Early Career Researchers Network

We are an inclusive community who focus on collaboration and community. We celebrate the research and discoveries of our network from undergraduate students through to academics in the early years of their first appointment, and are enthusiastic about finding new ways to share our research.

ECR Events 

What on Earth am I doing (next)? 

A new series of hour long, fast paced and informal sessions that will cover topics requests by Early Career Researchers (ECRs). These include Q&A sessions about unconventional career paths into academia, workshops on writing applications for interdisciplinary posts and Q&A sessions with industry panels. These sessions are designed to be useful and interactive. 

Who is it for? 

What on Earth am I Doing? Sessions are open to all Early Career Researchers, from undergraduates to people in their first academic position, from all departments and disciplines. This includes single discipline or Natural Sciences Undergraduates, research and taught Masters students, PhDs, Postdoctoral research associates and those with a Fellowship or otherwise beginning their independent research career. It will cover topics of interest to those who want to pursue a career in academia, industry or other research-related career paths. 

The programme is being led by the Biophysical Sciences Institute's Early Career Researcher group in collaboration with the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing and the Careers and Enterprise EDAPT delivery team. 

Find out more

• Internal What on Earth? website. 
• Biophysical Sciences Institute Early Career Researchers group 
• Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing's Early Career Researcher group
• Careers and Enterprise support for students: Support for Postgraduate Research Students 

BSI ECR Winter Symposium

3 December, 2025

Building on the success of last year's symposium, our 2025 symposium is returning. Again this will be a free, in-person, one-day event based at Durham University. It will bring together early career stage researchers (ECR), established academics and industrialists to explore the power of interdisciplinary life sciences research and foster new collaborations.

Find out more about the 2025 symposium and register your interest in presenting. 

Our ECR Board

• Dorothea Barnes, Natural Sciences
• Will Brittain, Department of Chemistry 
• Ermando Canga, Department of Biosciences
• Katherine Deck, Department of Chemistry
• Matthew Grobbelaar, Department of Chemistry
• Libbi Moon, Chair, Department of Biosciences
• Liz Morris, BSI, Co-Director, Department of Biosciences
• Julia Pryde, Department of Biosciences

To get involved, have your say and lead on organisation of ECR events please get in touch by email to bsi.manager@durham.ac.uk 

News

BSI ECR Winter Symposium 2024

The Early Career Researchers' Winter Symposium 2024, hosted at Durham University, marked an exciting event for the next generation of researchers at the boundaries of the life sciences and the other physical sciences. With over 50 attendees from eight institutions and companies, the one-day event focused on presenting cutting-edge research, and showcasing interdisciplinary discoveries from across biomathematics, biophysics, biological chemistry, chemical biology and bioengineering.

Workshop with Durham Spray Paints

A group of Department of Physics Postdoctoral researchers and PhD students took part in a spray paint workshop. The workshop was led by Lewis Hobson from Durham Spray Paints, who they were introduced to through the BSI's Seed scheme. This led to the creation of new artworks for the "boring corridor" in Physics (see below) and a new mural for the Department of Physics is being planned. 

Thesis Prize

The 2023 Thesis Prize was awarded to Katy Cornish (Department of Chemistry).  Her thesis “Fantastic proteins and where to find them” was selected by a panel of BSI members after being nominated by his PhD supervisor Prof. Ehmke Pohl (Department of Chemistry and Biosciences). The image below shows sampling of proteins from a geyser in Iceland, one of a number of extreme conditions. Find out more about this research and the wider Virus X Consortium project on our Chemical Biology pages.  

#HaikumyResearch

Earlier in the year we laid down a Twitter Haiku challenge - can you write down the most important part of your research as a haiku? We wanted to make people think about the main message of their work, to capture the essence of their research.  We were blown away by the responses from the budding poets and from the judges: poet Dr Katharine Goda, Prof. Tom McLeish FRS (University of York), Prof Masao Imaseki (Durham University).

The winning haikus covered topics from astrophysics to the author's personal growth through the PhD journey. One of the winners' haiku's is shown below (Cian Rynne, Durham Biosciences) and all three can be read in full in this news story or found at #Haikumyresearch.

BSI #LOOminaries

We took up the challenge laid down by Professor Lorna Dougan (Astbury Centre, University of Leeds) to transform toilet roll tubes into the scientists who inspire us. The scientists immortalized in loo-roll form included Margarita Staykova, Judith Howard, Eva Crane and Steven Cobb.

See our LOOminaries at the link: http://ow.ly/3BvD50DWHnN.

Early Career Symposium

Our very first research symposium was held at the end of July 2020. The symposium was held virtually and attracted more than 50 participants from 45 different institutions (13 different countries and 3 continents!). It was an amazing end to our first year of events and a offered a taste of what is yet to come.

To mark the occasion the 2020 ECR Symposium’s keynote talk was the Howard Prize Lecture. This was given by Professor Silvia Marchesan (University of Trieste) and was an amazing talk entitled “Heterochiral Peptide Assembly: Entry in Wonderland through the Looking-Glass” an Alice in Wonderland themed journey through peptide chemistry.