In this post we’ll cover what I’ve been up to recently, including a fancy invite-only research seminar at a castle in Germany.
For previous monthly updates see here: Beyond the PhD Series.
Work
Research fellow (postdoc) job
Since starting my current research fellow role at Bristol around 3 years ago I’ve mostly been employed on one big fellowship grant which my boss manages. This has meant that I’ve had a lot of freedom, and not had to worry about delivering specific bits of work. However, that funding pot was starting to run dry so I’ve started to become more involved with new funded projects.
Recently I’ve been managing a series of small grants, mostly in the £5-£15k range. These small grants are sometimes less competitive but also can be a surprising amount of admin work to manage. In actual fact there will be a blog post coming out soon on one of their websites since I had to write a blog post for them at the mid point of our £5k grant…
On top of that, I find that with short grants, which sometimes only run for a few weeks or a month, there is more scope to fall behind and therefore be trying to play catch up when you should be moving on to a new project. That has felt like the case for the last few months!
However thankfully I’ve now moved to being funded by two grants which are part of the same bigger bit of research, so I can largely now focus on one piece of work. Though I’m sure I’ll get distracted by other interesting side projects! The project is about using machine learning to predict methane emissions using satellite data. Generally things are going great with work on this big project and I’m enjoying it a lot.
In January to March I was employed 4 days per week at the university, and starting from April this reduced down to 3.5 days per week: with the rest of my time spent running the spin-out company.
Dagstuhl Seminar
In January I went to Dagstuhl: a fancy invite-only computer science research venue where you spend about a week discussing a certain topic. The seminar I was invited to was: “From Research to Certification with Data-Driven Medical Decision Support Systems“.
It’s based in a castle in Germany, a pretty cool venue!
The group was composed of academics, medics, and entrepreneurs. It felt a bit intimidating but everyone was really friendly. The venue is in the middle of nowhere, but great: if you ever get the chance to go I recommend it.
An article we wrote summarising some of our discussions is now under review at a journal.
Papers
So far this year there has been lots of paper action:
- We submitted a paper rejected from a major conference to the “Late Breaking Work” track of the same conference.
Outcome: Rejected. We got lots of good feedback. I’m now rewriting it for a journal. - A colleague linked to the methane emissions work I mentioned before submitted a bit of our work to a workshop at a major AI conference (ICLR 2025 Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning).
Outcome: Accepted, woo. - A few years ago I supervised an undergraduate on their research project and I figured the work could also be suitable for that same climate change workshop, so wrote it up quickly while returning from the Dagstuhl event.
Outcome: Accepted. The reviewers loved it, so I’m really glad we submitted it! - Finally, recently I supervised another undergrad and we submitted their work (with them as first author again!) to the same workshop.
Outcome: Rejected. They provided some useful feedback, and actually the meta-reviewer offered to discuss the work with us which has been very useful. - The Dagstuhl workshop paper I mentioned above is currently under review at a journal.
- In February we returned our revisions for a paper under review at a journal.
Grants
In February we found out that we were rejected at the first stage for a ~£1.25M grant I was working on with my boss. Apparently less than 10% of applicants got invited to stage 2. Grants are becoming really competitive.
Lectureships
Last year I submitted my first application for a lecturer position. I was rejected without getting shortlisted.
There are currently a few more lecturer positions advertised, so I’m currently deciding whether or not to apply. At the moment I’m thinking to not apply, because I’m still keen to move abroad and know I wouldn’t want to give up a job which is so hard to get in the first place.
Spin-out company
There are lots of changes happening but we’re making great progress in the spin-out company which I help to run. We’re fortunate to be on a few different accelerators and support programmes, providing lots of useful input on topics such as regulations and go to market strategy.
The Savvy Scientist website
New posts
Since the last post in this Beyond the PhD series, I’ve posted three new articles:
- Academic Networking 101: How to Build Your Research Community
- Part Time PhD: What to Expect and How to Succeed
- How to Write an Effective Research Introduction: Examples and Tips
Outreach
It’s always nice to get some engagement and recently I’ve been invited to give a few talks. I’m limited on time so can’t accept everything but I gave one talk, remotely, for the Biochemistry Society on ‘Stress Management During a PhD’.
They recorded the talk and it is available below if you want to check it out:
Generally in research I give 5-15 minute talks, so it felt very strange to talk for around 40 minutes plus questions!
