This week’s PhDetails is #81 with Gawain Antell, an American palaeobiologist who explores processes of macroecology and evolution at the University of Oxford. Gawain completed a B.S. at Yale in 2016, and then worked for the US National Park Service for a year as a Geoscientists-in-the-Parks Intern (similar to Geocorps). Gawain is now three years into doctoral research at the University of Oxford under supervision of Erin Saupe. Gawain builds statistical models to quantify how species' geographic distributions respond to environmental change throughout Earth history. Understanding past extinction events could help conservation biologists to target species at risk from modern climate change. You can find Gawain on Twitter @GawainAntell!
Photo credit: Jim Barkley
Well let’s start off talking about completely unscientific stuff: What is your favourite band/musical artist pre 1980?
I was trained in classical music and jazz before I went to university, so I love everyone from Brahms and Mendolssohn to Charlie Parker, Arethra Franklin, and Miles Davis.
Favourite band/musical artist post 1980?
My secret guilty pleasure is listening to whatever’s on Top 40, in the gym or while driving long distance. It’s my adult rebellion because I never heard it while growing up.
Favourite movie?
I love complex sci-fi stories that make us question anthropocentrism and what it means to be human. The remake Battlestar Galactica series does this really well, for example. For a feel-good movie, the Princess Bride.
Do you listen to podcasts?
I listen to podcasts sometimes when I run, and they are either about running (Running for Real by Tina Muir), diabetes/disability (BBC Ouch; The Bravest Life), or both (Type One Run). If I’m on a quiet train or bus I might catch up on Cite Black Women.
Where do you study and who are your supervisors?
I am based at the University of Oxford. My primary affiliation is the Department of Earth Sciences with Erin Saupe (https://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/people/erin-saupe/), who is fantastic at helping me with day-to-day project work. I have a secondary advisor in Zoology, Tim Coulson, who provides more big-picture mentorship. Having ties to multiple departments gives me wider networks of support and enrichment.
What year of your PhD are you in?
This academic year is 3 of 4.
Who’s giving you the money – and for how long?
The Clarendon Foundation, in partnership with St John’s College, funds my fees and stipend. Clarendon scholarships are awarded to international students and are paid by the University of Oxford Press. Other than the Rhodes scholarship, this is one of the few routes for non-EU citizens like me to be funded for study at Oxford.
Do you have any publications ?
The first research chapter of my thesis was published online in Current Biology: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.065. This work tested for the effects of competition on marine species’ geographic distributions throughout Earth history. I also wrote an article for a conference symposium volume, discussing the importance of digitisation for natural history museum collections. I was also lucky enough to work in the Yale Peabody Museum as an undergraduate, and with the support of the wonderful staff there I discovered two new species of fossil insect, which I described in the museum bulletin: https://doi.org/10.3374/014.057.0204. Coincidentally, my co-author on that paper is a researcher at Oxford, which first made me consider Oxford for my PhD.
Did you do a masters – where was it and was it about?
I didn’t do a masters, but I my undergraduate studies were unusually intensive and allowed me to gain a lot of research experience. For instance, one of my theses involved 2 years of fieldwork and analysis, and through a student job at the Yale Peabody Museum I had already published an academic paper by the time I graduated. I felt that those and other academic and practical experiences left me on par with what I might achieve through a formal master’s programme.
Do you do fieldwork? What is the best fieldwork you have ever done and what made it great?
Earth Sciences provides more field opportunities than any other field, even more than ecology, so I’ve been lucky to travel to many cool places. One field opportunity I want to publicise is the Paleontological Society two-week course on Stratigraphic Paleobiology run by Mark Patzkowsky and Steve Holland. These two instructors teach not only how to do fieldwork but how to analyse the data and how to lead fieldtrips responsibly. Plus, the course is based at a field station outside of Bozeman, Montana, where the scenery will take your breath away. I recommend the course for any other palaeobiology graduate students!
Photo credit: Jim Barkley
How many PhDs did you apply for – what were you looking for?
I applied for 5 different programs where I had been in contact with professors about projects. If I had applied to any more places, I don’t think I would have taken the other schools as seriously. My number one criteria was that the supervisor was not only doing cutting-edge work in my field, but also was someone who had a good record of supporting students. The personal relationship between supervisor and student is more important than the topic of research to a successful and positive PhD experience.
What is the most bodged piece of equipment you have had to use during field/labwork – did it work?
