21- Dr Marta Milo- Driving your career through curiosity

Dr Marta Milo is a research scientist who has demonstrated her courage in different ways, by working in a male dominated discipline, by retraining as a biologist and by daring to leave the relative stability of an academic position to embrace a new career in industry.

Her ethos in building her career is based on a deep sense of curiosity and a desire to build trusting collaborations.

Her aspiration to make the most of her knowledge, skills and research maturity, as well as a strong commitment to make her research count for cancer patients have been the driver for her recent move into the pharmaceutical industry.

Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking about:

• How open are you to listen to researchers from other disciplines?
• How much attention are you paying to language when developing research conversations outside of your specific research area?
• What is your own approach to giving and receiving feedback?
• Do you really know how you want to contribute to research? Will this drive your next career step?

About Marta

As a computer science and applied math research scientist, a move to biomedical sciences could have remained a distant encounter, but not for Marta. Her curiosity and thirst for knowledge motivated her to continue her training in biology. After a Wellcome trust fellowship that enabled her to extend her biological knowledge, Marta continued her career through a fellowship in Bioinformatics, before moving into an academic position in Computational Biology at the University of Sheffield.

Since 2020, Marta has taken the challenge of moving into industry. She is now Research Data Science Lead at AstraZeneca.

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Transcript

Warning- getting a perfect transcript is really hard. This transcript may have mistakes. Be kind to us by accepting these potential errors. We hope that the transcript can be helpful to some of you! Apologies in advances for any mistakes in the transcript.


Sandrine Soubes: All right. Let’s go.

[music]

Sandrine: Good morning, everyone. Good morning Marta.

Marta Milo: Good morning.

Sandrine: Today I have the pleasure to have with me on the podcast, Marta Milo, who used to work at the University of Sheffield and worked in the same faculty where I worked before. Now you’ve escaped Sheffield to go and work further down south. Big welcome on this podcast, Marta. Let’s get cracking. Tell us a little bit about your career so far.

Marta: Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much, Sandrine, for inviting me to this podcast. I’m very excited to share my experiences with you all. Yes, right, I was in Sheffield. I have been working in Sheffield for a long time. Now I’m in Cambridge, and I work at AstraZeneca.

My career started in Italy. I’m Italian from Naples. I studied there most of my studies, apart from one final year of my PhD when I came to Cambridge at the engineering department. That, for me, was a massive, open my eyes of what I really wanted to do, how I wanted to do.

Although I didn’t know where my research was going yet, I was still definitely positive on the fact that I wanted to do research. That’s where I started, I went back home and I found a postdoc position here in UK through my connection from the time when I was student. I have maths first degree, and Computer Science and Applied Maths PhD, but I now am a computational biologist. I work at the interface between two different fields, just biology and maths and computer science.

I went to Sheffield as a postdoc. We started to look together with the person who was my supervisor, my PI at the time. We started to look at problems to do with gene expression, microarray, and that introduced me to this new field of biology. I had to take the courage and retrain, which was quite hard, coming from a completely different mind frame. I retrained through a very nice fellowship the Wellcome Trust had at the time, which was advanced research, training fellowship. I was allowed to do research and training at the same time. That was an ideal platform.

After that, I spent a long time in the biomedical science department as a postdoc, then I moved into the clinical space, where I worked together with doctors, clinicians, and patients. That actually was a super important experience for me, because it helped me to understand and to feel the impact that my science, my work could have on people, and therefore put everything into the perspective.

All my work so far, all the science that I do so far, always look at what do I do with it? How do I use it to improve quality of life? Then I went back to more of an academic profile within the basic science, so I became a lecturer at the biomedical science department. I spent a long time in Sheffield family related things, I’ve had young kids, so of course, [unintelligible 00:03:56] ability was needed. After almost 19 years, I decided to leave academia and move to healthcare industry.

I am now a data science lead at AstraZeneca R&D. Still is research and development, but it’s more keeping an eye on what we do for patients. How am I going to use my experience, my science to help and improve quality of life for patients, particularly, I’m in oncology. That’s my career so far.

