Dr Sean Sapcariu is programme manager at the Luxembourg National Research fund. Trained as a biomedical scientist, Sean moved into university strategic development before jumping on the other side of the fence by now working for a national funder.
Growing up as an American is maybe what gave Sean a sense of freedom as he moved along his career. His ethos of trying things out and jumping into the deep end have been key in his career explorations.
In his current role, Sean is on a mission to influence research culture in Luxembourg- not a small goal! He talks about having huge goals as well as quick wins. A sensible approach when it comes to challenging research culture.
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
Dr Sean Sapcariu is programme manager at the Luxembourg National Research fund. Trained as a biomedical scientist, Sean moved into university strategic development before jumping on the other side of the fence by now working for a national funder.
Growing up as an American is maybe what gave Sean a sense of freedom as he moved along his career. His ethos of trying things out and jumping into the deep end have been key in his career explorations.
In his current role, Sean is on a mission to influence research culture in Luxembourg- not a small goal! He talks about having huge goals as well as quick wins. A sensible approach when it comes to challenging research culture.
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
Warning- getting a perfect transcript is hard. This transcript may have mistakes. Be kind to us by accepting these potential errors. I hope that the transcript is helpful to some of you! Apologies in advances for any mistakes in the transcript.
Sandrine Soubes: All right, let's make a start.
[music]
Sandrine: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Welcome on the podcast, Research lives and Cultures. I'm your host Sandrine. Today I have the pleasure to have with me Sean Sapcariu. I hope I'm not killing your name.
Sean Sapcariu: Sean Sapcariu.
Sandrine: Sean, that's the French version, Sean. That's it. Sean is coming all the way from Luxembourg and he's the program manager at the Fonds National de la Recherche. You see? I can pronounce this.
Sean: That one works. [chuckles]
Sandrine: You work in Luxembourg, but you are actually American. Let's get started in hearing about your career. How did your professional life start?
Sean: No problem. First of all, thanks for having me on. This is super cool to be here. In regards to my career, there's this traditional idea of a researcher that goes bachelor's, masters, PhD, postdoc, postdoc, postdoc, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, whatever.
No, I am not one for define the career paths. Mine looks like, bachelor, I did my bachelor and then I was a cook, and then I was a ski instructor, and then I was traveling for a bit, and then I did a master's and a PhD. Then I said, ''No postdoc.'' Then I went into the leadership of the university, strategy, development, and implementation, and communications at the University of Luxembourg. Then now I'm at the funder so in funding as a program manager for our funding program. Totally weaving around all over the place but I like seeing different perspectives.
I like understanding things from, different points of view. I like to argue that this way I've seen all the sides of research and the other stuff, but all the sides of research. As a researcher, as a PhD student candidate, from the leadership and the strategy perspective at the institution, and then now from the funders. I like to think I have a holistic view on everything
Sandrine: That's a place of mastery to have reached at a young age, really. [chuckles]
Sean: Not that young. [chuckles]
Sandrine: In a way, what's-- Because the narrative of the perfect career tract of what is defined as the perfect career or the expectation that the institution or the culture place on what a career should look like after a PhD.
What do you think gave you the freedom throughout your career to have a sense of, I'll do whatever I want to do or whatever I like to do, and I'm not placing any restriction on the opportunities that I take because I work with a lot of PhD student and postdoc who feel very trapped because they've put so much energy and years. They feel that if they give up working in research, it's like time wasted or years wasted of really hard work. I have a sense that you don't have that hang-up.
Sean: No. [chuckles]
Sandrine: How did you get that sense of freedom?
Sean: I'll attribute a little bit of it to being American because the American mentality is, oh, you want to be a cook? Go work in a restaurant and see how you do. If you're good at it and if you like it, you work hard and you're able to do it, which is a little bit different from the European mentality. One of the things I didn't say is that I tried to get a job as a cook when I had moved to Europe, but I was unable to get a permit. I got a job because that was no issue. Then, because I didn't have a training, a formal training, then I was kicked out and had some visa issues. That's a different story. I think part of it is the American mentality of like, you know what? I'll just try and see what happens.
The other part is just having the courage to do it. My friends and I at university, my bachelors, had a thing that whenever one of us would quit a job, we would open up a bottle of champagne or to buy a bottle of champagne for the person who quit because it takes some guts to walk away from something and to change your life and change your perspective and everything but we wanted to foster that. It was done in a completely fun way.
I think that mentality is something that I would recommend as useful, right? It's if you quit a job, it creates a little bit of unhappiness. Maybe your boss is unhappy, maybe you're unhappy, but you move on to the next thing and your boss finds somebody else or you stay in contact if you have a good relationship and you move on and you find something else, and then time heals all wounds, right? It turns out okay in the end, in general.