I once jerry-rigged pitfall traps to catch insects at a field site in Kenya: dug a pit in the ground with a trowel, placed a plastic bowl inside, and covered with a plastic plate held up by skewers. This setup was already rough-and-ready, but then the handle broke off the trowel and I ran out of both plates and skewers. So then I dug holes in the dirt with my hands, laminated a piece of notebook paper with tape as the raincover, and stabbed sticks through the paper to elevate it above the bowl. It still worked most of the time, except when elephants smashed the whole contraption or other wildlife drank the water dry.
What one piece of advice would you give to a masters student applying to PhDs now?
Be bluntly honest with yourself: how much do you really want this vs. how much have the people around you made you think that you want/need a PhD? Most of us receive a lot of pressure from our academic mentors, and sometimes friends and family, to do the more advanced degree. It’s hard to tease apart that internalised goal from our independent desires, but anyone who is brave enough to do so will be able to either go pursue something more meaningful instead, or continue the PhD route with new conviction.
How often do you meet with your supervisors?
My main supervisor has an office directly across from mine and we see each other daily - if there’s any minor thing I need to ask about, I can resolve it immediately. We sit down once a week to discuss projects in detail. I’m very satisfied with this setup.
What supervisor traits are important to you?
It is non-negotiable for me that I get along with any potential supervisor on a personal level, and that they have material/financial support like equipment and funds for travel, understand or be willing to learn about equality/diversity issues in their field and university, and support students in any way necessary. Although it is necessary for the person to be an expert in the field, this trait on its own is not sufficient.
What do you think are the worst supervisor traits?
Deciding whether to work with a supervisor is a little bit (or a lot) like deciding whether to enter a 3+ year intimate relationship. I would expect most people to be very careful to make sure any potential romantic partner wouldn’t be coercive or abusive emotionally, physically, or financially, but many prospective students don’t seem to have the same level of precaution when it comes to joining a lab. Unfortunately, there are toxic people out there in positions of power.
In one sentence what is your PhD about?
I study how species’ geographic distributions respond to environmental change, in past periods of Earth’s climate change history.
What has been your academic highlight of the last year?
Seeing my first PhD paper published in a top biology journal was tremendously satisfying. There were big highs and lows during the two years between first joining the project and finally seeing it out in print. I am thankful for my supervisor’s support the whole time. Erin encouraged me without falter, and when the article finally came out, we celebrated with a whole research group trip to the pub.
Have you had an academic lowpoint of the last year – if so what happened?
I hit an all-time low the summer after my first year. I had been training for my first marathon and preparing to submit my first PhD manuscript to Nature--expectations were high! The day of the event, I got heat exhaustion and landed in the hospital with heart damage. The same week, the results of the project changed from positive (supporting a big conclusion) to negative (at the time, an inexplicable result). I was devastated and suffered a depressive spell. With support, I then spent a year doing careful testing of analysis methods and also building up to a second marathon. In the end, the manuscript landed in a good journal and the race went well: the problem all along wasn’t my skill level but my impatient expectations.
Which academic idol/scientist have you met?
I met Geerat Vermeij when he received a medal from the Yale Peabody Museum in 2016, and that was memorable. He is an evolutionary biologist who specialises in gastropods and is blind. He has developed groundbreaking theories while fighting ableism in the academy.
Which academic idol/scientist would you most like to meet?
I wish I could time-travel to meet my study animals before they went extinct.
Who has been your academic role model/inspiration and why?
I look up to my supervisor, Erin Saupe, in many ways. She reminds me that science is a long game, believes that we should err on the side of generosity towards including people in our work, and is approachable with any kind of problem I encounter.
Do you have a favourite paper?
The book ‘Macroecology’ by James H. Brown inspired the entire field by the same name. Reading about ways to synthesise ecology, geography, and statistics captivated me and formed the starting point of my PhD.
What has been your favourite conference so far – why?
I love most of the conferences I attend, because the palaeobiology community is small and friendly. The North American Paleontological Conference in 2019 in Riverside, California, was especially enjoyable because the science was excellent and it gave me an excuse to return to the West Coast US, where my family is from. As an immigrant to the UK for my PhD, I only return once a year, and conferences are a great excuse to travel.
What hours do you typically work?
I aim to work 9 to 5, although I appreciate that flexibility in this is one of the perks of academia. For instance, it’s dark for so much of the day here in England in winter that sometimes I take a 2-hour lunchbreak to run outdoors and see sunshine for once. I try to make up the hours so it totals 40 across the week. I refuse to feel guilty or ashamed for keeping to this limit. I don’t work weekends unless I’m making up a certain number of hours that I skipped during the week.