Sandrine: An amazing career. There are lots of things to pick from it. One of the things that I’m interested in, the transition from being a mathematician or a computer scientist. I don’t really know how you define yourself specifically, but doing basically modeling of sorts and really complex stuff. As a biology is often we have no grasp whatsoever and learning to work with biologists in terms of trying to understand the biologists. Because the biologists are very unlikely to understand this stuff that you do that certain. How was it to, in a way start from scratch of learning again, as a postdoc?

Marta: One thing that has always been a characteristic of the way I’m interested in knowledge, in learning is curiosity. I was curious, that was the major drive. That was actually even beyond the fact that I had to go back on the textbooks and sit in the lecture halls as an undergraduate. The curiosity of learning this stuff that I could see in the data, and I had no understanding of what that meant, in real life, that type of curiosity was the major drive.

That was what helped me to overcome all the difficulties. Because one thing that was extremely hard was to try and to keep my computational research and knowledge up to date, at the same time but learning a completely different new field, completely undisputable way of seeing things. It’s either yes or no in math to a more empirical or maybe or maybe these, it’s a lot of uncertainty. That was very, very hard.

The nice thing about that, it helped me to see things from the point of view of a very dry logic in a little bit more perspective. It helped me to emphasize intuition that I had in the mathematical, in the modeling science, when I was writing equations would look, “Okay, what these equations are going to take me to?” That type of intuition came from my mind being trained to look at the experiments in the lab, and saying, “Okay, I’m doing this, but what am I expecting to see? Is that what I need to see? How do I adjust the protocol if things go wrong?”

That was very helpful. Equally, my logical mind, the way of thinking in algorithmic steps helped hugely to create protocols that were robust. The two things compensated each other, it was quite hard. The drive in both senses was curiosity.

Sandrine: I’ve been running some workshops over the last few weeks on collaboration with different groups of researchers. When I worked at Sheffield, I had run this program that maybe you had come across, the crucible program where I was trying to get people from different disciplines to collaborate. The work that you do is completely anchored in collaboration across disciplines.

What do you think that you’ve learned over the years again, with the work that you’re doing now, with having stakeholders who are in the medical healthcare profession? Collaboration is really an anchor of developing very innovative research, and especially now with the year of COVID, we know that it’s important, but doing it well, is hard. What have you learned yourself about collaborating well?

Marta: First of all, I just like to emphasize what you just said, collaboration is key today, for innovative science. There is no longer the days where we were stuck in the lab, a scientist was stuck in a lab either in front of a piece of paper writing equation or in front of a microscope looking down for hours in the darkness, they are gone.

Today, science, the real pieces of sciences that bring innovation that make advancement in knowledge come from collaboration. Understanding that this is a key for any future researcher because building the basis to enable yourself to collaborate well, is essential.

In my experience, when I decided to retrain, another need that I had, was to be able to speak the same language of the people that I wanted to collaborate with. I did the retraining because it was my choice, I wanted to know more in-depth, but understanding the language of the other people, and not just the way they think, the way they need to ask the questions, and the type of output that they need to receive is essential for collaboration.

One thing that I’ve learned from my collaborations is that you can give your ideas, ask the questions that you have, but it’s always good to listen. You got to sit there, listen, and listen to what they have to say and then contribute. This was for me, in the beginning of my career, something that, I was lucky, it came almost intuitively because of this curiosity thing, drive that I have, that I’m curious, so I tend to listen.

With the time I realized that actually that was a good strategy, because if I’m sitting there and trying to listen, and they have this feel that they ask you the right questions and they say, “Okay, this is what our problems are.” Then you can come in, and maybe your preconceptions die.” “Oh, that’s actually not what I thought it was.” That is where the nice collaboration starts, because then you start sharing ideas.

This is what I’ve learned from my collaboration, the nicest collaboration. The ones that I still have to these days from AstraZeneca to some of the scientists in Sheffield they all came from this mutual exchange of ideas, at the beginning, even completely destroying a research plan that wouldn’t work.

That was really something that I would definitely advice to any of young researchers to do when they think to start a collaboration, to listen, really trying to figure out what is? First, the language that they talk in terms of questions, the way they ask, the way they handle the output, and then really listen and question yourself, “Is that right what I’m proposing for them or not?”

