Hello, welcome to another of these Crucible Podcasts. Today we have three Scottish
Crucible alumni who've all gone on to have very interesting careers.

They're all from different years, all have different journeys through academia and beyond. But what role did Scottish Crucible play in getting them to where they are now? Why did they
take part in the first place? And looking back, how do they rate their whole
Crucible adventure?

Joining me are Professors Janine Illian and Steven Wallace and Dr Laura Winis.

I'm going to start at the start and how each of them found out about
Crucible, why they decided to take part and where they were in their academic career
when they applied.

Janine Illian, you took part way back in 2009?

Yeah, that's right. I took part in the very first Crucible in 2009. I was very curious. It
sounded extremely interesting. I came into it very much from the kind of
interdisciplinary angle and I thought well this is a nice challenge why not give it
a try. That sounded exactly like along the lines of what I wanted to do,
be interdisciplinary, meet people from other backgrounds and work and be creative
together.

Where were you in your academic career at the time?

At the time I was at the university in St Andrews. Andrews hadn't got my lectureship yet, but I had a
kind of five year position that basically promised a lectureship at the end. It's
relatively new to St Andrews and really kind of finding my feet and my own
direction in my career. Useful compass.

Okay, Stephen, same for you. You were a bit more recent, I think 2017?

Yeah, 2017 for me. Quite similar to Janine, actually.
I was at the start of my independent scientific career. I just joined the University
of Edinburgh on a lectureship. I'd been there for about six months. And to be
honest, I was sort of at that stage where I was just transitioning from being a
scientist as part of a really large bustling lab in the US. And that transition
into independence, I sort of found myself sitting in a room by myself, sort of
thinking quite prolifically about my future of research. And then the Crucible came
up as an opportunity that was advertised by the raw site of Edinburgh. And I just
thought it was a really brilliant opportunity for me to start building my scientific
and wider networks in Scotland, whilst also sort of thinking about my future research
plans and some of those slightly nebulous skills that

I guess you have to quickly develop when you transition to these sort of positions like leadership skills, management skills, etc. And the Crucible program just seemed like a really unique
opportunity to really do all of those things quite simultaneously.

Laura, similar story for you. You were 2014?

Yes, I was 2014. I was working at the time as a senior research fellow at Queen Margaret University. But after I finished my PhD, I'd worked at Trinity College Dublin for a couple of years and then at the Women's Health Council, which is a government agency in Ireland. And then I worked for a charity, the British Nutrition Foundation in London for a couple of years beforegoing back to academia, so to speak. So I was a senior research fellow at the time
that I saw Crucible being kind of advertised. It sounded like a great training
opportunity to learn from experts and from other researchers and different universities
as well as I thought it would be great to kind of improve my professional skills
and develop personally as a researcher and hopefully accelerate my academic career.

And how did it match up to your expectations? And what I'm particularly interested
in is, can you remember if anything came as a surprise to you?

You thought you were going to get this, but you also got that.

Well, I wasn't really too sure what to expect, but it definitely enabled me to see the bigger picture of the possibilities. I think that was such a great benefit of it. I think in terms of
maybe the unexpected, being part of the Scottish Crucible had a huge impact on my
career direction. It helped me realize the possibilities and alternative career
pathways, not necessarily academic pathways. So two years after the Crucible, I
actually left academia and started my own business. So it kind of just opened my
eyes to different possibilities. You actually think crucible helped you not only in
terms of thinking about academia but in thinking of leaving academia? Yeah, in a
good way, I'm nothing against academia but I just felt it wasn't the right
environment for me personally and I think the crucible definitely gave me a lot more
confidence as well as you know the science leadership training it was kind of it
gave me a lot more kind of leadership or encouraged me to be a leader in my own
field. For example, I became one of the Scottish reps for the Association for
Nutrition and one of my passions is getting the title of nutritionist,
a protected title in the UK, which is not at the moment and it's creating all
sorts of problems with misinformation and science and nutrition information not being
accurate. So, yeah, it kind of gave me that confidence boost.

