This week’s reading comes from Sharron Kuznesof

Congratulations to SNES colleague Dr Adriana Humanes who is one of the co-authors of this week’s EDI reading which was recently published in PlosOne Bio.  The paper argues for expanding how success and impact is assessed in the academic reward system (which is still narrowly focused on paper citations and grant funding success), and provides examples of how change can be achieved. 

Adriana and colleagues argue that mentoring can have a significant positive contribution to the career development of mentees and should be a measure of success.  This is particularly poignant because within Newcastle we are aware of more colleagues who would like to be mentored than there are willing mentors.  Perhaps in SNES we can commit to both the value of mentoring and develop an infrastructure to do this?

Davies et al (2021) Promoting inclusive metrics of success and impact to dismantle a discriminatory reward system in science. PLoS Biol 19(6): e3001282. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001282