Sandrine: One of the things that often people ask me in workshop is when do you start sharing an idea with a potential collaborator? There is a lot of fear in terms of sharing ideas that your ideas are going to be stolen, that people are going to take your ideas and not acknowledge that it came from you. Often people keep things to the chest because of this fear, and no collaboration can even happen if you’re keeping things to the chest.

In a lot of the advice that I give, I always say, use the mindset of abundance in terms of the way that you’re thinking of ideas. Ideas are endless, but people don’t necessarily feel this way. In your own experiences of collaborating and developing ideas and sharing ideas, what’s been your experience? The point at which you feel ready to share an idea or maybe experiences that you’ve had where you felt, “I should not have told this idea to this person.”

Marta: I think that collaboration is mainly based on trust. With time, with experience, you learn how to establish this trust. Of course, trust comes if they trust you. The first thing you need to do, although it seems a little bit counterintuitive. If I need to trust you, Sandrine, I need you, Sandrine, to trust me first. Otherwise, this kind of relationship cannot go on. Sharing ideas, you’ve got to do it.

I had cases where I shared my ideas. In a way I was lucky because collaborating with experimentalists or doctors, maybe my mathematical ideas weren’t really understood. Even if they wanted to take it and steal it, they want to be able to do it in a way that would make a publication without me, basically.

It has happened, although within similar peers, from the computational side, I did have situation where my ideas had been stolen, and then taken, and then other things, but I was never there to blame the person that stole the ideas. I self-reflected on myself and said, “What have I done wrong? Why has this happened? What is that I didn’t communicate, and what type of contribution I missed?” The idea was there, the intuition was right. This type of self-reflection actually takes the disappointment of having an idea stolen, turns it into a learning.

Unfortunately, every one of us in science and research have gone through this. Actually, it is healthy to go through that because it helps you to build your confidence. Every one of us has their own learning. We all learn in a different pace and in a different way. Learning how to make people to trust you is hard. I’m still learning. [laughs]

Actually, I’m starting from scratch here in this new context, but it is essential. I don’t think people should fear that others can steal their ideas. There are endless ideas, number of ideas. Okay, they stole one, it’s a shame. Self-reflect, number one and also, of course, if they stole your ideas, they didn’t make themselves to trust.

Sandrine: In a way, it’s a way of sifting through the relationship that you have. If somebody is doing that, then it’s not worth investing in the relationship and the collaboration. You may as well know from the start the kind of person you’ve got in front of you.

Marta: A very successful collaboration comes from complete trust from both sides. That is from all points of view data, understanding problems that may come when there is pressure, from all sorts of things, including sharing the writing of the manuscript and also being very open to feedback. People don’t understand that actually, feedback is essential. You don’t have to worry about asking feedback.

If I’m collaborating with you, for example, Sandrine, I shouldn’t have fear to give you some feedback, and say, “Look, maybe you would want to do this in a different way, or maybe this doesn’t really work from what we are seeing,” because it is how you improve and how you make the best piece of science. In this case, we’re talking about science, but whatever, it applies to any subject, really.

Sandrine: Any professional settings, yes. When you navigate your research careers, there are many points at which you have really hard choices to make. What’s really been your own approach in making the decision to go in one direction or another? What’s been your ethos, if I may say, in the way that you’ve navigated your career?

Marta: There have been moments where I had to face very hard decisions. One lately, just to leave academia and move to industry, that was one of a hard decision. [laughs] My ethos has always been to follow what I felt was the best way for me to contribute to science, to follow my instinct, and to follow my passion, because every type of work doesn’t really give you the benefit. It doesn’t allow you to feel happy if you don’t do it with passion. You can’t really give anything to others if you don’t do it with passion.

This was my ethos in anything I’ve done in my career is to follow my passion, to follow what I could do better, to feel that I was contributing, giving my passion, my everything, my head, my ideas, my skills. I always try to be very, very honest, first of all, with myself. What is that I really want to do? Have I given everything that I could to achieve that? That was my questions, and my ethos comes from trying to follow these.