I always find it strange watching myself on video so I’ve not dared watch it back, but I received lovely feedback afterwards so hopefully people found the advice useful.
I still struggle with nerves when public speaking, but do find that the more I do it the more confident I feel: although I’m not sure the stomach butterflies will ever completely disappear!
Website traffic
In January – March the blog had around 15k unique visitors per month, and just over 20k views per month:
Time off
Food growing
Since buying my house around 4 years ago, I’ve been trying to grow lots of different types of fruits and vegetables in the garden and create our own miniature ‘food forest’.
My partner has become very supportive and we’ve recently turned things up a notch, having bought around another 6 bare root dwarf fruit trees, and lots of different fruit bushes. We now have around 12 different fruit trees and many kinds of fruit growing. I’m excited for them to all settle in and hopefully produce some tasty food for us!
It’s amazing to see how much can fit into a fairly small space, although due to most of the garden being patio we are starting to accumulate a rather hefty number of plant pots. I’ve also started to add fruit plants into the borders where possible, although I suspect the local wildlife will eat the majority of the fruits before we get to them!
I also tried my hand at fruit tree grafting for the first time after needing to prune some branches on the new apple trees. I still find it amazing that you can grow several varieties of apples on a single tree. I did two grafts and one seems to have taken successfully, so for a first effort I’m very pleased!
Also, there were some trees getting cut down in our local area and we had an opportunity to take some of the logs and try growing oyster mushrooms on them. I don’t actually know what type of tree the wood came from so we’ll see if they do anything, but it’s a fun experiment.
In addition to growing food in my own garden, I also volunteered for a couple of hours with a local project, planting some new fruit trees to create a community fruit orchard. The variety in the picture is the rather interestingly named ‘shit smock’ plum!
I’m really looking forward to seeing how the trees grow over the next few years.
Books I’ve recently read
One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate – Kate Bradbury. I can’t remember where I saw this book recommended but thought it sounded like my kind of thing, since I’m trying to make my garden as sustainable as possible. The book was reasonably good, though much more of a narrative with a drawn out (and sometimes mundane) story than I was interested in.
Personal finances
Income
Currently I’m getting paid through my academic work and not the spin-out: so that we can concentrate on using money in a few key places: mainly employing other staff who aren’t part time.
January to March I was employed 4 days per week at the university, earning £2365.21 per month after all taxes. This’ll drop slightly going forwards, since I’ll now be 3.5 days per week for the rest of the year.
Savings
Besides when I used up most of my savings to put down a deposit on my house, these past few months have been the worst ever period for my savings.
In the three months this post covers, my savings went up £1489 in total. For comparison, last year my savings on average went up £1700 per month. I realise my situation really isn’t very dire but when I’ve been diligently saving for so long, and I didn’t even buy anything exciting, it’s still disheartening. There has just been a lot of political stuff going on which has led some of my investments going down – caused by a certain someone getting into office in January…
In February I actually took money out from stock market funds involving the US. Yes yes, “Time in the market beats timing the market” but I can’t help but feel like this time is different, we’ll see if that’s true. Currently I’m happy with my decision and I was still up compared to the original money I’d invested over the past few years. I’ll likely gradually feed it back in.
The declining political situation in the US is deeply concerning, and in fact I expect many people such as myself could likely be declined entry into the country, with a situation likely to only get worse. In somewhat related news, I recently set up a Bluesky account which you can find here.
Progress towards my 2025 goals
Last post I introduced each of the following goals. Let’s check in on progress now that we’re a quarter of the way through the year:
Better work-life balance. Generally successful so far. Less working at the weekends, and I’ve signed up for some different social events when in the past I’d otherwise have been too consumed with work during the week.
More deep work. This is on track. I’ve had less meetings and more opportunities to do meaningful work.
Go somewhere exciting for a holiday. This requires some attention. Potentially I’ll be going on holiday to Japan, or travelling more widely, towards the end of this year.
Do more with this website. I’ve not progressed this as much as I’d like to have done. Though that invited talk was a step in the right direction.
Spend more time outdoors. We’ve had some great weather recently and with lots of new plants to care for I’ve had a good reason to ensure I’m outside a lot. It’s great.
I hope you’ve had a great start to 2025. If you enjoyed this post be sure to take a look at previous updates in the Beyond the PhD Series.
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