Posted on by mamothena

About that funding…

I have been thinking a lot about funding for the next year of my PhD. It will be Year Four. Almost universally, it seems that PhD programs only fund you for about ¾ of the time you actually need to complete your studies.  Is the idea that you get a job towards the end? Or that you hurry up and finish?  If you go online my story is not unique; this is a common experience for many PhD students. This happens in South Africa, the rest of the continent, and even abroad. Discussion forums abound with PhD students offering each other encouragement and tips on how to survive/ where to get funding. It would almost be charming if it wasn’t so serious.

My lack of future funding feels like an individual failure – but it really is part of a larger societal problem. Postgraduate funding in South Africa is quite inadequate for a country that wants to pull up its socks. Not enough people are funded, and the lucky ones are not funded sufficiently. The issue of funding is not just about making life easy for a PhD student, as important as that peace of mind is. For South Africa in particular, there is a “need to bring a fresh outlook to the country’s development hurdles by training up postgraduate students who have been raised in disadvantaged communities and deeply understand the kinds of problems we need to overcome as a nation”. These are some of the thoughts of UCT vice chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng on the issue of postgraduate funding in the country.

To widen our lens a bit, we live on a continent that is 16% of the world population but only produces 1% of its research output. Wait, that’s less than 1%.  Lack of political will to invest in research and development (R&D) on the continent is one of the main factors leading to these dire statistics. South Africa is cited as only one of a few countries who have fulfilled the African Union pledge to spend 1% of their budget on R&D.

Where does this leave us? International funding and collaboration. There is nothing wrong with international partnerships. But as Dr Alan Christoffels of the University of the Western Cape writes, “the dependence on international collaboration and investment without any pan-African framework for increasing and sustaining local funding, limits Africa’s ability to drive a scientific agenda that is aligned to its specific needs”.

Long story short is that my problems with funding are the problems of every PhD student in South Africa and on the continent. The option is to accept it as the nature of the beast. Or we can look beyond the surface and examine the root causes, and advocate for better performance by our governments and even the private sector. As a society we need to care about our knowledge economy and home-grown solutions.  While we wait, and as we toil through fieldwork and data analysis (on our way to an even more uncertain researcher career),  we will nurse in our minds the nagging question whether it was/is all really worth it.

Posted on by Loosely Translated

FameLab: Three minutes can change more than just your life

Three minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time. In three minutes you could answer an email or two, write a tweet or make a cup of coffee. Three minutes in a PhD isn’t much either; I can capture a couple lines of data, transfer a few cultures to fresh agar plates and share a short conversation with one of the undergrad mentorship students in our lab. In three minutes it doesn’t seem like you could accomplish a lot… except when you’re competing in FameLab.

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FameLab is an international science communication competition hosted in over 25 different countries. It gives young scientists a platform to entertain and engage audiences about STEM by deconstructing complex topics into just three minutes. This year I had the privilege of taking part in the South African FameLab finals and it was awe-inspiring!

Before one can compete in the finals, you need to make it through one of the several heats, hosted at various institutions across the country. I took part in one of 2018’s first heats at Science Forum South Africa, which was hosted at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). There, I was runner up after the very talented, Khavharendwe Rambau—a renewable energy scientist at the CSIR. In her talk, she used the metaphor of killing two chickens with one stone to demonstrate how her research is looking at converting waste material into energy. It was an entertaining talk; a real eye-opener and a testament to what young South African scientists are trying to accomplish to help tackle our energy and waste problems.

The FameLab semi-finals and finals were then held in Port Elizabeth, between the 7th and 9th of May, and brought together thirteen of the fourteen heat finalists—all incredible scientists with a passion to communicate their work. Before the semi-finals, we took part in a Master Class, a two day hands-on workshop with Karl Byrne—an award winning professional science communicator trainer. We were all nervous. Nearly all of us were from different institutions, working on very different things but Karl (very cleverly) had us start off by telling stories, not about our science but ourselves. This helped break the ice, calm the nerves and turned the stranger across from you into a new friend.

While FameLab is a competition, and we were there to compete, the Master Class and the build-up to the finals really became about getting to know one another, learning from one another and sharing our stories. From a physicist that loves playing rugby to a young biologist with her own company, we had a vibrant collection of people doing great things in science and outside. I have always considered myself an informed member of the scientific community but there are so many great scientists producing fantastic science, even just in the South African space, that I wasn’t even aware of. We need to change that.

I found FameLab to be a celebration of science, a bringing together of young people with a desire to share just how their good science is going to make a difference in the world. During the training and my engagement with the other semi-finalists, I felt the science barriers fade; we weren’t biologists looking to stop plant pathogens or physicists trying to develop a more efficient energy source, we were regular people with a dream of a better tomorrow. Our areas of expertise were the tools we chose to help us realize those dreams.

One of the tools we rarely use or use incorrectly (because we weren’t trained enough) is communication. Our strength as a society has been through the transfer of information. It is how we grow, evolve and adapt—our strength lies in community and the science community is no different. To grow and strengthen our community, we need to practice using our communication tools, more and more. At your own institutions, make your own FameLab stage; in the hallway before a departmental meeting, at someone else’s table during your lunch break, in a different colleagues lab, etc. and take three minutes to share your dreams (with a stranger), start a conversation, share knowledge and even build a collaboration (a friendship). When put into practice, over and over, those three minutes, put together, will change many people’s lives.

Congratulations to Emmie Chiyindiko, my friend and chemist from the University of the Free State, on winning the FameLab SA finals at the Future Earth Conference! The FameLab finals were recorded; you can watch the whole function here! Emmie gave an excellent talk that taught me more about catalysts. Good luck in the finals, I hope you blow them away! See you on YouTube soon!