Sandrine: The point that you make is important honesty with yourself, because we have an image of ourself, of the person we would want to be. Is this persona that we are creating for ourself? Is this what we really want or dream, or is it something that we feel is expected of us? We may want to become a certain person, but maybe it’s not the person really inside you that you actually want to become. Often there is a lot of tension between this different persona of a future self and say, “Okay, what’s the reality of actually what I want right now?”

Marta: This is a very, very good point. I can talk about myself very openly, I have no problems about that. In my experience to this what it expected me to be, it was twofold. First of all, from myself, me in person, and then from my perception of others around. The hardest thing was to overcome my own ideas of what I’m supposed to be and what other people expect me to be. Not because they actually wanted me to be that, because I felt that they wanted me to be that.

It was the hardest thing to overcome when I had to make radical decisions like leaving academia and going to industry. That is something that if I had in time, I would try to mitigate. I would try to avoid being very close mind about this, because it’s where you make your improvement in career, where you stop, you self-reflect and you say, “Hold on a moment, is where I’m sitting right now, where I really want to be? Am I giving everything I can give? Am I happy? Is this what people are expecting me to do?” “Yes.” “Is that what you, what myself is expecting, wants and is expected me to do?”

Then it’s where, if you then start to ask these questions and there is a clash, so there is, “No, that’s not what I want to do. That is not what I think I can be,” then it’s the time to change. If you are sitting in a job or in a position it doesn’t exploit your skills, it doesn’t make you happy and it doesn’t give enough to the research field or to the community or to whatever you’re doing it’s the wrong place to be. That’s something that needs to be faced.

Sandrine: In a lot of the workshop that I run with people often I’ll say to them, “What we are doing is just giving you the time to pause and reflect on where you are at and thinking about all these fears.” I think that a lot of people avoid that sort of press the pause button to reflect and really reconsider. Because in a way thinking about your transition to industry, being a very established academic for a lot of people your position as a lecturer is the dream so many postdocs they were, “Why on earth would she leave Academia?” [laughs]

Marta: I did have people asking me that.

Sandrine: Can you tell us what was the driver? What made you make that transition?

Marta: The type of work that I do, the type of science that I do now currently I don’t feel that the Academia gave me enough chances or enough opportunity to exploit at maximum my skills. At this stage of my life, I felt that with all the experiences that I’ve accumulated, my knowledge, also my personal growth, my maturity, I am in the moment where I can contribute at the maximum.

I was sitting in a place where I didn’t feel I was actually even giving a 10% of what I could, so I had to change. I felt that I owe it to myself so I had to change that and I had to take the courage to do it, because it took quite a lot courage to do it. [laughs] To go my age into a new environment, in a different reality.

When people were asking me, “Why you’re leaving academia? Are you crazy?” “I don’t know,” I was like, “No, I leave academia because I love science and I feel that I want to learn more about science in a different context. Who knows, I might come back to academia.” If I didn’t do that, I would’ve regret it.

I think that whoever is, all the young researchers, the biggest advice that I could give, “Don’t do anything then you can regret,” because the fears changing it’s nothing compares to the feel of regret and the feel that you can’t do or you haven’t been able to give everything that you could.

It can go wrong, nothing wrong with that. It can make and failure, so it’s not a bad thing. Failure is a good thing because it has helps you to improve. It helps you to learn and you say, “Okay, I failed here. Why have I failed here? How can I make it better?” If you don’t fail you can never improve.

Sandrine: There is something that you said that I really like is that you said I owe it to myself and I think that’s a very powerful thing. It’s almost a form of really respecting who you are, what you’ve got to give to science or to whatever the context that you’re working in. To have a sense of really wanting to contribute and a sense of how you want to contribute, in a way it’s really a form of confidence and we don’t develop professionally in the vacuum.

We have lots of influence through mentors, friends, family members, head of departments, line manager whatever. In your case, who do you think have been people who’ve really influenced you the most in term of supporting you to build this confidence that you’ve built?

Marta: Certainly, the people who had the fortune to have as mentors and people who were able to coach me directly or indirectly. These mentoring and coaching is essential. One thing that I would repeat if I go back or I would change if I could go back is to have more of it, and then be more aware of how important coaching and mentoring is for a young researcher.

