Changing Academic Life

Reflecting on the episodes in this last season, asking for feedback and suggestions, and looking forward to transitions over the break.

Sarah Davies is a Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, & Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University of Vienna. Her work explores how science and society are co-produced, and of particular interest here is her research on academic work and knowledge production. In Part 2, Sarah Davies shares from both her research and lived experiences on topics like equity and valuing diverse work, care work in academia, creating collegial research cultures, and luck - the trigger for why I wanted to talk to Sarah. She discusses a recent paper she and co-authors published on luck and the situations of research, and how accounting for luck might just be one way of disrupting problematic rhetorics of excellence.

Sarah Davies is a Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, & Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University of Vienna. Overall her work explores how science and society are co-produced, with the digital and digitisation being key aspects. Of particular interest is her research on academic work and knowledge production.

Dr Elizabeth Churchill is a Senior Director at Google. She talks about creating team culture, leading teams and loving challenges.

Part 2 of the conversation with Dr Marta Cecchinato from Northumbria University where she shares how her research on shaping digital experiences to support wellbeing at work and in our personal lives has played out practically for her across a number of areas.

Dr Marta Cecchinato from Northumbria University shares her research on understanding the complexities of dealing with multiple technologies in everyday life and how we can shape our digital experiences to support wellbeing at work and in our personal lives.

This is a replay extract from a 2018 conversation with Professor James Wilsdon when he was a Professor of Research Policy at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He is now at UCL

Prof Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, a Professor in the Faculty of Computing & Informatics, at Namibia University of Science & Technology, shares the many challenges she and her colleagues face as Global South researchers trying to get their research reviewed, published and cited, highlighting reviewer assumptions and biases, and the ways our publishing models can exclude people from the Global South contributing to knowledge creation.

Edward Lee is a Professor of the Graduate School in EECS in Berkeley. This episode is triggered by a 2022 SIGBED blog post he wrote about ‘The toxic culture of rejection in CS’.

This is a confession comes from my reviewing hall of shame. And a call to all of us to be more reflective about our own reviewing biases and to draw attention to the bigger reviewing crisis we are currently facing.

This is a replay of the 2017 conversation with Gloria Mark in honour of her publishing her book called ‘Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity’.

Austen Rainer and I reflect on the Academic Leadership Development courses we co-facilitate for Informatics Europe.

In this short podcast [19:16 mins], I reflect on some of the themes from across the podcast discussions since Sept 2022 - themes around listening, leadership and stepping up to make a difference. I also conclude with a call to take some time now to reflect on and savour your 2022 and to think of your theme for 2023.

Dr. Aisling O’Kane is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in Health at the University of Bristol in the UK. In Part 2 here, she goes on to talk about how she came to take on an acting Head of Department role as a relatively junior faculty member, motivated by wanting to try to make a better workplace for herself and others. She also talks about issues of power and engagement and what she terms ‘a radical participatory decision making’ approach as way to try to engage people in being part of the change.

Dr. Aisling O’Kane is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in Health at the University of Bristol in the UK. In Part 1 of our conversation, she talks about her very diverse background from engineering to human factors and working in industry to a PhD and now in a faculty position. Along the way she reflects on the importance of mobility, the challenges being part of an academic couple with family, and the impact of COVID.

In Part 2 of our conversation, Dr. Stuart Reeves (Nottingham Uni, UK) describes his journey from protesting on the picket line about pensions to becoming an active academic member of the university Senate and reflects on his experiences of trying to effect change through being involved in university governance.

In Part 1 of our conversation, Dr. Stuart Reeves (Nottingham Uni, UK) reflects on the conflict in defining one’s own research brand vs the importance of the collective and collegiality in academia, and the structural issues that contribute to this. He raises the question of what are universities for and highlights the complexities of university management.

Dr Darragh McCashin is an Ass. Prof. in the School of Psychology at Dublin City Uni. In Part 2 here he unpacks the imposter cycle for us and points us to multi-level approaches for what we can do to disrupt, reframe and address it.

