You’re currently pursuing a degree in science communication but you work at CERN. Is this a typical path for a science communicator? Can you describe your research a bit and how your program works?

That’s correct – I’m pursuing a PhD from the Science Communication Unit at UWE Bristol, but my research is on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at CERN. Specifically, I’m studying the attitudes of the members of CMS towards public engagement with research (sometimes called “outreach”). I have also been working as a science communicator for CMS since 2010.
I don’t think there’s necessarily a typical path to becoming a science communicator or pursuing a PhD in the field. I started out with a BSc in physics from St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai University, before getting an MA in science journalism from City University London. I then moved to CERN to work for the CMS Communications Group. Somewhere along the way, I considered a PhD and received support from my employers to pursue it. It’s been a very fortunate journey, and, I should admit, more than a little serendipitous.
My research relies on the analysis of quantitative data collected from an online survey and qualitative data collected from personal interviews. I’m trying to ascertain how attitudes towards outreach might vary (if at all) across nationalities, ages and academic positions, and if they’re influenced by the attitudes of one’s peers, superiors and funding agencies. I am a distance-learning, part-time research student (a horrible combination, indeed!), and am quite fortunate that I’m allowed to take my courses remotely via video-conferencing if needed. I’m almost at the very end of my data-collection phase and will be immersing myself into thesis-writing mode very soon.

How did you become interested in science communication?

I think I’ve been interested in science communication as long as I’ve been interested in science: even in primary school, I used to talk endlessly with my friends about whatever science books I read. I began to seriously consider it as a career possibility when I felt, in my second year of studying physics at university, that I might not be cut out for research itself. Admittedly, I wanted to pursue theoretical physics and in a sense it was the right call! I looked around at courses on science communication and finally decided to take up one in science journalism.

What do you see as some of the problems today and where do you think science communication will change in the near future?

Science communication, as I see it, is doing well. The academic field is thriving and is gathering valuable empirical data that has helped define scicomm policies at institutional and government levels. There is a growing self-awareness within research communities that they (we!) cannot work in isolation from the rest of society and that meaningful two-way communication is crucial to tackling the intellectual, technological and societal challenges we face. I see science communication playing a crucial role in science itself becoming more open in the future, ensuring that the knowledge we as researchers gather and produce on behalf of all of society remains accessible (in every sense of that word) to the whole of humanity. I’m aware that there is a certain naïveté in that statement, but I have reasons for being optimistic.

You created the PhD starter kit. Can you tell us how this came about and what you hope to accomplish with it?

Honestly, I’m not sure I can satisfactorily answer either of those questions. The PhD Starter Kit was the result of an e-mail I started composing to a friend who was about to start a physics-education PhD at CERN about a year after I had started mine. Like me, he’s based full time at CERN. But since CERN is a research facility and not an educational institution per se, we don’t get a lot of training in the “how”s of doing a PhD. And without wanting to complain about my situation, it is true that those of us not pursuing technical PhDs (physics, engineering, computer science etc.) don’t really have cohorts at CERN we can turn to for support or guidance. Over the course of my first year, I had cobbled together a list of tools and workflows that might help answer some of the “how”s. I decided to send my friend a list of all my suggestions, but then felt that it might be better off composing a public piece that any other PhD students might benefit from, if they found something of value in it. I didn’t expect it to be read by many people and I was taken by surprise at how well it has been received. I’ve been sent a lot of warm feedback and suggestions for improvement from people who’ve come across it. It was even featured on Software Carpentry and shared on Twitter by the Mozilla Science Lab.
As to what I hope to accomplish with it, I haven’t a clue! If it can help even one doctoral researcher in their research, I will consider that a win. I didn’t start out writing the piece with any specific aims in mind other than to share what I had learnt with others.

Can you talk briefly about how you use Authorea in your workflow? What are the advantages of writing with a git interface?

I love git and I make that known all the time. I began using it when I first started working on the CERN Open Data Portal. Our development team was using GitHub to host the codebase and I quickly found out that I had to learn at least the very basics of git and GitHub in order to contribute to the project. With the help of some truly fantastic mentors within the project, I got to grips with git (via the CLI, which is quite an achievement for someone with minimal development background) and was exposed to its power. I felt that we as researchers weren’t fully exploiting this power in our non-code workflows. So I began looking at available tools and came across Authorea.
I don’t use it nearly as much as I would like to (for various reasons), but so far I’ve used it to author my conference papers, a book chapter on open data (on which I collaborated with my colleagues from the CERN Open Data Portal) and parts of my thesis (although this one is private at the moment). My workflow is a bit convoluted, as I prefer to work with local files (sometimes while travelling) — so, I set up a project in Authorea, link it with a GitHub repository and then clone the repo to my machine. I do my writing in markdown using Atom, and then push my changes to GitHub when I’m satisfied. Authorea then assembles the assorted markdown files into a single document, which I can export into whatever format I need at the time. The advantage of having a git backend is that I don’t have multiple files with appropriate version names appended to them — I can work with individual files for individual chapters/sections and have their full history stored in git. When I need feedback from my supervision team, I simply use Authorea’s web-based frontend to export the document to Word and circulate it for comments. The whole process works like a charm, and I wrote about my use-case for others to read: https://github.com/RaoOfPhysics/modern-research-publishing

Do you have a favorite quote?

A quote I turn to quite often is from the verse 47 of the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. In the original Sanskrit, it reads: “कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन |” (Or “karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣhu kadāchana.”) It roughly translates to say, “You must perform your duties, but you are not entitled to the fruit of your actions.”