Jean Paul (Part 1) Jean Paul (Part 1) on Sandpit funding & impact-focussed research

Geri: 00:00:05

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas, and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. If you're interested in hearing about a different model for research funding, you'll be interested in listening to this episode with Jean Paul. Jean is a senior scientist in the department of psychiatry, psychotherapy psychosomatics and medical psychology at the medical university of Innsbruck in Austria. She also happens to be a fellow Australian, but we'd never met at all. And I'm talking to her because she was recommended by Rafael Himmelsbach, as someone who might be really interesting to talk to about building a distributed research team Jean has a very interesting, mixed academic background. a social scientist, who's working in the area of health and illness and medical systems. Applying qualitative research methods in a domain that doesn't really have a lot of experience with qualitative methods and working in a lot of interdisciplinary, mixed disciplinary teams. And what's particularly interesting is Jean's experience in getting from Australia to Austria for the projects that she's working on. And that was through a process called a sandpit or an ideas factory It's a very intensive workshopping process and this was run by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute or as it's also called in German, the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft. And at the end of the week, there are some project teams in the workshop who are awarded funding to work together. So it's interesting hearing Jean talk about her sandpit experiences the decision to move to Austria., the experiences in starting up that project and undertaking interdisciplinary work and using a very different co-design approach and so on. Jean also talks about her own PhD, some of the particular projects that she worked on and some of her postdoc projects and in the interest of keeping the focus on the funding, I've moved some of that to the end of the episode. So if you're interested in hearing more about Jean's particular background and projects, stay on and listen for that at the end. So enjoy this part one. And in part two, we'll come back and Jean continues with some really interesting experiences in actually leading a project of more senior researchers and there will be lots of practical tips and tricks in that. Jean, thank you for joining me. Someone recommended you as a really interesting person to talk to about assembling a distributed team in terms of the process that you used and how the teams run. Before we get to that, do you just want to introduce yourself?

Jean: 00:03:21

Yeah sure so um, A fellow Australian, and

Geri: 00:03:24

By coincidence,

Jean: 00:03:26

there's a few of us around, but not so many on this part of Austria in the west, in Innsbruck, where I'm based. but yes, I moved to Austria in 2018. Up until then, I was working as a researcher at the Children's Hospital in Melbourne at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. And I would describe myself as a social scientist have quite a mixed academic background. I studied arts and science in combination at university. So I've always been interested in science and how things work, but maybe also in combination with how people experience health and illness and medical systems and so my PhD in Australia was looking at communication between doctors who specialize in genetics and their patients. I then couple of postdocs in, in Melbourne and worked on a couple of different projects, one about so as a qualitative researcher, always working in these topics to really understand those complex questions of, you know, social representation or understanding decision making, understanding behavior change understanding relationships between professionals or between families, across professionals, across organizations. So I ended up sitting in a very strange position where my research group that I was connected with were cell biologists who were doing genomic sequencing and sex chromosome research. And I was the one qualitative researcher who was. By themselves sort of in some way had a lot of networks across the research organization.

Geri: 00:05:02

Did you bring in the project grant to get to that position or did they get the grant and advertise for you? Because I'm always curious about those choices or how those postdoc positions and projects come about.

Jean: 00:05:18

Yes. So for those two positions, they were both Already funded and people knew of me at the Children's Hospital And poached me I guess My plan after my PhD was to have a break

Geri: 00:05:32

Yeah.

Jean: 00:05:32

and write up my papers and do some traveling. But already in the last year of my PhD, some professors who were in, in different departments wanted to employ me. And so that plan went out the window a little bit. And yeah, one of the national projects was money from the government. For this pregnancy project and the other one was from the Victorian government originally and then from the Australian government and I was employed with special discretionary funding from the director of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute because my Boss wanted to have a postdoc to do some of this qualitative research, but she didn't have the capacity to do it herself. And so she argued to have that position created. They were both, you know, term positions. So for a particular short term, I think one year, each of them were one year with renewing.

Geri: 00:06:22

So you could have still, we have an interesting, just little delay here, don't we, in the thing. You could have still chosen not to do it and to write up your papers and go traveling. What made you choose to let that plan go? Is it, was it something like you really wanted to do the projects or you were worried that no other job would come along? You know, how did that decision process? Yes.

