Blog ramble. – A Few Words…

When I was in year nine and choosing which subjects to continue with at school, I elected to study for a GCSE in Geography. At the beginning of the 2-year GCSE course, which I suppose must have started in September 1999, we were studying a module on climate and weather. As a part of this, the teacher asked us to pay attention to news about extreme weather events and other natural disasters, and to keep a diary or scrap book about our observations, to discuss them at the end of the GCSE course, two years later.

This was huge for me, as I have always been a project person! Like many little girls, I had mini-projects going all the time when I was a kid, such as carefully organising and reorganising the toy cupboard each Sunday morning, creating a village of shoe box houses for my dolls, and inventing distinct biographies for each of the Hungry Hungry Hippos (true story – I have always been very normal and, yes, I was an only child). Like any good Daughter Dad, my father was my partner-in-crime for a lot of these endeavours.

So when I came home from school that day aged 14 and told him about the extreme weather/natural disaster GCSE project, it became the new big thing that we were working on together. When he read the daily newspaper he would look out for any relevant reports, and hand the paper to me so I could find it, clip it out, and put it in my folder. I would make a note of anything I saw on the TV news or heard on the radio in the morning while he drove me to my friend’s house before school, and I’d check details or place names with him as I did so.

In school, the GCSE Geography course continued, and eventually we started focussing in-class on preparing for the final exam. So naturally I started wondering when we were going to present our project work. We had all spent two full years gathering intel after all, surely everyone was keen to discuss what they had found out! I began to worry that time was running out as there wasn’t much term left before we’d break for the final exams. With a sinking heart I realised that the teacher hadn’t actually referred to the project since that class two years previously when he first announced the assignment. And on deeper reflection, I had to acknowledge that not a one of my classmates had ever mentioned it at all…

Maybe you can guess how this story ends. I plucked up the courage to stay behind after class one day and ask the teacher when we would be presenting our extreme weather/natural disaster projects. Dear reader: he had not the faintest idea what I was talking about.

There are two possible explanations. Maybe the teacher and every other student forgot about the assignment, and I only remembered it for so long because it had become a Daughter Dad project. Or maybe I had hallucinated the entire thing – perhaps the teacher had said in passing that it would be good for us to pay attention to how extreme weather is reported, and my mind warped an offhand comment into an elaborate formal assignment.

Deeply embarrassed, I naturally fled the classroom and never talked to that teacher ever again. The only good thing was that I hadn’t asked the question out loud during class so that everyone would think I had volunteered us all for a huge weird additional assignment right before final exams.

I didn’t always pay a lot of attention in class so misunderstandings like this had happened before, where I had either missed important homework or done something that hadn’t been asked for. But this was on another level, as I had also roped in my ever-patient and ever-enthusiastic father to help me, and we had spent so much time on the work. Awks. Do I regret it? No! It was actually super fun and I think my dad even kept the scrap book we made, for a while at least. Maybe he gave it to someone at work a few years later when their weird kid started thinking about similar things, my memory is a bit hazy. But I know it was the first time I paid attention to climate news, and I know it was fun hanging out with my dad and talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and stuff.

Daughter Dad projects are the best thing in the world and I’m glad we had so many over the years. Like going to the duck park and keeping track of how many different kinds we would see on each visit. Or keeping a nature diary when we went on holiday when I was little, where he would help me with the names of things and give hints on how to draw them. A lot of our projects centred around collecting items related to my most recent obsession. For a few years this meant we spent every beach holiday collecting shells on long walks along the coast – which I now know is not the most eco-conscious hobby, but this was the late-80s/early-90s and we didn’t know not to. Later, I collected tiny animal figurines made of pewter or ceramic (especially the ‘Wade Whimsies‘), so my dad spent his weekends driving 10-year-old me around antiques fairs. Again, I was a very normal child.

Much later, while studying for my PhD in the USA, I mentioned to my dad (who had often visited the US on work trips) that I was trying to collect every state quarter coin. When I was about to fly home at the end of my studies, I was disappointed not to have been able to collect ’em all, and he casually asked me to send him a list of the ones I was missing, so he could look in his drawers to see if he had any lying around from previous visits. When I got home, there was a stack of gleaming quarters waiting for me on the coffee table – every one I needed to complete my collection. He had called in favours from old friends around the US to hunt them down and mail them to him in England. A good Daughter Dad will go that extra mile every single time, even when she grows up and leaves him.

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… .

Photo taken in 1985, the year I was born. My Dad the polymer coatings chemist is 34 years old in this picture, the same age I am as I write this caption. He is the handsome, smiling, dark-haired chap with the moustache and the brown tie, far right in the front row. My Dad worked in the research labs at Courtaulds, which became International Paints, which in turn is now part of the Akzo Nobel chemical empire. Dad developed new paint and coating technologies for ships, and was a key part of the team that developed InterPrime 198, which has sold over 75 million litres around the world.

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!

Category: Blog ramble.

Daughter Dad projects

So that was 2019.