The Big Life Scientist Survey
Scientists, we want to hear your views in The Big Life Scientist Survey!
The aim of The Big Life Scientist Survey is to highlight the biggest challenges life scientists are facing today around funding, pressure, publication and more. It’ll only take you five minutes to complete, it's completely anonymous, and at the end you can have the option of entering our prize draw to win $500 of Hello Bio vouchers too.
What's The Big Life Scientist Survey All About?
We’ve been speaking to a lot of life scientists recently for our Interviews with Scientists blog series and first ever Lab Heroes Awards, and we’re hearing the same issues coming up again and again:
Science can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle; experiments sometimes fail (sometimes repeatedly…), there is a lot of pressure – both external and internal – positions are often not very secure [and] hours are often irregular Kimberley Evans, Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge
I think the biggest challenge facing life scientists and their work at present is the lack of funding that there is to fund all the innovative ideas that are being thought of and applied for. Even with the new Dementia Research Institute that has been funded by the government there will still be many projects that are of good scientific principle but cannot get funded. Christina Murray, UCL Institute of Neurology
The lack of female role models in science really hit me when I was a Postdoc at Edinburgh in the Mechanical Engineering Department. In my institute there was one female lecturer out of seven! I also want to talk about the pressures that face PhD students and Postdocs. It’s something which comes with huge amounts of pressure, and definitely isn’t talked about enough. Maz, Science Vlogger: ‘Have You Ever Wondered'
I think some of the main challenges early career researchers are facing are the pressure to publish, short term contracts, and gender imbalance, to name just a few. Dr Deborah Kronenberg-Versteeg, University of Cambridge
Whether it’s stress and pressure, access to funding, or diversity in the lab, we want to shine a light on the biggest barriers life scientists are facing today, help you get heard, and tell it like it really is...
By completing our Life Scientist survey (which will only take a few minutes), you’ll be helping us to share with the wider world what life is like for the majority of life scientists working today. We want to hear from as many of you as possible, and make a lot of noise when we get the results, so please share the survey link far and wide with your networks and colleagues.
Your answers are completely anonymous - but if you like, once you have completed the survey, you can provide your email address to be added into a prize draw. The winner of the prize draw will receive a $500 Hello Bio voucher, and two runners up will receive a $100 voucher and a goody bag each.