Dr Darragh McCashin started as an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at Dublin City University during COVID. In Part 1 of this conversation, he reflects on his experiences doing an interdisciplinary PhD in digital mental health, on the importance of interdisciplinary thinking, and on starting a lecturer position at a new university during COVID times. Darragh is also part of the Core Group for the EU COST Network on Researcher Mental Health Observatory, called ReMO. In sharing what he loves and what he finds challenging in his lecturing role, we start to touch on the theme of the imposter, a theme that focus on in Part 2, coming soon.

Dr. Julie Kientz is a professor and Chair of the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington in the US. In part 1 of our conversation, Julie reflected on how she made her own way from a small town geeky outcast, to get through college, and then on to a PhD and a faculty position and parenthood. We continue here in Part 2 with Julie talking about some early roles that demonstrated leadership skills, her tenure process and finding a more focused path post-tenure. She also talks about how she came to take on the Department Chair role and then almost immediately having to lead her department through the COVID crisis and then the murder of George Floyd and ongoing racial justice issues. She role models leadership from a place of humility and care, working to her strengths, amplifying impact and being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Dr. Julie Kientz is a professor and Chair of the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington in the US. In part 1 of our conversation, Julie shares her fascinating journey from first wanting to be a vet to then getting into a small town college to do computer science and then eventually doing a PhD at Georgia Tech and later getting a tenure track position. Her telling of the story is rich with reflective insights and nuggets of wisdom, whether it is about the about the value of good mentors, advice to PhD students, doing a job search as part of an academic couple, how to survive that first year as a faculty member, making decisions and managing boundaries, and parenting alongside work. In Part 2 we focus on her path into leadership and being a department chair.

Oscar Trimboli is an author, host of the Apple award-winning podcast Deep Listening and expert on listening in the workplace. In Part 2 of this conversation, he unpacks his 5 levels of listening with some actionable strategies for how we can be better listeners. We also touch on listening in group contexts and cultural issues around listening, and he briefly introduces the four listening villains that can get in the way of good listening.

Oscar Trimboli is an author, host of the Apple award-winning podcast Deep Listening and expert on Deep Listening in the workplace. In Part 1 of this conversation, we discuss his quest to quest to create deep listeners, the costs of not listening, the 125-400-900 rule, and how be rather than just do listening and to ask great questions. In Part 2 (coming next) he will unpack his 5 levels of listening with some actionable strategies.

A short preamble to kick start the new 2022 season of Changing Academic Life podcast

This short related-work podcast replays part of a previous podcast conversation with Katherine Isbister about working 8-5, reflecting on productivity and praising yourself

This short related-work podcast follows up on the last conversation with Michael Bungay-Stanier, to present the seven coaching-like questions from his book ‘The Coaching Habit’ for helping us to stay curious longer, jump to advice a little more slowly. I also reflect on my experiences trying to apply this in my academic life where I see it as one of our most powerful tools to help empower and develop good people. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2021/7/2/rw8-seven-questions for a time-stamped transcript and related work links.

Michael Bungay-Stanier is an internationally renowned author, company founder and thought leader in coaching. Michael is the founder of Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that helps organizations move from advice-driven to curiosity-led. He's the author of 6 books, the best known of which is The Coaching Habit which has sold close to a million copies and has thousands of 5-star reviews. His latest book The Advice Trap, focuses on what it takes to tame your Advice Monster. We start off the conversation reflecting on his career choices and discussing the differences between academia and industry. He then discusses what it means to be more coach-like in our work - staying curious a little longer, asking good questions, and being slower to jump to advice – as well as how to recognise our different advice monsters. We finish off with some questions posed by participants on a recent academic leadership development course. Overview (times approximate): 00:28 Preamble 04:07 Bio 07:26 Career choices, meaning and impact 11:41 Academia 16:45 Staying curious longer 18:05 Advice challenges 23:26 Getting practical 32:22 Advice monsters & their prizes and punishments 42:51 Responding to questions 51:32 Wrap up 53:55 End

Dr Tanita Casci is Head of Research Policy, and Dr. Elizabeth Adams is Workstream Lead – Research Culture, at the University of Glasgow. The trigger for this conversation was an LSE blog article they wrote about rewarding contributions to research culture. In this conversation they talk about their journey in trying to promote a supportive collegial research culture that is aligned around core institutional values that reflect what matters to the people in the research units. They discuss various initiatives that are part of this, such as promotion criteria that reward collegiality, formal recognition of everyone’s contributions to research, from PIs, researchers, students and to technicians, and better supporting early career researchers. They make a compelling case for the importance of culture for good research, and role model what universities can do to proactively enable this.