Okay, we'll talk a bit more about where you are now in a minute, but Steven similar for you, can you remember looking back what surprised you in a good way, I hope, about taking part
in Crucible?

Yeah, I think when I was applying and I was asking people their
opinions on the Crucible program, everyone was like just do it, but it's really
intense. So the intensity I hear from a lot of people is quite a surprise for them
when they go on the program, but I was sort of pre -warrant a little bit about how
intense the three days were going to be. But I think the surprise for me was
expanding my sort of scientific boundaries, I guess, of where I was working, the
sort of creative opportunities that exist at the interface of my fields and other
fields which I would have assumed maybe before that point were not possible. I found
that really interesting and I think that's something that the Crucible really uniquely
develops.

A good surprise, I guess, was that, you know, I really look back on my
time And the crucible is really the point that I found my confidence, I guess, as
an academic scientist, where I stopped worrying so much about what I couldn't do in
this new crazy job that I had, and instead you really started pushing forward and
realizing the opportunities that were ahead of me, especially in Scotland. Yeah,
there's a sort of large Hadron Collider analogy here, isn't there? You can smash all
these interesting things together, and you can't be sure everything's going to
generate something, but every now and again something spins out of it that turns out
to be amazing. Yeah, it's a great analogy. I just thought of that. Janine,
it's a long time ago but do you remember what you expected to get and what
surprised you about participating? I definitely remember and I think that's one of
the important things to say anyway is that I very much remember how I felt after
the first session in Net and Bro at I, you know, was, as I said,
very curious about the event and I thought it's going to be nice and interesting,
but I hadn't expected the vibe that came with it. And, you know, that crucible
feeling was very strange terminology, perhaps, but there's kind of very supportive and
constructive atmosphere that makes the crucible for me. So, you know, it's not,
in addition to whatever the others have said and absolutely agree that it has also
contributed to my confidence and has been brilliant in that context, but also having
this kind of vibe of bringing all these people together who just want to create
stuff together is something I'm not going to forget, I think, so that was very
special. There's a sort of acceptance that people come to have, isn't there, that
actually you can go and talk about your subject, your area of interest to anybody.

And you're very unlikely to encounter anybody going, no idea what you're on about,
not interested. And they're gonna be looking for a connection. And when you start to
find those connections, you start to build potential collaborations.

Absolutely, absolutely. That's very well said. Yeah, somebody is welcoming your ideas straight
away.

Okay, so let's fast forward to today. Janine, you're now head of statistics
and chair in statistical science at the University of Glasgow. So what does that
involve on a day -to -day basis?

In my role as head of statistics, I'm kind of the senior person in the statistics group within the School of Mathematics and Statistics, so one half of the school that I'm looking after the day -to -day business here in terms of teaching and research, but also of course support people
in their careers, have to kind of think strategically with the head of school and
the other head of subjects or the head of mathematics. But then, of course, on the
other hand, I'm a normal academic, so I'm teaching myself and I'm doing research.
Yeah, so you've got to acquire quite a considerable skillset beyond the mathematical.
Yeah, absolutely different skills. You can be a really good mathematician or
statistician, but have no management skills at all.

So I'm enjoying that, in particular, the support of people and the strategic side of things. - And you're leading a whole bunch of research groups and I think you've also written the current
standard work on point process modeling. Now, bear in mind, I've only got A level
maths and some people listening to this may not even have that. Can you give us a
one minute guide to point process modeling?

Yeah, I can do that. So of course, I'm my favorite research topic. So basically I'm dealing with statistical models here
that try to model the locations of objects and events in space. So for example,
the locations of trees in a forest or the locations of earthquakes around the world.
The idea is to describe these patterns that these locations or points form in space
or space and time, or in particular, actually describing and modeling the geometry of
this. And this now sounds very very abstract and theoretical perhaps and this is
exactly where my work starts in a way because until very recently this was a very
very theoretical statistical discipline. It's been my mission basically to turn this
theoretical work into practically useful work. I transformed that discipline into a
discipline that actually can be used. So you mentioned for instance about earthquake
modelling is there anything in that to get us towards the ever elusive ability to
predict where and when earthquakes are going to happen? That's the idea in a way is
to get a better understanding on where and when earthquakes are happening. But the
earthquake work is actually particularly interesting in the context of crucible because
the person I've been working on with earthquakes is actually somebody met at the the
crucible that I attended in 2009 when we are still collaborating on this so this
this is my kind of one of my longer -standing collaborators.

