Career Column

Despite attempts by many universities to modernize their policies on working conditions and misconduct, the academic system has pushed back. Here’s how to ensure lasting change.

After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.

If we don’t slow down, the research enterprise is going to crash, argues Adrian Barnett.

Small acts of change have helped me to reset and give myself a break.

Do you struggle with the blank page? These strategies could help.

Academia too often has a ‘passion first, money second’ culture. Overcoming this mindset is crucial for building a happy career.

With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

A research background and a passion for sewing inspired by her father helped Yasmin Proctor-Kent to reach the finals of the 2025 television competition.

By creating a network of early-career principal investigators, my colleagues and I have enacted change and battled bureaucracy.

Science has become obsessed with publishing numbers. With this new satirical proposal, have we reached peak metric?

Unlike my colleagues, I faced a five-year wait to publish my PhD project. Here’s how I coped.

Grappling with difficulties in your career? Try asking an AI-powered advisory panel of experts, suggests Carsten Lund Pedersen.

Is it fair for grant reviewers — who are often our colleagues — to judge the legitimacy of career breaks due to personal circumstances?

A run-in with some artefact-laden AI-generated analyses convinced Lei Zhu that machine learning wasn’t making his role irrelevant, but more important than ever.

Posting preliminary results on my group’s website allowed someone to plagiarize our work, but it also exonerated us.

By refusing to bend the rules I set for myself, I created structure and a better environment for my mental health.

With thousands of papers being published everyday, it can be a task working out which matter. Here are some tips to help you decide.

How do you convince a teenager that a research career is within their grasp? Madeleine Cheung and her mentor, NASA scientist Charles Miller, explain.

YATSI aims to represent scientists based in academia and in industry, and to build bridges between the two sectors.

The professional-networking platform helped Elena Hoffer to launch a company and sparked a global conversation to re-imagine academia.