Jean: 00:06:48

think in research, you have to be careful what you say no to. And you know, it's a quite a small community, even though you know, this is an international research field. Melbourne is. a world leader in biomedical research and also in qualitative research. And yeah, the, I've also felt like research is very difficult to stay in as a career. And I didn't really know what the future would hold, how long it would be possible to Position that was funded. And I would give it my best shot until I had to make a decision if it wasn't working anymore. A lot of my colleagues and senior people around me you know, had missed out on funding from our national funding agency, the NHMRC, over several years and then have to make tough decisions if they move out of research and into private industry or retrain somewhere else. And my philosophy, I think, has always been it's a hard world to be in as an academic or as a researcher who's employed with research funding. So see how far you can go and if you have to make that decision later on, see how that goes. I, before I did my PhD, there was maybe another one of these decision moments where during my studies, I was interested in becoming a genetic counsellor. And that's something that now in Austria, there is a master's program in Innsbruck, actually. That's the first German speaking master's program for this profession. These are specialists who work alongside doctors and nurses and psychologists, and their role is really to help provide Genetic information to families to help make decisions on testing or to help understand test results and adjust to a condition that they might have or they might have it in their pregnancy. And that was something that really appealed to me with my mixed background of liking science, but more the human aspect. So I did do an honors project, which in Australia is the fourth year of your bachelor degree. With a group at the Children's Hospital who were doing a lot of psychosocial research in genetics. And they're one of the, back then, one of the leading groups in Australia that were doing this work. And I got really interested from that point in the research aspect, which I think in undergraduate science, you're not really exposed to research outside the lab. And in my humanities, also not really doing so much research and more just learning and writing papers and writing essays. So that opened the world, I think my world to applied research with within the healthcare system and what kind of skills I could bring to that area. So after doing that honors year my plans were to start a master's program in genetic counseling and I already knew the director who was. It's waiting for me to finish my honours year to start but my supervisors for my honours year suggested that I do a PhD. And one of them said that she would be retiring soon, so it's now or never. So I got diverted into doing a PhD instead, and since then I didn't then move back to doing genetic counselling program, but. My backup plan, I guess, which is something you have to kind of have in, in research, has always been that if you know, funding dries up and if I'm unlucky and not successful in getting funding for my position then I would try and do some further studies in social work or genetic counselling and move back to working with people having had that experience in research, but in a more stable position. But so far, I haven't had to do that.

Geri: 00:10:36

Yeah, that's interesting because Katta, who I just spoke to the last podcast episodes I've put out, also talked about having a backup plan and they now have a tenure track position but until that became clear, yeah, started doing some sign language degree just to, have another backup plan. Yeah. Interesting. And that feels like that still is a reassurance in a way that you can do that and actually you go into it now with so much more experience. I mean, just what you said about the, how to ask questions about you know, in a good ways or how to communicate news. Yeah, things that you originally framed as bad news actually can be good news, because it gives a path forward and all that sort of thing. So then how did you end up in Austria? Like, how did that project come about?

Jean: 00:11:30

yeah, so I guess that's also been part of my approach to work and work relationships. I've done a lot of networking, not in the kind of you know, traditional business sense of networking, but I've always looked after people who needed a small hand with something. And. Felt that was going to be rewarded in some way in the future, or just know that it's a good thing to do if you can help someone that you know. I was on the student committee and I think in implementation science, there's some word for those people who are a bit like a connection between other people. And, so I would often link people up when there were new people coming in. Even though towards the end, I was sort of like sitting by myself. I was well known across the organization and made efforts to go to different talks and really interested in what everyone was doing. So one of the postdocs who was a lab scientist met me in the coffee line one day. And said, and Jean, you're an interdisciplinary researcher. Would you like to work in Vienna for a couple of years? There's some some friend that she had who she did a postdoc with in France, who's now working in Vienna and is looking for people who are interested in interdisciplinary work in mental health. And you could apply for this workshop and then. see how it goes. And I thought, well, yeah, Europe would be something that I would be interested in doing in my research career. Why not? And I'm not very good with deadlines or I'm very good with deadlines. The deadline is when the work happens for me. So I sort of put it off a bit. In in applying for this this workshop because it just felt so strange. It's not really the way that research projects and positions are usually created. So this was through the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft in Vienna. And they had this concept of open innovation in science, which is still ongoing. And they wanted to fund research in a different way, recognizing that traditional methods of research funding often you know, awards grants to the most senior professor in that department who then gets more grants and once you get the success you keep getting it. And usually then you're in competition with the another group that's also working on a very similar topic, but you, it's hard to collaborate across groups or across organizations. And it's hard for new ideas to come up because it's usually step by step as the professor thinks of something in his path, in his next direction of his research, and usually he's using that on purpose. And so the Open Innovation in Science Centre wanted to use this sandpit approach or ideas lab approach to funding research, where they had quite a lot of money from the science ministry in Austria to fund a couple of research projects. And they invited international researchers who had very different backgrounds to apply to this five day workshop. And at the end of the workshop, they would award two research grants. The application process itself was also not traditional. You didn't provide a CV. Instead you had to answer some questions about your approach to interdisciplinary work, how you would explain your topic to someone outside your discipline how you see your area of research being able to address the topic of child mental health or parental mental illness. And yeah, more about your personality and your approach to work, work styles. And then they selected 30 researchers to, to attend these five days.