Jeremy Birnholtz is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Communication Studies and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments at Northwestern University in Chicago in the US. He also directs the Social Media Lab. The trigger for this conversation was the recent discussion with John Tang about reviewing and Jeremy continues this discussion, looking at issues around authoring and service asymmetries, the unsustainability of the current review and publication models based on what he calls the perpetual motion machine that pushes researchers to churn out more and more papers. He calls for a greater focus on quality of papers instead of numbers and to identify quality signifiers beyond just publications. We discuss his role as conference chair of the upcoming CSCW conference, which is traditionally about distributed online collaboration, and moving the conference online. Shifting topics, we also talk about his personal coming out and the pivot of his research to explore topics around gender and sexuality. Through all of these discussions, Jeremy’s curiosity and care comes through again and again. Much to ponder on here.

Neha Kumar is an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, with a joint appointment between the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. Her research area is human-computer interaction for global development. In this conversation she discusses the circumstances and choices and people that contributed to her path from India to Germany to the US, where she studied at Stanford and UC Berkeley, with time working at Microsoft in between. She then talks about her current faculty position and setting up her own research lab. She also talks with great generosity and reflective insight about the penalties and privileges of always being an underrepresented voice in every room and respecting difference. She brings a similar capacity to take perspective and see the bigger picture in talking about her tenure process, her service roles and how she looks after herself in the middle of all this. I encourage you to particularly listen to the end and her powerful call to us to be stronger together.

Having talked about superpowers and strengths, in the last related work podcast, it’s a natural follow on to talk about job crafting and exploring where we the power and autonomy to shape the work we do. Drawing on work by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, I talk about three ways you can job craft – cognitive, task and relational – and draw on examples including from pervious podcasts to illustrate. We all have more scope to make work more meaningful than we might think and even small tweaks can make a big difference.

Two recent interactions made me think more about the importance of knowing our own unique superpowers (as Aaron Quigley discussed), ie our strengths, and also our kryponite (thanks Lewis Chuang), and how this can help us work out what is our good academic life. And to recognise that it’s ok that we can all have different superpowers.

John Tang is a Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research, joining in 2008 and having previously worked in other industrial research labs at Xerox PARC, Sun, and IBM. He has a PhD from the design division of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He is a deep expert distributed collaboration and in particular the use of video in this context, which is now highly relevant considering the increase in video conferencing in these pandemic times. He also serves in many senior editorial and papers chair roles managing the review process for papers. In this conversation we reflect on the increasing amount of overwork and exhaustion we are seeing in the peer community and how this is playing out for the review process and also look at the broader implications. John describes it in terms of invisible disabilities and it being a community problem needing solutions at the community level. We also talk about the differential effect the pandemic is having, the particular challenges for more junior people and recognizing his own privileged situation. He embodies too a graciousness and generosity in how he approaches these challenges, including the impact on himself, that can serve as a role model for us all. He also reflects on the experiences of video connections in pandemic times.

Aaron Quigley is a Professor and Head of School in Computer Science and Engineering at University of New South Wales. He discusses his various career moves that have brought him to the current position and the role of both strategic hindsight and foresight around choices. He talks about silent warriors in relation to mentoring and supervision, as well as peer service. And he talks about his three secret powers of not worrying who gets the credit, listening and talking, and how they play out in practice. As part of this we also hear about his approach to leadership, getting the best out of people, and making the world a better place.

I hadn’t thought before about the fact that under managing could be just as harmful if not more than micromanaging. Finding the sweet spot is my challenge moving forward. These reflections are triggered by an experience this last semester, where I realized in trying not to micro manage I hadn’t set up the team for success. The challenging part of this was learning to step back from pointing the finger at the ‘others’ and to ask how I was complicit in creating this situation as a manager and what I could learn from this to do differently next time.

Austen Rainer is a Professor at Queen’s University Belfast in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His main focus area is team-based software innovation for societal, economic and environmental impact. Austen and I also co-facilitate an academic leadership development course. We talk about lots of different topics, from the motivation for his various moves from the UK to New Zealand to Northern Ireland, and negotiating various cultural differences, to his experiences being an academic leader, what he has learnt, including about having difficult conversations, and the strong values that underpin all his work. We also touch upon his COVID lockdown experiences, both in teaching his team-based module and how well that worked, and the personal challenges negotiating boundaries and staying well in working from home.