It’s a really very important both of them to build this confidence because it helps to self-reflect. It helps to see directions and from my point of view, I didn’t have enough of those. I had few exposure to mentoring and I would’ve wanted a lot more now I realize, but one thing that I really built professionally, my confidence on is knowledge. I’m always very hard with myself in terms of knowledge.

Do I know enough about this to say anything? The more you learn, the more the confidence comes from the knowledge at least in the professional setting. Whatever you do science or not science is that, but once you build that basic confidence the maturity, the personal maturity as an individual it comes from the coaching.

The coaching that helps you to self-reflect, helps you to question yourself and helps you to see what you have done to get to where you are. There comes to that face where you say, “Hey, hold on a moment. I owe it to myself.” My confidence was built on that knowledge and really self-reflection. When there was a time where I realized I had to change self-reflection was essential.

Sandrine: In the business world, in the private sector coaching is something that is much more acceptable. Why do you think that it’s not something that is so embedded in academia?

Marta: It’s a good question. I don’t think I have a full answer yet. One thing I wanted to say before I try to answer this question is the first thing I did when I moved to AstraZeneca is to do courses on leading people on coaching, on agility leadership. I did quite a lot of coaching as a student I was trying to figure out, “What is going on?” Because of course I realized that none of this was happening where I was before moving here. I needed to understand what ways that it takes to coach people.

While I was doing these courses, I was mapping back to what was happening in the academic environment, what was missing. The first thing that came to me was that in the academic environment people are scared to get feedback. People are scared to ask about feedback. People, they are kind of overprotective of their own environment, of their own selves to push themselves out of the comfort zone and say, “Hey, what do you think of this? What do you think of me in this situation? Can I give you? Can I have your feedback on that?”

That is something so that does not happen in academia, and very often in at least in my experience when I did ask for feedback in the academic environment, it was given not in a constructive way. It was given, maybe not intentionally, actually certainly not intentionally but it perceived as destructive. It made me reluctant to go back and ask again.

In industrial environment instead, feedback is given always even if you don’t ask for it and it’s always given in a very constructive way. Also, the pace is different. It’s very much structured because there are deliverables and that helps to keep a certain timeline.

You know what you’re doing next and therefore you know, “I haven’t achieved that, why? Why is that?” Then your line manager comes in and coaches you, I have a mentor here as well as a line manager. I go to my mentor and I say, “I feel awkward about this. Why? What’s happening to me? How can I get to my next stage of career?”

This is the questions I ask to my mentor. It’s taking a while for us to get the right relationship in place but in the academia this doesn’t exist. Coaching in academia sometimes it’s seen as waste of time, but it’s essential at least for the early stage career is such an essential thing.

Sandrine: We still have a massive amount of work to be doing in that area. One of the thing I’ll be really keen to hear from you. I run a program called Daring to Dare, and it’s really getting women to reflect on where they are, what they want. One of the things that many really struggle is this idea of being visible in their research community in order for people to pay attention to what they have to bring.

How did you go about yourself creating your visibility so that people will come to you to collaborate with you? Because people would say, “I don’t want to blow my own trumpet. My work speaks for itself,” but there is a lot of research out there and research doesn’t speak for itself and you have to be very proactive to put yourself out there. What was your own approach of doing this and did you struggle?

Marta: Yes, I did struggle, and we all do, but women, I think, in particular, struggle more in the academic environment. A lot less in the industrial environment, I still haven’t understood why in particular, but definitely in the academic environment, there is very a struggle. It is a struggle. I’ve never see myself as a woman, professionally, I see myself as a scientist.

I remove this bias whenever I am in a meeting, and I just try to be who I am and contribute with what I have to say in terms of knowledge, in terms of understanding. One of the ways that I’ve used to enhance my visibility is always to bring something to the table. Something that not is in my own interest, but in the interests of the table.

If I was at a meeting, for example, where there was, let’s say, discussion on certain topic, I would always add something that is unique from what I can bring with my skills to that topic, regardless whether the topic was of my interest or not. Creating this visibility, in that moment, even if it wasn’t something that I was super interested in, then later allows me to derive or stir more towards what it would be interesting for me.

