Ocean noise (part 1!)

I thought it was about time I wrote my first ‘fascinating science’ blog post, and considering I recently co-authored a report on ocean noise, and just gave a lecture on ‘human noise in the sea’, I thought this would be a good topic.

Listening for sperm whales & beaked whales in the Bahamas

I have spent a lot of time listening to the sounds of the sea, sitting on boats with earphones strapped to my ears connected up to a hydrophone (underwater microphone) being towed behind the boat.  The sound of the sea can be soothing (is there any better sound than sitting on a beach listening to waves crashing?)… I’ve sat listening to a cacophony of snapping shrimp (sounds like popcorn popping or small firecrackers), breaking of waves, the soothing sound of rain on the surface of the sea, the slow echoey clicks of sperm whales, and the joyful sound of dolphins whistling away.  Even snorkelling you hear all sorts of sounds from marine life – marine life is surprisingly noisy.  So it can be a soothing life, the life of a bioacoustician (that’s what they call us – scientists who study the sounds of life) – sitting listening to the sounds of the sea (and admittedly sometimes falling asleep to the sound of the sea!). [For a good collection of sounds of the sea check out the DOSITS (Discovery of Sound in the Sea) website here]

But the sea is full of human noise too, sitting on ships listening to the sea obviously there is the continuous sound of the ship as it moves through the water.  I have worked mostly on quiet scientific ships with ‘quiet’ propellers, but there were times when the quietened propellers didn’t work well and at certain boat speeds there would be a loud high pitched constant squeal, giving you a headache as you tried to pick out any dolphin and whale sounds in the background.  Ships contribute an enormous amount of noise to the marine environment.  Propellers, flow noise of water around the ship, engine noise… all help to make a boat noisy – and there are A LOT of ships in the ocean.  Just think of all those ships transporting goods around the world, not to mention all the other boats that use the seas.  Studies have shown that shipping is responsible for a 3dB/year (that’s a doubling) in low frequency noise in the oceans (< 50 Hz – we can hear from 20 Hz to 20 kHz).  The sea is full of a constant hum of noise. Why does it matter? Low frequency sound can travel over massive distances – it propagates well.  In fact it propagates so well that some whales like blue whales make sounds of similarly low frequency to communicate across ocean basins – thousands of kilometres.  Scientists believe that this allows them to communicate for breeding purposes.  However with the increase in low frequency ocean noise, this now means that whales are only able to communicate over 100s of kilometres instead of 1000s of kilometres [see this article]. Who knows what the consequences of such changes are… if these sounds are used for finding mates then how are the whales coping not being able to communicate over such large distances?  Whales range over such large distances it makes it difficult to know how many of them there are and therefore how they are doing – we don’t know whether this increase in noise is having knock-on consequences on breeding success.  But what is increasingly being shown is that shipping noise is stressful for marine life.  There are a very few but increasing number of studies showing increasing levels of stress in animals exposed to increased shipping noise.  For whales, there is the wonderful study carried out on right whales:

Picture this: right whales have suffered over time… they are called right whales because they were the ‘right’ whales to hunt and were pretty decimated by the whaling industry.  But they hung on in there, but now struggle because they are prone to getting hit by ships.  Scientists did some wonderful studies looking at how they used the sea and found that there were certain areas that were most important for the animals for feeding purposes but these were right in the middle of the shipping lane – they told the government and managed to get the shipping lane adjusted so it avoided the right whale critical habitat [see this article].  What a win for conservation science!  The scientists continue to monitor the whales and started recording ocean noise.  Then along came 9/11, the shock of the plane going into the twin towers in New York (I remember seeing it on the internet working on one of the top floors of the second highest building in Manchester – I still remember the feeling of shock). Traffic to & from the US stopped.  This included a substantial reduction in shipping – in fact there was such a reduction in shipping that noise levels in the right whale habitat reduced by 6dB.  Meanwhile scientists continue to study the whales – now they were following the whales and getting dogs to sniff out their poo after they’d dived.  They collected that poo and analysed it for stress hormones.  They showed that right whales were less stressed during the time of reduced shipping noise, but much more stressed with the substantially higher level of ship noise [see this article].  So if right whales are more stressed from high levels of shipping noise other marine mammals are likely to be stressed out too.  This will have knock-on consequences for animal health, reproduction, and overall fitness.

