Five best things about being a scientist

Academic careers: closed calls exclude women

Old continental European universities such as the University of Leuven have a major problem with diversity at the professor rank. In Leuven, for example, the professor ranks are overwhelmingly old, straight, white Flemish males, with their PhD from the University of Leuven (and often even the same department!). It is the very epitome of an old boys club, and there is absolutely no desire to change it. In my first months as a professor at Leuven I had multiple professors tell me to my face that, as a foreigner, I had no right to be here, since the positions were needed for Flemish graduates. And such overt insularity is not even the biggest problem - in a way I appreciated the honesty - it is the behind-the-scenes stuff which excludes or drives out anyone who does not look like they belong in the boys club. The problem doesn't stop at recruitment either - if you are a foreigner or a woman who slips through the cracks, there are plenty of ways of stopping you. Disproportionate amounts of clinical duties, low internal grant success, delayed promotions, the list goes on.

It should be fairly obvious that excluding 99.8% of the population is a poor start to any selection criteria seeking excellence, but the defenders of the old guard claim the opposite - that the very reason why we can't recruit more women is that the system is meritocratic, and if the best candidate is a man we need to take a man. It is an attractive argument, but it begs the question as to why the "best candidate" is almost always a man. I would argue that it is the closed recruitment process so often used in Leuven that ensures that top women do not apply, giving us a net decrease in excellence.

In this article, Dr Mathias Nielsen looked at the numbers in Denmark, broken down into "open" and closed recruitment calls. In "open" calls, 23% of successful candidates were women, while in closed calls created for a single candidate, only 12% of successful candidates were women. In other words, there is a substantial pathway for political appointments, and it is being used to favour men. This is a smoking gun for equality campaigners - proof that the appointment system is being exploited to stack the deck in favour of men. The one good thing that can be said for Aarhus University is that they provided information for the study, rather than trying to hide it.

I've been in committees at the University of Leuven discussing this question, and I've never seen anything more serious than the cliched "we need to do something about childcare" proposal (particuarly offensive in a system with one of the best childcare support networks in the world, as I can personally attest to). Since I'm use to arguing to a brick-wall on this topic, I might as well throw my proposals into the internet void. So here they are, my proposals for the University to increase quality and diversity:

1. Reduce the number of new professorships markedly. Having swarms of new professors just divides funding into such small units that everyone sinks. Plus we'll need the cash for a few of my other proposals below.
2. Create tenured senior scientist positions. Professors are not the only critical people to research, yet they are the only ones to get tenure. What I see happening a lot is that a senior professor has a fantastic senior scientist (who might not even want to be a professor) and they know that the only way they can keep them is to get them a professorship. The position is duly created, applied for and gained, and now the senior professor has a junior professor who in practice stays a senior scientist. These positions are important so let's formally create them, but be honest about it. Having this process will free up professorship positions for actual independent researchers.
3. Link every professorship to an attractive startup package. Better to have one professor who manages to take-off (and brings in money for the university) than three who crash and burn (and then sit on a 30 year work contract). The lack of a start-up package is the number one barrier to external recruits, as it means you essentially waste the first year unless you have a local sugar-daddy mentor, which only political recruits have.
4. Change the absurd language laws for science professors. The students learning science need to learn professional-level English, so why not teach them in English from day one? It certainly doesn't help them if they can write scientific papers in Flemish but not English, and you drive away most of the international talent if you formally require Dutch language skills you don't actually need for the job. Right now, the written English skills of our science graduates are not up to an international standard, simply because the students have not been forced to practice.
5. Back-end load the teaching duties. Over and over again I see universities load up junior professors with so much teaching that they can't succeed in research - and once the window of opportunity is closed it never opens up again. No teaching duties for the first five years, and progressively increasing teaching duties after that. Don't let the oldest free-load.
6. All positions need to be open calls. And don't even pretend that this is the case right now. A call that is only made in Dutch on the university website and only has a single applicant is not an open call. An open call has international advertising in English. It comes with a start-up package and does not have ultra-narrow terms of reference.
7. Audit the advertising of positions. If particular advertisers are only sending men your way, then drop them and use other ones that are better at reaching the full candidate pool.
8. At a minimum, interview four candidates of international quality. At least two of those candidates need to be women, and at least two should be foreign. If you can't find four candidates of international quality, then either your position is rubbish or your call wasn't open. At the end of the interviews if the Flemish man was the top candidate, then by all means hire him - the big problem seems to be that women aren't even interviewed in the first place. Give good women a chance to get a toe in and don't worry, they'll look after themselves. No woman or foreigner is expecting a hand-out, they just want the chance to compete on an open-playing field.
9. Audit clinical duties. If a professorship position comes with 50% clinical duties and 50% research duties, then the clinic should only be able to put you on for 50% of time. Pretty obvious, right? Yet over and over I see clinical professors being given clinical duties that are more than full-time, giving no time to grow a research position. And since young clinical professorships are the one place where women often suceed in high numbers, the clinical duties workload sabotages women's careers. A lot of the suggestions here cannot be applied to clinical positions (i.e., international recruitment is far more difficult when part of the job is patient care), so extra scrutiny needs to fall on clinical research positions to ensure they are being used appropriately.
10. International panels for grants and hiring. It completely gets around local politics, taking away the biggest tool in the old boy's club's arsenal.  Academics work for practically nothing, so it is a complete no-brainer, and standard in places such as Norway and Finland.
11. Audit the university. Let's pull back the curtain and take a look. There are dozens of different processes for hiring professors, which ones are hiring successful women and international recruits, and which don't. Shift funding to the tools that are successful, and stop those that are not. Compare the different department - which have recruited successful women, and what processes did they use? Force the under-performing departments to change their hiring policies.
12. Make all positions tenure-track, and actually get rid of people who don't make the cut. It is the one chance to get rid of sub-par professors and re-open the position up, let's actually use it.
13. Hold heads of department responsible. All new professors need to be able to show their productive independence (grants as promoter, publications as last author) within five years. If they haven't, then either the wrong person was hired or they were not supported enough - both are the responsibility of the head of department. If a head of department's toes were roasted every time a new professor ends up as a glorified post-doc, then the practice would shut down fairly quickly.
14. Listen to proposals that make you uncomfortable. The same old policies will give the same old results, so at least listen to some uncomfortable truths.

