Academic Science Career Paths

𝗦𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘂𝗽 𝗔𝗜 𝗹𝗮𝗯𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗿𝗴 A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at The Association of Chief Executive Officers about how traditional companies can strategize and evolve towards AI. I recommended establishing AI Labs or R&D departments as these units can drive significant innovation and disruption. In order to set up an effective AI Lab: ✨ Secure Executive Sponsorship: Gain support from top executives to ensure necessary resources and remove roadblocks. You *will* need them. ✨ Assemble a Dedicated Team: Start with a small, agile team, including a senior IC product manager and a research scientist/engineer, passionate about experimenting with AI. ✨ Identify the Problem: Define the problem you want to solve and identify the affected user segment to align efforts with business goals. ✨ Run a Pilot: Launch a pilot project with clear metrics. Move quickly and gather learnings to inform future projects. ✨ Evaluate Metrics and Scale: If metrics are promising, expand collaboration and integrate more products to broaden AI’s impact. ✨ Foster Experimentation: Create a culture where it’s safe to fail and encourage bold ideas and learning from mistakes. ✨ Upskill Your Team: Invest in ongoing AI education and training to keep your team at the forefront of technological advancements. ✨ Leverage Cross-functional Expertise: Include members from various departments to ensure holistic solutions. ✨ Monitor and Adjust: Continuously track progress and be ready to pivot based on feedback and changing needs. Ένωση Ανωτάτων Στελεχών Επιχειρήσεων- ΕΑΣΕ Tip: why not propose/start this yourself (regardless of your level)? #aiproductmanagement #marilyaipmbootcamp <><><><><><><><><><> Follow Marily Nika, Ph.D for content on AI & Product Management and the top AI Product Management certification (next cohort kicking off next week!)

This is especially for the academic conference warriors! Can you believe it's that time of year again? Yep, the #AcademyOfManagement conference season is just around the corner, and I can already smell the coffee and picture the sea of name tags worn by brilliant management scholars and practitioners from across the globe. But before you jump on your plane – are you actually ready for this conference? I mean, really ready? I used to think I was prepared just because I remembered to pack my laptop and a stack of business cards. Oh, how naive I was! 😅. So, let me share my ultimate AOM conference prep checklist. Trust me, this goes way beyond remembering to pack your laptop, an extra phone charger, and your presentation slides (though that's important, too!). 1. Read the program strategically ↳ Identify key sessions, PDWs, and symposia in your research area or the ones you're interested in. Plan your schedule, but leave room for serendipitous discoveries! 2. Craft your research elevator pitch ↳ Prepare a 30-second summary of your current research focus. Keep it short, simple, and engaging - your goal is to spark curiosity and invite further discussion! 3. Update your socials and academic profiles ↳ People will look you up. So, ensure your LinkedIn, university page, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate profiles are current. 4. Prepare thoughtful questions ↳ For each session you plan to attend, prepare at least one insightful question. It's a great way to engage and be remembered. 5. Set strategic networking goals ↳ Identify potential collaborators or mentors you want to connect with. Research their work and plan your approach. It helps if you can email them in advance to set up a meeting 6. Pack your digital toolkit ↳ Have relevant papers, your presentations, and a digital business card on your devices. You never know when you may need them! 7. Plan for self-care ↳ Conferences are intellectually intense, not to mention the socials. Schedule breaks, find quiet spots, and don't forget to hydrate! Bonus point: remember not to drink too much in those socials! 8. Be Authentic ↳You'll find yourself in a room filled with superstars and research idols. Some might even walk past you on the street. Always stay calm, say hello if you want to, smile, and most importantly, be yourself! Remember, you're human first and a scholar or practitioner second. Authenticity can lead to more meaningful connections than any rehearsed pitch or trying to force connections. What's your top AOM conference preparation tip? Share below and let's learn from each other! See you in Chicago! ---------- If you find this helpful, ♻️ share it to help someone. #AOM2024 #ManagementResearch #AcademicNetworking #ConferencePrep #AcademicLife #NetworkingTips #ResearchCommunity

