Thalia Eley is a Professor of Developmental Behavioural Genetics and Director of the EDIT lab, King’s College London. She is also Wife of Giles and Mum of Justin, Pasco and Theo. In this post Thalia discusses five points that have helped her to juggle life both inside and outside of…
A PhD is the ideal route for anyone hoping to pursue an academic career, who is hard-working, self-motivated and passionate about research. It is usually a three-year, full-time, postgraduate degree in which you work on a specific topic to produce an original piece of research. At the end, you get…
A month ago I left my hometown of Québec, Canada to spend a term in London. As part of my PhD at Université Laval, I am required to do a research practicum at another university in order to 1) acquire additional research skills and 2) be immersed in a different…
Mention that you are researching ‘genetics and mental health’ and you might notice a sense of unease in your audience. We usually tack on additional information, which ranges from, “investigating how we can predict response to psychological therapies using genetic information, and of course we incorporate environmental factors too”, to “but…
In mid-October, I attended a Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training course, which is available to all staff at King’s College London. The training course aims to (1) raise awareness of mental health, and (2) teach how to recognize and provide initial support to someone who is struggling. Molly…
Sometimes you find yourself stumbling across little titbits of surprising information. Those moments that stop and make you go “Huh”. Some of these moments are more surprising than others. So today, for your blog enjoyment, I present you with a carefully curated series of things I learned this week. Things…
I have a mild obsession (well, actually I have several, but only one is pertinent to this piece). Most of us have a thing we spend too much time on given its relative importance – computer games, knitting, running, animal species where the genus and the species are the same…
I was recently chatting with an early career researcher in a colleague’s group, who had read some of the pieces on our blog about balancing different activities. He was particularly interested to hear my thoughts about saying no… So here they are.
One of the things most academics get little if any training on is how to build a well-functioning team. Yet this is also without doubt one of the most important aspects of a career in academia. Here I share some ideas on what I have found works for me over…
Completing a PhD can often seem like a Sisyphean (or perhaps Bush-ian?) task. Of course, there are times when it doesn’t feel that way (ah, March 26th, what a day that was actually…). In general though, we expect stress – and we get it. But surely there’s a better way?
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