Interview with Dr. Robert Seaborne, researcher and founder of ‘Inside Academia’
The academic world holds a space for wonder and knowledge. Yet, it is also often accompanied by growing pressures and challenges, which only seem to become greater as one climbs up the academic ladder. For most, the only way to navigate through is usually without a working compass and lacking the necessary tools at hand.
Dr. Robert Seaborne is a postdoctoral researcher in muscle biology, currently at the Biomedical Science Institute (BMI) at the University of Copenhagen. He completed his bachelor in Sports Science at Liverpool John Moores University, followed by a masters and PhD degree, as well as a postdoctoral period at Queen Mary University in London. He is the founder of ‘Inside Academia’, a platform which focuses on mental health in the academic world. Featuring articles that highlight some of the unhealthy practices and stresses that can affect young students and researchers, it offers others’ experiences as a blueprint to navigate the rewarding yet challenging roadmap that involves going into science.
We had the pleasure of speaking with Robert and discussing his scientific trajectory, what brought about this project and his thoughts on the negative side of academia. One that almost everyone knows about and yet relatively few actively speak about.
Conchita Fraguas (CF): How did your trajectory with science first begin?
Robert Seaborne (RS): Science first came into the picture when I was a very young kid. I grew up in the English countryside, and there was a local library there. For some reason, I became obsessed with this science book. It was this ‘do experiments at home’ type of book, so you could perform really cool tiny experiments using standard objects that you could find around the house. For example, there was one where you could make an electrical circuit using a pickled gherkin and I found it fascinating. I probably rented the book out every month for like 10 months in a row to do all of the experiments, it was so fun. I think that is probably where my interest in science comes from. It was a combination of that and the process of building and making things that I found the most interesting.
Fast forward a while, I got really into playing football. I was playing with professional teams’ academies and there was a small chance of carving out a career in the game. Even though I didn’t end up making it, I became quite interested in Sports Science as a consequence. I ended up going to University in Liverpool and completed a degree in the subject. In my third year, there were a couple of lecturers that I had which got me interested in Biochemistry. I remember exactly two lectures which were really eye-opening for me, and I had this sort of lightbulb moment where I was like ‘Wow, this is actually properly interesting’.
“ I probably rented the book out every month for like 10 months in a row to do all of the experiments... it was so fun. That is probably where my interest in science comes from... I think it was a combination of that and the process of building and making things that I found the most interesting.”
I then pursued a master’s degree. During this year, we had a class called ‘Molecular Physiology’, which delved into real molecular science. It was at this point that I thought to myself that this was the subject that I was actually interested in. What really appealed to me was trying to understand what was actually happening in the body and why it was happening, and diving deeper and deeper until an answer could be found. Following that, I completed a PhD in Molecular Physiology with a focus on muscle biology, and again at that point I was more interested in how and why things were happening at a molecular level. This is why I went on to do a postdoc in functional genetics, which is about as ‘low’ as you can get in terms of molecular stuff.
CF: What an interesting trajectory. What attracted you to functional genetics coming from the muscle biology field?
RS: Many prominent muscle degenerative diseases actually have a heavy genomic basis, and so I became really interested in studying them from a genetic standpoint. I was first drawn by the cool techniques that the lab was using- I wanted to learn them all so that I could then apply them in a health setting, and muscle genetic diseases seemed like the prime target.
There is an array of diseases that have an axis between the brain and muscle, which are called neuromuscular diseases. In these, there is some sort of breakdown between the brain and muscle partnership, like in motor neuron disease. Over time, which can take as long as a decade or as short as a year or two, the muscle will begin to waste away. This will lead to the muscle losing both its mass and functionality, which are key determinants of human health.
My idea was that eventually, I could be in a position to research those diseases in some new ways, which is why I ended up moving here to Denmark. However, even now, the main thing I find interesting is method development, so I’m trying to work on some new methods, which brings us back to when I first took that science book out about building and creating. I find that quite cool.
CF: What was the pivotal point in your trajectory that prompted you to create ‘Inside Academia’?