Have you ever participated in a cross-cultural simulation? Our students at Imperial Business School have been engaging in a cultural simulation as part of Values Day. Cross-cultural simulation activities require participants (divided into 2 groups) to role play and learn one of two assigned cultural norms. They then send groups of visitors to each other’s cultures to engage and interact, with a debrief to their own group after each visit. At the end of the session, we debrief and discuss the following questions: ❓What was it like to visit the other culture? ❓What was it like to have people visit your culture? ❓What adjectives would you use to describe the other culture? Wondering what the commons takeaways for students from engaging in this are? Well, participants expressed… 👉🏽 how quickly they formed an in-group with people of their own culture. They had a short period of time to learn their cultural norms and even within such a short time, they bonded and felt the need to preserve their own cultural norms. 👉🏽 how isolating and uncomfortable it felt to be part of the out-group visiting the other culture when they didn’t know what the expected norms were. 👉🏽 how after every group that visited the other culture, their descriptions of the other culture progressively moved from being descriptive generalizations to judgmental stereotypes. This teaching activity provides an effective way to get participants to reflect deeply on how cultural norms form, how they are upheld and what inclusion/ exclusion looks and feels like. One thing is very clear - participants have a lot of fun engaging in this activity! Energy levels are high ⚡️ and reflections are deep 🧠! And that is exactly what educators hope an effective teaching intervention achieves 🙌🏾 ❓Can you relate to some of the participants takeaways as you have engaged with a new culture of a different country/ organisation/ institution? #FridayFocus #IBValues Sankalp Chaturvedi Maria Farkas Billee-Jean Smith

💡 For years, I’ve used the funnel metaphor to describe how entrepreneurship centres operate within universities. But recently, I’ve begun thinking less in terms of funnels and more in terms of prisms. The funnel metaphor captures a centre’s role in casting a wide net at the top by exposing large numbers of students and staff to entrepreneurial concepts through curriculum, co-curricular activity, and outreach and then narrowing that engagement to identify, support, and accelerate promising opportunities toward startup creation and research commercialisation. This model works especially well when a university’s entrepreneurship strategy is focused on economic outcomes: more spinouts, more IP licences, more venture funding. The steepness of the funnel walls signals how quickly individuals are moved from awareness to action; the narrowness of the opening at the bottom determines how selective and resource-intensive the support becomes. But this metaphor is constraining. It implies that the value of entrepreneurship lies mainly in venture creation and that the role of the centre is to sort people into a pipeline. It often misses those who don’t aspire to found a company but do seek to act entrepreneurially in their research, their careers, or their communities. That’s where the prism metaphor offers a powerful alternative. Where the funnel filters, the prism refracts. It doesn’t narrow possibilities; it reveals them. A prism takes a single beam of light symbolising the curiosity, talent, and intent of a student or staff member and splits it into a spectrum of entrepreneurial expressions. Startups are one colour. So are intrapreneurial roles, social innovation, civic tech, academic engagement, and Indigenous enterprise. The prism helps people see themselves not just as founders, but as changemakers in many forms. The choice of metaphor has profound strategic implications. A funnel-oriented centre builds robust pipelines, hones selection criteria, and focuses resources on scalable ventures. Its metrics are venture counts, capital raised, and IP outputs. It thrives in innovation ecosystems geared toward commercial success. A prism-oriented centre, in contrast, is about cultural transformation. It creates space for plural and place-based entrepreneurial identities, supports translational pathways beyond startups, and values mindset shifts over measurable outputs. It still supports startups but it also empowers those who will never found a company to still think and act entrepreneurially. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. The most sophisticated centres may be hybrids, adjusting their shape depending on where they sit institutionally and what kinds of change they aim to catalyse. Reframing the metaphor changes the questions we ask. Instead of how many startups are we producing, we might ask how many different ways are we enabling people to be entrepreneurial? Funnels channel. Prisms reveal. #EntrepreneurshipEducation #HigherEd #Universities

