Becoming a scientist

A write up by St Catz College

A Fellow of St Catharine’s has produced a new graphic novel to encourage high school students from all backgrounds to pursue STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Professor Adrian Liston (2023) has joined forces with illustrator Yulia Lapko on Becoming a Scientist: The Graphic Novel to tell the story of the twelve scientists in his biomedical research laboratory at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Liston explained, “Growing up, I didn't know what a career in science was. It was really luck more than anything else that allowed me to fall into the career I have today. When I looked around the amazing people in my lab, I realised that everyone had a story about overcoming barriers to enter science. While everyone's story is unique, what they have in common is inspiring – there are so many different pathways to success in science. I wrote this book to share these outstanding role-models with high school students, so they can find a story that resonates with them, and use that inspiration to go into STEM subjects.”

Cover of the Becoming a Scientist graphic novel by Prof. Adrian Liston with illustrator Yulia Lapko

Originally from Australia, Professor Liston is now Professor of Pathology at the University of Cambridge, a where he leads a team of researchers looking at the pathologies of the immune system. The idea for a graphic novel came about after Professor Liston’s group spent time at St Catharine’s for a team-building session, which invited each scientist to speak about their backgrounds, role models and motivations. With the group’s support, the new graphic novel devotes a section to each team-member’s story, with eye-catching illustrations provided by Yulia. Read the graphic novel online. 

Detail about Prof. Liston's story from the Becoming a Scientist graphic novel

Yulia is an artist from Kyiv, Ukraine. She balances her art career with her day job as Business Administrator for Cambridge’s Department of Pathology.

She said, “I might not be a scientist, but I can relate to the idea that everyone has the potential to become anyone they want to be. Our paths might be very different, and some of them are longer and tougher than others, but the key thing is motivation. Relatable role models help nurture our potential, and I am excited that our book offers twelve role models to inspire young people.”

Becoming a Scientist is Professor Liston’s first publication for a young adult audience (readers between 12 and 18 years of age). He has previously written All about Coronavirus, Battle Robots of the Blood and Maya’s Marvellous Medicine for children between 3 and 8 years old, all illustrated by Dr Sonia Agüera González (also known as Tenmei).

Professor Liston added, “Some readers might associate graphic novels with fiction like Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman or Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s collaboration on V for Vendetta, but there is a rich tradition of creative biographical works such as Marjane Satrapi’s memoir, Perspolis, or Art Spiegelman’s interviews with his father in Maus.

“I am privileged to go to work every day with such a talented group of people and it has been an honour to tell the different stories that brought us all together in Cambridge. I hope these diverse experiences connect with and inspire the next generation of scientists.”

Some of the scientists featured in the graphic novel with Prof Liston (centre top row) in their lab (credit: Natalie Sloan-Glasberg)

The graphic novel is also available in print from https://www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk/products/becoming-a-scientist

Becoming a Scientist - out now!

Becoming a Scientist: The Graphic Novel is now available in print edition!

The Golden Pipette

Science plays the long game, but Adrian Liston celebrates the small achievements his team makes along the way. 

Danielle Gerhard, PhD, writing for The Scientist

Hanging on the wall of immunologist Adrian Liston's laboratory at the University of Cambridge is a commemorative plaque. Engraved are the names of laboratory members who received the Golden Pipette Award, an annual honor that recognizes incremental advancements and team players. It may or may not grant the recipient the Midas Touch, but Liston reflected on how the tradition fosters a sense of community.

What is the Golden Pipette origin story?

In 2016, we had a special PhD candidate graduating from the lab. James Dooley had been a technician in my lab for several years prior to his graduation. To celebrate his achievements and the impact he had on the careers of others in the team, we painted one of his pipettes gold. The gesture was well received, so each year, we award the pipette to an individual who made a significant contribution to the team.

What does the Golden Pipette represent?