And it’s not just whales that have been shown to get stressed due to high levels of noise – a study that was published only this week showed that shore crabs exposed to ship noise had a higher metabolism – ‘crabsget crabby exposed to ship noise’.  Similar studies have been done with shrimp showing lower levels of growth and lower reproductive rates with higher noise levels [see this paper].

So as our seas are getting noisier from all the ships travelling around the world delivering goods, there is a growing body of works showing that we are stressing out marine life.  I’m not sure what the solution is… ship builders are making quieter ships – but it takes a long time to change over a shipping fleet – ships are operational for decades.  It’s something to ponder over…

p.s. I see this blog as ‘ocean noise part 1’ because there are many other sources of human noise in the sea which cause problems for marine life… so watch this space for future blogs on ocean noise ;)

pps. Blog posts have been a bit slow because our household was hit by a 4 week flu virus (2 batches with not much recovery between).

Encouraging girls to love science

This post was prompted by the recent uproar over the recent article/blog in the Guardian 'Girls and science: why the gender gap exists and what to do about it'.  Initially I had skim read the article & thought it had some interesting ideas mainly for trying to address the mathematical side – encouraging girls to be methodological and increase their aptitude & confidence in maths.  I retweeted the link to the article.  Today there was a huge negative response (in the twittersphere) from respected women scientists & it made me reread the article.  I now realise it is very patronising – suggesting girls would respond better if science was dressed up as a ‘social science’ or admit to them that maths is hard work?!  Personally I loved maths & found it easy – nature or nurture?

So it made me think about why I chose science and how to best encourage my daughters to be interested in science (I’d hope I could encourage them to be interested simply in learning rather than being subject specific).

My Dad was an electrical & electronic engineer and he imparted his passion for electronics on me – taking me into his office to see computers the size of rooms (pretty amazing for a young mind!), and at a young age I was bought ‘101 electronic circuits’ kit.  My Dad wanted to explain how each circuit worked before I connected it up according to the instructions.  This approach bored me somewhat & I skipped most of the 101 circuits jumping to constructing the ‘listening device’ for spying in on conversations (if the device had been small enough, which it wasn’t), and the final project to build a radio (which I never got working!). I did this without my Dad’s accompanying explanation because I just wanted to see them working, not to know how it worked!  My Dad also taught me to program from a young age, which I did actually enjoy – but mostly for telling the computer to draw pictures, not to write games as my Dad suggested & certainly not to learn how to ‘file’ as my computer programming teacher wanted us to learn (I was one of the first to do a computer studies GCSE!).  So you could say that for me maybe all this passion of my Dad’s rubbed off on me.  But I never really was passionate about electronics in the way he was (as a child he was building radios & record players from scratch – born to non-scientific parents!).  I was excited by technology but now how it worked.  I was a Star Trek addict, and loved science fiction. I dreamed of future technology, and imagined that in my lifetime there would be holographic tvs (I guess 3D tvs are nearly what I was imagining though without necessary glasses), teleportation (wishful thinking)… And I did love maths.  I’m not quite sure how that happened, but I remember being really fired up about maths at primary school with a headmaster who was a mathematician.  He used to take over the class every so often to impart mathematical wisdom, and I have vivid memories of him lining us up enacting bases (at the age of 10!).  I whizzed through the ‘maths at work’ booklets competing with the other top maths performer in the class – another girl (who is now a lecturer in psychology).

Meanwhile I was becoming fascinated with biology – we lived in a beautiful spot in the countryside, and I’d spend ages lying in the grass watching the birds, looking at all the seeds lined up on the bracken fronds, marvelling at all the centimetre long newly hatched frogs leaping out of the grass as I walked along the path, hatching caterpillars into butterflies… this was a lone passion, not one that was passed onto me (and the passion that has remained).