Geri: 00:15:18

Just curious, do you know how many applied?

Jean: 00:15:23

I think it's in their report. I'm not sure if the, off the top of my head, maybe a hundred or so.

Geri: 00:15:28

Right. Yep.

Jean: 00:15:29

And yeah, for me, it was quite an interesting concept and I didn't really know what to expect. It was a new area having you know, been working in genetics and hospital based research in Australia. I in my application, I kind of drew on some of the. themes I talked about with you already that could apply to mental health in terms of stigma and especially Erving Goffman's theory of face and representation of self. I thought those more sociological and qualitative approaches could be helpful in addressing some of the questions that they had in the workshops. And you had to. also define how much of your time you could spend on this work if it was successful. And for me, I would be working in a different area. So it would be a new job. So I put down 100 percent. And my boss at the time in Melbourne when I was selected to, to come over here for the workshop said a good feather in your cap. Which I thought was a funny phrase at the time. I don't think she knew what to expect, nor did I.

Geri: 00:16:36

So did you knew it was defined as a sandpit type workshop, ideas lab workshop, and it was clear that funding could come out of it. For you when you went in, but you didn't really understand what you were going to. It was just

Jean: 00:16:52

No,

Geri: 00:16:53

curiosity.

Jean: 00:16:54

funding, yeah, curiosity and Yeah, something also to add to your CV that you've been able to attend something like

Geri: 00:17:02

Yeah. The

Jean: 00:17:03

interesting. Yeah, exactly. And I mean normally the chance in Australia, the chance of Having success in a funding proposal at the moment. I think is below 10 percent

Geri: 00:17:16

Yeah.

Jean: 00:17:17

And that's for those that are rated the highest. So that was my experience of colleagues around me Trying to apply for funding knowing that it's very unlikely to get funding and especially as a social scientist not doing Something you know sexy that the funders might want you know, innovative that's going to really produce some technology that's marketable or, curing cancer or social science doesn't really have a very high reputation I think within general sciences. And here, I think there are some similarities with, I think physics, quantum physics is very attractive to funders and yeah, social science still not so much. So I didn't really have high expectations that there would be. a funded proposal that I'd be involved with at the end of it. But I thought it would be a good chance to be involved and have a go. And I also planned for a month's holiday afterwards visiting friends. So the five days were quite intense. For me, I was just more interested in the process and not so anxious because I wasn't so invested in needing the funding myself. It was an opportunity. But other people were very anxious. I think there were people who were you know, this is their topic and this is their chance to get a funded project. And from the start we were it was a bit of a social experiment where we were put in different groups all the time, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups of four and ask different questions. and told to, you know, communicate with that person and think about a research topic, a proposal with that person, present that back and always sort of cut short in time and move to a different place. And then we had inputs from scientists and from practitioners and from people with personal experience that were meant to help us get into the topic and think differently and create new ideas. And I think around the third day or so, we were given the chance to consolidate an idea that we might have had with a group. And, um, we

Geri: 00:19:31

that you self selected at that point, it sounds like the process for the first two days was very much about you. Getting to talk to as many people as possible and really try to identify where were the connection points. And so the third day you could start to say, Mary, Bill and, you know, whoever, we could work together.

Jean: 00:19:54

It was less people and more the idea. There was a kind of core group of us that had this idea that children whose parents have a mental illness are really missing a social network in modern times. And you know, the informal support and the low threshold neighbor that comes over to help out is something that could really make a difference to children in these circumstances. And so we had this concept of the village, which ended up getting funded. This idea was then attractive to a group of us. And we were already in some ways talking at different. Across different purposes, but the core component was really the network around the child and how do we include the child's voice and the child's perspective in designing that network and in strengthening that network rather than having adults make decisions on behalf of children especially in this context where Children can be often very fearful of sharing information because they want to protect their family. They want to protect their parent who might have a mental illness and they don't know what's safe and not safe to tell someone. And they're often in a situation where they've been quiet for a long time. They might be holding things together also at school. So our project really wanted to try and get directly to the child in a safe and empowering way. Also with the parent. And so even though there was, we changed other components of the project across the last couple of days, we were able to come back to that central point. And we had a core group of some health economists, psychologists and myself as a social scientist. We also had some people come into the group. You were allowed to change groups over the last days. So we had some people come in and then leave again, not really being drawn to the topic or being drawn to the central concept or not really understanding it because it was also quite vague and for research intervention, it wasn't, using CBT, you know, cognitive behavior therapy to do this and then evaluating this. We wanted to see how we could create or strengthen this village. And we wanted to do that together with stakeholders. So we wanted to use a co design process. which now I think is much more commonly talked about, but in 2017, I think was very early stages of co designing in, especially in mental health research. And so it was a very vague project in that we didn't have concrete evaluation measures because we wanted to design them also with our stakeholder group and we couldn't have a concrete sample size estimate because that also depended on the location and which hospitals were going to be involved. But the belief, I think of the core group that this was something that was going to be helpful and important and the willingness or desire to make positive change on the system. Across those researchers, I think was what was really attractive. And that's also what really resonated with me, given my background in wanting to design research that was relevant, had impact, and wasn't just for our own benefit as researchers.

