Episode 7: Fátima Sancheznieto

From biomedical to social scientist, Fátima Sancheznieto advocates for improving academic culture.

About Fátima

Academia is notorious for its difficult work culture. Fátima Sancheznieto is well acquainted with the issues that come with this. During her DPhil working with stem cells, she witnessed first-hand the harassment, bullying and maltreatment of her colleagues.

This inspired her to eventually pursue a post-doc in social sciences, looking at how post-docs and PhD students are trained. In the final episode of this season, Fátima discusses her transition between these different fields, the current problems with academia’s work culture and how one’s identity as a scientist is not tied exclusively to working in research. 

Transcript

Milly McConnell (intro): Welcome to eLife Community Voices, the podcast shining a spotlight on the remarkable individuals behind research.

Join us each episode as we feature personal stories that reflect the changing culture of research. We're here to shed light on the remarkable achievements and challenges faced by those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of knowledge. My name is Milly McConnell and I'll be your host today.

This episode, we are joined by Fátima Sancheznieto, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, where she develops and evaluates the impact of training interventions on early-career researchers' experiences in academia. We talked about the behaviours and norms harming young scientists, building a career in evidence-based advocacy, using lab skills in unconventional ways, and reframing what it means to be a scientist. 

Fátima, welcome to the eLife Community Voices podcast. It's really great to speak to you today.

Fátima Sancheznieto: Thanks. I'm really excited to be here.

Milly: Could you start by introducing yourself and tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

Fátima: My name is Fátima Sancheznieto. I have a PhD in the biomedical sciences from Oxford. Well, technically a DPhil, if you know you're going by Oxford nomenclature. And my work now though is in the social sciences.

So when I was doing my PhD, I noticed that there were issues in the way that colleagues of mine, friends of mine were being trained in their mental health, in bullying and harassment – the sort of standard issues that one hears about.

When I was doing my PhD, I noticed that there were these issues that were going unresolved, that people in power either knew about these things and didn't seem to care, or, thought they were doing right by the trainees even though the trainees (and by trainees I mean graduate students, postdocs, you know, even junior faculty) – they were having experiences that contradicted that, right? These were people that were either struggling financially, struggling with their mental health, as I mentioned, experiencing bullying and harassment. And so I became really interested in the way that we were training people.

And so I shifted from studying stem cells to studying how we train PhD students and postdocs. And the way that I was able to do that was I had some mentors who believed in me and brought me in to do a postdoc with them after I had done my PhD in the biomedical sciences. And that helped with the transition into the social sciences, was essentially needing to reskill myself, as it were, in those skills.

Milly: And did you find that was a fairly smooth transition, so in terms of gear change in your career and people around you supporting it, did it follow on naturally, or were there challenges and pushback?

Fátima: Well, I mean it depends on who you're talking about, right? So I mean, in many ways it was right place at the right time that these people, Doctor Christine Pfund and Doctor Angela Byars-Winston, you know, they're experts in mentorship and at the time they were doing the mentorship training for the scholarship that was funding my PhD.

So the fact that we were able to cross paths, the serendipity there, right place, right time, that they believed in me and believed in the work that I was doing because at the time I was just a grad student, like many other grad students who was doing sort of local organising. I mean, later it turned into more national organising, you know, scrappy young PhD student with a blog essentially, back in those days, and a Twitter account. But, you know, they sort of saw that I was very passionate about this. I started going to conferences, giving talks, doing podcasts like this one, and they believed in me.

On the other side, though, I had one PhD supervisor in particular who had the sort of typical response of, well, I hope this isn't taking too much time away from your real work in the lab.

There were people, for example, my thesis committee when I did my viva at Oxford. They also had this weird comment at one point when I was doing my defence (I didn't do very well, I should mention that). And that wasn't necessarily a response of not spending time, you know, I was doing my work. But there was some off-handed comment of “What do you want to do after this?” And when I told them, I was like, “oh, I'm moving into a social science advocacy space to study training environments”, they were like, “oh, that's…”, you know, sort of a dismissive “oh, you're fine”. Like it doesn't matter. There is, I think still, this culture in the biomedical sciences, in particular life science, physical sciences, that the social sciences are somehow less rigorous or, less important to study or that there's less expertise involved in doing these things. And that's absolutely not true.