In this short related-work podcast, I share the stories of two people we’ll call Alex and Blake who are facing the challenge of meeting tenure criteria. From this I reflect on the personal, professional and societal impacts entailed in this push for so-called excellence. I then discuss two different papers that point in different ways to the need for institutional and cultural level response and present ideas for practical actions – for how we can address academic rejection and what it means to focus on soundness and capacity instead of excellence. As Moore et al state, excellence is not excellent and in fact is at odds with qualities of good research.

In this short related work podcast, I talk about the importance of noticing people, showing appreciation and saying thanks. Small actions can have a big impact, for them and you. And it can be contagious - a good contagion!

In this bite-sized Related Work podcast, I reflect on how these stressful times can be a catalyst for growth and change, moving on from bouncing back (resilience) to bouncing forward. I connect to literature on resilience and post traumatic growth and theories around ‘tend and befriend’ to point to the choices we can make in how we interpret and respond to the current challenges.

In this bitesize ‘Related Work’, the first of the new year of 2021, I suggest using a theme for the new year and also connecting with your superordinate goals, your why, and to explore learning goals.

Here are some brief reflections from me on this VUCA year of 2020! I also announce a new series of bite-size podcasts that I’m calling ‘Related Work’, discussing a single topic or concept from both an evidence-based and experiential perspective. Starting 2021.

Dr Eunice Sari is the CEO and Co-Founder of UX Indonesia, the first UX Research, Training and Consulting Company based in Indonesia, among many other ‘first’ roles and achievements. She has more than 15 years of experience in academia and industry. In this conversation Eunice shares her career trajectory working and studying in Indonesia, Denmark, Finland and Australia.

Anirudha Joshi is a lecturer, teaching interaction design in the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in India. Anirudha discusses his career path from engineering, to working in design, to coming back to university to teach and later doing his PhD. Many of his stories point to his particular ‘self-taught’ learning style, of learning first by doing then building on that learning in whatever way he needs. He also talks about developing HCI capacity and community in India and the particular challenges, as well as design in an Indian context, and what we can learn from India. At a personal level, Anirudha also reflects on what he learnt from a recent sabbatical - how he is shaping his research to focus on making an impact in education in India, building up a collaborative lab culture, and making healthy life choices.

An “in-between” podcast reflecting on my own experiences being COVID-stranded in Australia.

This is the Part 2 of a discussion with Pejman Mirza-Babaei. Pejman is an Associate Dean, Industry Partnerships and an Associate Professor of User Experience Research in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. In the Part 1 he talked about his research and getting to tenure. In this second half we explore Pejman’s experiences in navigating life post-tenure, working out how he can have the biggest impact, and learning to become an academic leader, in particular what it is useful to focus on and how to get the best out of people.

Pejman Mirza-Babaei is an Associate Dean Industry Partnerships, and an Associate Professor of User Experience Research, in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Pejman’s story spans Iran, the UK and Canada as he discusses his path from Masters to working in industry to doing a PhD closely tied with a start-up, and then his experiences moving into a tenure track position immediately post PhD, well in fact before his PhD, and later taking a break to work back in industry before working out that academia is what he wants to. What’s particularly interesting in his story is how strategic he has been in exploring his options and making decisions, leading to him getting tenure in very quick time. And what else is interesting is how he is always seeking feedback and open to learn. There is a Part 2 of this conversation (coming next) where he talks about the uncertainty of life post-tenure and how he has navigated these new choices, as well as what he has learning moving into more faculty leadership roles.

At the beginning of 2020, I look back on 2019 & 2018 around the podcasts and my personal reflections.

Rosa Arriaga is a developmental psychologist who transitioned into computer science as a senior research scientist in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech in the US. She talks about the journey becoming a computer scientist and applying the toolkit she brings from her psychology background to technology problems around chronic disease management and the reward of seeing real impact in people’s lives. She has also recently taken on the role of Chair of Graduate Affairs and talks with passion about her role in making processes and expectations clear and easy, and in promoting the importance of whole selves.