The selection process for Assistant Professors in India is in a deeply troubling state. On paper, the eligibility criteria may appear fair, but in practice, they are riddled with rigid cut-offs, historical inequities, and opaque mechanisms that end up excluding some of the most deserving candidates. One of the most glaring issues is the arbitrary insistence on a minimum of 60% marks at every academic stage, from school to postgraduate studies—even for those who hold a Ph.D. This rigid benchmark often assumes a uniformity that simply does not exist in India’s diverse educational landscape. A decade or so ago, in several Indian states, scoring 60% in undergraduate studies was considered a notable achievement. The topper might have received 65%, while other "good" students hovered around 50–55%. In contrast, other boards and universities awarded marks more liberally. The result? Brilliant candidates are automatically screened out, not because they are less capable, but because they were educated in a system that didn't inflate marks. The 60% rule also fails to account for the complexity of human lives. A candidate might have had a difficult year due to mental health challenges, physical illness, or family crises, leading to a temporary dip in academic performance. Yet, the system shows no compassion, no room for redemption. It dismisses the person’s hard-earned achievements across other stages of their career and labels them “unfit”. There are countless scholars who have risen above adverse circumstances, performed exceptionally in their Ph.D., published in reputed journals, and shown a clear passion for teaching and research. And yet, they are eliminated from consideration—because of a percentage on a marksheet from ten or twenty years ago. It is not just unfair; it is wasteful. To make matters worse, it is an open secret that in many institutions, personal connections often matter more than merit. Without the backing of a senior academic mentor (often referred to as an “academic godfather”) many deserving candidates are simply never considered. This discourages independent thinkers and undermines the values that academia is supposed to uphold: integrity, intellectual curiosity, and fairness. Recommendations should not be one of the major selection criteria. It is clear that the current system is broken. What is needed is a more holistic and contextual approach—one that looks at a candidate’s overall academic journey, research contributions, teaching potential, and the challenges they’ve overcome. While it is not easy to prescribe a perfect solution, what we can say with certainty is that the present system is not working. It is creating a generation of disillusioned academics who are excellent, driven, and passionate—but constantly rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with their true abilities. India cannot afford to keep losing such talent. It's time to rethink the way we select the future minds who will shape generations to come.

Learning continues to be an imprecise science. That said, when applied by qualified teachers, the science of learning principles, rooted in cognitive psychology and evidence-based practices, seem to produce the results that school systems value. Given a school curriculum defined by a prescribed syllabus and limited instructional time, and with about 30 to 40 students in a class, teaching strategies such as explicit instruction, scaffolding, retrieval practice and cognitive load management align well with the need to prepare students for standardised assessments. These strategies have proven quite useful in helping students efficiently acquire the knowledge school systems want them to learn and apply it effectively in formal assessments. However, does the science of learning address all dimensions of education? Agree that not all students are inherently curious or motivated by self-directed inquiry. Does this mean we should completely exclude them from such learning experiences? Exploration is fundamentally how we learn in the real world. While it may not be the most effective method for helping students acquire curricular content, shouldn't children be allowed to discover their interests? And explore these areas with guidance and rigour? Shouldn't school systems encourage students to engage in open-ended inquiry, confront ambiguity, imagine possibilities, test their ideas and learn from their failures? The conflict arises when exploratory approaches are mistaken for instructional strategies to teach prescribed syllabi within strict timelines, and when their effectiveness is evaluated using standardised assessments. (Employing highly structured science-of-learning strategies in open-ended, exploratory contexts could also stifle students' autonomy and willingness to experiment.) Both approaches have distinct roles. While the science of learning might be well-suited for systematically teaching foundational knowledge and skills, exploratory reasoning and learning allow students to engage with real-world scenarios and navigate complexities (in a technology-enabled microworld or otherwise). For instance, what if we introduced one graded interdisciplinary project each year, beginning in middle school, where students could choose from a list of projects or formulate their questions independently? This project could be assessed more on the process and student reflections rather than the outcome. Could this work?

No, a high-quality research paper is not enough to create an impact with your work. (there are >3.5 million new science and engineering papers published yearly...) Throughout my academic journey, I've discovered that creating impact with your work isn't just about publishing papers but strategic positioning and intentional networking. Here are 5 critical pathways to impact that can also elevate your academic profile: Research Publication Strategy → Target relevant peer-reviewed journals → Collaborate across interdisciplinary domains → Develop a consistent publication track record Conference and Symposium Engagement → Present research at national and international conferences → Seek opportunities for panel discussions → Network with thought leaders in your field Digital Presence → Maintain an updated professional profile on platforms → Regularly share research insights on academic social networks → Create a comprehensive digital portfolio showcasing achievements Strategic Collaborative Research → Initiate cross-institutional research projects → Build meaningful partnerships with industry, academia, and policymakers → Contribute to multi-disciplinary research initiatives Professional Development → Pursue advanced certifications → Attend workshops and specialised training programs → Develop complementary skills beyond core research expertise Your academic journey is a continuous evolution. Embrace these strategies, and watch the impact of your work grow. #Research #Scientist #Science #Career #Professor #ChemicalEngineering #PhD Interested in diving deeper? Let's connect and discuss your growth trajectory!