Geri: 00:23:10

Yeah. Again, I'm just really struck by the parallels with a lot of the work that we do in our research area. Just, in terms of giving people a voice, the co design, the participatory processes. And I recognize also that coming more from that medical space in the sense that you're dealing with mental health and then the issues around it. It probably was incredibly radical because you were not complying with any of the post positivist sort of paradigm at all in how people define good research. So it seems like you as a team, as you got together, were quite passionate about the idea and the approach that you wanted to take. What did it involve then in the next couple of days to convince whoever it was there a panel that you had to then present to and, you know, how did you present the arguments to them?

Jean: 00:24:11

Yes. So there was a group of mentors who were senior academics in this field from different countries and different aspects of that topic. Who had also been invited to support in the early days the discussions and provoke and question so they would walk around and listen to the conversations and maybe provide some input and then in the presentations we would give would give feedback. But then they turned into the evaluators. So I think there was a little bit of conflict in some way that they had their potential own agendas of wanting to influence groups to pick up one of their ideas in some ways maybe as well.

Geri: 00:24:52

Both methods and research concepts or directions.

Jean: 00:24:58

I mean, I didn't have any specific experience of that. It was just that there was this extra layer I think of the process where we were being mentored by people who then eventually evaluated us. So there was a dual role that they had, which I think at times was complicated for them, but also it was complicated for some of the researchers because some of the researchers did know some of the mentors as well. But for me, I think I was quite naive also not having Not knowing much about the topic, not having researched it myself, coming in thinking it would be an interesting experience to be involved with and being surrounded by experts who were, you know, postdocs in this area for, you know, in discipline for many years. and I think, like you said, that the research was quite innovative for the field in mental health. A lot of the participants were psychologists, and I think psychology has a very traditional scientific approach,

Geri: 00:25:59

Yes.

Jean: 00:26:00

sometimes some qualitative research, but usually as a, as an add on. And especially I think in the German speaking countries, it's quite difficult to compete against the traditional psychological paradigm in research if you want to get funding. So this was a great opportunity that we were getting good feedback from the mentors that we could have this much freedom. In the research design which was a luxury, I think, also by the last day, so we were working through the night, you know, until three o'clock in the morning, we had to prepare a five page proposal and a presentation. And then on the last day, give a presentation, our final one just before lunch and I think after breakfast one of our team members, Hannah, who's based in Germany and is a psychologist, she said, well, we should have some sect to celebrate. So we took a bottle of the sec from the breakfast buffet and went out on the on the patio. We were all in a retreat in a wellness hotel in outside Vienna for these five days. So we went out onto the patio and shared this in this sec. And I think some of the other researchers were a bit put off that we were so relaxed. But her motivation for that was We want to be a group that enjoys each other's company. And she, she's, she has quite a good position herself. She was already a professor and I think she had made the decision after experience that she would do research with people that she enjoyed working with and try and avoid doing research where there's too much conflict. And so that was her, you know, we need to have fun. It's a, it's an interesting project and it's going to be tough and there's a lot of risks. But we need to have fun together. So that's how we started off as well. And we gave this final presentation and then the judges or the mentors became judges and went outside to choose which projects they were going to fund. Yeah. And they chose two when they came back in

Geri: 00:28:00

of how many were presented, roughly?

Jean: 00:28:04

Yeah, I think maybe five.

Geri: 00:28:06

No,

Jean: 00:28:06

At that point?