Erasmus scholars

The Erasmus program is a wonderful European project which drives brain-circulation around Europe. Our lab takes at least two Erasmus scholars every year, teaching them skills which will hopefully serve them well in their future career. In return we get skilled help in our projects, a network of future collaborators across Europe, and (last but not least) all of the advantages that come with intellectual diversity. Our last Erasmus scholar was Alper Çevirgel from Turkey, who drove forward the production of nanobodies in the lab and left us with a great protocol for Turkish coffee.

Once upon a time...

.... a scientist could write a concise grant and be funded

(translated: "Proposal: I need 10,000 Marks")

Being a mother and a scientist

Worth a read

No separation of medical and mental health

Reporting on our research:

2005 NHMRC/RG Menzies Fellow, Professor Adrian Liston, is one of the researchers in an important study which provides new insights into the cause of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), underscoring the connection between psychological factors and the immune system.

Adrian, who is now Professor of Translational Immunology at the University of Leuven and the VIB, Belgium says “The most important message from this research is that we cannot separate medical and mental health. The two influence each other; in our study high levels of anxiety or depression increase susceptibility to gastrointestinal infection and long-term complications.”

The findings in this latest research are based on an investigation of a drinking water contamination incident in Belgium in 2010, and have been published in the leading international medical journal Gut.

Described by Professor Liston as an accidental experiment, the study was set up to look at the long-term effects of an outbreak of gastroenteritis after 18,000 people came into contact with contaminated drinking water in the towns of Schelle and Hemiksem.

As reported in news-medical.net, following the patients from the initial contamination to a year after the outbreak, the researchers could assess what factors changed the risk of long-term complications. They found that individuals with higher levels of anxiety or depression prior to the water contamination developed gastrointestinal infections of increased severity. They also had greater risk of long-term IBS.

Professor Liston says there are broad applications for these research findings.

“There is a strong tendency to compartmentalise society - economy, welfare, health, education, etc. In reality, each individual moves around all these different sectors of society on a daily basis, so each influences the other.

“The Whitehall Study, a major UK study that is still ongoing, found that the degree of autonomy people experience in their jobs has a major influence on mortality. Other studies demonstrate the link between un/under-employment or social disenfranchisement on health. These effects are rarely taken into account when designing public policy. For example, a policy change to welfare that decreases financial security may save the government a few dollars in the welfare budget, but it will cause much larger increases in the health budget due to the flow-over effects of anxiety.

“What we really need is an integrated strategy that takes into account urban design, the welfare safety net, public health, employment structures and recreation”, Professor Liston said.

Thesis edits

Seems accurate...

Menzies Foundation interview

I was interviewed recently by the Menzies Foundation, of whom I am the 2005 alumni. Here is the Q&A.

What is your job?

Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and Director of Translational Immunology in the Flemish Biotechnology Institute.

What is the most fulfilling aspect of your work?

Discovery. Science is really a terrible career in so many ways, and yet it attracts many of the best and brightest because it holds out the promise of discovery. There is nothing quite so satisfying as unravelling a new gene network that leads to diabetes, or finding the mutation that holds the key to curing a sick child.

What is the book that has influenced you the most?

Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre should be a must-read for anyone in the medical research industry. It is a book that is shocking in how it reveals systemic defects in pharmaceutical research, development and sales, and yet it is also eminently practical (even hopeful) in giving simple advice that would remedy the situation.

Who would you most like to meet and why?