So I think, to your point – “Were there obstacles?” – I think the obstacles came from the perception of people who had been my colleagues, who realised I was taking a change in path and they didn't quite understand what I was doing, and they didn't quite see it as a valid next step in my career, I guess.

I had a very,very funny interaction with another PhD supervisor. I had three, but I went to visit him and he said, “So how are things going? What are you doing?” And I said, well, you know, I just finished writing a grant proposal, I've got two papers that have been published. And, you know, I was invited to give a talk in Spain on my work. So everything that people in the biomedical sciences or physical sciences are doing. And he looked at me and he said, “So you're not doing science anymore, right?” And I was like, dude, I just told you, like, you know, I just wrote a grant. I'm writing papers. I'm still in the academy. What more do you want? So I think what he meant was you're not doing biomedical sciences anymore. And if that had been the question, then the answer would have been, yes, you are correct, I am now a social scientist, I am not doing biomedical sciences anymore.

But you know, it's interesting because I work with a lot of social scientists and inevitably the social scientists who do this work tell people like me and one of my supervisors who have the degree in the biomedical sciences, that that gives us a little bit of “street cred” or credibility when we're doing mentor training for people in the biomedical, physical and life sciences.

So again, I mean, this goes back to there is this unfortunate culture of hierarchy, of which sciences are more rigorous or better than others, and who knows better than others.

Like I said, I'm very privileged, very lucky, that I had mentors who believed in me. I had people who were able to teach me a lot of these skills from scratch. A lot of these things I'm still not an expert in so I get to collaborate with a lot of people who are experts in this. When you switch fields that drastically, you try to become a generalist rather than a specialist, so that you can understand enough of the landscape to be asking the right questions and to be knowing who to contact in order to be able to answer those questions in a rigorous fashion.

Milly: So once you'd developed those skills and had the support of these mentors, what was the next step to implementing this? What did you do with those skills?

Fátima: It's only until recently, like a year and a half, two years ago, that I started asking my own scientific questions.

We do workshops. We don't just do the workshops, we also teach people how to run the workshops: it's called Train the Trainer. And one of the questions I was very interested in is culture change in an organisation.

So inevitably when you train someone to give a workshop at an institution and to be pushing for culture change, there's all of these questions about barriers that they are going to face in an organisation that doesn't necessarily want to change, or in a culture that doesn't necessarily want to change. So my question was, “What are the factors at both the individual level (so a person's position in an organisation, what career stage they are in, whether they're getting compensated for the work), but also the organisation itself, you know, factors in the organisation. Do they have support from departments, from institutions? Does the skill in how they implement the workshop, you know, some of their confidence in implementing the workshop, do these play a role into how widely accepted the work is?

So that was one question that I was interested in asking because I'm interested in culture change in the academy and systems change in the academy.

The other question that I asked, and this has been a question that me and others have had for a really long time is, you know, in the United States, you have two different ways to fund someone who's doing their PhD. And that is they are either trainees on a fellowship or they are researchers, so effectively labourers under their supervisor's grant. And so inevitably my question is, “Well, how does that change not just the experience of the grad student moving through the system?” And then inevitably, the question that matters to the funding agencies and to the institutions is, “How does that impact the decisions that they make after leaving grad school?”

I'm very interested in people's stories. So if you're going through the academy as someone on a training grant versus someone on a research grant, how are those experiences different for you, even if you're in the same lab, right? Those are things that I'm fascinated by.

I guess I got away from the original question of how did I implement those skills? But to give a short answer is I help evaluate training programmes so people sometimes will come to us on my team and say, hey, I have this training programme. How do I best evaluate its effectiveness? So we do some evaluation science to support them. We implement workshops quite a bit and then study those, the effectiveness, of those workshops ourselves. And then we're also asking bigger research questions.