Sandrine: That's very true. Funny because I'm running your program at the moment called Daring to Dare for university where working with early career women, and for me, that's exactly daring to dare is daring to put yourself in a place where you don't know what's next. You don't know how it's going to be like. It takes courage to change like that. Can you tell us a little bit about your actual job right now? Because, obviously, each country is different in term of the way it supports research. You work for a national funding agency.
Sean: I work as a program manager at the FNR, Fonds National de la Recherche, Luxembourg National Research Fund in English. As a program manager, I have lots of hats because we're only, I think, 30 people. We're very small. We're probably one of the smallest funding agencies in the world. We do a lot and so we have to wear a lot of different hats for a lot of different things.
In one part of my role, I am responsible for funding programs. Certain entire funding schemes, I am responsible for organizing them, implementing them, improving them, making sure that they run okay, that the evaluations come in. We find enough reviewers, that the panels work okay. When the projects are funded, I follow the projects from an administrative side to make sure the reporting goes okay. I'm the main contact point, which is my favorite part, the main contact point for the researchers at the funding agency. Being small, we have a really nice ability to have this constant contact with researchers and the administrators and everybody in the research ecosystem, which is fantastic.
Main contact point, making sure things move forward. That's the coordination role. Then I'm also a subject matter expert for biology because I did my PhD in biology and so that's my area. In the programs that I coordinate, I find the reviewers and I`m the main liaison, the main contact point for the biology projects. For other people's programs, I am the one that find the reviewers for them as well. They coordinate the projects and they say, "Sean, we have a couple of biology projects. Can you find some reviewers for that?"
Then also, in European projects because we are involved in a lot of European projects, multilateral collaboration stuff because Luxembourg is small and we like to collaborate. I'm responsible there as well, for the biology side of things. At the same time, this research culture side has come up and I got really interested in it randomly.
It sprung out of a little bit of the open access stuff and open science things that we do in Luxembourg. Then we wanted to go a little bit farther toward careers and other things. I asked for the test. I volunteered because culture's been always something that's interested me, research or otherwise, or food or whatever. Then I took it on and then I jumped right into the deep end and I saw all the things that were going on and this wave that's moving for research culture.
I said, ''How can we use this to implement and improve our projects or processes?'' How can we apply these best practices and also these experimental new ideas towards our own processes to improve research culture and research assessment for people in Luxembourg? Then of course maybe on a more, on a more international scale as well. I'm involved heavily with various national and international research culture "related" things that apply directly from a research funder's perspective.
Sandrine: Doing that work is quite complex in term of the various stakeholders. It's about influencing and as a founder, that's the only thing that you can do to influence. How do you find that in term of you may set in place a number of actions that researchers were funded by you, things that they have to do, but at the end of the day, once you've given the money the practices are really based in the institution? How do you approach that, the influencing as a funder?
Sean: That's an excellent question and probably the main issue, not issue, but the main crux, if I can use this word, of the research culture initiative, so to say. We're a funding agency so our main lever of influence is funding money, which is an important one in today's day and age and in research always. What we can do is we can incentivize with and, punish but we'd rather incentivize because incentivization is a much stronger influencer than punishment. Even though people like to punish. It seems easier in sorts.
We can nudge and we can say, "We think this is the right way to go based upon international best practices or what we've seen in our national system. We nudge by putting policies in place and then incentivizing these policies. For example, open access. We say we require all publications to be open access which is like a mandate.
At the same time we say but you're going to do it. We want you to do it so we'll pay for it. We'll pay for your article processing costs. We'll make it easier for you to do these things that we think is the right direction to go. This is the same thing that we can do with research culture. I would argue also that open access is part of research culture but in the broader sense. That's one thing.
The other thing is, honestly, building trust which influence-- We can say that we try to influence, but it's rather that, as you pointed out, it's up to the researchers and the institutions to do a lot of this stuff. I always like to talk about this triangle of trust where you have the researchers, the institutions, and the funder and we all have to work together and trust each other and realize that we're on the same team. The goal of research is to move research forward.
There's competition between groups and competition between countries and all of that should maybe be a little bit less in terms of rankings and all that other stuff. In the end of the day, we're trying to advance society and we're working together on this. We want to fund the best research. The institutions want to do the best research and also to have the best researchers and the researchers want to do the best research for themselves as well as this noble goal. Once we all change our perspective and realize that we're on the same team, then a lot of this influencing will become much easier.
Sandrine: One of the things that I've heard a lot is pushing the responsibility to the funders where the research team leader may say, "If we had more money, if the funding was at the longer timeline." How do you respond to people to step who may say if the funders and then...
[chuckles]
Sean: That's a good question. Everybody has responsibility, funders as well. I will fully admit that we have certain responsibilities. One of my favorite things that I've heard, I think it might have been at a welcome trust conference or something, is that I think in the UK the best things that have pushed research culture stuff forward is when the initiatives have been bottom-up from the researchers and the institutions and the people in the top, in the institutions, the deans and the presidents and whatever and the funding agencies either support these or just get out of the way and let them happen. It's this mix of bottom-up and top-down stuff.
