Interview "Develop many of the soft skills that are often neglected"

You came with the BAM Adolf Martens fellowship to Germany. How was your first year at the BAM?

My first year at BAM was intense, but also very fulfilling. The Adolf Martens Fellowship provided me the opportunity to experience working at BAM and living in Germany, which convinced me that this was where I wanted to stay. However, I quickly needed to make preparations for my career after the end of the one-year fellowship. It was, thus, necessary to identify and apply for a longer-term research position, navigate the corresponding visa process, acquire German language skills and obtain good long-term housing. That was a lot to take on in a single year. Without the Adolf Martens Fellow-ship as an intermediary period between my career in the United States and getting established in Germany, it is hard to imagine how I could have suc-cessfully made the transition.

Now, you are a research management advisor at BASE. What are your tasks and how did you hear about this position?

While working at BAM, I got to interact with many German companies and government agencies through my research projects and corresponding sci-entific conferences. This is how I came into contact with the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE), where I currently work. I submitted my application for a job at BASE in response to an adver-tisement on the Interamt system used by the German government, which is a great resource for anyone considering a career in the federal, state or local government agencies and ministries.

As a research management advisor, I am part of a team that develops and implements the long-term research strategy of BASE, including research col-laborations with external partners. In particular, I coordinate the BASE re-search activities in the “European Partnership on Radioactive Waste Man-agement – 2” (EURAD-2) and in the “Sustainable network for Independent Technical EXpertise on radioactive waste management” (SITEX). I am also responsible for the coordination of BASE research activities related to the transport and interim storage of radioactive waste (such as studies on con-tainer integrity). Research in these areas includes, notably, ongoing cooper-ation with BAM.

In my current position at BASE, I engage directly with a wide range of ap-proaches and perspectives, which I find both fulfilling and intellectually stim-ulating. For example, each country has its own unique approach to address-ing the challenges of radioactive waste management. At the same time, these complex challenges also require interdisciplinary research involving the social, engineering and natural sciences.

Which experiences from your time at the BAM are useful for your current work?

The most useful skills from my time at BAM are the communication, net-working and project management skills that I honed over the course of my projects. In particular, these skills were essential in my role as the coordina-tor of the BAM interdepartmental research project “Construction material technology, test procedures and monitoring methods for safe sealing struc-tures in repositories” (SealWasteSafe), in which I collaborated with an inter-disciplinary team of researchers and interacted with the end users of the re-search results. While at BAM, I also got to serve on the planning team of the EU research project “Pre-Disposal Management of Radioactive Waste” (PRE-DIS). The knowledge of EU research processes that I gained from this expe-rience has been directly relevant to my daily work at BASE, and I continue to collaborate with many of the European research contacts that I met through the PREDIS project.

What advice would you give to early career researchers for their career planning?

There are a few pieces of advice that I have found very helpful over the course of my own career.

First, I think that it is essential to remain flexible. While it is good to have long-term objectives, over-emphasizing the final destination of one’s career can lead to rigidity and stress. Rather, it is important to use the intermedi-ate career phases as an opportunity for intellectual exploration and personal growth, including learning to lead a balanced and healthy life. As is the case in most German research institutes, BAM will only ever be able to offer a permanent research position to a small fraction of the PhD students and postdocs who work there. On the other hand, the experience of working at BAM offers these early career researchers the key skills and contacts for a successful scientific, industrial or public sector career in Germany once their research stay at BAM comes to an end.

My second piece of advice would be to focus on and develop many of the soft skills that are often neglected by early career researchers in the natural and engineering sciences. These include not only public speaking, networking and conflict management but also creating an inclusive, multicultural and di-versity-friendly environment. Particularly for the individuals that will transi-tion out of the research world into industry or public administration, these soft and interpersonal skills will likely be far more relevant and important than the narrow technical skills involved in their current research projects.