Alex Taylor is a sociologist and a Reader in the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London. Alex moved into academia in Sept 2017, having worked at Microsoft Research Cambridge prior to this for over a decade and as a post doc researcher at Surrey University before this. Alex talks about his work at the boundaries of disciplines where he doesn’t feel like he has a clear disciplinary home, and about his experiences working at Microsoft. He explains his very conscious decision to then move into an academic position. The trigger for this conversation was a twitter post where he commented on the many different skills that he had to draw on as an academic. He reflects on the labours of academia, and the need to prioritise and make choices. He also talks about generative resistance in the face of the demands of the academy, taking principled stands, saying no and offering alternatives. And he talks about doing this as a collective endeavor and the power of small everyday actions. In all he does Alex is deeply reflective and values-driven and asks How do we create the opportunities and the spaces to do the academy differently? He shows many of the practical ways we can all be part of this.

Tom Erickson is a cognitive psychologist by background and was a researcher (social scientist and designer) at IBM Research since 1997, having previously worked in the early days of Apple and their Advanced Technology Group, and at a start up. Tom reflects on his experiences working in industry research, some of the pivotal work he has been involved in. He has also telecommuted most of his work life and he talks about how he made this work. Tom has also recently retired and he managed his transition to retirement in a really thoughtful way, being very deliberate in thinking about how to make a better life for himself and in what he calls ‘practising retirement’.

Jennifer Mankoff is an endowed professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Washington in the US. Jen’s journey to this position though hasn’t been straightforward because she has been dealing with ongoing chronic health issues since her PhD days. Jen talks about managing disability as an academic and in particular the ways in she positively frames her experiences and points to the support of family and colleagues. She also has interesting experiences about being part of an academic couple as well as managing parenting and extended family caring roles. While considering herself a private person, she recognizes it is important for people like herself to share their experiences, not just of successes but also about what is hard, and to give the message that we all go through these hard times and can find ways forward.

Moshe Vardi is a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in the US and holds numerous honours and awards. This is the second part of our conversation where we focus more on the changes and challenges in academic life. Moshe reflects on: the increasing pressures to publish, the seduction of big data on how we evaluate research, and the increasing pressure and stress on students for these and other reasons; how we need academics to get more involved in social issues but that we are instead training people to be self-centred focusing on their own careers just at a time when we need then to get more involved in social issues; whether we should be focusing mentoring more on post-tenure people because of how hard it is to sustain an innovative research agenda over time; and why we need to have more conversations about our obligations as academics to take more social responsibility.

Moshe Vardi is a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in the US and holds numerous honours and awards. In this conversation he talks about the impact of technologies on society and how this challenges what computer science should be concerned about and our responsibilities to engage in these issues. What he has to say speaks not only to computer scientists but to all academics. This is actually the first part of a much longer conversation. Part 2, coming out as a separate podcast, discusses the changes and challenges in academia more generally.

Jofish Kaye is a Principle Research Scientist at Mozilla, and before this he worked at Yahoo and Nokia. Jofish made a deliberate decision not to pursue an academic career after he finished his PhD and it’s interesting to hear how his decision-making criteria evolved from being primarily about the people he could work with to being more values-driven and being able to make an impact. A strong sense of values and having impact are threads in a lot of what he talks about. He also discusses his experiences more generally working in an industry context and also moving into more management/leadership roles.

Katie Siek is an associate professor in Informatics at Indiana University. Katie shares her experiences being part of a dual career couple and has some excellent advice for faculties on how to handle this better. She talks about the challenges having children and how she learnt to take proper time off with her second child. She talks about her passion for mentoring, recognized by a special mentor award and learning how to lobby upwards to effect policy change; also about building her group and their wall sit challenge. We finish with her very personal story of managing an invisible illness at work, and a call to have more open and honest discussions about these issues and to advocate for and support one another.

Leysia Palen is Professor and Founding Chair of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has also led the establishment of the Crisis Informatics research area. Leysia shares her career journey in getting to this place, an amazing story of being a first generation college student, dealing with imposter syndrome, and moving to a new university to support her spouse. It is also a story of focus and perseverance, defining a new research area, being supported by her own soft money, then finally getting a half-time faculty position, while at the same time having a family and growing the internationally recognised Project EPIC. It was only relatively recently that she got tenure and then quickly became a full professor. Leysia also talks the challenges and lessons learnt in setting up and leading a whole new department and what higher education can be in this era.

