Methods: Are the methods appropriate to the research question, and are they correctly applied? Are statistical assessments and resulting inferences appropriate and proportional?
  4. Use of Figures: Are the figures clear, easily understandable, well-described in the figure legend, and appropriate to the purpose?
  5. Impact and Engagement: How well does this paper communicate economic/social impact or the potential thereof? How well have the community engaged with this paper – altimetric score, citations etc.?

The submissions were outstanding! And we would like to once again thank our academic panel for reading up to six papers each, giving up some of their own time to contribute to this excellent competition. The criteria and guidance text may change for this year’s competition, and we’ve had feedback from our academic panel based on their experience of the papers. In 2019, we hope to receive just as many (if not more!) brilliant papers for consideration!

 

Best Talk on the Day

Talks were evaluated on the day of the symposium by FMS PostDoc Committee and the evaluation was based on:

  1. Talks delivery
  2. Slides quality
  3. Answering questions
  4. Accessibility to all FMS audience
  5. General impression

Each session (Health, Signalling and Structure) was evaluated separately and the winner of every session was selected based on number of points given (1-3, where 3 was maximum obtained in a selected category). Particular attention was made to the talk delivery and its accessibility for all the FMS audience. The final winners list was based on points given by every evaluation criteria. Katarzyna Mickiewicz (ICaMB) was a clear winner as she won in all the categories. Her talk was very clear and very well received by the audience. Second best talk was won by Susanna Millis (IHS) and the third prize was awarded to Dan Peters (ICaMB).

 

Best Poster

Anyone who had submitted an abstract for a poster was invited to bring a poster. In fact, anyone at all could bring a poster, and that open invitation will run again! We had upwards of 30 posters on display, and some of those post-docs who had missed out on an oral presentation were invited to give flash presentations of their poster to entice the audience. The judging of the posters, however, was left to you! As you all toured the posters, you were invited to vote for your pick for best poster, truly democratising the choice of winners! For that we used an online voting platform that allowed for only one vote to be cast by the same individual.

 

Looking Ahead to 2019

Though we do intend to tweak some of our processes, the feedback from post-docs, PIs and attendees was overwhelmingly favourable – so if it ain’t broke, we won’t fix it! We have a simplified, single submission form which will allow registration and abstract submission in a one-stop-shop all ready to go! Our panel of academics is under assembly for judging paper submissions – and accepted manuscripts count, so get submitting now! We certainly enjoyed bringing this celebration to our community in 2018, and are now hoping to build on that to make the symposium and annual centrepiece to other on-going activities for the post-docs of FMS.

 

 

 

 

 

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Celebrate good times, come on!

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It’s no easy life as a post-doc and it is vitally important to celebrate the successes: little or large! So we want you to give us your good news, your celebrations, and let us celebrate with you!

  • Have you had a paper accepted? Send us a link to put it out here for more people to see!
  • Have you received a grant, a prize, or a fellowship? Let us know so we can share the success, and let people know which schemes support post-doctoral researchers!
  • Did a student you supervised win a prize? Shout about it! The contribution of post-docs to undergrad/MRes supervision is vital!
  • Were you invited to speak at a conference, or win a travel bursary? Brag all you like through us!
  • Attend a really useful, fun, fascinating conference? Tell us so we can go too!

You can contact us via facebook, twitter, email or form (see ‘contact the committee’ page)! If you want to write a small summary of your activity, your experience applying for a grant/prize/fellowship, or anything else, to be published on this website, get in touch! We’d be delighted to work with you.