Working Scientist

Brandon Brown “fell into farming” after tiring of city life during the COVID-19 pandemic and now tends more than 150 fruit trees alongside his research into HIV and public health ethics at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine. “I had to look at farming the same way that I look at my academic career, and to take it one day at a time with my eyes towards a goal,” he says.

Brown says it took him a while for the realization to dawn. “My PhD taught me that the work is never done, and there’s always a new research project to pursue, more students to collaborate with, more policies to work on,” he says. “And since research builds on research, the fun never ends.”

Mornings spent outdoors also gives him time to think about work priorities. “I have lots of free time to think as I do the farming, and many times I write down notes as I’m working, because ideas and kind of reminders and goals and deadlines pass through my mind,” he says.

There are other benefits. Brown says he now falls asleep to the “beautiful” sound of howling coyotes, alongside possums, racoons, skunks, squirrels, lizards and gophers.

This is the fourth episode in a six-part series about creativity in science. Previous episodes featured a researcher who draws parallels between her research and sewing, another whose pursuit of baking and fermentation revealed fresh career opportunities, and two researchers who follow the concept of “day and night science” to distinguish between routine tasks and reflection.
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Baking bread during Covid-19 lockdowns provided Chantle Edillor with some career inspiration. “I knew I wanted to do something different and an exploration in sourdough presented an opportunity that I felt uniquely able to pursue,” she says.

In 2022, after completing PhD research into metabolic diseases at the University of California Los Angeles, Edillor began a postdoc there, where she researched the anti-inflammatory properties of fermented foods.

She now works as a fermented food scientist at Microcosm Foods, a non-profit research organization that maps connections between fermented foods, microbes and human health, a role she combines with assay development at the Astera Institute, a similar non-profit based in the Bay Area, San Francisco.

In the third episode of a six-part podcast series about creativity in science, Edillor says fermentation techniques re-ignited a childhood interest in cooking: “I have early memories of sitting and watching the Food Network with a metal bowl full of egg whites in my lap, holding a whisk and attempting to make stiff peak meringue, but also to understand how proteins capture air to create volume and texture.”

Edillor’s culinary and scientific creativity extends to adding kombucha to leftover dinner party wine to make red wine vinegar, and making miso from blue tortillla chips. “Because the chips had been deep fried and fat does not necessarily ferment super well, it had this off flavour, kind of oxidized fat. I​​​​​​​’ll not be commercializing that anytime soon.”

Summing up her career to date, she says: “I​​​​​​​’m a human geneticist masquerading as a yeast geneticist, masquerading as a microbiologist. There are certain areas of science that are less competitive and more collaborative. Those are the spaces I like to occupy.”
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Yasmin Proctor-Kent likens sewing to science. “I find them really hard to separate them in my brain. I don’t think I can sew without engaging the same part of my brain that I do science with,” she says.

For Proctor-Kent, a research and development scientist at the cancer diagnostics company Leica Biosystems, based in Melbourne, Australia, the two pursuits require similar approaches, relying on her own and others’ prior knowledge and expertise, reading papers, or reading from other people who have sewn a similar garment. “It’s about applying theoretical knowledge to something tactile, something practical that you’re doing,” she adds.

In the second episode of a six-part podcast series about creativity in science, Proctor-Kent recounts how she honed her sewing skills during the Covid-19 lockdown before applying to The Great British Sewing Bee, an annual TV competition, reaching the 2025 finals.

Kit, a semi-finalist and mathematician, was similarly creative. “Mathematics and spatial reasoning and 3D plotting and all of that mathematical brain that Kit has, really did apply to the Bee,” she says. “When we were given a sewing pattern and told to make it in two hours…Kit already knew exactly how every single pattern piece fit together.”

Finally, Proctor-Kent urges other scientists to take up a pastime, even if it feels risky. “You get to a point in your career where you have success…you have a fear of being bad, at trying something new. We should all sit in that fear. Allow ourselves to be wrong. Allow ourselves to be bad at stuff. Allow ourselves to be embarrassed.”

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The French biologist and Nobel prizewinner François Jacob talked about day and night science as part of the creative process that underpins research. The former, he argued in his 1988 autobiography, is a “cold, orderly logic” leading to a conclusion of the kind that gets covered in seminars and papers. Night science, in contrast, is a “stumbling, wandering exploration of the natural world.​​​​​​​”

In the first episode of a six-part series about creativity in science, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher describe how they apply the day/night science concept in their own research and collaborations. Yanai, who studies gene regulation and cellular plasticity at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, recalls telling his lab colleagues to change tack when they get stuck: “We need to snap out of this. We need to zoom out. We need to pop out into the world of night science, into the world of ideas, where we’re going to have to use abstract thinking. We’re going to use every trick we got, And that’s going to give us the way forward.”

Yanai and Lercher, a computational cell biologist at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, co-host the Night Science podcast and run workshops outlining the tools required to make science more creative alongside the “executive” process such as running experiments, applying for grants and writing papers.

The two compare performers that pivot between musical genres (Bob Dylan from folk to rock, for example, and Beyoncé from R&B to country) to scientists who change disciplines, bringing the fresh thinking of a “beginner’s mind” to a particular challenge. “You hold no allegiance, no loyalty to any particular idea. Everything is on the table,” concludes Yanai.

Future episodes will explore different approaches to cultivating creativity in science.

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Among the barriers faced by researchers who move abroad to develop their careers is a so-called “hidden curriculum,” says Sonali Majumdar, whose book, Thriving as an International Scientist, was published last year.

Navigating these unwritten rules that cover social norms and cultural expectations, both in the lab and outside work, can feel particularly daunting to scientists who, like her, were born elsewhere, she adds.

In addition, international scientists often have restrictive funding arrangements that tie them to a particular lab or Principal Investigator’s research focus, she says.

US visa restrictions can often mean missing family events back home. Majumdar, for example, who gained a biochemistry and molecular biology PhD from the University of Georgia in Athena in 2014, could not return to India to attend her parents’ funerals. “It was probably the biggest sacrifice I’ve had to make in my life,” she says.

In the final episode of a six-part podcast series covering books about the scientific workplace, Majumdar, who is now assistant Dean for professional development at Princeton University in New Jersey, tells Holly Newson that having a “growth mindset” can help international scientists to thrive abroad.

This means not focusing on problems, but on possibilities and solutions, she says, supported by advisors, mentors, and sponsors.

The US, she says, has a reputation as a melting pot of different cultures, a place to meet colleagues with a shared passion for science and solving problems.

But in the last decade the climate for researchers who relocate there from abroad has become more difficult, she adds.
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