Forever Young

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I was asked by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (specifically by Dr. John Peter Wittschieben) to say a few words from the successful applicants’ perspective during the “ How to Get Funding from International Foundations ” info event, which took place on April 26th in Biomedicum Helsinki.Useful informationTo be clear: The event was very useful. Specifically it was useful due to the detailed information provided by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and JDRF , who presented during the event. In the very beginning, I was surprised to hear our Dean talk in his introduction about the “lucky ones that received the funding”. In my naïveté, I always assumed that funding was distributed according to excellence and ability, not according to luck. While more experienced researchers like Mikael Knipp were able to give good advice, I could not. Obviously, I cannot boast with my own funding rates (which are about 5%, one of 20 applications being successful).**No time for science, too much time for grant proposal writing?**Some participants expressed surprise about the current widespread complaints of researchers about low funding rates, arguing that a rejected application leads to an improved renewed application in the next round. I agree, that the improvement might be substantial for the first few rounds, but then it becomes a game of diminishing returns. I write an average of 20 grant applications in order to get one accepted, and for 15 of these, I rather agree with E.P. Diamandis, who in Clinical Chemistry complained about the $20+ billion loss due to unsuccessful application writing.**Who is a “Young Investigator?”*The other question that - interestingly - was discussed (and which I had wondered about already for years), was the term of “young investigator”. The bottom line was, that everybody is a young investigator who does not hold a full professorship. This might be the only sensible definition, as the average age of principal investigators has been steadily rising during the last decades (see e.g. here ). Many investigators will therefore stay forever young (or at least until they retire).It is difficult to be creative if you are struggling with fundingAlthough I could not convince many (maybe nobody), I objected to the notion that is is desirable to combine the goal of creativity and applicability in academic research. True creativity originates mostly from a primary motivation and utilitarian aspects actually get in the way of creativity. This is not to say, that creative research cannot be very useful. To make them an important criteria in the distribution of funds is just asking too much from the money source, namely to be able to predict the future. Creativity and the push towards “applicability/impact” of research are not only orthogonal to each other, but are pushing into opposite directions. If the research is struggling with funding, it is difficult to be creative. The basic needs for survival need to be met before people can realize their possibilities. In addition, when foundation ask for short term applicability, they appear to me like politicians, who think in terms of the 4 or 5-year election cycle. For much of academic research, we cannot predict its future uses. In addition, potential applications are mostly MUCH more than 5 years into the future. If the push towards applicability results in shifting the balance from basic towards applied science, the pipeline (basic research > applied research > engineering) will dry out from its source. Maybe this push towards applicability will also accelerate the blurring of the lines between the traditional universities and the universities of applied sciences. *I have to side with Marx this time: Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein.

Good leadership?

Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When I started as a principal investigator at the University of Helsinki , I was advised to take the “Good leadership” course which was arranged by Personnel Training . Together with 14 other research group leaders, I learned between November 2013 and March 2014 from Sanna-Marja Heinimo and other experts i.a. the “skills for effectively developing, coaching, empowering and leading others to getting best results”.At the end of the course, we had a dinner with Jukka Kola , who is now credited for implementating the extensive (and according to many observers overboarding) cost savings that were forced upon the university by the budget cuts mandated by the prevailing political powers.I do not want to discuss here whether such drastic measures were necessary or a less extensive savings strategy would have been sufficient. Even the decision whether to save or to practise deficit spending in an economic downturn is mostly not based on facts but on ideology. In economics, fashion and Zeitgeist are at work in addition to hard data. Therefore, it is not surprising that prominent economists are holding opposing views concerning the effects of deficit spending. But I go off on a tangent here…I simply wanted to express my total disappointment. Not in the savings themselves, but in the way HOW the savings were implemented in relation to the “good leadership” practises that we have been advised to practise.The decisions were not sufficiently openly discussed. Still now, the grounds for many lay-offs remain incomprehensible and controversial (see e.g. this article in the major Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat). Since transparency was noticeably absent, the talk about good leadership by the top management of the university seemed to have been hardly more than lip service. I do not doubt that they have the best intentions in mind for the greater good of the university. Just who defines the greater good? Most oligarchs define it themselves, don’t they?So it is not surprising that in the recent workplace well-being survey, the satisfaction with the strategic leadership at the university level (rectors and vice-rectors) was at an all-time low. If the polls would be repeated now, the results would likely be much worse, especially if the fired people would still get a voice. Notably, it is not only the average employee of the University of Helsinki, who does not trust the leadership any more. My feeling is that the distrust now pervades researchers at all career stages. What future is possible with such a constellation?Google is consistently named among the best American companies to work for and they decided to spend millions of dollars and many years to research how to create the best work teams. The single most decisive factor in determining the innovation outcome, creativity and productivity of a team was psychological safety ( see this NYT Magazine article ). Guess how safe university employees are feeling at the moment.When we were talking with Jukka Kola, I was very impressed with his clear commitment towards increased internationalization at the University of Helsinki. However, I already wondered back then how realistic the goal to “actively recruit top international staff” is. Now it seems even more unlikely that this goal can be reached to a meaningful degree since universities start to experience a new wave of brain drain. Even at the students’ level, where the internationalization has made amazing progress in the last 20 years, we might see a decline with the introduction of tuition fees for non-EU/ETA students .

Creativity on Michael’s Domain

Forever Young

Good leadership?