I started this webpage in September 2019, so this will be my first ‘year in review’ post. Hopefully I can keep doing something similar in the years to come. But how to summarise a year of one’s professional life? And how much personal detail to discuss here, on what is ostensibly a science/work-focussed site? For a number of reasons, the personal and professional are strongly intertwined for me, defining and often directing each other. By all professional metrics – as I will discuss below – 2019 has been a banner year for me. I’ve worked harder than ever, I’ve achieved a lot, and I’m feeling genuinely hopeful for a fantastic year in research ahead. But this year followed the worst year of my life. I want to use this introduction to put my 2019 into context, context that would never be apparent from a simple list of accomplishments.
2018 for me was a wasteland. Let me start from the beginning. The day before Christmas Eve 2017, my paternal grandfather passed away. He was in his late-80s, and had been ill for a long time. He suffered from a range of health problems relating to miner’s lung, including severe asthma and emphysema. He lived at least ten years longer than doctors expected him to. So while it was obviously very sad to lose him – especially at Christmas time – it felt right, like things were happening in their natural order.
My grandfather’s death started a small existential panic for me, as he was my last surviving grandparent. This made my parents the oldest generation in my family. I am an only child, and neither of my parents have siblings either, so the family suddenly felt incredibly small, and I started to realise that within the next few years I would need to think very seriously about moving back to the UK to be closer to them when they were eventually old enough to need my help.
Unbelievably – and I mean that in the literal sense that I still struggle to believe that this really occurred – my Dad died on January 10th 2018. He was 66 years old, and he died three weeks after his 88 year-old father who had been unwell for years. My Dad was healthy, fit, and he took good care of himself. In fact, he was out on one of his weekly 8-mile walks in the wilds of Northumberland when it happened. He had had a routine cardiac check-up a couple of months earlier and was given a clean bill of health. But there was a sneaky clot hiding somewhere close by his heart, undetectable, and causing none of the classic warning symptoms such as dizziness, chest pain, shortness of breath, etc. One day the clot moved, and that was that.
My father was my everything. My whole world. I am finding the grieving process to be a very slow and heavy thing, and I am certainly not able to write about that yet. I mention this enormous loss here in this post on career achievements only because of the unpredictable effects it has had on my work. Most of 2018 is a blur for me, there are big gaps in my memory of the period, and my CV for that year is pretty thin. I achieved very little of note because I could barely concentrate. I didn’t publish much, I got no new grants, I didn’t supervise any of my own students. I was completely adrift in the world, and felt that nothing I did or said mattered in the slightest. When 2019 began, I can now with hindsight see that there was a marked shift in my behaviour. I didn’t make any conscious decision to change, but I started to work harder than ever before. And the result has been an extraordinary year, that will lead into an even more productive 2020. I’m immensely proud of what I accomplished this past year, but I’d give it all away in a heartbeat, if… .
2019: What have I done?
Popular* science writing
*’Popular’ in this case meaning for the general population, not necessarily meaning well liked.
Ever since university, I have “wanted to write”, whatever that means. As much as I love scientific research, I think my ideal would be to write all day every day. But I never had the guts to really give it a go until 2019, when I suppose I needed new challenges to keep me distracted from the aforementioned personal shit. In spring 2019 I jumped into the world of #scicomm by joining the scientific consortium over at Massive Science, and I am delighted to have now published 4 full-length articles and 4 shorter lab notes with them! It has been a lot of fun, and I’ve written about everything from environmental policy, to science communication tools, advances in medical biotechnology, and new biotech products that are already on the market. My most widely read and shared article for Massive Science was a short biography of the 17th century ecologist Maria Sibylla Merian, who turns out to have a pretty complex legacy. The piece that I found most fun to write was this one about cat arseholes. I never expected to use the phrase ‘anal sac’ in my career, but here we are.
