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For the Postdoc Appreciation Week, the Biochemistry Postdoc Association sat down with Prof David Gavaghan, Oxford University Advocate for Research Staff, to hear his views on how postdocs contribute to Oxford University, what kind of challenges postdocs face, and the bright vision for the future of research staff support at Oxford in the next few years.

Thanks for sitting down with me for this interview! It is International Postdoc Appreciation Week 16-20th September. With that in mind, I’d like to pick your brains on a number of topics around postdocs’ contribution to the University and how our postdocs are supported by the University. Before we get to that, I’d like to hear a bit about you. Who are you, academically?

I’m David Gavaghan, I am a professor of computational biology in the Computer Science Department. I came to Oxford in 1986 to do a Master’s Degree for a year. During my Master’s year I got offered a job in a hospital for a year, and soon after I started my PhD sponsored by the hospital. That’s when I started doing biological and medical research, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

What was your experience of being a postdoc?

I actually had a predoc. I was a research assistant in a hospital and a member of research staff whilst I did my PhD. Then I got a Wellcome Trust biomathematical training fellowship, and at the same time I had a Junior Research Fellowship at New College. Then I got a Medical Research Council career development fellowship, and then I had 2-3 month bridging contracts before I got my University lectureship. So effectively, I was a member of research staff for 15 years: from 1987 until I was appointed to University lectureship in 2002. I know what it is like to be on short term contracts! 

So short term contracts were a challenge you faced during your postdoc. Were there any other challenges?

My DPhil supervisor died shortly after I started my first fellowship and he was going to be my academic mentor. He was fantastic role model and it was very sad time. When I look back whilst this was a huge challenge it meant I was effectively thrown into being completely independent right from the start, which has probably helped in the longer term. Other than that, there were the standard postdoc challenges. You always feel under pressure to produce the outputs, whether you’re on a fellowship or working on a standard postdoc with a PI. The pressure to produce academic outputs creates challenges with the rest of your life. I am quite aware of all of this and I think that’s why I am interested in doing this role.

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You are the University Advocate for Research Staff. What does that role entail?

I started in this role about eight months ago in January. The remit of the role is pretty much to look after, and advocate for, the University’s 5000 or so research staff which is its largest staff group. It’s about 30% of the University staff. Most of the research staff are early career researchers, and we would like Oxford to be seen as is the place to come to further your career, whatever your aspirations might be. We want to provide the professional and career development help to allow you to achieve your next career goal, whether it be in academia or one of the many wonderful job options outside academia that you could go into. That’s the overarching goal. We are also looking at representation and making early career researchers part of the decision making processes. We want to make sure postdocs feel valued and welcome and supported in developing their careers. 

I believe this is a new role. Do you know the reasons why the University decided to create this role now?

We actually re-invigorated an existing research staff working group about two and a half years ago now. One of the things we decided was that we did need this advocate role to bring a central focus to looking after researchers because they’re considered of such value in the University. There are two driving forces of the university research: there’s the research staff themselves (the postdocs and the people who’ve been here for a long time on research contracts) and there are post-graduate students who do research. The post-graduate students are, to a large extent, supervised, or at least co-supervised by postdocs. So that’s the engine of the University’s research, certainly in the sciences, and increasingly in the social sciences and humanities. The University wanted to ensure that we were doing everything we could to support that group, and to continue to attract the best researchers from around the world to Oxford. The only way we can do that is to provide a really nice environment. So this role is to co-ordinate all of that activity. There were other, external drivers obviously, for example the Research Evaluation Framework (REF) environment statement and that’s part of it. But really it was about the Divisions and the University essentially wanting to look after research staff as well as they could. There are pockets of real excellence in the way we look after research staff in the University, but it wasn’t consistent right across the piece. Could we share best practise from areas where we’re doing really well to make sure that all postdocs have that really good experience. Understanding how postdocs are treated in different parts of the University is another big focus at the moment.

How much of your time does this role take?

Nominally, it’s 20% of my time so one day a week. I suspect it is quite a bit more than that at the moment. But once the main career development and representational structures are in place and we’ve built a team, things should settle down. There are a large number of people across the University employed to help research staff already, and the colleges are also involved. There’s been a lot of meetings just to understand people’s perspectives and to get people onboard. What we want to do is to coordinate that much better and use all the resources we’re putting into this in the best possible way. 

You mentioned that there are about 5000 research staff at Oxford. Are most of them postdocs?

Yes, most of those are early career researchers. About half are in the Medical Sciences Division, over a thousand in MPLS, and smaller numbers in Social Sciences and Humanities. But altogether they represent over 30% of the University’s total staff. 

From the University’s point of view, what do postdocs do? What are their key contributions to the University?