It’s all again creating that little trust. Then the visibility also tried to do quite a lot at the beginning of my career is through networking. You go to meetings and they know you. They know who you are and then they see you participating to the seminars asking them questions, trying to get engaged with the group.

Often, I used to go to lab meetings of other groups just for that, and that helped me a lot without visibility. Because then people, if they had, for example, a question or some point of problem to solve, they would say, “Oh, I know she’s working on that.” I was putting myself forward for seminars, in the lab meeting present my work, even if it wasn’t really there for any specific collaborative in objects, but just for visibility and that helped me a lot.

Then once you created this network, then you are visible. Then eventually, with time, you can even choose who you want to work with and who you don’t want to work with. As a woman, I remember at the beginning when I started, I’m saying biomedical science, not because I wanted to point the finger against biomedical sciences, because it was my experience. In general, I think it happens everywhere. It happens here in Cambridge as well.

The beginning, I remember I used to sit there quietly, maybe even lift my hands up for asking questions, I’m never been picked on the questions, [unintelligible 00:33:31] “What’s going on here?” Then I was like, “Trying to figure out why I wasn’t like transparent. I couldn’t be seen.”

I start then to think, “Okay, we’ll watch others asking questions. What type of questions that were asking?” Then I noticed that they were asking all kinds of hard questions, challenging questions, and then I was thinking, “Oh, okay.” One thing I had to do is then to deepen my knowledge so that I was in a position to ask a challenging question.

Finally, I had the chance to ask a challenging question, then the game turned, because then I was always picked, I had my hands up. Although it sounds a little bit weird, and then I say, “Oh, what do you mean? You’re challenging the--” Yes, unfortunately, that was one way the things-- then the game turns around.

Sandrine: One of the things that you said earlier, Marta, was that you never see yourself as a woman but as a scientist, and I will challenge that and say that specifically because of your discipline, there are not many women in your field. In a way, you could say that in enhance your visibility because you’re one among many men, and at the same time you able to have a voice in a research community where you may be the only woman is not necessarily easy.

There are many women who find when they are still the only women in the room find that credibility challenging. We may see a lot of women leaving certain fields because they still remain and their only women.

Marta: The only woman for me, it’s not a problem. I’m a scientist like them. No problem. I do have to say, if you allow me to report a little tale or anecdote, so I wanted to do physics, not math as an undergraduate. At the time, in Italy, you could go a week earlier before finalizing your application to see what’s going on, and some open courses, open lectures.

The day I went, I opened the door of the lecture theater, and I was the only woman in 150 people. I opened the lecture theater, I was sitting at the back, and I had 150 faces turning towards me, all guys, and I was the only lady there, the only woman there. That put me massively off but I was 18 at the time. That was, “No way. I cannot do this.”

I was sitting there. Just the whole lecture I was sitting there thinking, “No way, I cannot do this.” That put me off completely and I went to do math. I ended up in physics, because my PhD was in physics. [laughs] Then, of course, I grew and then you grew in confidence, I grew as a person.

In general, today, I am still finding a way to overcome that. It’s still not finished. I still and sometimes see from the body language from the feeling in a meeting, and then the awareness, and shouldn’t stop me to feel a scientist like all the others. I’m sitting here for my own right. I’m sitting here because I have to be here, and I have rights to be here, and I’m a scientist, and my ideas count as much as.

Every time, I feel that “Oh, okay, she’s a woman.” Then I say it to myself, “I’m a scientist and my head is as good as all the others.” If I have something to say, which makes sense, and of course, not the stupid thing, then I speak up. That’s definitely something that I always try to say it to myself, whenever I feel like that, and I still do. Still ongoing, it’s a constant learning about it. [laughs]

Sandrine: Mentioning the mindset of telling yourself, “I have the right to be here. I have the knowledge,” but, in a way, you can’t let go of that. It’s like an ongoing exercise.

Marta: Yes. There is always this unconscious bias in other people around that comes through, and it’s inevitable. The key thing is to be aware of it and mitigate it and make other people at ease, because it’s done without thinking. It’s unconscious, it’s not because they want to and that is a mutual thing. From the male, it’s a mutual thing, so as women we have to make others feel comfortable as well as.