Everybody has to understand their role in the game. Everyone takes responsibility for different things. We are responsible for ensuring that the money goes towards the right-- We still want high research quality. This is super important, but at the end of the day, how do you define quality? Quality can be broadened into these other things. We can incentivize that through throwing money at it and broadening our evaluation criteria and listening to the researchers and what they think.
The researchers also have to hire more diversity and include their people in their projects and allow more of a say and push their researchers and the institutions should also push their researchers away from just publishing in high-impact journals and more towards broader definition of societal impact. Make policy briefs, give information to public information sessions, link your research to the users of the research and get them involved in all aspects as best as you can of the research process.
If this was done, then everything would be fine. I don't fully buy it. I'll give one example. I was actually thinking of it this morning of the block grant funding. People say that if money was given a longer term to the institutions directly then everything would be better. Maybe. We, in Luxembourg, have a very peculiar situation where our funding from the FNR, competitive funding, is only-- I want to say 25%, I think, of the amount of money that flows into the national institutions. They have massive block grants, but we still have the same issues that everybody else does.
The money is not the solution. It's the culture. It's the how that money is used and the thinking and the perceptions and the mentalities that are in everybody's heads of how the money should be used, how the money should be given, what the indicators and metrics and success definitions are. There's no one solution to this. It's everybody working together to try to figure out together how we can move things forward.
Sandrine: One question that I'm interested in asking you, do you feel that you were prepared to do these jobs through the various opportunities that you took from your PhD onward? Maybe you didn't, but I've worked with a lot of PhD student and postdoc when I worked as a researcher developer. I was always running induction and trying to get PhD student or postdoc to take opportunities, to become visible, to put themself out there. Sometime you are so much focused on actually getting this dumb experiment [chuckles] to work that it's really hard to do other stuff or to have your mind even conceive the next step.
In your case, the transition outside of doing biology, what did you do during that to prepare yourself to have the tools, the thinking tools, or the interpersonal tool to actually be really great at your current job?
Sean: You're begging the question by saying that I'm great at my job, which thank you, I guess. [laughs] I don't know. One could argue whether I'm good or not, but to answer the fundamental question, there are a lot of facets to this question that I could try to pick off. One is the daringness. How do you prepare for complexity in doing things? I think we talked in the introduction, learning by doing, try it. A lot of stuff I had absolutely no idea how to do. When I walked into a professional kitchen for the first time, I had zero experience, zero and I was made fun of and it's part of the game. Then you just say take these criticisms, learn from everything.
Criticism is not always personal, shouldn't always be, shouldn't be personal at all, but if it's given in a good way, feedback and criticism can be constructive and you can learn. Learn from everything. It is probably the number one rule and through this learning, you become better. You learn what not to do. You don't make the same mistakes over and over and over again. You learn to do the job in a good manner. In an excellent manner, whatever excellence means. That's one.
Second, sometimes you have to step back and look at the bigger perspective. If you're focused on getting the experiments to work, which is important, of course, but also, a lot of times if you're working on a problem, say, it's a math problem, when you're in university or high school or whatever, you can't crack it. You can't figure it out. You just step outside. You go for a walk and then it comes to you in the shower or in the forest. This is also important, to take stock and look at things from a different perspective. Take a step back from your experiment. Take a day off, half a day off.
I did this a lot in my PhD. I was not as hard a worker as maybe I should have been [chuckles] and having this different perspective, this turning your brain off and towards something else helps immensely as well. I try to do that now also to-- If I'm stuck on something, just take a break, go do something else, make some bread, make some lunch and see what happens.
The third, don't be afraid to connect because we're all people. The various jobs that I have, it sounds impressive. Going from directly from a PhD to the top of the university food chain. How I got that job was they were developing a new strategy for the university and I was the doctoral school representative for the biologists and the biomedicine students of PhD candidates. I was invited to this meeting, which was math. The meeting was math, but it was organized by the rectorate, by the heads. Then the assistant to the rector, the advisor to the rector was there. I went to her after the meeting was done and I said, "Thanks," that's it. I said, "Thanks for organizing this."
We started small talking. Then after five minutes of small talk, she says, "Oh, are you looking for a job? Give me your CV." I had the interview the next week. This is what I tell every researcher that asks me about my random crazy career path. What did you do? Talk to people. If you want to get out of research or if you want to find your postdoc, if you want to try something, send an email. Walk up to somebody at a conference when conferences will exist again. Just do it. The worst they say is no or they don't answer and you have to follow up, no harm done and it's fine. Then in the best case, you get something new, a new experience, new perspective, a new job, whatever.