They’re the driving force behind the research. The University is incredibly successful at raising external research funding and most of that external research funding other than large capital grants for equipment is spent on research staff and postdocs. They’re employed to do the research, and either have their own funding through fellowships or conduct the research that’s written in the grant applications. The way that it works the best is collaboration between the PI and the postdoc, or the PI and the team of postdocs and DPhil students. Postdocs were involved in most of the breakthroughs that University is rightly famed for. Without them the University couldn’t do the research and it wouldn’t continue to be the world leading university it is. I don’t think anybody would disagree with that.

What are some of the main challenges for postdocs at Oxford and elsewhere more generally?

Oxford in particular is such a large University, and it’s a bit of an unusual place because of the college system. Typically, postdocs don’t have a college affiliation so settling in is quite a challenge. So that’s one of the things we really want to look at. There are also the general challenges to being a postdoc. This is the point at which you decide what you want to do, and the first postdoc particularly is critical. If the first postdoc doesn’t go well and you don’t get publications out, and you want to be an academic, then that really does make it difficult to move on to the next step. So you need to both settle in to your new role as a postdoc and start creating outputs and think about the next stage of your career, all at the same time – just at the point when you might be thinking about other things in life like whether you want a family. And there may be other things impinging because parents are getting older and so on. It all happens in this period between being about 25 and 35 and everything sort of crowds in to make it challenging whilst you’re under incredible pressure all the time to effectively produce research outputs which are internationally competitive so that you can go on onto the next stage. I don’t think this is true just in Oxford but also elsewhere. One of the things that I really want to focus on is allowing postdocs space to think about what they want to do next. Because most of them won’t go on to become academics, it is really important that they have the space to figure out what it is they might want to do. You do want to make that decision reasonably early.

What kind of support does Oxford University offer to its postdocs, currently?

It varies across Divisions and Departments at the moment, but we are making it more homogeneous. We are planning to start with the professional and career development support straight away. One of the things we’re introducing right across the University is career development reviews for all research staff. We hope that within the first six months of starting a postdoc, all postdocs will get a career development review, either with their PI or with someone of their choice, and it is entirely focused on what your career goals are and working together to try to fill in some any obvious gaps in your CV that might prevent you from achieving your goals. That conversation has to be early on because three years isn’t very long, so you need to start thinking about it straight away. The reviews will be repeated annually.  Then the next step, which we’ve done quite a lot on, is to put in place the professional training programme that will allow you to gain the skills you need. 

And then a supportive environment, including how do we support partners who’re coming into Oxford better than what we do at the moment, and spaces for the postdoc community so that they can arrange networking meetings and seminars. This space will be ready after Christmas.

Another important thing is better communication. What we would like is for postdocs to be fully involved in the decision making processes of the University at all levels. We’re working with OxRSS to put in place a much more transparent representative structure, which will go from Departments, through Divisions, to University level so that involvement in decision making process and information can flow up and down and is done at whatever is the most appropriate level. 

We’re hoping that every Department, or groups of Departments that have small numbers of postdocs, will have a representative forum for postdocs and that forum will get a little bit of admin support and a small budget to organise networking events. This will be the place locally where postdocs can go for support. This exists in places but we hope this will become more coherent and consistent across the University over the next year.

There will also be some representative fellowships for the postdocs who are doing things at Divisional and University level. This will get them a little bit of financial support to do their research because we realise there’s a lot of time involved with this. We’re going to have an annual college dinner for postdoc reps and there will be various events just to make it clear that we really do value what our postdocs and research staff altogether do.

Going forward, what kind of changes do you expect to see in University’s support for postdocs in the next 2 to 5 years?

Longer term, we’d like to have space for postdocs to organise networking activities, at least down and up the hill for now, but probably within each division. We’re looking to the extent to which college affiliations could be extended, and we’re also trying to include college-only research staff in everything that we do. Down the road, the University obviously has plans for building accommodation for which research staff would be one of the priority groups. It’s part of a longer-term strategy. The most important thing in that is that once we’ve got the representational structure in place, research staff will be fully involved in all of that planning. It’s not the University deciding what’s best, now we’ll be able to decide together what we need to do to meet collective goals. 

It’s postdoc appreciation week. Do you have any call to action?

Get involved! That’s the big one. The more postdocs come along to meetings the easier it will be to persuade Departments to support them. Volunteer to be the representative if you feel you have something to contribute - initially on the forum within the Department and then maybe after you’ve done that for a while, volunteer to be the rep on OxRSS and on the Divisional committee. And then if you really get into it, maybe take on one of the larger roles. The more that postdocs network themselves and discuss amongst themselves how things can improve, the easier my job will be, basically. 

How can Oxford postdocs (research staff) reach out to you, or make themselves heard via other routes?

Getting involved locally is the best way. There is a leadership for postdocs through this representational structure, and I’ll be meeting with that group regularly. 

Getting in touch with me directly is also absolutely fine! It’s surprisingly difficult to communicate with postdocs directly! Knowing who they are and then being able to email that group collectively is quite challenging. We’re working on that, and once that’s in place it should be easy to communicate both ways. Communication flow is absolutely critical!

Thanks you very much for your time!

- Interview by Aino Järvelin, Biochemistry Postdoc Association