Sandrine: Can I ask you a controversial question? Because, again, in terms of making other people aware of some of the biases that they display, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, how do you feel that you’ve been able to point things out to people when there is clearly a behavior that-- It’s not even like an extreme behavior, but so often there is things that are very subtle and people will not become aware of them unless we inform them of how their behavior is influencing others.

Now, as a research leader, in a way, we finally see the power of pointing things out to people. How do you feel that you can do that? Especially in the very subtle things that may be the type of words that people do, body language that people may have in meeting where you can say to a colleague, “After a meeting, can we have a chats?” Do you feel that we’re able to do it or is it something that’s still really difficult?

Marta: No, I do that. I normally do this one-to-one, and if I feel that there is something wrong, of course, I don’t point a finger, but I asked questions like, “How do you feel about the meeting? How do you feel that has happened? What do you think this other person thinking?" How they feel that person was during the meeting, and that was just a way to start opening up a little bit and then point possibly alternative way of behavior or trying to figure out that person, that behavior in that way.

What were the reasons for that behavior to help and to try and figure out, “Okay, so you have this difficulty, how else you can express that? What can we do to make both of you comfortable about this and all of us around comfortable about this?” You take time to get to this point where you have enough confidence to do this one-to-one. As a young person, I would go to my supervisor or I would go to my mentor or I would go to my line manager. I wouldn’t be able possibly to approach the one-to-one.

Then I urge any young person or any young researchers that feels that to go to their mentors, to go to their supervisor, or to go to their line managers if they feel that there is something wrong, as soon as they feel it. Because sitting on it does not help, it makes things worse. I do think that these types of conversations the first point.

Very, very, very often, in my experience at least, they always been a game-changer, they always worked before going to HR or any others of the most extreme solutions. Very often, these are all unconscious. Some people don’t want to behave like that, but they just don’t realize, and they’re very nice healthy working environment, and these one-to-one’s are really important.

Sandrine: I think that’s an important thing that you just said is that many of this behavior of people don’t necessarily want to hurt or be unpleasant, but because of the way you were raised or the way that things were done in the past, that people just carry on practices. It leads us to the conversation now of having worked for many years in academia and experiencing your transition in a very different professional environment, what kind of leader are you now becoming in an industrial setting?

How are you learning to establish research culture within a non-academic environment that you feel is really supportive over the early career researchers?

Marta: Here I’m lucky because I have a very supporting environment and I see young people being extremely supported in career progression, but also in bringing forward their ideas, so speak up. I’m very, very lucky because of this. The type of leader that I’d like to become is one of those leaders that influence people, one of those leaders that catalyze tension, one of those leaders that are there to support when it’s needed, but also to challenge the person to be better, to grow.

This type of leadership comes with time, but also comes with the awareness of where I am now and what do I need to become that leader. Being a leader doesn’t really come for free, it’s not genetic, sometimes it’s genetic, it depends on the personalities, but you got to build that profile. You got to learn how to be a leader. That’s why I’m doing all these courses on leadership and things because I want to learn how to be one of those leaders that can influence young people.

One of the things that I really, really like to think is that some young researchers get influenced, inspired by what I say, and becomes a lot better than I am. That would be my dream. A student, not just a student, but also some post-doc that works with me or here, in this case, some associate scientist that works with me that becomes better, better than me and that’s fantastic. That’s what the type of leader that I like to be.

A type of leader that I like to let the people that I’m leading to grow, to grow to be better, to grow to be what they want to be. Here in the industrial context, in a way, the fact that we have deliverables, the fact that we have stakeholders, we have projects helps. Because you can adjust the timeline of your work, and you also can see where there are slots where you could do your own personal growth. Or even to identify where you would need one, because not necessarily that there would be other challenges or different projects, or even different type of people where you don’t how to handle them. That’s where coaching comes in. [laughs]

One thing that I am very keen is on inclusion and diversity. Diversity, not just in terms of ethnicity, of culture, but also diversity in terms of ideas, diversity in terms of how we think. I don’t want a group that we all think the same. I don’t want a group that they all follow what I think, absolutely not. I would want to lead a group that challenge my thinking, challenge my points, groups that have a diverse way of thinking being really. That’s something that I’m trying to work towards.

