What I was going to talk to you about was a couple of opportunities I’ve had over the last year. Training opportunities that I’ve done with two of my postdocs, that has had benefit. I’m sure it’s had benefit to them, but it’s also had huge benefit to me. Therefore, I thought that might be quite a good opportunity to share how these things work. These are two projects I have that are at the translational end of my research. I work on materials and devices that are used or have potential to be used in overcoming vision loss.

One of these projects is some work we’ve done over a number of years associated with treating a corneal disease called keratoconus, which is where the cornea becomes misshapen. We’ve actually patented a new technology that is potentially a new treatment for that disease. Then over this last year I’ve had funding jointly from the EPSRC IAA, Impact Accelerator Award and the enterprise board of the university, to try and see if we can develop this into a product.

As part of this, I’ve been very involved with people in RPI and looking at ways that we can find what the route would be to translate this technology. There is a programme called the Lean Launchpad. It’s funded by Innovate UK and it’s a consortium of seven Northern universities. It’s run out of Queen’s University Belfast. They’re the leads on it. It’s designed to provide training for postdocs to look at what they call the ‘customer discovery journey’. In other words, you get about £5,000 to spend some time while doing your research, over a ten-week period, to go and talk to people.

They set it up in such a way that over this ten-week period, this starts off with a launch meeting where my postdoc and myself and Shona Jones, as a tech transfer officer from RPI, went to a first meeting. You meet with and have access to experts who know about developing and translating technologies from the lab into either commercial products or in this stage, commercial or clinical products. Within that, they provide you with a load of tools to try and work out who your customers are.

In our case, those customers could be clinicians. They could be stakeholders in terms of the patients. They could be people who could manufacture the technology and they could be the regulatory bodies, for example. Then you identify who are those people, and then the postdoc has an opportunity over the next few weeks to make appointments to go and see them. This first project was running in January to March, so we actually managed in this particular project, to go out and to visit these people. Hannah, my postdoc on this, went to a major conference where there were a lot of exhibitors in the right area. She went around talking to all these people. She got interest from them.

One of the things that you learn is how to develop a pitch. To talk, rather than at a scientific conference, but how to pitch your technology to a commercial organisation, instead. She did a lot of getting this experience. She talked to a lot of different people. She talked to a lot of patients about whether they thought the technology would be useful to them. She talked to a lot of clinicians about how they thought it would fit into their care pathways, for example. Overall, she got a really good idea about how we might be able to take this technology to the next stage.

From her point of view, she also had a bootcamp where she was taught how to take the information and look at the information in a very different way than we would if we were doing a research project and looking to write it up as a scientific paper. To look at it in terms of the value proposition, as they call it, of the particular technology. How valuable is it? What’s it worth to somebody? How can you then make that so that you could sell it to somebody in a totally different way? It provided herself, but also she then fed this all back to us as a team, how we might then develop this technology further to the next stage. There was an opportunity then at the very end. We had what’s called the options roundabout, where she then presented.

She had to give a five-minute, so a very short presentation, on the technology and what she had found out about the customer journey. Who our customers really were and what the value of the technology was to those customers. She presented that to various funders and stakeholders and investors and then got feedback from them. It was a very short training opportunity, this ten-week period. We did that last options roundabout on 6th March. That was the last time I flew in an aeroplane, to Dublin.

At the time we were thinking, this is all okay. There’s no great problem about this. Of course, a week later, everything went completely mad. It was an extraordinary, useful opportunity, not just from the fact of learning from Hannah’s point of view of how to do this and from my point of view of how to do this. This is not something I have the skillsets to do, either. Also, it actually has put us in a position with this particular project where we now know where we can go forward. In fact, over this week we’ve had a conversation with one of the companies she met at the conference, to see whether they will partner with us for the next grant application that we’re going to do to it. Then we’ll ask the DPFS to take this project forward.