Sandrine: That rings completely true with some of those things that I say to researcher, and in a way, what I like in what you're saying is that sometime it doesn't have to be a master plan. It's just saying thank you for organizing this event and then engaging in a conversation from that and the notion of happenstance, of things happen just because you meet somebody in a coffee shop or whatever.
Sean: Sometimes you will fall on your face. Sometimes you will make a fool out of yourself. Sometimes you will look really stupid in front of somebody that you think is very impressive and it's okay. You give them a story to go home and tell their family, "I met this person today. They walked into a poll when they were trying to talk to me and it was super hilarious." Maybe that super awkward moment makes them remember you. Then a little bit later, they're like that person that did something super awkward, that person was working on this thing that I'm doing. I'm going to give them an email or give them a call." You never know.
Sandrine: One of the things we can follow up here is straight after your PhD, you started working with very senior academic, in the top management of the university. That's something that some people may find a bit scary. You are working and you are developing policies with senior research leaders. How did you build the confidence to just be yourself and do the work that you had to do in a context where you feel, oh, I'm just a PhD student, as said? I've just finished my PhD and I don't have years of experience.
Sean: The transition was actually during my PhD. For the last six months of my PhD, I actually was working in both roles as a PhD student finalizing my thesis and getting ready for the defense and everything. Also, a couple of days a week at the rectorate doing this strategic communication job, which was fun, [chuckles] It led to some intense negotiations between my two bosses which is weird.
It's two parts. Again, it goes back to the confidence in just trying. Just try it, learn by doing, know what your strengths are. Actually, one of the people from that job told me every year he takes stock of all the things that he's done and all the strengths that he has and he plans the next two, three years or where do I want to be in three years. Even if it doesn't happen, he just plans. I want this, this, and this because then your goals and you can equip yourself with the skills or experience to move towards them. Even if it doesn't work and you don't go in that direction, it goes plan X, that's fine.
That's one. Understand yourself and your skills and know what your strengths are which is very, very important, and know how to sell them, easier for an American than a European but something to practice.
Number two is get yourself a good support system. My boss at the rectorate was amazing. She trusted me to do the job. It was like we talked and then I gave her the CV and she was anyways building this creative more unique strategy office. She was building this team and she had this vision of this idea of how things could be in a new unique evidence-based decision-making way with people like me and others that were hired.
There was a small team, only four people, and then she gave us the trust to go forth and do it. We're going to make mistakes and we'll improve, we'll be the better for it. Then she will help guide us and say here's your goal. Go for it. I will support you. What do you need? This is immense. If you can find yourself a good boss, hang on to their every word, he, she, they, whatever. Then that also helps you build the confidence in yourself when others do it for you in the first place.
Sandrine: It's funny because in a recent interview I did with a research team leader, one of the things he said was trust doesn't need to be earned. In a way, it's like you don't need to wait for people to demonstrate that they can do the job. You let them do the job and then you know that you're giving them trust from the beginning in some ways and create a structure where they can succeed, but also, fail so that they experience from their failure. Not being scared to let people fail so that they can learn from it. Often, people are scared of disappointing their line manager or their PI, or whoever they're working with.
Can I ask you in the role that you are doing now working as a funder, what do you think is really the key thing that you want to contribute? If you are going to step into a new role in a couple of years, it's like in any job we have a pet project, things that we feel I really want to make this happen. If you decided to change, what is the thing where you will feel so excited that you've made this happen?
Sean: I tend to make myself grand goals anyways. If you make yourself a huge goal and you accomplish 30%, 40%, 50% of it and that's already a massive achievement. I like to make myself huge goals and then accomplish as much as I can [chuckles] until it doesn't work anymore or someone else takes it or I move on to the next thing.
Honestly, my grand plan, the thing that I would be most proud of is if we can make Luxembourg, as a country, stand up with the big players and a wonderful innovative research culture that everybody thinks as a role model for others in Europe or around the world or whatever. I say that in a little bit of a nationalistic. I'm not even Luxembourgish but in a nationalistic sense, but that can only be done by working together with others.
The goal is to make Luxembourg as a leader in work research culture, have a really great positive research culture. The only way to do that is to work with other countries, with the UK, with the Netherlands, with Switzerland, with Europe, really, to bring everybody forward together because research is a global interconnected ecosystem. The only way we're going to make our culture better is if we make everybody's culture better.
We bring everybody up together. [chuckles] That's my really small easy to accomplish goal that will totally happen in the next two years, but not. [chuckles]
Sandrine: It's good to have grand goals. I think one of the things that will be interesting is to hear about the specific project that you're currently working on in terms of the way you think this project can influence the research culture.
Sean: I actually have a couple of specific initiatives that we as Luxembourg are doing. We heard about this research culture thing and then we immediately tried to like, what can we do quick wins to try to push things forward? The first, and I would say coolest quick win, even though the other ones are also very cool, but this one's awesome, we have FNR awards where we recognize the best researcher. A great research that's being done in Luxembourg and research communication, some other things as well.