RS: During my PhD, things became quite intense. I came to a point where I could no longer disassociate the work that I was doing with anything else, and it became everything I did, and everything I was. By the end of it, over the course of two and a half to three years, everything I did was focused around my PhD, and Monday through to Sunday I’d be working in the lab. Looking back, it was a combination of stresses and pressures that I both put on myself, and that the industry also puts on you, and I ended up working myself into the ground and burning out completely. I managed to get to the end of it, and it was only then that I looked back and I realised what had been happening, and it hit me that it was completely the wrong way of going about it.
There was nobody there to sit you down, and tell you, ‘there’s a lot of stress and pressure that comes along, and you need to spend a long time working with how to deal with all of this and learn to balance it all out’. I didn’t really have that. There wasn’t an awful lot of information about how prevalent it was, and not a lot of coping or support mechanisms out there, stating what to do about it, and how to handle it.
"Looking back, it was a combination of stresses and pressures that I both put on myself, and that the industry also puts on you... [Once] I managed to get to the end of it, I looked back and I realised what had been happening, and it hit me that it was completely the wrong way of going about it."
After my PhD finished, I spent some time reading and researching around [this topic]. I realised that there were a lot of people around me who were showing a lot of the warning signs of going through what I had gone through. And that’s when I started to grasp some of the ‘hidden truths’ in terms of mental health in academia. The quite alarming number of people that are struggling, which are typically PhDs and postdocs, but also include early career scientists and even lecturers and professors.
In my case, I couldn’t recognise that I was struggling myself. I had no idea [how to balance it all out]. I wasn’t equipped to deal with it, I didn’t have the tools to do so. And I don’t think you do unless you go through it and have to acquire them. We aren’t really shown that much information about how prevalent [poor mental health in academia] is. It’s swept under the carpet, it’s probably the biggest elephant in the academic room- everybody knows about it once they have experienced it, but nobody confronts it or tackles it head on.
"I didn’t have the tools... I don’t think you do unless you go through it and have to acquire them. It’s probably the biggest elephant in the academic room- everybody knows about it once they have experienced it, but nobody confronts it or tackles it head on."
The main point of starting the platform of ‘Inside Academia’ was to in some way help tackle that problem, by providing a bit of a platform just to raise the understanding of the prevalence of it and get the message out to as many people as possible. At the very fundamental level, if someone was struggling, even if they couldn’t recognise it themselves, by reading short blog articles of others’ experiences it might make them realise “this isn’t normal” and perhaps help identify some of the warning signs, and think “maybe there is someone there than I can reach out to and get some advice from”. That was the initial idea.
CF: I find amazing the fact that you dissected your difficult experience and created a platform that others going through something similar can relate to and benefit from. What helped you through it?
RS: Support mechanisms and networks are crucial, and I know that for some people who don’t have that, it’s a lot harder for them to deal with. My mom and dad are a really good support system. And alongside friends who even though they have no idea what I do science-wise, they could not care less. Every time we would see each other, the last thing they wanted to talk about was what I was doing at work, which was brilliant because the focus was off work completely and [more on my wellbeing]. After the PhD finished and I thought about starting this platform, their support helped get it off the ground, and felt like it was worth doing. I was quite fortunate to have that around me.
"[The culture in academia] is almost like a war of attrition more than a story of success, about who can survive the longest rather than who can flourish... I definitely have no idea how to change it, but I think it starts with talking to people, and I’d like to think that things are changing for the better."
In the platform, the people who write the articles are really the brave ones, as they are allowing their stories to be shared regardless of whether one person or a million will read it. They are happy to allow people to read their experiences knowing that they might support someone, and contributing like that, it takes a lot to do it. I also think that having a culture of security is really important for it, with people with different experiences, can share their stories and give advice to help each other out, and this only works in an environment of trust and security.
CF: What is your current standpoint on the culture that surrounds the academic world, looking back at your younger self first experiencing it and what you know now?