In fact, they very interestingly are saying that for them, it probably isn’t the right product, but they have already introduced us to another company who are very interested. We’re all going to talk to them on 13th November. To me, that’s been an incredibly useful opportunity, both from Hannah’s point of view in terms of a skillset that she now has and might want to use in a future post, although she’s still employed with me for a bit longer. I’ve also learnt a lot from it, as well. We’ve done this again on a second project, between June and August. This was then completely online, but that postdoc that did it again as a second project, her project working with me finishes this week. She has a new job, which is outside academia.

Not going into specifically what’s associated with the Lean Launchpad project but more into a project management role on another very big grant. Which I think she felt that when she was able to talk about the Lean Launchpad at her interview probably helped her to get that job. I think overall, that’s allowed both my postdocs and myself to gain new skills and information that I don’t think I would have found out otherwise. It’s funded in a small way. It’s funded with £5,000 so the funding didn’t come off my grants.

They did both have to take time out of the project to do this, but I think it was really very well worth spending that time. It depends on how you show it. If you talk about an exciting opportunity, then, ‘Have you thought of an exciting opportunity such as such-and-such?’ Rather than saying, ‘What else might you do?’ That doesn’t sound very encouraging! I think it depends how you do it. Academia isn’t all rosy, is it? One of the ones that I was involved with, once, I did this thing run by the Royal Society, which is called – I can’t remember what it was called now. I shadowed a Member of Parliament for a week and they tell you all about, particularly about the Government Office of Science and what it does, and postings.

People who are scientists, you can do some absolutely fantastic things, really interesting things that are associated with government and policy. You’re using your science. One of the things they described, how you had to be able to read maybe five scientific papers. Come up with five points so an MP could do a press conference. You had 20 minutes to do it. That took some skill, and academics can be really good at doing something like that. I think it can mean a really exciting opportunity for some people, who perhaps don’t want to be sitting in the lab running experiments that don’t work all the time.

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For me, the issue about postdoc destinations is not actually an issue about postdocs and destinations at all. I’m going to explain why I think that, and then I’ll explain what I think. Prior to working at the University of Liverpool, some of you will be aware, I used to work for a company called Kinetic.

In that role I recruited people with and without PhDs, and with and without experience after their PhDs. I typically ended up recruiting people or wanting to recruit people with more experience, and would far prefer somebody with the level of experience of a postdoc, to the level of experience of a PhD student, to the level of experience of an undergraduate. I’ve sat on the other side of the fence, I suppose is what that means. Also, as Rachel highlighted, when you’re in that kind of position, you get trained in things like how to build relationships with external organisations, how to sell stuff, how to compile a value proposition, how to make that convincing to other people.

I think that probably comes through in spades in terms of my interactions with other organisations now. I work on things that are broadly data science, so taking data and trying to help people make better decisions on the back of those data, and that’s pertinent to academics; it’s also pertinent to industry and government. If you look at the destinations for my PhD students, the demographic that they go to is broadly similar to the demographic that my postdocs come from, which is broadly similar to the destinations that my postdocs go to.

In all those cases, it’s about a 50/50 mix between government and industry, users, fundamentally, and academia. I think that’s kind of interesting, so I looked at the postdocs that I’ve had, and I’ve got a list of 15 postdocs that I’m either currently employing or have employed in the last, whatever that is, seven years or something. Of those, six came from industry, three were my PhD students, and one, two, three, four -whatever is left – one, two, three, four, five – I’m assuming that adds up, were PhD students from elsewhere. It just gives you a flavour that that’s – it’s not a home-grown PhD student turns into home-grown postdoc, turns into home-grown lecturer. It’s an environment where there’s much more mixing, in an epidemiological kind of context.

I think it’s then really about, how do you build an environment around you where that is normality? For me, that’s about listening, not just talking to, but listening to the organisations that you’re interacting with, who typically… Yes, they want to understand research questions and answers, but also they want to recruit people, and they want help on that patent that they are thinking about which needs somebody to objectively assess whether it’s actually novel and worth employing a lawyer to take a close look at.

