Castles and Coprolites

I've been thinking a lot recently about how the experience of being an academic has changed since I started my PhD back in 2004. I wrote about one aspect of this a couple of weeks ago - the shift that many funders have made from the traditional bullet point CV to narrative résumé s. Related to this, is the attempt to move away from what you might call 'traditional' metrics such as journal impact factors and author citation counts. The journal impact factor refers to the average number of citations received by articles published in a journal over a specific period, typically two years. Author citations track how often a researcher’s work is referenced by others, often aggregated into metrics like the h-index (an h-index of 10 would mean a researcher has 10 papers each cited at least 10 times). These numbers have traditionally been used to assess the "impact" of research, with higher citations meaning greater impact. I am told they influence decisions around hiring...

I recently attended a RICHeS Regional Workshop at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The event was a great opportunity to hear about the latest updates from other RICHeS facilities, and from the AHRC team on the progress of the overall programme. They have been holding these meetings around the UK as a way for different facilities to meet with the user base, and it was a great opportunity to showcase our plans for the North East Material Culture Analytical Suite (NEMCAS) .  One of the highlights for me was catching up with some familiar faces, especially Dr Paddy Gleeson , now Director of the Institute for Heritage and Environmental Science (IHES), the Northern Ireland RICHeS facility at Queen’s University Belfast. Paddy and I were both early career lecturers together at Newcastle many years ago, so it was wonderful to see how his career and the QUB facility have developed, and that we have both moved towards heritage science. The scale of the QUB RICHeS fac...

One of the most formative aspects of my academic career has been my involvement in grant assessment. Like many researchers, I began by reviewing journal articles - once you have published a couple of papers, you find yourself being asked to review others on similar topics. Over time, I started to take up opportunities to review grant proposals, and this has become a central and enriching part of my professional life. The first grants I reviewed were for a European programme in 2014, where I was invited by recommendation from a colleague - they needed someone with environmental archaeology experience who could review a handful of proposals with a quick turnaround. I was still very much an early career researcher, just a couple of years out from finishing my PhD. I was thrilled that my expertise was being recognised in this way, and it is a responsibility I took very seriously. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide range of funders, both in the UK and international...

Over the past few years, the Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI) has emerged as an alternative to the traditional academic CV in research funding applications, and has been adopted by major funders such as UKRI and the Wellcome Trust. This format is intended to rethink how we present our careers and contributions, with the idea being that the R4RI format is more inclusive and allows us to demonstrate a wider range of contributions. I have mixed feelings around it. I certainly agree that we need to value a wider range of experience and contributions, but I have some reservations about the format’s effectiveness and accessibility. The R4RI is basically a narrative-based CV that encourages researchers to describe their work across four key areas: contributions to the generation of knowledge, development of individuals and teams, contribution to the wider research community, and contribution to broader society.  It is designed to recognise a broader range of contributions, inclu...

It’s hard to believe it’s already been six months since I joined Durham University . The time has absolutely flown by, and I’ve found myself in the midst of a whirlwind of new ideas, collaborations, and opportunities that are making this next chapter of my career incredibly exciting. One of the most rewarding aspects so far has been the chance to work across disciplinary boundaries. There’s a real appetite here for collaboration, and I’ve been lucky to connect with brilliant colleagues in engineering, biosciences, and computer science. Together, we’re developing a cross-department XR-CT centre, bringing together our  complementary facilities in Archaeology and Engineering . I’ve also been exploring new collaborations with the computer science team, particularly around machine learning for XR-CT segmentation and analysis. There’s huge potential here, not just for streamlining workflows, but for transforming how we interpret complex datasets in archaeology. We’re already thinking ...