Geri: 00:28:07

good. Good. I mean, if we look at the traditional sort of acceptance rates, as you said that's good. And also, it sounds like that process of having the week, a whole week in this sort of pressure cooker, intense situation, because you used the word intense before Working till three o'clock in the morning, pulling it together, you do, it's really an opportunity to get to know people, to get to know how you might work together, who's going to be good at what sort of aspects and whether you would enjoy it. And sometimes we don't get that experience with other projects going through traditional funding processes until we've got it funded. And then we start working together and we go, why did I ever think I could work with this person? Yeah, that's an interesting process in that. In that way as well in, in actually team building and relationship building.

Jean: 00:29:04

yeah, I think that was a big part of it. You could get to know someone quite quickly in the way that they listen to your ideas or not, and the way that you could connect around a topic. And I think that was good in, you know, kind of choosing people who you felt more comfortable working with. I mean, we didn't know them beforehand. and we didn't have, we hadn't submitted CV, so we didn't really know so much about each other. I think some people knew each other if they were, more specialized in this research area, and there were a couple of them that kind of knew of each other or some that had worked together, but overall, people didn't know each other. And so it was really a chance yet to get to know people in terms of their personality as well.

Geri: 00:29:49

Yeah. So just, and did they do something in the first day for ice breaking and. Getting to know each other type exercises before you got into the ideas brainstorming and groupings that you did.

Jean: 00:30:04

It was probably all mixed, so it was probably all focused on an activity that was relevant to the topic, but that was part of the reason for moving people in different groups all the time. So that everyone had a chance to kind of. Get to know each other on one level. But we had lunches and dinners together and breakfasts together and people kind of got to know each other, even if they weren't working in a group in that way. And, some groups didn't work. There was someone who went out by themselves and presented a project alone. And I mean, I think our group functioned. I think we were doing fairly well over those days, but there were other groups that there was, you know, the ideas couldn't connect with each other in that group, so the group separated and tried to, there was sometimes pressure to add more and more concepts into a design because these projects were very generously funded, so it was 3 million euros each over four years and so there was pressure to keep thinking bigger and bigger. And I think we were in some, we were in some ways pushed a little bit in, in making a project bigger than we would have otherwise, but you know, there was still stuff that we said no to, like, including biomarkers or, you know, making it, yeah, it was much more in the social aspect of our project, but there was another one that was doing a lot of psychometric, a lot of yeah, biological measurements and yeah.

Geri: 00:31:30

That sounds like a really interesting process. Yeah. I remember when I worked in the UK back in the early two thousands I participated in a sandpit project. A Sandpit process there and we ended up getting a project funded and there's some similar experiences you know, different as well. It's a good process, isn't it? I wonder how it could scale, do you know, are they continuing with that process?

Jean: 00:32:03

I think it was a good process for me and a good process for our team. We were funded.

Geri: 00:32:08

Mm.

Jean: 00:32:09

know that everyone had the same experience and the same reflections. And but I think it's. Compared to traditional funding approaches, I think it's very valuable because I think the challenges that have been identified in traditional funding methods could really be addressed in, in a sandpit or in an ideas lab. I think what was really valuable with the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft is they didn't stop at the funding process and just give us the money. They wanted to invest in the experiment of how do you support this group who's been formed in this way. And this is where it was quite different to, I think, at Harvard. This is where the Sandpit ideas came out in Harvard at the medical school and they haven't had, they didn't have any successful teams stay together. To finish out the projects that were funded. And so the Ludwig Boltzmann were in quite close conversation with Harvard to understand what was going wrong there and what they could do differently. So they invested not only quite generously in the projects, but also in the infrastructure. To support us as researchers and to support the research project. They had a relationship manager program and relationship manager who was, I guess, in one way, a bit like my mentor. So I ended up moving to Austria to lead the project. and the rest of the researchers could stay in their organizations and worked on the project for a fractional time

Geri: 00:33:44

can I just pick up on one point there? You just said you, you moved to Austria to lead the project. How did it come about that you were the leader?

Jean: 00:33:58

Yeah, so the group itself were already employed, I think, more in stable positions and no one had the capacity to spend 100 percent of the project of their time on the project, or even 80%. And I think to take on the principal investigator position, you had to be 80 percent or more of your time on the project. So I was the only person in the team who was available to do that. Which was also quite an interesting position as a qualitative researcher, a social scientist, and quite a lot younger than the rest of the group and a non German speaker. this big project and move from Australia to Austria to do that. But I guess it could also be that being Australian gives you a little bit of courage in moving around the world. And yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it was also, you know, my personality and the way that I saw my work and to take on that challenge. And. It took another six months before we finalized and started the project then in 2018. And I guess I was still in a bit of disbelief that it was actually going to happen. I'd been to Austria a couple of times, but only to Vienna and around Vienna. And yeah, I studied French at university as well, but I'd never spoken a word of German. And when I'd been here for the five days, you know, even the letters, I didn't know how to pronounce letters. And we didn't know where we would be based in Austria. So that was also another step in that six months before I moved to have a host university selected, and in the end we chose Innsbruck because the rector here is a psychiatrist and we felt that would be, we would be very well housed in a university where mental health was something they were particularly understanding of and and supportive of.