At secondary school (unusually a state girls school), I dropped biology because I didn’t like the biology teacher (how much influence teachers do have!).  I still had my passion for maths but not overly for the other sciences – I loved maths and art.  When we were studying for our GCSEs we gained a new headmistress, one who was passionate about getting girls into engineering.  Something I’d never considered (despite having a Dad who was an engineer) – but she negotiated some free engineering evening courses at the local college & I signed up.  Admittedly there were only a small handful of us girls who signed up (not everyone’s idea of fun to do courses in evenings!)… but I loved it – the two courses I enjoyed the most was electronics (we had a project of designing and building a circuit – I think it was a light sensitive switching light – so the light came on when it got dark), and I loved the mechanical engineering class (making things on lathes).  I knew I didn’t really want to do mechanical engineering (it was fun playing on lathes but not something I wanted to do as a career) but really enjoyed the electronics J  So before you knew it I wanted to do electrical and electronic engineering at university & chose A-levels of maths, physics & chemistry (& art because I still loved that!).

I have to say that electronics did not live up to the excitement for me.  I did a degree, and 6 years working in industry before I gave it up.  I didn’t have an innate passion for the subject, and felt dissatisfied.  I guess my favourite part of the degree was my final year project working on image processing – analysing x-ray images of the vocal canal during speech, extracting the contour of the vocal canal so that mathematical models could be built to create better voice synthesis.  Fun stuff!  But my career followed a different trajectory, lovely people, but subject that just didn’t excite me (and I’ve rarely had problems being a woman in engineering, it just wasn’t an issue).  So eventually I retrained in my true innate passion of biology – still science though!  I have to say that of the few women engineers that I do know many did end up retraining – but they all stayed in science J  (maths teacher, oceanographer & computer programmer)… well apart from the girl who dropped out in the first year of our degree who left to study textiles (she knitted through the lectures).

So what does that teach me about how to encourage girls into science?  I do think that being unafraid of maths is a really essential starting line.  It isn’t difficult!  Ok… I’m not sure whether I found it easy because that’s the way my brain is wired or whether it was my Dad’s influence on me (note that neither of my sisters found maths easy, but then my Dad concentrated on ‘downloading’ his knowledge to me rather than them – though my middle sister did end up becoming a medical doctor which is very science based!).  I do think that many kids (male or female) get a brain blank on maths because they are told it is difficult.  So some of the suggestions in the Guardian article made me think that maybe these suggestions would help prompt young brains to think logically (following instructions for building lego, or following recipes, etc.), which would help make maths seem not so difficult (because it is really about learning rules). Also it is clear that schools do have a really important role – good teacher role models (I had to start biology from scratch after giving it up at 14 due to a dreadful teacher), events to encourage girls into science (or boys admittedly!).  The courses I did to encourage girls into engineering were great, but I’m not sure they were the answer because they were only taken up by a small handful of girls (& I think several of us ended up becoming engineers) – we need to encourage them earlier than this.  I do think good female role models could make a big difference… though it made no difference to me (I can’t think of any female scientists that particularly inspired me as a teenager).

As to me with my girls – I just plan to show my excitement for science, and encourage an enquiring mind.  I’m not sure I follow the ‘never tell the answer’ approach of the guardian article, but if my daughters are in the right frame of mind then I try to encourage them to solve problems or answer questions themselves (if they are not in the right frame of mind it’s better to give the answer & explain! In the end you want them to enjoy it, which you can’t if you get continuously frustrated).  My 3 year old is already showing promise for a good methodological brain… great at jigsaws and patiently watches me do something and copies meticulously.  But I must admit, I allow free creative reign when it comes to lego J I’ve always still harboured a secret desire to be an artist so I do like to allow as much creative flow as possible – but then this is pretty essential for scientists too!  I hope in the end my daughters will not be afraid of science & enjoy it.  However, I also hope that I equally encourage a love of literature, history, art, music,… and that the choice of career they end up with is one that is right for them. 