Science is tough. We work at the very limits of human knowledge, which means we constantly fail. The Golden Pipette tradition is one of the ways we create a positive culture and supportive environment. Big achievements, such as a paper, take a long time, so it’s important to celebrate the small successes: generating a transgenic mouse; developing a new protocol; the heroic effort that ends up as supplementary figure 12. It also signals our values and priorities: imagination, creativity, robust science, and team contributions. 

How did your team respond to the Golden Pipette?

It seemed silly at first, but the tradition has outlasted everyone in the group. It serves as a visual reminder that we’re part of a greater project. In a recent hiring round, several people said that they look forward to the chance of winning the Golden Pipette.

Read the story as told in The Scientist...

Becoming a Scientist: The Graphic Novel

Our latest project has just been released: Becoming a Scientist: The Graphic Novel!

The novel follows the stories of the amazing team members in the lab (or, at least, those team members who have been around since last October when we started this project!). We follow their story in becoming a scientist: the barriers they had to overcome, the role-models who helped them on the way, and the motivation that drove them to enter STEM.

This is a unique project for us, because it isn't about our science. It is about us as scientists. Where we came from, and how we got here. None of us were destined for science, yet somehow here we are, working together to better the world...

Our amazing illustrator, Yulia Lapko, brings to life each person's story. We have Magda, daughter of Somali refugees, drawing strength from her mother's sacrifice and equally determined to help others in turn. We have Alvaro, who barely managed to get into school growing up in Peru, and has now made it to Cambridge with a ripper of an under-graduate project. James, who took a long and winding route, overcoming every disadvantage life gives a foster kid, and yet somehow beating the odds and now helping others succeed. Stevi made the transition from patient to researcher, and Tombi brings her mission from Zimbabwe to help the global ubuntu. I realised, looking around the lab, that I could talk about how inspiring I find literally every person - so I put them all into a book!

I draw inspiration from these amazing team members. I could have written this story at any point over the past fifteen years - we have nearly 200 amazing alumni, each with their own unique story. I wrote these stories to provide role-models to anyone thinking about starting a career in science. Science is not for the privileged few. Science is for anyone who has ever asked "why?", and anyone who is too stubborn to know when to stop asking! Take a look into these stories - if we can succeed in science, you can too!

The book is live now to read at Issuu, and will be released soon in print. If you want to support more innovative projects in broadening participation from our lab, drop us a donation!

Improving research culture within your lab

The companion piece to our article on nurturing a positive research culture at the organisation level, our new article should hit closer to home for most researchers - how to nurture a positive research culture at your individual lab level!

Running a research team is not simply about producing important research findings. It is important for the team leader to also focus on creating an environment that is a positive experience for the team members and a place for them to build further careers from. Focus on the culture of the team feeds back into the quality of the research, aiding impactful, reproducible and ethical research. Part of building a positive research environment comes from your role as a leader, and interacting with you team with kindness and integrity. However you can aid this process by engineering the structure of your team and through thoughtful consideration of your language and actions. In this article we discuss several tactics to research team leadership that may help team leaders create a positive environment for their team members.

Read at Wellcome Open Research

Nurturing a positive research culture

Write-up on our recent article on positive research culture:

Nurturing a positive research culture

A Fellow of St Catharine’s is sharing practical advice on how to nurture a positive research culture within a laboratory and across an organisation. Professor Adrian Liston (2023), Professor of Pathology at the University of Cambridge, has co-authored two articles in response to a new emphasis on the importance of research culture in the UK’s funding landscape. The first article has just been published in the journal Immunology & Cell Biology.

He said, “The choices made by the leadership of a lab or an organisation – intentionally or more often than not unintentionally – can determine their research culture. There are cultures where researchers operate in competition (what I would call a toxic culture) or, with a bit of luck, you may encounter more positive research cultures, which tend to grow organically from the kindness and integrity of team members. Over successive generations, researchers have perpetuated cultures that were linked to past achievements. Unfortunately this hasn’t weeded out negative tendencies, because some researchers can succeed in a toxic environment in spite of – rather than due to – that research culture. We need to take a more deliberate approach to establishing positive research cultures within our organisations.”