RS: First off, I must say that there is a real and noticeable difference between the UK and Denmark in terms of the external pressure that’s applied to people. There are of course always many factors in play, but generally speaking, it is slightly better here than in the UK. Having said that, there are still a lot of similarities. One of the main ones, which still holds true now as it did when I first started my studies, is this “win-at-all costs” mentality, that is subconsciously driven into people. Meaning that you need to be the best of the best if you want to survive in academia. And it ends up being like a war of attrition more than a story of success, meaning that it’s almost about who can survive the longest rather than who can flourish within the industry. This was subconsciously fed into me, all the way from my masters through to where I am now.
"It’s the story of 'having to win', the survival of the fittest idea that is fed into people from a very young age...Over the years this creates a mindset in somebody, where they put a lot of internal pressure on themselves."
And this mentality can encompass many things. It’s about the grades you need to get into this master’s program, or the x amount of papers with this number of citations to get this position, or to get this grant. You’re competing against this lab or another… it’s the story of “having to win”. The survival of the fittest idea that is fed into people from a very young age. Over the years, this creates a mindset in somebody where, they put a lot of internal pressure on themselves. Another thing is that there are a lot of unnecessary and sometimes useless metric systems, that grade people, departments and universities. It’s like a system that has been put in place as an easy way for panels to rank maybe a candidate above another or reviewing bodies. But what we don’t realise is that this easy ranking system can very easily destroy the essence of what science is about.
I have really enjoyed my time in Denmark so far, in my lab team they foment us to follow and focus on developing our ideas, and because of that I spent the last year working on a few side projects focused on developing techniques in my field, which I would probably not have had the space and time to do [under more demanding pressures]. What we don’t realise is that this is where ideas come from. When you think about things. And yet we don’t give ourselves that thinking space anymore, with universities pressuring us to publish papers, and planning a workload of experiments.
CF: What would you tell your younger self; first starting out in science?
RS: I think there’s a lot of things that I would say. One would be just to slow down, both physically and mentally. I think allowing myself to explore the nuances of what’s going on in [between experiments]. I never gave myself time for that, ever. Just having somebody there just to say stop, slow down, think.
I would also tell myself to not let work overlap into “life moments”. Meaning, to never give up all the other facets of what you’re doing in life, just for this one. If you consider your life as a collection of pillars that constitute what make you yourself, whether it’d be relationships/social life, work, family… Never ever let all of them break down for just one. Because if that one breaks, then everything can come crumbling down.
Basically, if you put all of your energies exclusively into work, you end up becoming a reflection of what happens in the lab, and your worth becomes dictated by how good your [experiment] comes out, or whether your grant gets accepted or not. And if it doesn’t, then your self worth is gone. And this can not only be extremely hard, but if you strip off everything else and your work becomes the [only focus], it’s very tricky to disassociate from that as well.
CF: What is something that you would like to see in the upcoming generations of young scientists?
RS: I think what would be good is to have the next generation of people going into academia be mentally equipped to deal with some of the negative by-products that go along with it. And certainly, not to pass their bad experiences onto the next generation, which I know has been done previously. But also to challenge the status quo of how the industry works and to challenge the mentality of ‘papers papers papers’ and ‘grants grants grants’ and focus more on the raw characteristics of what science is all about. I definitely have no idea how to change the culture, but I think it starts with talking to people, and I’d like to think that things are [slowly] changing for the better.
Dr. Robert Seaborne is delighted to continue in the world of science, continuing his interests of building, creating and applying his skills to the field of muscle research. Notably, he is soon to be establishing his very own laboratory group, based at King’s College London in the United Kingdom.
Alongside his exciting research, he is passionate and vocal about mental health in academia and offers motivational talks as well as coaching and mentoring sessions. Robert has confessed that ‘Inside Academia’ has been on a short hiatus over the past year, however, he is happy to re-ignite the platform in 2023. It features podcast episodes and articles dedicated to the topic of mental health in academia alongside the sharing of experiences. And is a space that is always looking for new community members to engage with and contribute to the site.
You can find more information about ‘Inside Academia’ here: https://www.insideacademia.co.uk/
Interview and words by Conchita Fraguas
The Earth Youth Project