Managing PhD anxiety and insomnia

Academia is becoming saturated with mental health problems, and it's becoming normalised. By the end of my degree I was aware that most of my peers had developed some kind of issue, in the UK drop outs due to mental health problems were up 210% 2014-15 compared to 2009-10. But it seems that the deterioration of …

Women in STEM

Happy International Women’s Day! A day to fight for gender parity and celebrate the achievements of women worldwide. We have a long way to go to close the pay gap in the UK which is still on average 14.1%! I took great joy in reading about the achievements of countless inspirational women in STEM. I always …

My first international conference

I have been wanting to write about avenues of science in UK policy for a while, but before I had the chance, I found myself at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in an international consortium on building a long-term global omics observatory for monitoring the planet’s ecosystems. So instead I am going to …