Geri: 00:35:56

Mm When you say we, who was we, is that you and the rest of the team or you and Ludwig Boltzmann?

Jean: 00:36:03

Me and the team, the Ludwig Boltzmann had universities that ahead of the Sandpit had to kind of provide their intention to be able to host a project.

Geri: 00:36:15

So

Jean: 00:36:16

they were already primed to be a possible host. Another reason we chose Innsbruck was because of the project trying to make some kind of network social change in the way that organizations are communicating with each other, but also people coming together. We thought that a smaller city might be easier to take some steps forward. And if we were in, in Vienna, I think we would be quite a small project in relation to the rest of research that's happening, especially at the medical university. And. You know, coming from Australia, where we have quite a few big cities to a European country, where Vienna is the headquarters and then the other cities are much smaller in terms of their capacity to do research. I think it works quite well for us in people being really excited that we were here and questioning in some ways, you know, why would you choose Innsbruck and why would you be in Tyrol? But in some ways also our stakeholders became proud that that they had this project and that they'd been successful in some ways too in having the opportunity to make some improvements with research in this area.

Geri: 00:37:26

So there are two threads I'd love to pick up on. One is to go back to the relationship, that the support that you received from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in terms of Ensuring that the team functions well and doesn't fall apart like some of the other experiences. And then I want to talk about some of your leading the project and lessons learned from that there. But so you said, and again, you know, I interrupted you there. You started to say that part of the infrastructure support that they provided was a relationship manager. Can you say more about what the support was that they provided and how that played out and what value it was?

Jean: 00:38:07

Yeah, so this was a person who was a psychologist working as a project officer in the Open Innovation and Science Centre. And she was the contact person for everything to start with. So also salary negotiations and moving over to Austria for me helping me set up. She would come to Innsbruck from time to time and go shopping for furniture with me and also acting a little bit like a coach. So every week or every fortnight, having meetings and talking about how the project's going, she had quite an active role helping design the website. So there was specific elements of the project that she was. working on more as a researcher as well. I think having this lens of trying to support open innovation in science. And I think at some points that was a bit to use the German word irritating, which we don't say in English so much. But for some of the team members we felt that The open innovation in science angle was pushing us sometimes to the limits of what we were capable of doing in our research plan. But from the open innovation science center side, they were very committed and dedicated to testing how far open innovation and science could go in these projects. And so sometimes that was her role to kind of challenge us and think where else can you involve the public? How else can you raise awareness of the topic and what else can be done? Which I think in a traditional project doesn't happen at all. That you have someone sort of from the funding agency, but the Ludwig Boltzmann has two roles. in being a provider of research or a doer of research and a funder. But usually you don't have someone encouraging you through, throughout the research process to be doing more and different. And at some points that really did spread us thin and make people feel quite challenged. I think everyone in the team taking on this project was taking some kind of professional risk in some way. Which I think in doing interdisciplinary research you often are challenged in having to let go of the purity of your own discipline. To pick up the value of someone else's and bring them together. And in our project we really saw that we were doing transdisciplinary research rather than interdisciplinary research

Geri: 00:40:48

How do you find that difference?

Jean: 00:40:51

yeah, I don't think it was something we thought of before so much, but the transdisciplinary research is really doing things together and melding knowledge and ideas and conversations, and that means that at every point you have to have these discussions, these clarifications, and things can be slower, and things can be off putting, or you might realize that there's some misunderstanding because you can't take anything for granted and you have to challenge the assumptions of your, of yourself and of other disciplines. I think in other interdisciplinary research. You can do your own research and bring that together with someone else's research at some point to put pieces of the puzzle together, but it's not this mix or this melding of thinking and of approaches at every stage, which is, I think, what was a challenge, but also a real benefit because you learn a lot about the other disciplines, but you have to give up a lot of yourself. In believing that what you're going to produce together is going to have a good outcome for the families and the services here. And so I think that was the, you know, coming back to the ideas lab, that was what the central purpose was for us as a team and us individually in our work, that we wanted to do something that was going to make a difference, which meant that. you had to give up something to do that. And you know, you could have done much more traditional research that might have more value in a high impact journal. That might be easier to explain and have less criticism from reviewers as soon as you start mixing things, then you have to be very prepared for criticism and explanation of why you've done things in a less traditional approach. So I think that was part of the. part of the value that we saw in doing the work like this, but also the risk that people took.