How do you avoid procrastinating?
Strategy #1: I ask, ‘what is the smallest task I could do right now to move forward?’ Even ‘write an email to X’ can feel overwhelming, so I might start with, ‘look up the email address of person X.’ Once I get started somewhere, I often lose myself in the task and forget my hesitancy to do it.
Strategy #2: I tell myself that whether or not I feel like doing something is irrelevant. I don’t need to be in a ‘perfect state’ of wanting to do something in order to work on it. I realise that the finished task will not be perfect, either--perfection is the enemy of the good, as they say. This self-talk takes off any pressure that I might feel to do the task to an unachievably high standard, which might have scared me off of starting it. Then I focus on doing the best I can in the moment.
What motivates you in your day to day PhD life?
I aim to treat my PhD like a 9-to-5 job, which obviates the need to feel motivated. I go to the office every weekday because that is my habit, my expectation for myself; I do not even ask the question ‘do I feel like going in today?’ Then, I do not feel guilty about clocking off on evenings and weekends.
What do you do when you’re not working – how do you balance it with your PhD?
I strive to keep to a regular work schedule, which means that evenings and weekends are free for me to do anything else. I run, play cello, see performances, meet friends, cook, read, whatever. In the second year of my PhD, I maintained a strict schedule to fit in 40 hours of work, 40 miles of running, and 10-20 hours of graduate student body organising every week--but now I am much more relaxed outside of work.
If a genie could grant you one wish to help with your PhD what would you wish for?
The bureaucracy of Oxford University is truly stupendous, so above all else I wish that a genie would come and centralise the system. When I try to explain just how redundant, disorganised, and inefficient the current administrative system is, most people don’t believe me, but dealing with it really does end up sapping time from my research.
What would be your dream job?
My dream job would involve research, teaching, travel, autonomy in what I do, and adequate compensation/support. This sounds a lot like a professorship, but without the administrative paperwork, grant writing, and human resources management.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Cheeky answer: I’ll be sitting at a computer. Serious answer: I might be finishing a first postdoc position and desperately applying for jobs all over the world while re-evaluating my life choices.
One word to sum up your future in academia:
Opportunistic
What do you want to achieve outside of academia in the coming year?
This year I have consciously stepped back from big goals outside of my PhD, because I overdid it in the years prior. In my second year, I trained for and ran a sub-4 hour marathon while setting PB’s in every shorter race leading up to it. At the same time, I volunteered 10-20 hours/week advocating for and organising students as the president of my college graduate body. After so many months of intense self-discipline, I realised I needed a recovery period, so I let myself off the hook for everything except going to the department 40 hours/week.
What essential tool hardware/software could you not do your PhD without?
R, an open-source computing environment and language for statistics.
Where is somewhere you would like to work in the future?
I would love to join an Antarctic research expedition, either for marine animal/plankton surveys or fossil collecting.
Do you have a favourite organism?
Heteromorph ammonites were incredible. Google them! They look a bit like nautiluses except that the shell grows in a super weird way--the coils switch direction! Sadly, these animals went extinct along with non-avian dinosaurs at the end-Cretaceous.
Are there any social interactions/meetings which have enhanced your PhD experience?
I am the first PhD student in my lab, so I was quite lonely in the first year of my PhD. I asked my supervisor to link me to other labs, who adopted me into their meetings and social events, and that brought a lot of fun and new ideas into my academic life.
If you could change one thing about your group/department structure what would it be?
Oxford has a slew of structural barriers to inclusivity. Because the university has such a complicated administrative structure, as I mentioned earlier, this also makes it very difficult to change. I wish I could see faster progress from the advocacy work in which I’ve been involved.
What major question in your subject area is yet to be addressed – why is it important and why isn’t anyone addressing it?
There are some very well-documented evolutionary patterns that no one can explain. In particular, extinction and speciation rates change in unison at all time scales, but we don’t know why this would necessarily be the case. Similarly, there is compelling evidence for ‘diversity-dependent diversification,’ the slow-down of speciation as more species are present. People assume that this is driven by competition, but the exact mechanism by which competition between individual organisms would change species-level origination/extinction rates is debated. My first PhD paper, linked above, tested a mechanism based on geographic range size and found no support for it in marine ecosystems.
Comments
Post a Comment