I guess as a parent, my take home message is to encourage an enquiring mind, but not to the detriment of enjoyment!  In my experience, if you enjoy it, you are more likely to want to keep doing it J  So maybe some of the suggestions in the article aren’t too bad taken with a pinch of common sense!

p.s. I will not be colour-coding according to the guardian article (are you kidding me?!!!)

pps. Alas my 3 year old is currently obsessed with princesses, so one of the favourite activities at the moment is to build a (freestyle) castle out of megablocks for the princess to live in and let down her long hair so a prince can climb up it.  Oh well, at least there is a science counter balance to the princess fetish in building a castle (which is great fun!).

ppps. If you want a giggle, read the counter-article ‘Boys& Science: The gender gap and how to maintain it’ J

New year, new blog, New Year’s resolutions!

Well I was hoping to do a weekly blog but a few weeks before Christmas life just got completely crazy… work deadlines, some horrible lingering virus of nigh on a week of high temperatures & three weeks of sinus pain, and of course trying to sort Christmas presents!  The bug hit just before a NERC funding workshop, I was so feverish I just couldn’t force myself to go, which was pretty gutting.  But we also had a deadline for a report about ocean noise that week which I worked on from my sickbed (deadlines don’t move if you’re ill!).  I was actually grateful that the days I felt my worst were work days so I didn’t have my two daughters to look after, they were safely tucked away in nursery having fun.  Being ill and looking after young children is not much fun!!!

So suffice to say that the blog got abandoned as a low priority task.  But new year, new me!  ;)  New Year’s resolutions?  Well I am one of those types who like making New Year resolutions … though I can’t say I always keep them!  My fantastic sister of ultimate willpower managed to give up chocolate for a whole year but alas I wish I had her willpower!  But it’s nice to have goals… even if they hang over you like a dark cloud & say ‘look what you’re not achieving’, leaving you with that continuous guilt feeling (not selling it well am I?) ;)

So New Year’s resolutions to try this year:  well I always start with a fitness one.  This year I will run a half marathon (and do the training for it).  I attempted this one last year, and did fantastically for the first 3 months training (I was very chuffed with myself for keeping it up… though I was on maternity leave… so no work commitments), but then I sprained my ankle so badly that I was out of action for 6 months (how I did this is another story altogether – one involving remote walks with toddlers on my own on the Yorkshire Moors, an ambulance and very kind strangers).

Sad to say the rest of my New Year’s resolutions are work based.  Now that both girls are settling relatively easily each evening now, my primary New Year’s resolution is to work weekday evenings.  This is a sad but true necessity of being an academic… working 3 days a week during the office hours is simply not enough to keep up with an academic career.  There is a never-ending pile of work to do, and alas since I have returned to work from maternity leave in June I have not managed to write one new paper, simply because I’m fire fighting everything else & haven’t managed to put in the extra time for a variety of reasons.  So… evening working here I come… yippee! (?)

Onto my next New Year’s resolution: to write at least 3 new first author papers (& submit!) within 2013.  Hoping this is reasonable at 3 days a week… I have one started (more analysis to do), another one analysis in progress but no paper outline as yet, and one is an idea un-started & data looking at me and taunting me (looking forward to it but need to get the other two out of the way first!). It’s on my blog so I’m committed now ;)

The other work New Year’s resolution is to raise my work profile J  Will keep up the tweeting (I am a twitter addict now, I don’t think this will be a problem!) & blogging, adding in some ‘fascinating science’ themed blogs.  But also I will try to combat my fear of raising my profile & sign up to The Women’s Room.  The Women’s Room is trying to re-balance the media bias towards men as expert representatives in their fields, by providing a central resource of women experts in their fields.  I have shied away from the media in the past because I have always felt like I would say the wrong thing. Always afraid that I will say something that is completely wrong, and have fellow experts in the field gaffaw and write me off as a scientist.  Basically in the words of Alienor Chauvenet in her blog post I suffer from imposter syndrome. So I’m going to fluff up my feathers like a bird preparing for a battle, and get out there and be confident & shout about myself ;)  Ok maybe not quite that bold, but I will try to be better at self-promotion – through Twitter, my blog, and use many of the other tools out there to raise my profile online (linkedIn, ResearcherID, etc.)… and not shy away from media coverage.