Stephen, your background's in synthetic organic chemistry. You've fairly recently become professor of chemical biotechnology and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. I think the full title's a lot longer than that. This is all about finding better,
less fossil fuel dependent waste to make the molecules and chemicals we need?

Yeah, absolutely. I lead a research team here of about 20 scientists, roughly about 10
chemists and 10 biologists. And yeah, we're working with about 25 different industrial
companies in the UK and worldwide at the moment, trying to design new bacteria that
can valorize waste materials like agricultural waste, you know,
sometimes super waste actually, plastic waste, and to transform them into chemicals
that we rely on every single day, like medication, food, perfumes,
cosmetics, all of these compounds that I think people don't realize exclusively come
from fossil fuels right now. And that's particularly, I think, interesting. For
medicine, people don't realize that most of the medication they take is actually the
same material as goes in their car. It's derived from the same petrochemical
feedstock. So yeah, defossilizing the chemical industry and cleaning up waste at the
same time using microbes. - I think you're right that a lot of people won't realize
about that, but I suspect they also won't realize that we're at a level where we're
engineering microbes. - Yeah, I totally agree. And as you know, in many ways, this
technology is quite new, but in many ways this technology is quite old. Before the
happened around, you know, 60 to 100 years ago. We made everything via biotechnology.
We fermented, you know, sugar to make drinks and alcohol, etc. So it's really,
I see it as using modern molecular biology, but at the same time sort of going
back to more sustainable industrial practices that actually we've done in the past.
If you're in all these different projects with all these different large
organizations. How on earth do you work out how to partial out your time? That's an
extremely difficult question, a very topical question actually. I think,
you know, I love what I do. So yeah, I find the time, it's yeah, it's like,
you know, it's a bit of a hobby for me. I find it pseudo recreational. So they
always say, you know, find something that you love doing and then convince someone
to pay you to do it. So that's why very much what I feel like I'm doing right
now. - Okay, that sounds very positive.

Now, Laura, I'm guessing that when you took part in the Scottish Crucible, you could not have foreseen that in 10 years, you'd be out of academia, as you said, you'd be an award -winning freelance nutritionist, you're a podcaster, you're a published author, you're a regional food tourism ambassador for Edinburgh. This would not, I suspect, have been in your mind 10 years
ago.

