Driving your career through curiosity
With Dr Marta Milo
Marta 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.
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.
Get in touch with Marta via LinkedIn
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
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?
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion with Marta
What is the quality of your listening in research conversations?
I am always interested to hear how researchers approach collaboration conversations, particularly collaboration across disciplines. Marta makes a point about the importance of “language” in collaboration. As a computer scientist who made the move to biological sciences and now working with clinicians, Marta will have faced the challenges of being understood by others from different disciplines and of learning to communicate in a way that engage others from a different disciplinary background.
Marta says that when we collaborate, we need to get to grips with the way our collaborators think, the way they ask questions, but also the type of answers they need to receive so that conversations can move forward. Interdisciplinary collaborations are hard work, because they take a lot of listening. Being opened to do more listening than talking is not something that is easy for everyone. I often talk about the problem of egos in being in the way of effective interactions. Paying attention to how much listening we are actually doing in our research exchanges could be a way of raising our awareness of what is actually happening during our collaboration exchanges, questioning ourselves about the balance of the exchange.
Next time you get started in a collaboration discussion, ask yourself:
o Who has the most “airtime” in our discussion? Is it just me talking or am I giving enough time to my potential collaborator? Am I really trying to understand where they are coming from and what interest them?
o Would I be more prepared to unpick my research assumptions, if I started listening more intently to my collaborators?
o How far would I challenge my own research approaches, in seeing research questions through the eyes of someone else?
Who am I supposed to be in my career?
Knowing who we want to be as researchers and research professionals can remain one of our many unanswered questions. Our worry of making the right choices in our professional lives can be a hindrance in experimenting with what our next step may be. Marta refers to the need of being honest with ourselves about how we want to contribute to science or to our professional field. What does it mean to be honest in this case? Marta talks about following her curiosity, instinct and passion as her way of making her career decisions. She admits that a critical step in navigating research careers in a way that is honest to our true self is the need to overcome our own idea of what we are supposed to be or what is expected of us. There is both our perception of what we think others expect of us, and our own narrow way of thinking about ourselves.
Career transition takes courage. The transition from academia to industry at a stage in Marta’s career where others may have seen her as pretty settled into a lectureship position came because she took the time to ask herself questions about how she was contributing and wanted to contribute to science.
The desire to want to contribute to science in a significant way, the awareness of having skills that she wanted to use to maximum capacity and the commitment to want happiness in her research life were factors that created the impetus to switch her career to industry. Having worked incredibly hard to build her professional competencies, she felt that she owed it to herself to find a research environment that allowed her to expand the reach of the impact that she could make.
o Do you feel that you are able to use your competencies in optimum ways?
o Are you satisfied with the type of professional impact you are making right now?
o Are your stopping yourself from contributing in bigger ways/ in a different context because you feel it is not expected of you?
The scary side of feedback
Marta shares that she has come to realise recently how important coaching and mentoring were in becoming a research leader. She describes that her confidence as a leader has been built through becoming more aware of the knowledge she has accumulated, but also through self-reflection. That’s where coaching/ mentoring come into play as they facilitate self-reflection.
Receiving feedback as a leader is something that is well established in the private sector, but feedback in academia is much less embedded in the approaches used to support leaders build their teams. Feedback exists in the context of improving manuscripts, grants, teaching, but research leaders in academia are not using feedback in the role it could play in building effective teams. People are still scared to get feedback. Learning to provide feedback in a constructive way could be a good starting point.
If you think about your own context, when was the last time you sought feedback about your approach to working with your team? Becoming a daring research leader committed to contributing to an improved research culture could be simply about seeking honest feedback from your team members. Creating psychological safety so that team members feel they can open up and share feedback is an important commitment to make.
It can be difficult to do on your own. One of the services I have for Principal Investigators is exactly that, helping PIs get feedback and use the feedback received from their teams. If you are interested in experimenting with feedback, get in touch!
I have recently come across an interesting coaching/ facilitating approach called “clean language” that uses the world of metaphors to help individuals and teams explore their ways of thinking about a context. This methodology seems very fitted to experiment with the role/ approach to feedback in research teams.
If you have never come across clean language, you could have a look at this TED talk.
In exploring how feedback could play a bigger role in helping you further develop as a research leader, you could ask yourself these questions to explore the models/metaphors that you hold in your mind about feedback:
o What would you like to have happen regarding giving and receiving feedback in your team?
o When you are giving feedback at your best, you’re like what?
o When you are receiving feedback from a team member, that’s like what?
o What kind of feedback is this?
o What needs to happen for feedback to be helpful?
o What happens just before you give/ or receive feedback?
“A very successful collaboration comes from complete trust from both sides...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 opened to feedback.”