Later in the year, as I felt more confident in my non-academic science writing (Thanks Massive!), I started to pitch ideas to other outlets. I intend to do this a lot more often in 2020, but so far I have published one piece in the Last Retort pages of Chemistry World, a periodical for the Royal Society of Chemistry. The article shows off about how we run our lab at KTH, where we strive to make sure everyone contributes a fair share to general upkeep efforts.
Of course I also started this webpage in 2019. I’m still not sure that I’ll use the blog feature very often, but I am certainly finding it useful to have this easily editable website to collect information about myself. Already a few people have written to me after finding this site to enquire about future collaboration or upcoming recruitment drives.
Academic writing
This year I have written three extensive reviews or book chapters on various subjects, two of which are now published and one that I expect to be submitted in early 2020 (pending contributions from co-authors…..project deadlines are so much easier to meet when I am the only person involved in the frickin project). I’m working on a few research articles that I also hope to submit early 2020, but it’s been nice this year to focus on deep dives into topics I’m passionate about – soil microbes (mostly bacteria), how and why they produce biomass-degrading enzymes, and how we can use those enzymes in industrial biotechnology. My plan is to write a short blog post about each of these reviews in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
As always, if I publish an article in a scientific journal that you don’t have subscription access to, and you’d like to read my article, get in touch via email, Twitter, or ResearchGate, and I’m happy to share.
Teaching and supervision
An area of academic work that I really dove into this year was education. I am currently a lecturer on five master’s level courses at KTH and one at Stockholm University. Lectures at KTH are two-hour sessions where I teach for two 45 minute sessions, with a break in between. It takes me probably 4-5 days to prepare a new lecture from scratch, and I’ve delivered 12 new lectures this year. So you can see how long I’ve spent on teaching and class preparation. This is in addition to having two full-time master’s thesis students with me in the spring, three summer interns, and another master’s thesis student who started in September.
Although it has taken a huge amount of work, I’ve found my teaching this year to be incredibly rewarding. By contributing to a number of different courses on the KTH biotech master’s programmes, I’ve gotten to know a group of 15-20 students pretty well, and in fact 4 of them have asked me to supervise their master’s theses next year. (Actually 6 of them asked me, but I felt that would be too many students to supervise with care.) It is a great feeling to know that these students trust me and like me and my research topic well enough to want to spend half a year working with me!
The large amount of teaching and supervision I completed in 2019 has allowed me to apply for Docentship at KTH, and that application is progressing nicely. I will write a blog post about what Docentship means and how it is acquired in the new year, after I am interviewed by teachers and students about my pedagogic practice – eep!
Scientific research
Check out the page Research Projects for info on my current research interests and goals, and some relevant academic publications. My main focus this year has been bacterial, with members of the group looking at Bacillus and Chitinophaga as plant-protectors and biomass-degraders. Lots of data generated this year, and I can’t wait to share it all with you in 2020! I’m hoping for several research publications and a couple of conference presentations to showcase our work.
Something I’m especially proud of with my current projects and upcoming publications is how student-led my research is. I have had the great fortune of recruiting some truly exceptional research students into my group this year, most notably Anna and Zijia. They are both extremely hard-working young women, keen to learn new techniques, excited by research results, and dedicated to precision and reproducibility in their work. I feel privileged to have been able to supervise two such promising young scientists, and I hope I do their work justice in upcoming publications.
I had a run of great financial news at the end of the year, when I learned I’d been awarded two fairly substantial research grants from national councils in Sweden. This new money, coming in over the next 5 years, will let me work independently on topics I’m passionate about, and I’ll be able to recruit post-docs to get two exciting new projects started. I can’t wait!
What else?
According to GoodReads, I’ve read 54 books this year. According to Criticker, I’ve seen 92 movies. I’ve watched probably 100+ hours of YouTube, and I’ve also re-watched all seasons of Brooklyn 99, Green Wing, and Archer. I’ve tried my hand at pickling a dozen types of vegetable, and I got my hair dyed blonde for the first (and last) time. It’s almost like I’m trying to distract myself from something, who knows. Anyway, see you next year!
A Few Words... 