Absolutely not, no. I started my own business about eight years ago now in
nutrition research and communications and it's grown from there. So what I do now is
one of the main areas I focus on is helping perimenopausal women looking for dietary
advice because that's a huge gap of nutrition information there. So I was getting a
lot of one -to -one clients asking questions on how what the kidney can help with
symptoms and maintain their health. So it kind of developed gradually over the course
of a few years to write an Eating Well for Menopause book. And I got that
published down the self -publishing route, which is a journey in itself. And also I
do online courses, CPD courses, or training courses for fellow health professionals on
Eating Well for Menopause. Because it's just such a neglected area of science and
translating what we know from science into practical messages. So that's one area and
then the other area as you said is regional food tourism ambassador role which came
up a couple of years ago. It was a new initiative from Scotland Food and Drink and
I jumped at the chance because one of my passions as well is trying to change the
perception of the Scottish diet and prove what we eat in Scotland. And I thought
that would be a great opportunity to do some work in that area to promote a
healthy Scottish diet. So part of my role with that was two projects that I did.
One was the Startup Food Connections podcast, which is all about connecting people
with the food that they eat and hearing from farmers and food So here in the truth
about how we make food and the hard work that goes into making our food and dispel
a lot of the nutrition myths as well on different foods. - I was gonna say, 'cause
you've gotta do two separate things there, haven't you? You've got to try and change
the reality, but you've also got to try and slay the myth. - Absolutely, yeah. And
there's a lot of miscommunication and myths on social media, especially. And I do
feel bad for kind of farmers and primary producers because they often are made out
to be not doing a good job but actually it's quite the opposite. They care a lot
about the land and how they produce food in a high quality way. And there's also,
I think now there's the Scottish Eat Well Guide as part of all this. There is,
yeah. We're very excited about that. So you might have heard of the UK's Eat Well
Guide, which is kind of the national dietary advice on what is a healthy and
balanced diet. But there have been some other versions, like the vegan version of it
and the South Asian version, but there was not a Scottish version yet until last
month. So I developed the Scottish version of the UK's Eat Well Guide, which
hopefully will inspire people to enjoy a healthy balanced diet using the many
nutritious foods that we actually grow and produce here right in Scotland. It is
possible to have a healthy Scottish diet. I had thought naively possibly at the
beginning this would just be a simple stick some Scottish foods on the Eatwell Guide
and that's it but it was a huge hugely complex task to try and get the right
foods represented in the Scottish Eatwell Guide and find a place for Haggis and
amongst all that. Of course Haggis. I love Haggis. Particularly listening to all
that, it sounds amazing, but what role do you think Crucible has played in getting
you to where you are now? Because you're not in academia doing all these amazing
things, you might have got there anyway, wouldn't you? Possibly, but maybe a bit
slower, but I think the Crucible had a huge impact on that. Again, the
communications aspect was huge. I mean, Vivienne Parry's session on the media during
the crucible training was absolutely fantastic. I mean, I was already interested in
communications, but that really hooked my attention on just how important it is for
scientists to effectively communicate with a wide audience and use different types or
different ways to communicate with different types of people, engage with the media.
I was actually just the nine the Scottish news last night talking about Vitamin D
and soon after doing the crucible training I was invited to speak on nutrition
communications and in the media at the Institute for Food Science and Technology's
annual conference and so it's just really encouraged me to use different media
platforms and I do that all the time in my role now. I'm on social media,
I do Facebook lives, I do podcasting and I'm a veg power ambassador as well, which
there's nothing better for enhancing your skills than I was doing an Eat the Rainbow
campaign for primary school kids and I had to do pieces to camera talking about
different coloured veg whilst throwing different coloured veg in the air, talking
about its key nutrients, why it's healthy and a fun fact as well, all whilst
there's a classroom of kids waiting to get into the room that we're filming in. So
I had 10 minutes to do seven short video clips. So talk about pressure and it was
a good experience. So I think communication is key for scientists.
And also I think the Stephen thing that if you make the pressure fun, if you re
-badge it, you can find it more enjoyable. Stephen, how much is Crucible helping you
on a day -to -day basis in terms of collaboration, communication, or anything else?

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more with what Laura just said there. I was
nodding so much during when you were talking there, Laura.

Which is great on a podcast.

Yeah, I know exactly. It's not very helpful.

I totally agree. I think the communication skills that that Crucible taught me,
specifically Vivian's session. It really became very clear to me very quickly that,
you know, getting bogged down in the detail of what we do and that's something that
scientists, you know, should be doing and basically was what I was trained to do up
until the point where I joined Crucible. But dissociating yourself from that, finding
a top line narrative as a way to engage a wider audience in your science and
ultimately generate more impact from the work that you're doing was something that I
was really keen to develop more and Vivien and I actually sort of engaged a lot
more after Crucible as well and I was invited last year to give a TED talk on on
this subject of biotechnology defossilizing the chemical industry last year in Vienna
and I found myself during the preparation of that really just always leaning back on
what I've been taught in Scottish Crucible and so you know that that that that
experience wouldn't have been possible without that sort of bed rocker training that
I got during Scottish Crucible in 2017.

So yeah, I totally agree Laura. Yeah. Jeanine?