Milly: That's really interesting.

And one of the questions I was going to ask is, has there been overlap in the things that you used to do – do you apply those those skills now? Or is there anything that you particularly miss about biomedical research?

Fátima: The overlap I think is more from a culture perspective, right? I understand the culture. I have the lived experience. I know which questions to ask, what issues were important when I was a PhD and a postdoc and continue to be important, you know, to some degree they've been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, by the current political landscape in the US.

Overlap in terms of skills. You asked if there's anything I miss. Yes. Those are things that I like doing at home. So, like, cell culture. I don't get to do that anymore, and I used to love coming in [to the lab] to change media on my cells. But I have a kombucha culture going in my kitchen, so I still have to do media changes, I just do them on something different, I'm not working under sterile conditions, and the waste, the discarded “media” (quote unquote), is stuff that me and my partner get to enjoy.

We also have  a garden that we grow our own produce in, and taking care of plants.

And then in the kitchen, when you're cooking with a lot of these ingredients, there's a surprising amount of similarities to like, here's your protocol, that's the recipe, right? If you understand the basic biochemistry of the ingredients that you're working with…the example that I always give is beans, right? And the pectin structure. There's a lot of people know that they should soak their beans, but actually the better way to cook them is by brining them. So you put them in a very salty solution, then the sodium ions replace the calcium and magnesium ions and you weaken the pectin bond, and you actually are able to make a smoother, better texture bean when you're cooking.

So, you know, those kinds of things are things that kind of went into what, you know, in the lab. You're troubleshooting an experiment. You have to think about all of the possible ways in which something happens, and the more you understand the system that you're working with – the cells, the inputs, the outputs – the better you're able to troubleshoot all these different pieces that might have gone wrong with your experiment.

Milly: It sounds like you pick up skills and approaches and techniques and then apply them to everything in your life.

Fátima: [Laughing] Why not? I mean, if you have them, you might as well, right?

Milly: It seems like this scientific approach, you've applied that to the work you do now. You're trying to troubleshoot and work out how management and the environment in a research lab can be better.

Fátima: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's very interesting. I was just at a conference. I love sitting to have lunch with scientists at a conference. Scientists are, I mean, they're my people, right? These are people that are incredibly invested in one very niche question and get so excited about that. So I sat at lunch talking to this group of scientists at this conference that they invited me to give a talk at, and I got to geek out about bugs with an ant biologist, and I loved it. I mean, this person clearly loved bugs and knew their bugs, it was really awesome to talk with them about bugs.

But the other half of the conversation that we were having at the table was about all of the current issues, not just with funding but with training and all of these systemic issues that we have.

And so you get these two things that scientists usually talk about. They're either talking about the system that they are in, i.e. hey, this sucks, or this isn't working as well as it should. We've all had those conversations at the lunch table, at the tea room or wherever it is. The other thing that we talk about is our work, our science. We love it.

There's a lot of administrators and leadership. I think you sort of get…jaded isn't the right word, but you get, I think, acculturated to a system and you see it as normal. You know, you're a fish swimming in water and then all of a sudden someone's talking to you about water. 

When the junior folks, who are incredibly interested in these questions, and who are being taught to be critical at a systems level and are being given the skills to be critical, I get these senior scientists who are appalled that their graduate students or their postdocs are all of a sudden criticising the academic system.

And it's like, well, what did you expect? They're scientists. You're training them to do this. You're training us to ask questions. And so to your point: I'm troubleshooting, why the heck can't we be doing things in a better way? We know from the literature in organisational psychology and management in education that there are better evidence-based ways to train people. And yet we refuse to do it, at least at a collective, widespread scale.

Milly: So if you had the power, a magic wand, to make one significant change in the way that science teaching is done and lab culture is acted out, what would be the first thing you would change?

Fátima: Oh, gosh. I think for me it’s some separation, some clear and delineated separation between training and learning, so, you know, training: teaching, education, learning. And labour.

