Act now to support early-career researchers

When the first rumours of a then-distant virus started, I was a postdoc at the University of Warwick in the UK. I was trying to get as much science done as possible in preparation for my move to Spain to start my Marie Curie fellowship on 1 March 2020, and I had handed in my notice. As the pandemic landed its first blow to Europe, lockdown was imposed both in the UK and in Spain, and all flights everywhere were cancelled. The start of my fellowship was postponed, and I suddenly found myself with no old job, no new job, no income and no idea what was to come.

There were other storms brewing in my personal life also, and my mental health took a serious hit. I sought medical help for my mental health for the first time in my life, and it saved me. As did the financial help I received from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemists’ Community Fund, a true lifeline. Without this support, I would likely have been forced to abandon my scientific career, and certainly forced to abandon my academic career.

As this was happening to me, I could also see dark clouds descending on my friends and colleagues: losing jobs and other opportunities, fearing the end of fellowships or short-term contracts, their experiments halted, their mental health in tatters. This was not an isolated trend from my close network: an article published in Nature last year highlights the disastrous landscape of interrupted postdoctoral research and postdocs’ exacerbated anxiety in the face of an uncertainty that adds to an already precarious career stage. The pandemic is also having a disproportionate effect on women’s publication track records (particularly those with younger children), further deepening the gender gap in Stem.