Science policy

This week, we are exploring biology and policy.

What issues are at the forefront of policy discussion in biology? How have these changed over the years? And how does policy work impact our day-to-day life? With me to discuss this are Laura Marshall, head of Science Policy at the Royal Society of Biology, and Sana Zakaria, director of Emerging Technology and Resilience at RAND Europe, a member of the RSB's Education and Science Policy Committee.

Welcome both to the podcast.

Thank you.

So could we just start off by, um, introducing yourselves, your roles, and just a little bit of what your work is about, perhaps Laura first?

Sure.

Um, so yeah, I'm Laura Marshall, head of Science Policy at the RSB.

Um, and I've headed up the policy team at RSB for the past ten years.

I mean, so like this is a really bad.

There's so many bad ideas about like science policy right now.

It's it's there's really nowhere to even start because it's like all bad.

It's

And now we're just taking that investment and going away.

People going to Denmark or Germany or Australia or China.

And because they're going to be treated better, they're going to get better funding, they're going to be dealing with far more stable science policy in terms of funding, unlike the craziness that's happening here.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, Shaheer, you came here.

This year, I covered all the sex jokes astronomers and scientists slip into our paper titles and some of the science behind those.

In today's coffee chat, I cornered Alex Byrne, now a postdoc in my group at MIT, to chat about his interests in science policy.

All right, Alex.

Well, thanks for taking the time to chat with us today.

we're going a little bit astray from what we usually do in these interviews.

And I want to talk about some potential career paths and interests that are adjacent to academia.

And one of these is science policy.

And it's something that you have gotten increasingly interested in over the course of your PhD and now into your postdoc.