Yeah, I mean, I can absolutely agree with what Laura and Stephen have said.
So I don't want to repeat this in a way that communication are the importance of
communication and confidence. I said earlier that I'm in a role kind of in between
the theory and the very applied end of statistics. And I think the crucible has
given me this confidence to actually see that this is an important role. So, and
that's the thing that I'm particularly good at. Previously, it was always, I didn't
have the confidence to think that this was just important because the theoretical
part seemed always so very important and so much, much kind of cleverer.
And I always thought what I'm doing is just the boring applied stuff. But I have
now kind of seen that the role as a communicator between different groups of
scientists is actually an important and an increasingly important role. And I'm very
kind of happy in this role. And I'm able to also kind of teach others to kind of
identify when they realize that they actually really good as the in -between person
in a way. So that's one of the take -home messages I got from the participation in
the Scottish Crucible.

Finally, because we're running out of time, I mean, Janine's
already mentioned that she's still working collaboratively with one of the people from
her original Crucible. I wondered if the other two of you still have connections
going on. Stephen?

Yeah, we had a project that finished quite recently, but a
project that lasted a couple of years after Crucible and because of a conversation
that I had during crucible with a marine biologist who was based in Edinburgh at
the time called Heidi Burdett, who had been studying marine coral and their
fundamental biology. She mentioned to me once, I think it was a lunch or over a
glass of wine in the evening, that there had been a microbe that had been found in
some of her coral that produced this chemical that's called dimethosulfide. From
chemistry, you know, I use dimethyl sulfide in my lab days all the time, and it
was currently and still is produced from petrochemicals. So over that conversation, we
were like, "Oh great, you know, this microbe can make this chemical. Why can't we
engineer it to make more of this chemical and then create a sustainable bio process
to sort of completely decouple the manufacture of this industrial product from fossil
fuels?" And that's what we did, and work sort of has been going for a couple of
years now we're in the process of sort of trying to intensify and scale this up
but it was a project so that wouldn't have happened you know had we not been
having that discussion at Crucible. And this is the kind of serendipitous stuff that
Crucible really helps with and sometimes you feel that why isn't there more of this
in academia bringing people together who would never normally meet because every now
and again you get something like this.

Yeah I totally agree, you know, real science
is discovery, not intent, so yeah, we should be having more of these discussions for
sure.

Laura, it might be harder for you, given that you've stepped away from
academia, but do you still have connections out there to your fellow Cruciblists?

Absolutely, yeah, actually it was Ewan Campbell who I met on the Crucible Train and
I was on, he was my very first podcast guest, he was my guinea pig, so to speak,
talking talking about honey and beekeeping. He's a, his area's biologist. He's a
biologist and studies bees. So I had him on explaining how honey is made and just
the background to, to beekeeping, which was a fascinating episode. But yeah,
I echo Crucible again was great at just making me realise how much you can learn
from other disciplines and not working in silos Because as a nutritionist or in any
field, I guess you tend to go to your nutrition conferences and speak to other
nutritionists, but actually go into different types of conferences. I went to the
hospitality one recently and got a completely different perspective on some key issues
and go into business networking groups. I think Crucible has just made me realise
talk to everyone and make connections in different fields because it can be really
useful, especially if you're entrepreneurial or having your own business, talking to
people from different backgrounds and perspectives just makes you realise what's
possible or conform really useful connections. Really usefully connected with me today.

That was Dr Laura Winis, freelance nutritionist, author, podcaster and regional food
tourism ambassador for Edinburgh. And you also heard from Professor Stephen Wallace,
who is Professor of Chemical Biotechnology and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the
University of Edinburgh, and Professor Janine Ilyan, who is Head of Statistics and
Chair in Statistical Science at the University of Glasgow. They are all crucible
alumni, Scottish Crucible alumni, and there are more elaborations on collaboration and
more alumni illumination in the other podcasts in this series spanning Scottish
Crucible and European Crucible, so go and check them out and have a listen whenever
time allows.