We developed a new award last year for this year's award ceremony. Then we changed one of our awards. I will say I can't take full credit for this because my colleague Linda Wampach has done a massive amount of work on this brainstorming and we did this together, but she gets all the credit because she did all the work.
The new award that we created was an FNR award for outstanding mentorship. This is to valorize, in a soft way, that mentoring and leadership is important. It's massively important in research. We launched this call, we created this thing based upon what we could find from the sporadic examples like University of Glasgow and Ireland Science Foundation, some other countries that we're doing stuff like this, and Nature as well, the journal does mentorship awards.
Then we developed the process and we launched the call and we got 17 applications, which for us was a lot. Remember, Luxembourg is small. All the applications were great. It got to the point where when we were looking at them, we sent them out for external review from people who were established in mentorship and who one has have won awards before and for mentorship.
Our internal feedback was, wow, all of these are so nice. We have to choose the best. We have to find the real stars among them. To have that baseline so high at the beginning was really nice. The winners of the awards were, we can't say because it's not done yet. We're really proud of what has come out of that, which is great.
Then the other award which we used to have was an award for outstanding scientific publication and in the line with DORA and all these other initiatives that are moving forward in research culture. We say, no, it's not the publication that's important. It's the achievement.
We've changed the scientific publication award to an FNR award for outstanding scientific achievement to signal that we're looking broader. It's the whole thing, the whole package that we wanted to reward. Not just the paper that was published and how many citations it gets and all that stuff and where it was published, which is, of course, not that important for the actual science that's being done or research that's being done.
That's one example that I want to mention. The second one that I want to say from a national level, I have a couple of examples, I apologize, [chuckles] is the narrative CV. Narrative CV is something that is cropping up in different countries the Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, Ireland, I'm probably forgetting some, but this is one of the "low-hanging fruit" that people are saying, "This is a very easy way that we can broaden what we incentivize and what we reward through evaluation."
We developed one as well based very strongly on the Royal Society's resume for researchers with a little bit of an addition from the NWO and the Netherlands, the Swiss National Research Fund, and some other internal more Luxembourgish-focused stuff. We've applied it broadly across all of our programs.
Sandrine: Can I ask you maybe for international norm, EU-based listener, what the narrative CV is?
Sean: A narrative CV is a shift away from a traditional academic CV where the traditional academic CV is just a list of publications and grants received and honors and awards and jobs that you've had, positions that you've had, more towards a narrative style, a written description of the things that you are most proud of in your career that are applicable to the grant that you're applying for.
The idea is, it's a little bit like a job application. We want to do this grant in this area, which involves three PhD candidates and it's about working with doctors in drug development and stuff. Therefore, in my narrative CV, I will discuss my experience and my excellence or quality of how I mentor PhD students, postdocs, and others, how I build my team, how I work with the public, how I work with doctors and all these sorts of things that are not necessarily directly found in a publication list.
They can also give evaluators a really good sense of what kind of research you are and what your skills are that are directly applicable for the project and proposal that you're submitting. That's the whole goal, is to make a more holistic evaluation to not bias people by seeing a massive list of publications and saying, "That person published a lot, therefore, they are a good scientist," which isn't really truthful because past success is not an accurate predictor of future success. Just because you were good in the past, doesn't mean you're going to be always a fantastic scientist with great ideas and good implementation.
Then, also, biases against the younger generation of researchers who haven't really had the chance to build this track record, but maybe they have really good ideas, they're really solid, and they really want to do robust, reproducible research in an open fashion and they want to build inclusive and diverse teams and be great mentors to their PhD candidates and postdocs. These people should also be rewarded and given a chance to get grants and to do research.
We've developed a CV like this and we've applied it across all of our grants. In addition, we are getting feedback because this is new. I think narrative CVs are only a couple of years old anywhere in the world. We've developed a very short easy-to-fill-out survey for the applicants when they apply to our proposals. They developed or filled out a narrative CV, "How was it and what did you think?"
Then also for the reviewers, "You've got this narrative CV. Did it help you evaluate the project? Did you understand the academic age?" With this information, we can then have a feedback loop, an iterative development, and improvement of this narrative CV, and of course, sharing this data with others that have their narrative CVs or are thinking about doing narrative CVs, that they can then jump on the boat, and again, we can move all together forward in this area.
Sandrine: What have you already found out? Have you already had a round and received some feedback or not enough yet?
Sean: Again, remember, Luxembourg is small so the sample size is a bit lower than maybe other countries, but for the applicants, we already have almost 200 surveys which are generally positive. People are generally very positive. We don't get any demographic information so it's hard to say are the established researchers more against or the young researchers more for. It's all anonymous.