A new category for me this year is a ‘green’ New Year’s resolution was prompted by @HuffPostGreen to have a green eco-friendly NewYear’s resolution for 2013.  I ummed and ahhhed over this one… ‘eat less meat’ was a good idea but as ex-vegetarians we still eat very little meat, ‘have shorter showers’ was one option for saving more water, but I was a bit reluctant to have shorter showers – one of my few luxuries as a parent is my quiet time in the shower ;)  And anyway a couple of years ago I decided I’d rather have fewer showers than shorter ones (call me grubby if you like!).  So I settled on ‘consume less & only buy essential items’.  This was prompted by another @HuffPostGreen post about consuming less.  We consume resources at too high a rate for it to be sustainable, and I believe it is our addiction to consumption & ‘growth’ that is the real problem behind climate change, the wobbly economy, etc. So the article echoed the thoughts I have had for years. We, as individuals, and as a society need to learn to survive on a LOT less.  And to be honest I don’t believe we need to buy so much to be happy.  Live simple, be happy J So this year I will try to consume less only buy ‘necessary’ items (or things that have a smaller impact on the environment).  I’m not sure it’ll be as easy as it sounds… we are already thinking of a new sofa because ours is lumpy & looks like something out of a student house, and replace the bed with a sofa-bed to make more space in our spare bedroom.  When really we have a perfectly functional sofa & bed!  Hmmm.  Will keep you posted on progress ;)

My final resolution is just simply plagiarised from @rachnp89’s New Year’s resolution (check out her blog post here) – to ‘maintain a sense of wonder’.  It is so easy to just get bogged down in endless work, keeping up with demanding toddlers, keeping up with chores, that it is easy to lose perspective and feel a bit lost and bewildered (& stressed) by life.  In work life it is easy to lose sight of why you chose the career in the first place: a love of the subject… for me biology.  When I started out in biology I had a sense of wonder about every new thing I learnt… who knew that mychorrizal fungi formed a network of interactions between trees in a forest providing the trees with nutrients and gaining food in return – how cool is that? I was continuously amazed and excited by the new world I was delving into.  Darwin’s finches were a revelation, I even loved learning about molecular pathways in molecular biology, it was biological mathematics… fun!  These days I can feel that wonder less because it’s easy to get bogged down in too much detail.  I am going to plagiarise Rachael’s blog again here by quoting her quote from David Foster Wallace:

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me...

... the real value of a real education ... has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: "This is water.""This is water."

So this year I am going to remember to take delight in the small things… in my science, but also in the everyday things – little moments of joy from being a parent (like my daughter running away from the waves on the beach yesterday… not just the delight on her face but the wonderful misty drizzle over the sea giving the landscape a mystical calm feel), smiles from strangers on the street, and just to delight in nature like I used to – hearing birds sing, jumping in puddles, watching snails explore...

Which New Year’s resolution am I most looking forward to?  Definitely this last one, it’s a great counterbalance against a hectic life, especially one where we are continuously bombarded by bad news. 

So here’s to a wondrous 2013!

Men are parents too!

My husband read my blog and said I wrote about the juggle of parenthood with my career as if I was a single Mum.  This and a few prompts from twitter colleagues has prompted this blog.

Why single out women in the juggle of parenthood and careers?  I answer that by saying that it is usually the women who take maternity leave & hence the break from their careers (breastfeeding is a woman’s domain despite it apparently being possible for men's nipples to be stimulated to produce milk…).  It is also usually the women who take the brunt of the childcare – going part time, and taking off time if the kids are sick.  However childcare does not have to be the woman’s domain.  I do know some couples where the man goes part time or even cares for the child(ren) full time.  In fact, my husband and I agreed that whoever got the permanent job first would be the main breadwinner, and the other would be the main child-carer.  But I found myself being unsatisfied with this thought – I wanted to do it! In the end I would rather take the hit on my career.  Is this selfish?  In fact, I suspect that of some of the (few!) couples I know where the man is the main child-carer, the woman would rather at least share the childcare if not be the main child-carer rather than the breadwinner.  I’m sure this is not always the case though!  So for me, we were lucky – my husband got a permanent lectureship which meant (a) we had the security of a permanent income to have a family and (b) I got my way being the main carer for our children.