I think the apprenticeship model served science for the hundreds of years that it did. I think we're past it, I think we're beyond it. And because science has become this hyper-competitive enterprise (wherever you live, it's hyper competitive), graduate students and postdocs are called trainees, but they're also being exploited for their labour.

People get really upset when I use the word exploited, but at least here in the United States, you have people who are getting paid on 50% appointments, who are working more than 40 hours a week, whose labour benefits the labs that they're in because they then produce grants from that labour. And there's sort of this unspoken thing that that is okay. And that may have been okay in a different scenario and in a different system. But right now there's a lot of graduate students who are unable to pay for groceries, pay their bills, meet their basic needs, [they’re] grinding themselves to the bone, exhausting their mental health and their capacity, leaving everything behind, including other hobbies, families. Academia has become this all-encompassing thing.

And there's a part of me that wishes that there was a model where the training wasn't also understood to be labour. And how we do that, because it's so entrenched into like the details of that, I think are dependent on the country, the funding, the way that we reward the doing of science.

And of course, it brings in a whole other slew of issues, because at least here in the United States, you don't pay for your doctorate, right? Your labour kind of pays for that degree. So there's a whole lot of intricacies as to why the system is set up the way that it is. I'm not saying it's as simple as that, but I do worry that a lot of the issues that we face, particularly with lab supervisors who abuse and take advantage of and exploit their grad students and their postdocs, is because they don't see their responsibility to their trainees as part of this training thing, but they see them essentially as cheap labour.

I've posed this question on the internet, on Bluesky. I've said: “Instead of hiring a postdoc, why don't you hire a staff scientist?” And there's all these responses all up in arms…what it boils down to is either the institution or the individual doesn't want to pay more for an equally trained position because funds are scarce for everyone – everyone's trying to do more with less. 

And the same goes with grad students – a lot of times, supervisors are incentivised to hire postdocs instead of grad students because postdocs already come in with a lot of skills.

So I think the motivations there are…it creates an interesting conflict of interest to be the boss of someone that you're also meant to be training, is all I'll say.

So that's sort of my magic wand, you know, if we could fix it.

Milly: So on the other side of that, what advice would you give to a postdoc who is feeling undersupported or trapped in their lab culture?

Fátima: I mean, it's harsh to hear, but it's “get what you need and get out”. The advice I give to undergrads now when I talk to [them] is think really hard about whether you need the PhD or not. And what I mean by that is, I've done focus groups where I have graduate students who come into a focus group, and they will tell you – there's one grad student who says, “I went to work in industry after undergrad for five years and then came back to get my PhD because I knew I wouldn't have the level of advancement that I wanted out of my career without the degree. And so I came back and it's made all the difference because I knew what I wanted. I knew what labour conditions I could and couldn't accept. I knew better, you know, I had more skills.”

And then on the other side, you have the undergrad who goes straight into grad school out of undergrad and they will tell you that was a mistake: “I wish I wouldn't have done that.”

So, you know, I ask undergrads, think about whether you really need the degree or not, really do some career exploration early.

I would say to the grad students as well, take time aside of your graduate degree to really figure out what it is that you want to do because the chances are you don't need a postdoc to do it.

I mean, the talk that I give now is I show data that shows the significant majority of people who get to the end of their degree in an academic setting, don't want to stay in a faculty position, and they still go do a postdoc. 

And when you look at the economic data, a postdoc, at least here in the United States, is a significant loss in income up to 15 or 20 years out.

Industries outside of academia do not value the postdoc.

But I would say, if there are offices or people in your department or in your institution doing career and professional development support, access those as quickly as possible.

Cynthia Fuhrman's group has some great resources over at pd|hub, where they do a lot of professional development resources and guides for people and help them find what it is that they want to do.

And, you know, the point that I was making to you is: get what you need. So get the publication, get the letter of recommendation, and get out.

If you want to be a faculty in an academic position, those positions are very scarce. A lot of people aren't getting those positions even after they've done years of postdoc-ing. And so I think the sunk-cost fallacy is a very important thing for scientists to understand. And that is just because you've already spent so much time investing into this dream of yours, there's no reason why you should be spending more time trying to. And that doesn't mean you're a failure. That doesn't mean you're a bad scientist. It just means that we're working in a hyper-competitive environment.