Sandrine: It’s funny because I had a conversation not long ago with an academic who works in Switzerland. We were talking about the challenge when you are new PI and you’re recruiting your first PhD student. How risky it is who you recruit in terms of this first few years as a PI and how challenging it is to make decision on who you are recruiting.

When you’re building your research team, whether it’s in academia or industry, which advice would you give to new research leader in terms of thinking their approach to recruitment? To be open to having people on board who are, yes, have a very different way of thinking, because, in a way, it takes vulnerability to have on board people who are so different from you, who are going to challenge you. As a new PI, you may not be ready yet to have somebody who is really pushing you.

Marta: I would say you go to recruit thinking of the project. The project, of course, needs to be laid out to have different ways of evolving. If something goes wrong, you need to have a plan B. You need to recruit thinking, “Okay, this person, would this person be able to switch immediately to plan B if things go wrong?” Because as a new PI, the confidence that you could get is on the how well the project is going on the results.

If the project is successful, then is it lesser of a worry to think about, and you can concentrate on handling the best and the personality, the supervision, the mentoring, the coaching. If then you have problems with results as well, then you have to put a lot of effort in trying to make the science work.

The first thing is to have a very strong project, a couple of plan B and C, and recruit thinking, “Is this person, the right person to be able to switch from plan A if it doesn’t work to plan B,” and allowing to have the science than strong. Because that will cover a very big bulk.

The first project, first PhD student, that student needs to go to completion, that’s the first thing. Then, while you do that, you can be relaxed and trying to learn how to handle the personal relationship with your students. Therefore, you can start to think, “Oh, okay, maybe I can get now someone.” Because you already had a group, someone that can interact well with the others in the group so to be complementary but at the same time in line.

That’s the second level of complexity. If it is your first student, my advice would be get the best possible students academically to cover that part, and then slowly you learn how to grow the students and yourself.

Sandrine: To grow the group. Marta, to finish off our conversation, you have so much experience and we could probably talk for many hours. If you had to start all over again your research life, your research career, what would you tell your young self in terms of making the journey a bit easier?

Marta: One thing that I would tell to my young research self is to find more coaching and more mentoring, best definitely. To move more, not to be stuck in the same place for a long time and to do it as early as possible, because then it comes to the point where stability is important for other reasons. Remember, okay, we’re talking about work, but life is not just work, it’s other things.

Finding the right balance between life and work is super important, but as a young self, and I would say to myself, “Okay, find more mentors, find more coaching, and move around a lot more when you can.” All the young people that are listening right now, don’t be afraid to move around. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out of your comfort zone at the beginning of your career, because all this helps to build your confidence that you’re going to need later when you can’t move that much.

Sandrine: When personal circumstances make it harder.

Marta: Just based on my experience, and what I’ve learned in these years, don’t isolate yourself. Don’t put yourself in a niche, in a cocoon and do your own science. Just open them up, open your science up to others, even exploring avenues that initially you didn’t think of, because it’s these that helps you to learn, to grow and at the same time to be visible. The opportunity to publish to work or to make impacts in many different areas that are a little bit maybe outside your initial project is what it takes to break an academic career or any professional career to advance.

Sandrine: What are you most excited about in terms of the work that you are doing now? It’s a new area, a different way of working, but what is really the key thing that you’re really excited about this transition to working in AstraZeneca?

Marta: Definitely the fact that I can use my knowledge, my skills, my ideas, my head, my intelligence, to make something that has a direct impact on the life of many cancer patients. For me, this is the most exciting and this is what it takes me to work over what I am expected to work. It’s the motivation that whatever can come out of my head or my experience of my knowledge or what I’ve learned has a direct impact on the life of these people. That is certainly the thing that is the most exciting for me and the motivation that drives me here in this new adventure. [laughs]

[music]

Sandrine: Thank you so much Marta for taking the time to talk with me. It’s been really a pleasure. Thank you.

Marta: Thank you. Thank you, Sandrine. Thank you, everyone.

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[00:53:02] [END OF AUDIO]