Prof. Adrian Liston in his laboratory

The new emphasis on research culture was clear in June 2023 when the four higher education funding bodies in the UK announced that the Research Excellence Framework 2029 will have an expanded definition of research excellence to encompass people, culture and environment. This is on top of the £30 million already announced by UKRI’s Research England in 2022 to enable higher education providers to develop and initiate activities that will enhance research culture across the sector. 

Professor Liston explained, “There has been a recent sea change in attitudes at the highest levels of government and funding bodies, who now accept that research excellence is not only fuelled by the quantity and quality of outputs, but also by people, culture and environment. Personally, this change is very welcome and I am excited that we now have a fresh opportunity to rethink the research cultures that we are perpetuating, break bad habits and nurture positive ones.

“If we want to replicate the advances seen in other areas of scientific practice in progressing research culture, it is vital that we share best practice, examples and mechanisms that benefit our field. I know from my own experience that an individual early career researcher might only have worked in two or three different research cultures before deciding how they want their own lab to operate. I hope these two articles offer a toolkit for others to draw upon and inspire further discussion about different aspects of research culture so we can harness the collective experience of labs and organisations across the world.”

Team members in Prof. Liston's research group

The first article in the pair identifies the actionable areas where organisations can create and reinforce a positive research culture:

• Aligning staff recognition to the organisation’s missions;
• Designing the organisation structure around the mission and the people;
• Building a respectful environment;
• Openness and transparency; and
• Equality, diversity and inclusivity.

Each area is accompanied by frameworks, examples and/or other resources for readers to review and adapt according to their organisation’s needs. While Professor Liston and his co-author Professor Denise Fitzgerald work on similar research themes and have chosen to publish with Immunology & Cell Biology, their arguments are relevant for other academic disciplines. For example, their argument for organisations investing their energies at all levels of the ‘respect pyramid’ rather than relying entirely on punitive actions against toxic behaviours like bullying and harassment:

“The most visible interventions for nurturing a respectful environment (punitive actions against toxic behaviour) should also be the rarest, in the same way that the hospital is the last resort in creating a healthy environment. Underpinning this “emergency care” should be strategic positive interventions, rolled out when environments are suboptimal but before they reach a critical stage (analogous to treatment by a family doctor). More pervasive still should be the underlying fabric of the organisation, supporting a culture of respect, with individuals, in particular those in leadership positions, taking personal responsibility for their interactions.”

The respect pyramid provides the basis for building a respectful environment

Reference 

Adrian Liston and Denise C. Fitzgerald. Nurturing a positive research culture within your organisation. Immunology & Cell Biology. 2024; 1–10. doi: 10.1111/imcb.12795

New Editor-in-Chief at Immunology and Cell Biology

Using "I language": how to communicate with your team

One of the biggest challenges of having your own team as a PI is learning how to communicate with them about behaviour you are unhappy with. For me, this is often about deadlines. I hate deadlines being missed, and in particular I hate it when a deadline is missed and not communicatd, and basically it is on me to realise, chase up with the person, diagnose the problem and arrange a new deadline. Because it annoys me so much, I go out of my way to make the deadlines achievable - I ask my team member how long they think a task will take, and then I'll often add on a few days or weeks if I think they are under-estimating it (or if the deadline would fall during a period where I wouldn't be able to respond anyway). I'm also highly receptive to a team member telling me, in advance, "I know that we agreed on X as a deadline, but I can already tell I won't make that, can we push the deadline back to Y". With all that being the case, some people repeatedly miss deadlines, and it really grinds my geers. It is one of the easiest ways to sour a professional relationship with me (which, incidently, I explicitly write in my "lab policies" doc that I give to new lab members - it is not a secret!). If it is frustrating me, then I need to bring up the issue with my team member and deal with it. Here is my secret:Use "I language". To explain "I language", it is easiest to start with "you language". "You language" is saying "you missed this deadline". The problem with this is that it immediately puts the person on the defensive: you'll see them coming up with excuses or rationalisations. That isn't a productive mindset for you to change someone's behaviour."I language" reframes the debate. "I feel really disrespected that you missed this deadline and gave the work to me late. I had reserved Friday morning to work on it, but instead I had to skip out on going to the park with my son on Saturday because I got this late. I know that this feels like a one-off to you, but when I manage a team of 15, people only need to do this twice a year to ruin almost every weekend for me. This is really important to me, and now that this has happened several times I feel like you don't respect me or value my time".Advantages of "I language":

