blog

Gary McDowell is August’s “F1000 Specialist of the Month”. He is the Executive Director of the Future of Research nonprofit and a resident at the Manylabs open science skunkworks in San Francisco, where he works to support junior scientists advocating for changes to the scientific system.

F1000 Specialists are PhD students, postdocs, clinicians and researchers who help their colleagues use F1000Prime, F1000Workspace and F1000Research, and spread the word about F1000 within their institutes. If you’d like to become an F1000 Specialist yourself, you can sign up here.

What are some things you have done as F1000 Specialist?

When I was a postdoc at Tufts, I was trying to show others in the Boston area how useful I found F1000Workspace, and now that I’ve moved out of academia, I continue trying to show others how useful it can be for citations etc. I work exclusively on a Chromebook now, and use Google Docs for all my paper-writing, for which F1000Workspace is very useful! I’ve also been encouraging others to share papers, posters and slides on F1000Research, particularly on the Future of Research Channel – having slides and posters available is really effective in helping people track what we’ve been up to and talking about.

Do you have any tips or advice for young scientists?

Keep your eyes open to the realities of the system around you. It’s up to you to get what you need out of your training, and to find the way you want to pursue science. There’s a lot of misinformation and platitudes out there about how you should be pursuing a scientific career. It’s important to find ways of using your passion for science that also align with your values.

Finally, can you tell us a little bit about your work?

I’ve recently started working full-time to help junior scientists in different places to organize meetings, talk about the problems facing science, and try to find ways of effecting change to solve them. I’m trying to write a lot of articles to make my case, and working with institutions, scientific societies and federal agencies to try to implement changes to improve the situation for junior scientists. At the moment a lot of focus is on getting information to junior scientists and increasing transparency about graduate and postdoctoral training. It involves a lot of fascinating work on trying to solve a really big problem, with all sorts of collaborations with interesting groups. Which is why I got into science!