Is this fair?  Are there a lot of Dad’s out there who would like to be the main carers?  I know a full time Dad who wouldn't want it any other way (I’m not sure how his wife feels about this, but there may not be another option financially for some).  It is more difficult for men – the laws do not let men take more than 2 weeks paternity leave* (and in fact in the university where my husband works the men only got statutory pay i.e. severely reduced pay for those two weeks, whereas women get a few months at full pay – how is that fair? My husband took leave instead of paternity leave but still had all the work to do when he came back – delayed stress).  There is a definite need for the laws to change (aka Germany/Sweden/Norway) so that maternity leave can be divided equally between parents, and there needs to be a stronger culture of encouraging more flexible working. I would be interested to find out what difference this legislation has had on women being retained in science (or elsewhere) in countries like Sweden and Norway - do they have better female representation because of this?  You'd hope so!  I would be happy to share childcare equally with my husband – say both working 4 days a week rather than me working 3 days a week and him full time).

And to plug my husband’s efforts – I am lucky to have a very supportive husband who will look after the girls at weekends when I need to work, or take time off to look after the girls when I have meetings on my non-working days when the girls aren't in nursery.  (At which point I should also plug my mother-in-law who comes to look after the girls at the drop of the hat when my husband can’t take the time off – especially when I have overseas meetings to go to). And as to single parents… I have no idea how you do it!

*Addendum: apparently men can take up to 26 weeks additional paternity leave if the child's mother has returned to work (in the UK) - though as it was pointed out by a friend who discussed this option with their partner, if he had gone for this option it would have been to the sacrifice of his career - 'laughed out of the building' was the expression she used :(  It would be interesting to hear from any men who have taken this option... encourage others & a new culture?

Parenthood versus career?

The SpotOn conference focused my thoughts on parenthood and trying to juggle a career, which has to be one of the main reasons for the lack of women in science as you scale the career ladder.  It’s the same in any field, I've had many a discussion with non-scientist friends on the difficulties of balancing career & parenthood (not always women!).  I actually think that I am very lucky to have a flexible career where I can work part time flexible working hours & flexible location – one of the benefits of an academic career. By contrast, a close friend also has two little girls, her employers won’t let her work less than a 4 day week, and she has to commute into London by train.  She is only allowed to take a limited small number of days off to look after her girls when they are ill, which is difficult in the early days when they are beset by bug after bug.  So I feel lucky.

The downside is that an academic job is not limited 9-5, there is a limitless amount of work to do to keep up in academia, so it’s the norm, and it’s expected to put in a lot of extra hours.  As a working parent this makes keeping up with your colleagues really difficult, especially in the early days of parenthood with bugs galore, sleepless nights, and just plain exhaustion.  And when you don’t have ‘tenure’ in American speak, you are trying to compete against fellow scientists who don’t have those constraints & can put in a lot more hours. Personally, I really feel this.  I could work full time, but I want to see my girls grow up and be involved in their lives especially in these pre-school years, so I choose to work part time.  So my choice, my hit?  This choice does make me feel like I am drowning in my academic career, struggling to balance data analysis & paper writing with writing grants to provide me with my next post-doc.  Plus all the other commitments – all the European project meetings, associated reports, etc. (why are European projects so bureaucratic?), other reports, paper reviews, helping students, etc. etc. (blogs?!). At times I have reached near rock bottom and wondered if this career I’d worked so hard to get was worth fighting so hard for. I continuously consider giving up on my fight for my academic career.  I suspect I am not alone.  This must be one the most significant contributing factors into the lack of women in science at higher levels.  In the end for me, my love of science is winning out so far, and everyone says it does get easier as the kids get older.