Mike Twidale is a professor in the School of Information Sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, recipient of numerous teaching awards, and more recently program director for a new Masers degree. We talk about how he handled the tenure process, his teaching approaches, and agile research. We also discuss stepping up into leadership roles. Having thought he would never be any good at leadership, he has developed his own leadership style by playing to his own strengths and the complementary strengths of those around him, among other effective strategies. We also talk about the value of story-telling to make explicit the multiple different ways of doing academia. And he talks about metrics as just being an indicator.

Lindsay Oades is a Professor at the University of Melbourne, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Positive Psychology at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. I was keen to talk to him because of his expertise in positive organisations and taking a systems perspective to promoting wellbeing at work. In this conversation we talk about his own experiences of changes in the academic sector, and his key learnings getting to full professor. We also talk about what positive psychology can contribute to academic work environments and wellbeing, covering issues around values, purpose and meaning, strengths, promotion processes, performance reviews, job crafting, and academic leadership.

Jan Gulliksen is a Professor in Human Computer Interaction and Vice President for Digitalization at KTH in Stockholm Sweden, among various other national and international leadership roles. He was also Dean of school for 7 years and we talk here mostly about his experiences and thoughts on middle management and academic leadership. He shares his personal development as a leader as well as some practical strategies, many using techniques from his background in theater and drama, for example, in how to read and interact with people, or in using improv theater to create insight and shift values around PhD supervision. We also touch on a range of other issues including the nature of academic freedom, building organizational values, the importance of 2-way trust, what makes good role models, the problems with meetings, the ‘too’ in working too much, and much more.

Rowena Murray is a Professor of Education, Director of Research, in the School of Education at the University of the West of Scotland. She is an internationally recognized expert and author on academic writing and on running writing retreats. In this conversation she talks about the writing retreats for both the importance of learning behaviours around how to write, and for the value of the academic friendships that arise from such writing groups. She also talks about the challenges of being a woman professor dealing with unremitting criticism and undermining, and in having to fight for academic writing as a legitimate research topic in its own right. And she gives very practical advice for creating the support you need to deal with this and how to care for yourself in the process. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/7/11/rowena-murray for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.

Kirsten Ellis is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Melbourne. She discusses how she deals with changing goalposts around performance outputs, being passionate about her research, having success at getting grants but trouble getting published. She discusses the impact that repeated rounds of redundancy have on morale and culture, and on being open and authentic at work. Authenticity comes through as theme throughout. And she talks about how she manages being a mother of three teenage girls, including one with a disability, as well as having a mother who is sick. Her non-negotiable going flying time every week is a key part of how she cares for herself so she can care for others. To provide context, she also mentions a session with me around values. This was done as part of a Career Development Workshop that I ran at Monash at the beginning of the year, where I first met Kirsten. The audio quality isn’t as good as it could be in parts.

Janet Read is a Professor in Child Computer Interaction at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. Janet’s path to academia was via maths teaching, and then falling into a PhD after she had a family. Our discussions are wide ranging and throughout she is incredibly thoughtful, reflective and proactive in how she goes about unentangling processes and challenges. Because this ends up being a long conversation, I’ve added some notes on the web about the high level topics and talk about it two parts. In the first part, up to about the hour, she explores her own journey learning how to do research, how to supervise students, and how to support good learning experiences. She has some really interesting things to say about today’s university process-driven culture and argues that we need to do much better at understanding students and how to better support the learning experience, not equating attendance with learning. In the second part, she talks about being a complete academic, that one of the challenges is that no-one really knows what an academic actually does. She talks about how she deals with the demands on her time, the potential costs of being too efficient, being proactive and looking after your own needs, creating a collaborative group culture, wishing for encouraging and supportive leadership and saying ‘well done’. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/ 5/17/janet-read for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.