Actually I see the benefits of partnership as being two-way traffic of staff, not one-way, and that interaction also supporting impactful research, so being steered by the needs of the other organisation in terms of steering your academic research, but also hopefully taking the research that you’ve historically done and taking that forwards to achieve impact. And both directly and indirectly supporting funding, which can be significant.

Just to make that a bit more real, in the context of PhD students – what’s that, one, two out of seven PhD students that have graduated with me recently have gone to work for DSTL, so that’s part of the UK Ministry of Defence, after they finished their PhD. I probably have current grants of about £2 million from DSTL. Those two things are correlated.

Building the partnerships is not about a destination for postdocs, it’s about a relationship between you and an external organisation, which means that your postdocs have a route for employment, but also means there are a whole load of other benefits that stem from that interaction. I think it’s about an environment in which people trust you as an individual to tell them what you think, and help them to open up and tell you what they think. That’s a skill, and not everybody finds that easy, but it’s not specific to postdoc, it’s just about having open and honest conversations that enable people to think and work through tough issues.

Because it’s not obvious what a postdoc should do next if their grant’s running out and there’s no prospect of what’s happening, but that’s no different to a PhD student that’s running out of writing-up time. Hopefully we will all be giving PhD students support to help them to figure out the next step on their journey.

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I think we have to remember that both our PhD students, our postdocs and ourselves, have lots of relationships with organisations outside the building. Those relationships are really important to building good research collaborations and good proposals, and routes to impact. For PIs, I think we also need to think about how we can’t do all of that ourselves. Both of the previous examples have talked about how working with both postdoc and PhD colleagues, you can build those relationships. I think we always have to put that in context.

For me, I think the issue for me is I’ve done very few funded research projects that were pure research, pure science, pure social science and so on. Nearly all the ones I’ve had funded have had a stakeholder or an impact part to it, and at the middle of that relationship has been PhDs and postdocs, particularly postdocs. Different to the other two colleagues, of course, I’ve predominantly worked in social science and the arts sector. I’ve also worked with big IT companies, a bit like Simon. I’m not going to go to those examples, I’m going to go to my social science and arts ones.

My very, very first postdoc – I usually tell the story that my very, very first postdoc married my very, very first PhD student. That’s a different story! She came from a, in and out of academia a little bit, from after her degree, first degree, with some journalism background. The project was on some of the very first uses of websites by political parties. While she was a postdoc, she really wanted to stay engaged with the journalism element because she thought it was relevant to the project. She wasn’t sure whether academia was her thing, and so on. I just said, ‘Well, if you want time, you’ve got development time if you want to use that to do your journalism qualification, learn shorthand, those kinds of things, then go on and do’, and she did. She, in the end, became a journalist for the ‘Guardian’, originally in political stuff.

Then she became their gardening editor because her hobby was gardening. Very recently, she’s gone freelance, writing books and blogs about gardening. If you look at the work she does, it has a, there’s a strong research element in it and it’s not just, these are things in my garden, it’s ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ type stuff. That was her career journey. Also, it means I’ve always got a contact in the press, not so much these days because she’s gone into gardening, but historically, always had a contact there. I think the second example I’d use is when, before I came to Liverpool, I used to run a big research institute. Within it, we had a group that was constantly facing industry around the relevance of both packaging and product design.

Now, a lot of what they offered was a consultancy service and contract research service to small businesses and so on. Actually, there was a bit of a two-way flow going on there between these research, essentially people appointed on PDRA contracts with research backgrounds, a number of which, who then went on to work in small companies or large companies, essentially got poached from us, to take their research skills into – or, to be honest, one of the packaging companies we worked with, we thought, that person there is brilliant. We poached them in to become a researcher. There was a very two-way street there. The revolving door we might like between research and industry was there because it was built in. Now, the advantage there was we had a big pile of funding.

We had a couple of million pounds over five years to do that kind of relationship. It was written into it. Importantly, as Simon, as everyone has been saying, that two-way street between the clients, the stakeholders and us, kept setting the research agenda, or we could take a research agenda like environmental packaging out to these companies that weren’t previously looking at it. That was an example of quite a lot of two-way backwards and forwards. Two last ones then, when I was running the ICC at Liverpool, when I moved here, again, we spent most of our time working with small stakeholder organisations. Our researchers were often people who had come in from the arts sector, the cultural sector, where they’d had a role doing research and evaluation.