The statistics are quite positive. Definitely, the trend is towards people being supportive of this change. There are some vocal negative critiques and also some actually really good feedback in the open text area. Then, for the evaluation, the evaluators, we have around 90 responses, but we're in the evaluation process right now so I'm expecting more to come, a lot more hopefully.
Again, it's quite positive. People are generally favorable in the switch towards the narrative CV. There were, of course, the traditional people or people that are against for very traditional reasons because something that is quantifiable is easier to go through. Narrative CVs and a lot of the stuff towards responsible assessment requires a bit more work from all sides. This is scary. Obviously, we're all lacking time and this doesn't help, but we have to pair this with other initiatives to make it okay for everybody.
Sandrine: One of the things, I guess, that will be really interesting is to see the difference that it makes in term of diversifying who gets the award in terms of ethnic diversity, gender, and all that. People say that the way that you look at a CV completely bias, maybe the perception that you have of the research that the person is presenting. It's the diversity element of that and how it's influencing who gets the grant is going to be really fascinating.
I'm sure that it will bring you a lot of really interesting new ideas. It's building different ways of doing the reviewing. I think it's really, really quite exciting, actually. Going back to the award that you were talking about in terms of mentorship because, in my institution, we had that creating an award for mentoring. Also, I had set up an award for early career researchers to reward their contribution and there has been a lot of resistance of having a reward for early career researcher. I was interesting to hear whether you've considered it because I always felt that-- Again, depending on the country, there are lots of variation on how long people can stay postdoc, and so on.
For us, we were aware that some researchers could stay postdoc for their entire career, and there wasn't really a mechanism for them to get promoted and no real mechanism to reward them. We had an award where we were rewarding contribution to outreach or public engagement or through teaching, and in a way, keeping it quite open so that whatever way an early career researcher was contributing to their department, the faculty, the university, there was a mechanism to acknowledge the contribution.
I was wondering if it's something that you are doing or have considered because I feel that it's not necessarily seen as a priority. I guess that a lot of early career researcher expressed a lot of frustration on how they are not necessarily rewarded for their extensive contribution because not all of them want to become lecturers or principal investigators, but finding mechanisms to really reward them in a more visible way.
Sean: Totally agree with you there. I think this is a very tough nut to crack. It's something that we're actually working on for the future because we have also a working group, a Luxembourgish working group on research culture which involves all of the institutions in the FNR. Thinking of these ideas and the tasks we've assigned ourselves, focus point is early career researchers, postdocs, and such, and how do we make them a more supportive environment and more inclusive and an environment that rewards them a bit better. We're not that far yet with this one.
However, I will say with the awards, for the Scientific Advancement Achievement Award, it's a team award, and usually, when the award is granted, there's the one applicant that has to be the main corresponded between us and the award-winning team. It's always the team that goes up and accepts the award. They get a video. It's always the team that's in the video. People are rewarded a little bit for that reason as well and then everybody in that team can say, "We won the award together," or, "I was part of the team that won the award."
In addition, you were mentioning the other things they do aside from the research and we actually already have awards. I didn't mention them because they're normal to us, in promotion of science to the public. What initiatives have researchers or non-researchers done to bring science a little bit closer to the public?
A lot of times schools or non-researchers win these awards, but very often also teachers win these awards. For example, there was an archaeologist. He basically developed this event with a heavy metal band and mixing with fossils, this whole campaign around fossils and heavy metal. It was wonderful. [chuckles] This sort of stuff, we like to valorize as well and reward.
Sandrine: One of the things I'll be interested when early career academic first putting the funding application together. It's a massive undertaking. What advice would you give to a new research leader when they're building relationship to really develop the projects that they're going to put forward? From looking at some of this application, you must have a sense that, this collaboration on paper, they don't look for real. They just made up just for the purpose of this application or may maybe it's not so visible, but what advice do you have for those who are just at the threshold of developing these initial first proposals?
Sean: The first piece of advice or really mandate is that the future generation of researchers are these people that are developed in these applications and they're the ones that will mandate where we're going and what is important in the future in terms of research culture and open science and diversity and inclusion.
Already, now, they can start or you researcher can start to think about these things and include these things in your application. Even if your funder doesn't specifically ask or require for it, you can still say I publish open access in all my publications. I share all of my data and source code and all that stuff and I develop inclusive teams. I am passionate about-- I don't know. [chuckles] Anything, really, research culture related.
Shift the focus away from h-index and impact factor and all these sorts of things because, even if it's not expressly stated in a research funder's process or application guidelines, you are being evaluated by other researchers. You set the tone and they will also start to-- They're starting to move in this direction. I've seen a lot of reviews and we push our reviewers to try to say don't think about metrics, that's not important.
We tell our panels, explicitly, you're not allowed to use impact factors in your judgment, you're not allowed to use h-indices. You can't control the external evaluators as much, but you can nudge them or incentivize them.