Kylie Ball is a Professor in the in the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Faculty of Health at Deakin University in Australia. She is also Head of early- and mid-career researcher (EMCR) development and publishes a very impactful blog targeted to EMCRs called The Happy Academic. We have a wide-ranging discussion about the EMCR support initiatives she has put in place, including workshops, mentoring programs and virtual resources, as well as the blog which she talks about as a form of virtual mentorship that can have a wider reach. We explore her own strategies for physical and mental wellbeing and how to form good habits. Themes throughout are around how much there is that we can actually take control of and make choices about, and we get a good sense of how to create a kinder and more supportive culture within our faculties. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/4/18/kylie-ball for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links

Carman Neustaedter is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada and is also Director of the Connections Lab (cLab) research group. He talks about the importance for him of taking time to reconnect with his identity and values, and building in regular time for reflection, both on the bigger issues of where he is going and also on day to day work like writing challenges. He also discusses feeling overwhelmed and deciding to track his work time over a whole year, which led to surprising findings about how he actually spent his time and how he worked fewer hours than he thought he did. He also touches on issues around handling reviewer critique, managing his email inbox and how he structures time and prioritises family. A thread through a couple of stories is also the importance of being able to take on the perspective of others, whether these are the critical reviewers or colleagues. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/3/6/carman-neustaedter for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.

James Wilsdon is a Professor of Research Policy in the Department of Politics and Director of Impact and Engagement for the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Associate Director in the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He has been involved in many policy and think tank initiatives. Of particular interest here, he chaired an independent review of the role of metrics in the management of the UK's research system, publishing a final report in 2015 called The Metric Tide. More recently he has chaired an expert panel on Next Generation Metrics for the European Commission. In this conversation we talk about his experiences working in both policy think tanks and in academia, about the increasing focus on research impact for academics and how the UK has created some culture change in this direction. He also discusses issues around metric-based systems of assessments for academics and calls on us not to indulge processes of evaluation that we know empirically are bad science. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/ 2/1/james-wilsdon for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.

Luigina Ciolfi is a Professor of Human Centred Computing at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). A common theme of the conversation is her passion for giving back. We talk about peer service organising a conference, and about her early career experiences as a junior faculty with responsibilities for a program, and what sorts of training and support were or could have been useful for her. In giving back now to junior faculty, she also talks about recent training experiences to take a coaching/mentoring approach and the value of this. We then talk about some of her recent research studying how nomadic workers and how work-life balance plays out for them and how there is no one strategy that suits everyone. She reflects on her own strategies here and also on the challenges of working in a different country to your families. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/1/16/lui-ciolfi for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.

As with the end on 2016, this is a short podcast (18:58) where I reflect on the year that has been. I also add my call to increasing compassion and kindness in the workplace and discuss the benefits of doing this and various options for how to play it out. I would also love to hear your feedback and ideas for what and who you want to hear about in future podcasts.

Michael Muller is a researcher at IBM Research in Cambridge MA. We cover a lot in this conversation, Michael reflects on his long PhD process in cognitive science, long in part because of chronic diseases that he still deals with. He talks about the decision to move to industry and his experiences working in various industry positions since then, including interpreting participatory design methods for a North American industry context, finding out he wasn’t suited to management, and loving the work he is doing now. A theme across many of the stories is the tension arising from navigating organisational demands and his own deeply held values, and throughout you can hear his deep care for people. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2017/12/6/michael-muller for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.

Jolanta Burke is a Positive Psychologist, who works as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Leader of the MAPPCP programme at University of East London and also has her own consultancy business. She shares how she dealt with burn-out during her PhD, having to find a place of harmonious rather than obsessive passion, and how this influences her work supervising students now. She also shares her experiences working in business contexts as a consultant, in creating positive workplaces and how we could better do this in academia. And she shares her passion for making a better world through communicating our research to people and helping people. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2017/11/11/jolanta-burke for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.

Evan Peck is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell University in the US. Evan has a passion for teaching and also wants to do good research but when he was looking around for a faculty position, he decided he didn’t want to trade off family life and life quality to do it all, as he considered he might have to at a top-rated school. He also wasn’t sure about industry where he could have better life quality but would miss teaching. He is now an evangelist for Liberal Arts Colleges, like Bucknell, as a middle way for PhD students to include when considering career options. Evan talks about his decision processes getting there and his current experiences as a new faculty in establishing work to include teaching, research and time for family. He also has a great blog post written on this topic. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2017/8/9/evan-peck for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.