Graphic designer Jakob Trollbäck remembers a 2014 meeting with film director Richard Curtis and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, then very much a work in progress, coming up in conversation. Curtis, whose movies include Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually and the Bridget Jones series, is also a UN Advocate for the SDGs. The meeting in Trollbäck’s New York studio suddenly turned to the 17 goals, with Curtis telling him: “I think this may be our last shot...

When Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency, sought to change the country’s food systems in 2020, it started by looking at school meals and funding several projects around menus, procurement, and how cafeterias were organised. Breaking down a big goal into smaller component parts and bringing together different interested parties, as Vinnova did, is key to delivering the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), says Kate Roll, a political scientist based at the Institute for...

Growing up in the last years of the Cold War motivated Gabriele Jacobs to enter academia and play her part in building peaceful societies.  Jacobs works at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where she researches the role artificial intelligence (AI) can play in public safety and the ethical debate surrounding this. She describes how experiments are being conducted on beaches in the Netherlands to see if AI can be used to predict human behaviour. These experiments also test the...

Sigit Sasmito describes how his research at James Cook University in Brisbane, Australia, is helping to protect both peatlands and mangroves across southeast Asia, as part of a drive to meet Sustainable Development Goal 15. The goal, one of 17 agreed by the United Nations in 2015. aims to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. This includes sustainable forest management, combating desertification, and halting biodiversity loss. Indonesia, where Samito grew up,...

Watching documentaries about the Titanic inspired deep-sea microbiologist Beth Orcutt to study life at the bottom of the ocean - a world of ‘towering chimneys, weird shrimp and octopus nurseries’ that she has visited 35 times. But Orcutt says there is so much we still don't know about the deep sea, which is a problem for the sustainable development of this environment. Orcutt works at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay, Maine, where her research helps to understand how deep-sea...

Analytical chemist Jane Kilcoyne was working in her biotoxin monitoring lab one day in 2018 when she noticed a bin overflowing with plastic waste. The observation prompted her to join forces with like-minded colleagues and develop a package of measures aimed at reducing their lab’s carbon footprint. Their efforts include reducing energy consumption, composting shellfish waste, polystyrene recycling, and digitizing documentation.  Labs are estimated to use 10 times more energy and five times...

In the sixth and final episode of The Last few miles: planning for the late stage career in science, Julie Gould unpicks some of the generational tensions that can arise in academia when a colleague approaches retirement. Inger Mewburn, who leads research and development training at the Australian National University in Canberra, tells her: “There’s a fine line between being around and being valued, to being around and kind of being a pain in the ass and no one will tell you to go...

In the fifth episode of this six-part podcast series about the late career stage, physicist María Teresa Dova outlines how she is preparing colleagues years in advance to ensure a smooth handover of her lab at the University of La Plata, in Argentina. But in the United States, when the principal investigator leaves it is likely the lab itself will close down, Gould discovers. For microbiologist Roberto Kolter, emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, this meant...

The list of things to organize as retirement from academia approaches can feel daunting. In the fourth episode of The last few miles, a six-part podcast series about the late career stage in science, researchers talk about health, housing and financial planning. Carol Shoshkes Reiss, an immunologist at New York University, explains how her institution assigns individual wealth managers to advise on retirement investments and budgeting. Inger Mewburn, who leads researcher training at the...

Because many scientists see their career as a calling, when retirement arrives it can bring with it feelings of insecurity and worry about what this means for them. Microbiologist Roberto Kolter, emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, is keen to show others that retirement is a joyous time and a chance to broaden one’s scientific area of interest. It can also bring with it new speaking and travel opportunities. Experimental physicist Athene Donald is soon to complete a...

The idea that retirement marks the end of employment and the beginning of a life of leisure is one that many academics feel is outdated. Roger Baldwin, a retired researcher of higher education at Michigan State University in East Lansing and chair of the US Association of Retirement Organizations in Higher Education (AROHE), a membership organization based in Los Angeles, California, describes it instead as “an open ended period after one’s main professional employment that has almost...

What are the signs that you’re transitioning from the middle to the late stage of a career in science? Is this transition something you can plan in advance, and if so, what does this look like? Working backwards from your planned retirement date can help you to re-evaluate your priorities and predict the challenges the next few years might bring. But in many countries there is no set retirement age, so it can be difficult to know when to start preparing. Scientists from across the globe talk...