Geri: 00:42:58

Were you able to get publications that people were proud of?

Jean: 00:43:05

Yeah, we're still publishing. But we, yeah, I think I think the publications we have, that's one aspect of the output of our we felt that there were greater outputs. in addition to publications. Publications, of course, because we want to also push against traditional research paradigms too. We don't want to just make changes to the non academic community, but we also want to influence the academic community to learn what we learned and to be influenced by that. And also to push back against funders and publishers and editors, reviewers that what we're trying to do is valuable research. In this particular group of patients or group of families where there's a parent with a mental illness randomized control trials have rarely been successful. And as a social scientist and a qualitative researcher, that makes total sense to me. But for my colleagues. been involved in those randomized controlled trials, even the knowledge that there is some intervention or even receiving an information sheet about a research project increased people's outcome scores. So both groups, You know, there was an improvement and you'd need such big numbers. There's so much stigma for families in this position, but it's really hard to recruit families. Most of the research has also focused on parents with depression or anxiety who are better functioning and has not been able to support families where there's a more serious mental illness. So we also wanted to try and include all diagnoses. And we made things a bit hard for ourselves in some way if we were wanting to do a high quality traditional research project, but we wanted to try and also make impacts for families and services here. So one example is that recruitment was done by practitioners. As a research team, we could have gone to the hospital and sat there and put up posters and, you know, encouraged people to come and see us. We could also have gone to general practitioners but we decided to work with the Adult Mental Health Services where the parents are probably most vulnerable and the children then are probably most in need of support. That meant that there was more fear for families because they probably also have had bad experiences in the past with different services and probably contact with Child and Youth Welfare. But we also gave a lot of control to the hospitals to make decisions about how children could be identified and how families might be recruited into the project. And the head of the psychiatry department here wanted it to be the job of the doctors of the psychiatrists to recruit families rather than the social workers or the nurses. Because he felt that it was the job of psychiatrists to ask patients about their family and about their general well being, not just about their symptoms, but understanding their social network, understanding their world, so they knew, you know, so as a psychiatrist, you can treat the patient better. Psychiatrists have a very short amount of time to work with families. So that didn't always mean that the conversation was very in depth and they may not have really understood what the project was about. And if we had nurses or social workers, they had much more time to reach more families, to have a higher recruitment. But through doing that, we were able to Have these questions about parenting and general well being of Children or caring responsibilities introduced into the electronic medical system of the hospital here in Innsbruck. So every adult who is admitted to the hospital here is asked if they have caring responsibilities and then is given some guidance of how to have those conversations in a more deep way to have the time. And this is something that our colleagues in Melbourne have been trying to get changed for over 20 years. Being in a small city and really helping the community feel a sense of ownership of our research I think helped make a change that hopefully is going to be very valuable for doctors in thinking about who their patients are. When we started the doctors, some of the psychiatrists told us that the project wouldn't work because their patients didn't have children and we know that's Internationally, that's not true, but so why would it be different in Innsbruck? And then we had some change over time where some of the psychiatrists said, actually, I think this project would be really valuable because if we start understanding about caring responsibilities, maybe we can reduce the length of stay, inpatient stay for these adults and helping their recovery. Can we also include some assessments of recovery in the evaluation?

Geri: 00:47:55

so that the the whole approach of being driven primarily by impact and it's still, it's research. But not just for the sake of high quality journal publications and the careful thinking about who you involve and how you involve them sounded really key to that. What were some of the challenges in working with stakeholders in this way in a project? Yeah. Because you talked before about not having as much control in defining what goes forward. And that's where we'll leave it for part one. Keep an eye open for our next episode. Part two, where. Jean will talk a little more about how they engage with stakeholders as part of this very participatory co-design process and dealt with the challenges there. And I think also very interestingly, she talks about being a younger leader, principal investigator of a project and. How she worked with and helps lead a distributed team of more senior researchers. And this part also includes lots of very practical tips and tricks about how to manage a distributed team, how to facilitate effective meetings, and how to get everyone working together. And I'll leave you here now with a little more detail, if you're interested in Jean's research during her PhD and in her post-doc projects that are really interesting around health and genomics and, qualitative methods and working in interdisciplinary teams.

