I was asked by a member of staff the other day, what the purpose is of our new school. Why bring these different sciences together and will they help our careers or hinder them ? As someone who has spent their whole working life working between the worlds of chemistry, biology and agriculture this multidisciplinary world is all I have ever known but I can understand the basis of the question. This conversation got me thinking….about careers, rites of passage, how we support new members of staff and how we celebrate and reward success. Those questions have been coming together in my mind and I thought I’d explain why.

We have some very bright and promising people coming along and it’s important we give them the opportunities they deserve. Times change and they won’t always take the plodding paths we did in our day, where promotion was about a minimum number of years of service and mysterious metrics relating to teaching and research. Having worked in other sectors, I’m keen we fast track people to take up posts at a higher level as quickly as is appropriate for their professional development.

These reflections were inspired in part by me having the opportunity to host Professor Sally Shortall’s inaugural lecture last week, and it reminded me of the thrill of presenting my own inaugural lecture at Durham in 2003. It felt like an important step on both a personal and a professional level, something that I was able to share with my family as well as with colleagues. Sally has achieved a great deal and for her too this was a significant moment, celebrating her appointment to the very prestigious Duke of Northumberland Chair of Rural Economy in CRE, and it was a pleasure to see how her family and friends, as well as her colleagues, were there to share her celebration, both at the lecture and afterwards at a dinner in the university. It was an extremely enjoyable evening and an opportunity for me to meet up with people I hadn’t seen for a while, including Professor Philip Lowe. We all had a great time.

Of course, as well as a pleasant social event, an occasion such as an inaugural lecture provides an important opportunity for sharing your vision of the world – which is such an important aspect of one’s research. It’s an insight for others into what you do and why you do it. For me, as a biochemist, this lecture shone a light onto social science. I really hadn’t thought about some of the points Sally was making, in particular about farm accidents, and how agriculture being a macho industry may influence behaviour. Hearing about research that is so very different from the kind of lab work that I’m personally involved in, does make one see things with fresh eyes.

To go back to that original question about the purpose of our new School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, I’m not entirely sure I can yet give a complete answer – other purposes will emerge over the coming months and years, I am sure. But one answer is, just like me attending Sally’s lecture, that it does bring our different disciplines together in a way that can stimulate new perspectives on problems. It means some of us who are biochemists and plant scientists learning more about social science, having the opportunity of a fresh look at problems that affect the world. It means chemists working more closely with marine biologists, or soil scientists. It could mean any combination of expertise coming together to address challenges – and that is very much the way that both government and industry want us to work.

So I hope that is an important underlying purpose for the School. As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, it’s also about our youngest members of staff, and what opportunities we offer them to work with all these colleagues across a range of different disciplines. That will be their route to success and those of us in more established roles have to be alert to their potential and ensure they have the networking opportunities and the support they need. We should be celebrating their achievements as they build their careers – I would certainly like to mark these much more publicly in the future. Rites of passage are extremely important, whether that’s a graduation ceremony, an inaugural lecture by a new professor or any of the many steps and achievements in between. They need to be acknowledged.