Dr Becky Carlyle - Building Labs Where It's Safe to Fail

Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Failure in academia gets treated here as a structural problem before it gets treated as a personal one. The starting point is that this is one of very few careers where a run of setbacks can genuinely end the job, so the emotional weight attached to ordinary professional rejection is not a resilience deficit, it is a symptom of the environment. From there the focus shifts to what group leaders can actually do. Being open enough about small mistakes that they get discussed rather than hidden.

Training junior team members properly so they can ask the questions they think are stupid. And the harder one: how you react on the day someone drops a stack of unlabelled sample plates, or damages an ultracentrifuge rotor beyond repair. Two contrasting stories cover exactly that, and the difference in lab atmosphere afterwards lasted months. Also here: the "Not Yet" board in Oxford where twenty rejections earns the team a dinner, CVs of failures, the case for the narrative CV, why putting on a brave face may be feeding burnout rates in academia, and when to hand someone to proper support rather than carrying it yourself.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-building-labs-where-its-safe-to-fail/

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Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer's Research UK Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford, and has previously worked in the USA. Becky writes about her experiences of starting up a research lab and progressing into a more senior research role. Becky's research uses mass-spectrometry to quantify thousands of proteins in the brains and biofluids of people with dementia. Her lab is working on various projects, including work to compare brain tissue from people with dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease, to tissue from people who have similar levels of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology but no memory problems. Becky is also a mum, she runs, drinks herbal teas and reads lots of books.

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This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, who we thank for their ongoing support.

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