Now other than freelance writing, you may be thinking "Is that Chris' job". And the answer is no. You might have dived through my website and read that I am a Research Software Engineer - whatever that means.
So let's explain that and relate that to my writing and communication background.
After a number of postdoctoral research positions, grinding away at work, and trying, and failing, to obtain funding for my own independent research I changed career. One of the limitations of my work was the number of papers coming out. I was hindered by the fact that in many of my positions I was performing what was predominantly software engineering, with few opportunities to have incremental research outputs that would have led to papers, even though I was creating software that would have long term implications for research, these were not measurables for research grants.
So feeling rather down about pursuing a career as an academic I took a different route, and applied and became a Research Software Engineer.
An RSE essentially means I am more in a support role to researchers, still performing research, still performing software design and coding, but my career progression is more about software outputs and creating sustainable code, not papers.
The upside of this career change has been great. I have much more opportunities to train and learn software design and programming - in the last year I have learnt python, databases, TensorFlow, and a bit of java. I also get to work on a diverse range of projects ranging across the spectrum of chemistry, engineering, materials science and medicine.
Perhaps most importantly I feel much more valued as my background as a chemist is now invaluable for the team as I can be the first point of contact for chemistry researchers, and interpret their research for the non-chemists RSEs, and thus figure out who in the team is best suited to tackle the chemistry-based software challenges. My broad research experience allows me to interact with so many researchers.
Building up all of this I am now managing the software development on a large grant, supervising students, and have now obtained my certification for teaching programming. And as for the pandemic - not commuting has meant a better work-life balance and I am much more rested and more productive. The benefit to my science journalism is that I am now exposed to so many research themes and ideas, that I feel more and more capable of writing about many different topics. Likely in the next blog post about my day job I will chat about why I like programming in python. - Chris
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