They came into the university to do that in an academic research context. When they left, they’d either moved into academia, or they’d moved into doing that to, say, a large arts or a charity organisation, taken those research skills out into there. Lastly, I think I want to talk about one last thing, is activism, and my current postdoc, Helena, doesn’t mind me saying this, she’s had a career doing activism around data and digital rights. Data and digital politics, what citizens’ rights should be, what our rights should be to look after our own data and so on. She’s written on that. The project she’s working on is on that. What she wants to do is still have that activism impact.

All the way through the last couple of years, I’ve been supporting her to go to events, to do things, to publish in non-academic contexts, where she can take that forwards. Now, she’s about to have an interview next week for a one-day-a-week placement in Parliament, to work with the Online Harms select committee, to bring that, both the, so that brings together her academic research work, her activism and so on, and of course, gives us a fantastic route to impact for stuff from our project. I think, what I’m trying to say is that, sometimes, I think the idea is you just need to think about where the people that you’re working with, the postdocs, want to be, what’s the creative space they want to work in, and supporting them there.

Then, I think, everybody wins. The other couple of quick things I’d say was, if I look at – as Simon said this, I was just trying to toss up some numbers. I’d say it’s been about 50:50 of postdocs and PhD students of mine who’ve gone into academia or non-academic roles. A couple of colleagues are now lecturers at universities, including Liverpool. Others are on their next postdoc-type appointment. Quite a few have moved into arts organisations, a couple into big IT, educational, technology, IT industry, strangely enough.

Then, obviously, design companies. Again though, that was not by default, hopefully, that was by design, that was where they wanted to go. I think it’s important that we provide that opportunity as much as we can. We can’t control everything. Who knows when the jobs come up, whether they’re an exact fit, etc.? I do also think we advantage colleagues, both when they are trying to move into academia or elsewhere. If they’ve had a variety of experience and they can bring that, as was just said earlier, to an interview, then they stand out as a candidate, and so on. I think those are some examples from me. I just couldn’t think of working not like this if that makes sense. I think it’s pointing out that, what is it you want to do? Academia, if your next job after your postdoc is not another postdoc, right, it’s likely to be a lecturer and so on.

Well, that includes the teaching, administration, and all the other stuff we have to do. It’s a specific type of career path and so on. The person we probably should have here is my wife, Rachel who’s spent half her career outside of academia and half in. She’d probably tell you the dark sides of both, as well as the whatever. She worked for research-facing organisations in the public sector. She did nothing but research when she was in those roles. She did, five days a week, research. Some of us would beg to do five days a week research.

There’s lots and lots of roles out there that people can take on. We have to remember that the vast majority of PhD students and postdocs do end up working in industry or other things. I think it’s about telling those stories, that if somebody doesn’t – and telling the truth about what an academic job means. An academic job means the teaching and the research and the chasing grants and so on, whereas some research organisations, you can spend your whole career doing research, never have to worry about chasing a grant or teaching anybody, and so on. I think it’s about getting over that fear that if you’re not capable of doing something outside academia – the number of academics who tell me that, which I just weep at because the amount of skillsets we’ve got… As was just explained, about doing a scientific brief for a minister, I’ve had to do that. ‘We want something for the red box in two days’, and you just sit down there with a big pile of paperwork, and so on. I got a secondment into government for a while.

There’s huge amounts of skillset we’ve got and it’s talking to people about, well, where is that best used? What do you want to use your research skills for? One of the examples, a thing we’ve got on the Prosper site is a colleague I work with in a charity, who’s got a geography PhD and so on, but spends her time managing and directing research in a charity, research to have impact on a daily basis. That sounds like an exciting job to me and it’s a researcher’s job. I think it’s about unpicking that. Also, making people feel confident that if you move out of academia, you’re not losing the academic-ness, and so on.

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