Sir David Attenborough. A gentleman in the literal sense of the world, since childhood Sir David has nurtured in me (and countless others) a love of biology. For me, Sir David is the world’s most effective advocate for animal rights, environmentalism, evolution and atheism. All this is perhaps because he rarely talks about any of these topics directly; he cultivates the fertile mind and plants the seeds of knowledge.

What are your passions outside of work?

As Rosalind Franklin said, “Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated”.

How do you describe leadership?

Leadership is moving forward in a way that inspires others to move forward with you. A scientific leader will open up a new field of research, opening the gates for others to follow and build upon. The best scientific leaders are those allow others to take the lead in building once the new field is open and look instead for the next opportunity for breakthrough.

Who would make a better leader? Engineer, doctor, researcher or lawyer and why?

The effectiveness of a leader will always depend on the context, and the individual’s qualities will always trump that of professional training. That said, different professions do hone different skills. Engineers apply proven rules with precision, doctors are trained at pattern recognition and decision making, and lawyers are trained to find loopholes to prosecute their agenda.  As a researcher myself, I would say our most important attribute is the ability to critically assess our own opinion based on data available, and, most importantly, change our opinion if new data does not support it. Perhaps over the short-term the training given to engineers, doctors or lawyers may be the most efficient, but for long-term progress, nothing beats the scientific approach of data over ideology.

If you were Prime Minister of Australia, what would you do first?

Looking at the bigger picture, the most important change needed is to bring the scientific approach into policy creation and political decision making. By this I mean an approach to policy where we start by critically looking at all the data (and not just the data that supports our ideology), assessing the effectiveness of previous policy approaches (with an international eye), designing new policy (that include measurements of effectiveness), and tweaking policy when failures are identified. This scientific approach to policy should be standard, but many of the failures of the current government stem from a triumph of ideology over data. Australia’s terrible record on the environment (such as our failure of leadership on climate change) stems from a failure to accept the consensus data on the scale of the problem. Our record on refugee rights is not only a moral failure, it is also a data failure – a key policy of the government is to keep data on the abysmal conditions of refugees away from the voting public. Opponents of same-sex marriage prophesize varied doomsday scenarios without looking at the decade-long experiences in Europe. Economic policies seem more tailored to the electoral cycle than to long-term objectives, and so forth.    

Graduation of Dr Anh Nuygen

Congratulations to Dr Anh Nuygen, who graduated with her PhD from our lab!

Anxiety increases the risk of gastrointestinal infection and long-term complications

A study in the aftermath of 2010 tap water contamination in the Belgian towns of Schelle and Hemiksem provides valuable insights into the cause of irritable bowel syndrome. A team comprised of scientists at VIB and KU Leuven has made significant progress in uncovering the connection between psychological factors and the immune system. Their findings are based on an investigation of a massive drinking water contamination incident in Schelle and Hemiksem in 2010, and are now published in the leading international medical journal Gut.

In December 2010, the Belgian communities of Schelle and Hemiksem in the province of Antwerp faced an outbreak of gastroenteritis, with more than 18,000 people exposed to contaminated drinking water. During the outbreak, VIB and KU Leuven set up a scientific task force to study the incident’s long-term effects, led by Guy Boeckxstaens and Adrian Liston.

Seizing an unexpected opportunity

Adrian Liston: “The water contamination in Schelle and Hemiksem was an ‘accidental experiment’ on a scale rarely possible in medical research. By following the patients from the initial contamination to a year after the outbreak we were able to find out what factors altered the risk of long-term complications.”

Anxiety and depression affect immune system

The scientists found that individual with higher levels of anxiety or depression prior to the water contamination developed gastrointestinal infections of increased severity. The same individuals also had an increased risk of developing the long-term complication of irritable bowel syndrome, with intermittent abdominal cramps, diarrhea or constipation a year after the initial contamination.

Guy Boeckxstaens: “Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a condition of chronic abdominal pain and altered bowel movements. This is a common condition with large socio-economic costs, yet there is so much that still remains to be discovered about the causes. Our investigation found that that anxiety or depression alters the immune response towards a gastrointestinal infection, which can result in more severe symptoms and the development of chronic irritable bowel syndrome.”

Psychological factors key in preventing long-term complications

The study’s results provide valuable new insight into the cause of irritable bowel syndrome, and underscore the connection between psychological factors and the immune system.

Adrian Liston: “These results once again emphasize the importance of mental health care and social support services. We need to understand that health, society and economics are not independent, and ignoring depression and anxiety results in higher long-term medical costs.”

For more details, see the original publication: Wouters*, Van Wanrooy*, Nguyen*, Dooley, Aguilera-Lizarraga, Van Brabant, Garcia-Perez, Van Oudenhove, Van Ranst, Verhaegen, Liston*, Boeckxstaens*. * shared authorship. Psychological comorbidity increases the risk for postinfectious IBS partly by enhanced susceptibility to develop infectious gastroenteritis. Gut. 2015, in press. 

Update on Wednesday, July 8, 2015 at 7:33PM by Adrian Liston

An article written in Healio on our study