In many parts of the world these days garments are bought purely as fashion items, and discarded after just a few months or years. But as the global population grows and personal wealth levels increase, solutions are urgently needed to process increasing volumes of textile waste as consumption rises. This waste includes synthetic fibres, which do not degrade in nature. Sonja Salmon describes advances in enzymatic processes to deconstruct and then recycle mixed fibre garments made from both...

Draw a Scientist is a test developed in 1983 to explore children’s perspectives of scientists and how stereotypical views can emerge at an early age, influenced both by popular culture and how STEM subjects are taught in schools. In April, 50 images from Nature’s weekly Where I Work section, a photo essay which depicts an individual researcher at work, went on display in London’s Kings Cross district. The photographs were chosen to reflect the diversity of scientific careers, and in the words...

Lynette Cheah’s research group collaborates with psychologists, computer scientists and urban designers to develop smarter and more sustainable ways of city transportation. “We can’t have sustainable cities without transforming the way people move and how goods are moved around,” says Cheah, an engineering systems researcher who is based at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Cheah outlines some challenges to meeting targets in the eleventh of 17 Sustainable...

Francisco Ferreira’s first exposure to inequality of opportunity was during his daily ride to school in São Paulo, Brazil, and seeing children his age selling chewing gum on the streets. Ferreira, a former World Bank economist who now researches inequality at the London School of Economics, speculates on the wasted human talent caused by such hardships, and how many more scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and writers there would be if inequalities could be tackled at an early stage in...

Power networks are humankind’s biggest engineering achievement to date, says Sinan Küfeoğlu. But ageing infrastructure in advanced industrialised economies, coupled with the fact that around one billion people in the world lack continuous power access, particularly in Global South countries, could threaten the delivery of Sustainable Development Goal 9 by 2030, he warns. The goal promotes resilient infrastructure, inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and innovation. Speaking in a...

In Kenya, where Moses Ngoze teaches entrepreneurship and management at Masinde Muliro University in Kakamega, micro, small and medium enterprises provide 75% of jobs and more than 80% of the country’s gross domestic product. Typically these organizations employ between one and 100 people and include subsistence farming, hospitality and artisan businesses, mostly operating in a jua kali environment, a Swahili term meaning “hot sun,” he says. Ngoze's research explores how the enterprises can...

Julien Harou’s career started in geology in his current role as a water management and infrastructure researcher now straddles economics and engineering, with a particular focus on using artificial intelligence (AI) to measure Ghana’s future energy needs.  Harou is relatively upbeat about progress so far towards achieving sustainable and reliable energy for all by 2030, the seventh of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the United Nations in 2015. He points out that from 2015 to...

María Teresa Dova describes how an early career move to CERN as the first Latin American scientist to join Europe’s organisation for nuclear research ultimately benefited both her but also the researchers she now works with back home in Argentina. The move to Geneva, Switzerland, where CERN is based, required Dova to pivot from condensed matter physics, the subject of her PhD at the University of La Plata, Argentina, which she gained in 1988.  But any misgivings about the move to Europe and...

A 2021 report by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean revealed that only 18% of public universities in the region had female rectors.  Vanessa Gottifredi, a biologist and president of Argentina’s Leloir Institute Foundation, a research institute based in Buenos Aires, says this paucity of visible role models for female scientists in the region means that damaging stereotypes are perpetuated. A female, she says, will not be judged harshly...

Fernanda Staniscuaski earned her PhD aged 27. Five years later she had a child. But in common with many scientist mothers, Staniscuaski, a biologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, saw funding and other career opportunities diminish as she combined motherhood with her professional life. “Of course I did not have as much time as I was used to have. And everything impacted my productivity,” she tells Julie Gould. The Brazilian biologist founded the Parent in Science...

Paleontologists Ana Valenzuela-Toro and Mariana Viglino outline some of the challenges shared by researchers across Latin America. These include funding, language barriers, journal publication fees and conference travel costs. But the two women then list some of the extra burdens faced by female researchers who live and work there, many of which will resonate with female colleagues based elsewhere.  “When you are in a room sharing a scientific idea or project, nobody listens to you. Then...

In 2013 physicist Carolina Brito co-launched Meninas na Ciência (Girls in Science), a program based at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul. The program exposes girls to university life, including lab visits and meetings with female academics. “There are several girls who have never met someone who has been to university,” says Brita. “It’s beyond a gender problem.” Jessica Germann was one of them. The 19-year-old is about to start an undergraduate physics degree. She tells Julie...