Jean: 00:49:37

I would describe myself as a social scientist have quite a mixed academic background. I studied arts and science in combination at university. So I've always been interested in science and how things work, but maybe also in combination with how people experience health and illness and medical systems and so my PhD in Australia was looking at communication between doctors who specialize in genetics and their patients. And in this context, it was children who had a a developmental delay without a diagnosis. Originally, I was interested in breaking bad news. I thought that was a very interesting topic in terms of communication, in terms of linguistics. But I wanted to do some research that was valuable to the doctors who I'd be watching and listening to. And so I spent the first year of my PhD sitting in on clinic appointments and really listening to their Challenges and discovered that bad news was not necessarily bad news in pediatric genetics because often families spend a long time looking for answers to explain the child's delay. And really, when you do find a diagnosis, that's for some people, a relief and the end of a journey and the start of. Treatment or, you know, can have big implications for families and what was really complicated in terms of communication was not having answers and how you can communicate uncertainty in that context and especially with new technologies always being introduced in genetics and genomics and at the end of the day, parents were wanting to have I had questions that were very practical. What school should my child go to? How can I access speech therapy? And that wasn't really the area for the specialist in genetics to be able to help. So I discovered that the doctors really felt, a lot of the time useless and it was very hard work for them explaining complicated information to parents that they weren't sure how helpful it was in the end. And so that, that relationship between parents and doctors and within the family unit was really interesting for me. Also in relation to stigma and the way people see themselves or the way professions are seen. Doctors also discussed that comparing themselves to other specialists, they didn't feel so useful and it was very difficult for them to see what benefit they had on parents lives or children's lives if they were only maybe seeing them one time. And compared to orthopedic surgeons who were fixing broken bones and then you can see a child from not being able to run around to Once the cast was off running around again. And so that, yeah, those topics are really interesting to me in terms of dealing with professional identity and for parents dealing with medicalization of their child in some cases trying to be a good parent and just doing what the parents, the doctors told them to do. But not always really sure exactly why they needed to have this test done, which often didn't give them answers. Having meant more mundane concerns.

Geri: 00:52:57

Like the everyday, as you said just as a brief interject I'm really struck by some of the parallels with work that's gone on in our group from different people, like Francisco Nunes, for example, did a lot of work with people with Parkinson's disease. And a lot of what you've shared there. Some of the things resonate with what he was finding there in observing the Parkinson's patients in with the clinicians and so on. So it's interesting. And for him, it was thinking about how to then translate that into technology support. But yeah, so go on, Jean.

Jean: 00:53:32

No, I think that's very interesting and I think there are when I first started working in Austria, I, it was quite a big shift from genetics, where I was primarily working as a social scientist. How did you get to Austria? Like you were doing that work in Melbourne. in Australia. Yep. Melbourne. I then couple of postdocs in, in Melbourne and worked on a couple of different projects, one about so as a qualitative researcher, always working in these topics to really understand those complex questions of, you know, social representation or understanding decision making, understanding behavior change understanding relationships between professionals or between families, across professionals, across organizations. One project was looking at pregnant women and asking questions about alcohol consumption. In Australia for many years, we've been collecting information about smoking to try and distribute health services and target them in areas where there might be more smoking related. Pregnancies or people who've had been born with mothers who were smoking during pregnancy. But alcohol is a much more difficult question to ask about. And so the Australian government commissioned my boss at the time to try and do some more qualitative linguistic research in understanding how questions might be asked. to get good information for the government about drinking while pregnant because we know that yeah, if you drink a lot of alcohol while you're pregnant, your child will, might end up with fetal alcohol syndrome, but there's no concrete evidence on what level is a safe level. So the Australian government has recommendations that no level is safe. But the British health department still have mixed information that one or two glasses a week is okay ish. And so health providers in Australia are giving mixed

Geri: 00:55:26

Hmm.

Jean: 00:55:27

which is also what we found. So we did some qualitative research with focus groups and interviews with obstetricians, gynecologists, pregnant women, midwives in rural, regional, remote areas in Australia. And at the same time, I was also doing a project with the Australian Genomics Health Alliance which is a research project to try and understand how we can introduce genomic tests, which sort of more closely follows on from my PhD. into mainstream health care services, knowing that genomics is becoming more and more important for many other specialties. But people might not have that specialist knowledge to be able to effectively order those tests. And so I was doing some literature reviews and planned some interviews with doctors from different specialists to understand how they might order a genetic test. So I ended up sitting in a very strange position where my research group that I was connected with were cell biologists who were doing genomic sequencing and sex chromosome research. And I was the one qualitative researcher who was. By themselves sort of in some way had a lot of networks across the research organization.

Geri: 00:56:43

And that's where we got to in the main body of the podcast episode that you just heard. So that last piece was just filling in some of the details of Jean's background. Come back for part two. You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www. changingacademiclife. com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts. And you can follow ChangeAcadLife on Twitter. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues. Together, we can make change happen.