However, things are getting easier for women in academia.  I have been very lucky in my choice of ‘bosses’.  In my first post-doc, I worked with a female academic with kids. She was incredibly supportive when 6 months into my post-doc I moved to the other end of the country when my husband got a lectureship (she let me work remotely).  And she was also very supportive when a year later I went off on maternity leave!  Women like her, who are successful academics having juggled a family, are an inspiration to women like me – she makes me feel like it’s possible.  We need women high up in academia (and science) to inspire us and make us think that it is possible to be a successful woman & parent.

My current boss is not female, but is a parent, and an advocate of the Athena Swan charter.  The University of Exeter is a member of the Athena Swan charter which is in place to advance the representation of women in science, engineering and technology.  To encourage this, my new boss (& hence the university) are keen to support part-time flexible working – I work 3 days a week, and since I live a 2 hour commute from the campus work flexibly between home and the campus.  This makes a huge difference – of course it’s still a struggle to get all the work done I need to to progress my career, but a flexible working environment and a supportive boss and university makes it actually possible to consider staying in academia.

Of course what is really needed for women in any career is a change in law and culture – the ability for both men and women to share maternity and paternity leave, the ability for both parents to work flexible part time hours, so that it is possible to share the ‘burden’ of childcare.

(and as a side, could academics work a bit less hard please? I don’t want to spend every spare hour I’m not with the kids working or feel like I have to sacrifice family time so I can keep my career on track. Moan over - now back to the grind ;) I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't a passion!)

...coming soon:' Equality? Applying for jobs while pregnant'

Watch out - new blogger alert!

My first ever blog - well that's a lie... I did start up a research project blog a few years back which was great fun.  But this is my first ever personal blog.  It's a bit scary!

Why now? Well it's all down to a chain of events starting with a course on applying for funding which included a very inspiring talk from Ceri Lewis (@CezzaLew) who in part was extolling the joys of twitter. Where have I been?  I have definitely been 'all at sea' without twitter - it's like a little beacon of light in the darkness.  Now I can keep up to date with what is going on in science as it happens.  I have gone from being blind to twitter to being a twitter addict (helped by my newly acquired smartphone).

Twitter introduced me to a whole new world - the online world of women in science.  I am no feminist (as a friend pointed out if I'm fighting for female rights I'm a feminist) - I have never had any problems as a woman in science despite originally working in a very male dominated world of engineering (I was one of 10 girls out of 120 on my degree)*.  However, since I have had children, the difficulties of trying to keep my newly formed academic career in marine biology alive while balancing part time working and the demands of parenthood makes life very different. I really am struggling to keep an academic career on track only working 3 days a week while struggling to put in the extra hours needed. Three and one year olds are very demanding (as are academic careers)! Since I came back to work after my second daughter was born, I have definitely felt all at sea in my academic career with a severe loss of self confidence. Finding twitter and all these other women in science blogging and tweeting has made a huge difference to my self confidence.  I have been inspired by many of the talks in the SpotOn series of talks (see the Women in Science: Improving the visibility of women in science both online and offline session), and by women scientist bloggers and tweeters like Athene Donald (see her blog post 'To blog or not to blog'). I no longer feel all at sea, but part of a big community of women scientists :) Thank you!

So I decided to take the plunge and start to blog. I'm not sure how the blog will evolve, or how often I will post.  But hopefully it will resonate with others out there - male or female that are struggling to keep on the academic rollercoaster while experiencing the other rollercoaster that is parenthood.  And please pass on any tips for doing this amazing juggling act, because I could do with all the tips available - I'm not sure I'm managing it very well!

Watch this space... ;)
(and follow me on Twitter @ClareEmbling)

ps. also planning to use the blog to share fascinating science :) So watch this space even if you're not a struggling scientist & parent...

* Eleven years as an electrical and electronic engineer (degree & working in industry) and now ten years as a marine biologist (MRes, PhD & on post-doc number 2)...