I would say start doing this. Do the things that you believe in that you value in research and put them into your proposals because that will come through more honest, than doing it the way that everybody else says so. Honestly, that's what's going to differentiate you in your proposal from another.
If you have one reviewer that looks at your publication list compared to another person's publication list and the "quality" based upon these metrics is the same, the thing that's going to push you above is going to be when you start saying that you're committed to the future of research in this holistic research culture, open, transparent, inclusive, diverse manner, and then there's going to be somebody on that evaluation panel that's going to be like, this person, this is the future generation. This is who we want to be funding because that person's going to build a better research ecosystem for everybody. That's what's going to push you over the top.
Sandrine: I really like that because, in a way, it's telling people don't wait until you are forced to put it in the form. Just display your ethos and the way that you want, the environment that you want to create for the teams that you will be in the future. It's almost like having, demonstrating your value and your commitment to a positive research environment, not just tick box exercise at that point.
Sean: Research culture is all about values. I will go on and on about this. You, as a researcher, need to define what your values are because you'll either have them defined for you by your institution or by your funding agency or you define what they are for yourself and it's much stronger if you define them for yourself, and then with that self-definition, you can then push values of others of institutions in the direction that you want collectively.
This is important because currently, the values at a higher level are implicit. They're not explicitly defined in many places. If you go to your funding agency and all the young researchers are saying, open science and transparency and gender diversity, these are the things that are important to us and this is what we're going to put in all our proposals, then that will start to shift things.
Sandrine: Often, we are full of good intention, we are full of motivation, energy, and desires to change a professional environment or to change a research culture but what do you think is really in your way to actually create a change that you would like to see in research?
Sean: Old conservative points of view.
[chuckling]
Sean: You could argue this for anywhere where cultural change is necessary, not only in the research domain. It's the people that are not forward thinking that want to say, we just hired this great professor because he or she has a phenomenal publication record and can publish in all these top journals and that's the person we want and we just hire them. We're super proud of that and we're going to communicate to the moon about this. These people are very difficult to change. You can't change a person's opinion about this stuff.
The way that you do it is you incentivize. You need the people in the right positions that are able to drive this forward. Then once those things are moving, then everybody else needs to support. The more-- What is it? Snowball effect. The more critical mass that's gained on momentum, that's gained in some of these initiatives, then these people can't say no because, in the end, they are responsible for making sure that their institution or their funding agency or their group or whatever is of high quality and is successful.
If everyone around them is starting to change, then they're going to get on the boat as well or they'll disappear, and then you will take their place as a young researcher, and then you can then define what success is and what quality is.
Sandrine: In the role that you have, you will be facing lots of difficult decision. One of them is, you may receive lots of amazing research proposal and the funding is limited so you need from so many, but overall in the role that you play, what are the most difficult decisions that you've had to make?
Sean: That's a hard one.
Sandrine: Sorry. That's a tough question.
[chuckling]
Sean: The most difficult decisions I've had to make, I don't know. The thing is, I don't try to think of decisions as being difficult. They're either the right thing to do, for my opinion, or not. I try to push pretty hard on stuff. It's not a matter of a decision being difficult. It's a matter of being open and flexible to adapt the idea that you want to make sure that everybody's on board with it. There's been plenty of initiatives that I've had that I say we're doing it this way. This is how the narrative CV is supposed to look like. Then I've developed something. I've shown it to internal of the FNR. I've shown it to other researchers because you need to get feedback.
One person doing everything is also not good because everybody has to work together and you need to develop things that are in the interests of the entire ecosystem. I've had these initiatives. I've put them forward, the first draft, and they've been torn apart. Something that I thought was absolutely a great idea, phenomenal, this is going to change everything. You get a couple of perspectives that are actually no, that is not going to work and for these reasons. You have to be open to criticism and say actually you're right. You, 10 other people that agree the same thing against [chuckles] my one.
This is okay. It's less, I would argue, about difficult decisions. It's more about accepting criticism and developing something together, to making something that's going to be the best for everybody by getting everybody's opinion on board and being with someone telling you no, that doesn't make any sense so that's not good. Change it, move it in a different direction or cut it completely.
Sandrine: It takes a lot of humility because, in a way, it's almost accepting that the idea that you thought was amazing actually wasn't so amazing at all. It was just an idea and the richness of the feedback of others actually is maybe making your idea more powerful, impactful.
Sean: Of course, feedback is critical. One person is not going to change research culture by themselves. We're going to change it together. We have to. Part of that is getting people on board in the process of change. Be them, my colleagues in a funding agency or researchers or your colleagues in your group or your institution, find the people who are going to support these ideas and who are willing to give you open and constructive feedback and nurture these connections and build this coalition, this coalition of the willing to change things.