• it is actually true. The problem that you are addressing isn't actually their action. The real problem is that this particular action hurts you. We all have different trigger points - messy bench, missed deadlines, swearing, having the radio on - each of these will cause one person to grind their teeth while another person literally won't notice. How do they know this is a sensitive issue for you without you telling them? 
• it emphasizes the importance of the issue. For some people, deadlines just aren't that important, so it is hard to make them feel like deadlines are important to them. But they can understand that missing weekend after weekend with your child is important to you, and once you link the two they will get it
• it puts the other person in a zone of empathy rather than in a zone of defence. They don't feel attacked, they feel taken into your confidence, and are gaining an insight into what is important to you
• word spreads faster. People don't like to share that they got told off, but they will share that you are really sensitive to some particular things
• it works. Except for sociopaths, people don't like causing pain to other people. If you find that "you language" works better on someone than "I language", that is a giant red flag that that person has no empathy or ability to work as a team

This probably sounds a lot more like relationship advice than mentoring advice. Which is because it is - I got it from "Why Marriages Succeed or Fail", a scientific analysis of relationships based on recording and analysing real interactions between couples and then correlating these interactions with later divorce rates. While the book is about personal relationships, I believe that the data holds just as true for professional relationships. It is well worth a read for other tips, such as making sure you have a good ratio between positive and negative feedback.

Career milestone: 200 papers

Our new paper out at Nature Immunology was my 200th scientific paper! A good time to look back on the portfolio. 

First, my coauthors: 

My most frequent coauthor is James Dooley, no surprise since we've run the lab together these last 14 years! 67 articles coauthored, a good third of my papers. We've had a lot of staff and students trained in our lab over these years (165, to be exact), including a few who changed the direction of our lab - Stephanie Humblet-Baron coauthored 46 papers and Susan Schlenner coauthored 17, both are now professors at the University of Leuven. Vaso Lagou also coauthored 17 papers as a post-doc, before moving over to the Sanger. Jossy Garcia-Perez and Dean Franckaert were both PhD students, with 15 coauthorships, now working together at CellCarta. Our major collaborators come through clearly: Carine Wouters (28 papers) and Isabelle Meyts (15 papers) on the clinical side, An Goris (15 papers) on genetics, and Michelle Linterman (18 papers), Patrick Matthys (16 papers) and Sylvie Lesage (11 papers) for immunology.

The research topics come out via the key words from the titles. Tregs, Foxp3, T cells and the thymus all leap out, but looking closely you'll see pretty much every branch of immunology represented. A special call-out to my favourite cytokine, IL2 (with 14 papers, and getting stronger) and our microRNA papers (22 papers, but it was just a phase). 

The work is pretty evenly split between mouse and human, although we tend to use "mouse" a lot more in the title. In terms of topics, 88 papers work on autoimmune diseases, with 17 touching on diabetes. 40 papers intersect with cancer biology or cancer immunology, 30 papers are on primary immunodeficiencies (across both mouse and human, but spread out over so many genes and syndromes they don't pop out here). 15 papers papers are on neuroimmunology, a current strength of the lab.

Finally, the journals that published our work! Really thrilled to see Nature Immunology up there, with 8 papers. We have a scattering of other top journals, Cell, Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Genetics all get a mention. Our most popular journals, however, are The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (10 papers), which has published some of our key work on primary immunodeficiency in both mouse and human, and Immunology and Cell Biology (10 papers), the Australian and New Zealand society journal (and a pleasure to work with!). I've been told by senior researchers that publishing anything below the top tier "dilutes my record", but I'm proud of all the science we do, and work to make sure that every story finds a home and every staff member or student with data gets to show it on the international stage.

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