But I would say, you know, for people who need to “get out” of a particular situation, especially where there's abuse or bullying and harassment involved, the support of a therapist is fundamental. If you don't have access to that, the support of friends and family and a caring network. Reconnect with the people who you care about. Reconnect with your communities. Reconnect with yourself and your sense of value: your needs have value, your interests, your desires, your dreams have values. Relearn how to set healthy boundaries for yourself. And as you start to reclaim a sense of who you are and what your needs and desires and dreams and hopes are, then you can start to detach yourself in a safe and healthy way from these really toxic relationships.

Milly: There was a point there that you made about it not being a failure to leave academic science. And I know when we talked earlier in the week, you mentioned that people have a very strong sense of identity as a scientist. And, definitely you've shown that there are other ways to explore those interests and passions by picking up hobbies and other things.

Fátima: Yeah. Well, and not even that. I mean, you can still be a scientist by, you know, applying those skills in government policy, in education, in industry, in consulting.

I think the biggest disservice we do to our brilliant, young, curious minds is to warp their sense of identity as a scientist solely to be tied to an academic science career.

There's a sense of awe and joy and wonder that we get when we're young that drives us to these different fields and these different ways of exploring our science. I don't think the academy needs to, by default, be a place where we lose that because we're thinking about the grants and the politics and the hyper-competition, and we’ve got to do more and more and more and more and more.

I regained my love of plants and animals and microbes when I was able to stand back.

But there's no reason why we should teach people that the only way to be a “successful scientist” is in the academy.

I think people are starting to get away from the idea that going into industry is a failure, but I think people still see other careers: mine or going into government policy or into consulting or, you know, I mean, heck, opening a bakery – those are all things that employ curiosity, inquisitive problem solving.

There are ways you can be a scientist outside of the academy, but I think that the key question there is: we need to be encouraging our young scientists to recognise that from an early age so that we're not just all shoving them into this meat grinder that is the academic pipeline. I hate using that term pipeline, but it chews our students up and it spits them out broken. I mean, that's the reality. It sounds very bleak, but you look at the mental health data in grad students, you look at the underemployment rate of people with graduate degrees. There is no reason why we should be churning so many people through these advanced degrees, who will end up in careers that only need a basic understanding of science literacy and are able to communicate that to people.

PhDs are great. People should be doing PhDs. But the over-explosion of people and number of people with PhDs and postdocs has a lot to do with the economics and the cost of labour of those grad students and postdocs, and less about actually having a well-trained workforce because we're not training them to go out and do other things, at least in ways that those other industries value them.

And again, I'm speaking very much from a US perspective, but given the way that my work is received in other countries, when I come to give talks, and the fact that I did some work in the UK, makes me believe that there's at least some level of comparability there.

But now you've got me ranting about what it is that we do to our trainees. I just care a lot about our, you know, undergrads – our grad students and postdocs, I really do, because I feel for them and I feel their passion, and I hate to see that diminish and disappear in a system that should really be encouraging it and fostering it.

Milly: Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and talking to me today. It's been fascinating to hear. 

Fátima: You're welcome. Yeah. And again, just to not end on like a bleak, you know, dire note of everything is terrible. Just yeah, encouraging people to recognise that their needs, their dreams, their hopes, their values, their boundaries, all of those have value. And that there's a way to find those, whether you stay in an academic career or not.

And there's people like us doing this work so that we can hopefully change the system slowly but surely into a system that better aligns with our values of discovery, knowledge seeking, creativity, problem solving, making the world a better place.

All of the things that we go into science for.

Milly (outro): That's all for this episode of eLife Community Voices and brings us to the end of this season. I hope you've enjoyed hearing more about the human side of science.

To stay up to date with eLife, you can sign up to our newsletter and follow us on social media. Thank you once again to all our guests for this season and to the team at eLife and Neil Whiteside at Freedom:ONE for editing this episode. And thank you to you for listening.