Sandrine: One of my last few last question will be about, what do you think needs to happen for research leaders to really shift their perception of what it means to lead the research group? Because often, we train PhD students in doing the research, but there is still no really requirement in term of their team leading skills or their leadership skills. The institutions are very reluctant to implement a requirement on this. Even the funders not really demanded. There are people who are naturally good and reflective and prepared to attend courses to learn how to become a better supervisor, better leader but some people still say, oh, no, I know how to do that, and making things to compulsory doesn't really help. What do we require over research leaders so that they are well trained and supported and reflective? What is it that you can do as a funder yourself?
Sean: To me, the whole leadership aspect, the development of leaders in research through trainings and whatever, this is a low-hanging fruit. This and the narrative CV are the two "easiest" things to implement that can affect real change. Narrative CV, it's maybe a bit harder because you'd get a lot of people on board. Training people is literally, give them a little bit of time to do it, a little bit budget to attend trainings, then let them go. This is really minor. If you give them even three days in half a year or a week in a year, this is a relatively minimal time and also monetary commitment and you can make a massive impact.
On that specifically, I think that this is something that we all should be working towards. The question though is how to do it, which is much harder. This is actually something that I'm thinking on. I think this is the next step, at least for the FNR. How do we incentivize leadership and reward leadership? One of the things is to try to force it. We're going to create soon a center of excellence, big funding scheme.
In these large funding volumes, we've set budgets for different things. One of them is for human resources and training and leadership. We've made it you get this amount of money per year. It must be co-funded. We will give you this much. You will provide this much as well. You can't transfer this budget line. You can't move it somewhere else. You can't use it for anything else.
Then, it's again, this trust, you say, "This is important to us." You tell them, "This is important to us." Training and leadership, important, very important. All levels, not just the leadership of the research groups and whatever, also development of technicians and postdocs and PhD candidates and also administrative staff. Research is not just done by researchers, it's done by the whole system.
They all deserve to be developed and have their career developed to be at the forefront, to be eminently employable because if the person is only on a temporary contract, which is another thing that we didn't discuss, you need to make sure when they leave that they're ready for that next job and will be able to get that next job, wherever it is.
Then they'll think fondly back, "My time in Luxembourg, they got me ready for the next thing. I don't want to stay connected to them. I want to collaborate with them because that's a good place to do research." That's the one aspect. Once you tell them that this is important to you, the researchers, and the research institutions, and you incentivize it, you say, "Do it. We trust you. You know what you need best to develop your career. Think of a career plan for you, your team, your institution, whatever, and do it."
The idea is that the endpoint should be that they take it upon themselves to develop these career development tools within the institution or, in our case, I would love to see this across Luxembourg because we're too small to have stuff at the university that the other institutions can access, which is silly. To develop this together where we can maybe, in the end, even think about how can we fund this together.
We're giving you a little bit of money now but if the institution shows a drive and a willingness to develop something more holistic then how can we support that? Then we don't need to put the money in the grant anymore because we're going to help you develop something and you've developed this program that everybody can have access to and benefit from.
Sandrine: It's going to be really exciting to see the stuff that you develop over the next few years. To conclude our conversation, I'll be interested to get you to reflect on all the stuff that you've done in your career so far and think about if you were going to give advice to your young self, what would you tell yourself to, in a way, maybe make the journey easier or more fun? Maybe it's all been enjoyable and fun.
Sean: Honestly, I've had a good ride. [chuckles] It's been a fun career track. I like to judge my success by the amount of stories that I can tell about cool things that I've done in my life. I've done research on mind control sharks. I've done lobsters identifying each other through peeing in each other's faces. I've seen these things. I didn't get into those stories. I have tons and tons of stories from the different perspectives that all impact and influence what I'm doing now. I don't like to regret because I'd rather say, "The point where you are now, it comes from all these things that you've learned from the past." I wouldn't do anything differently.
If anything, I would just learn more from the experiences that I've had to try to see what else can I scrape and dig out of there that could affect and help me be whatever I want to do now. This is what I would recommend to anyone. Don't regret, take stock, look back, reflect, take stock, and what can you learn from what you've done already, and then apply it to the future.
Sandrine: My final question is, again, reflecting back and projecting yourself forward. What do you think is the anchor of what motivates you?
Sean: People. I do it for people. All the things that I've done, I've done for people. Research is anyways at heart for society but also, as a researcher, I didn't want to just do my own research. I wanted to get the group, move the group forward and help others, and do the research together. As a cook, you're serving people good food. You're making them happy. As a ski instructor, you're teaching kids how to ski. As an administrator now, as a research funder, I'm trying to make research culture better for the researchers and the administrators and the technicians, and the people in research.
I think that we should do this together for people in a way that there are no ulterior motives. The goal should be to make people's lives better through research or by making the research ecosystem better, that their lives are improved.
[music]
Sandrine: Sean, it's been really a pleasure discussing with you. Really, really appreciate giving me your time. I hope that we can carry on having more conversation in the future. Thank you.
Sean: Thank you. It's my pleasure.
[music]