🎓 Thriving as an Early Career Researcher: Top 10 Tips for Your First Academic Role 🚀 👩🔬 Starting your first academic role as an Early Career Researcher (ECR) is an exciting milestone, but it can feel overwhelming too. From publishing your research to balancing teaching duties, there’s a lot to navigate. Here are 10 actionable tips to help you hit the ground running: 1️⃣ Understand Your Role: Clarify expectations for teaching, research, and service to align with departmental goals. 2️⃣ Set a Research Plan: Focus on quality over quantity in your publications and aim for high-impact journals. 3️⃣ Strengthen Teaching Skills: Start small and refine your methods with feedback from students and mentors. 4️⃣ Build Your Network: Seek mentorship, collaborate with colleagues, and attend conferences to expand your connections. 5️⃣ Apply for Grants: Begin with small funding opportunities and work towards larger collaborative grants. 6️⃣ Publish Strategically: Use your PhD research as a foundation for early outputs while exploring new directions. 7️⃣ Manage Your Time: Prioritise your goals and establish work-life boundaries to avoid burnout. 8️⃣ Learn Promotion Criteria: Familiarize yourself with pathways to progression early in your role. 9️⃣ Engage in the Academic Community: Join societies, review papers, and increase your research visibility online. 🔟 Reflect and Seek Feedback: Schedule regular check-ins with mentors and adjust your plans based on progress. 💡 Your first academic role is about laying the groundwork for a rewarding career. Take it one step at a time, and don’t hesitate to seek support when needed. 👉 What advice helped you the most in your early career? Let’s share insights in the comments! #EarlyCareerResearcher #AcademicCareer #HigherEducation #ResearchTips #TeachingExcellence #AcademicSuccess #LinkedInAcademia

Everyone has heard of Fulbright, Erasmus, and Chevening. But one of the most powerful research opportunities in the world? Almost nobody in Uzbekistan or Central Asia talks about it: the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). Why? Because until recently, awareness here has been very low. Historically, only a handful of researchers from the region ever won MSCA funding, though institutions are eligible under Horizon Europe, and some Uzbek institutes are already partners in EU projects. MSCA isn’t just one fellowship, it’s a family of EU-funded programs that support researchers at every stage: 🔹 Postdoctoral Fellowships (PF): Apply as an individual, but with a host university or research center. If selected, the EU funds your salary, training, and research for 1–2 years. 🔹 Doctoral Networks (DN): Institutions receive MSCA funding to create PhD positions. You apply directly to those advertised positions (fully funded). 🔹 Staff Exchanges & COFUND: These are primarily institutional: your organization applies in partnership with 2 EU-based organizations, then selects candidates internally. 💡 Don’t stop at the “big name” programs. Some of the most transformative opportunities are the ones most people haven’t even heard of. #Scholarships #Fellowships #MSCA #Research #CareerDevelopment

After two years as a research assistant, I’ve realised that “early career” almost never means pre-PhD researchers! Most roles, schemes, grants, and opportunities use “early career” as a code for post-docs, sometimes for PhD students, but almost never for pre-doctoral researchers. I get why it’s like this. Many people go straight from their degree to PhD and then postdoc, so the support is set up with that path in mind. But it leaves out so many who don’t follow the typical route. I keep wondering what gets missed when pre-docs are seen as passengers and not as part of the crew? It’s not just about missed opportunities. For many, especially first-gen, migrant, or career-switching researchers, those years before the PhD are where you get your first exposure to research, build confidence, and decide if research and academia is even for you. The irony is, most of the real support only kicks in after you’ve already made it through the hardest part, which is getting into a PhD. For so many of us trying to get a foothold, it can feel like the doors only open once you’re already inside! 🤷🏽♀️ If we want an academic community that’s truly inclusive, maybe “early career” needs to stretch a bit wider. Because support structures work best when they meet people where they are, not where we expect them to be. What do you think? How could we make support in academia more open across all career stages? #EarlyCareerResearchers #PrePhD #ResearchAssistants #SupportSystems