PolyDoc Careers Seminar: Scientific Publishing

The PolyDoc Careers Seminar aims to expose students and postdoctoral researchers to a variety of jobs for which a science or engineering degree is highly valuable. Speakers provide personal perspective about their work, which would not be accessible otherwise, and questions are highly encouraged. The EPFL community at bachelor, master, doctoral, and postdoctoral levels are all equally encouraged to attend.

Zoom link: https://go.epfl.ch/scientificpublishing

Speaker 1 – Mary Elizabeth Sutherland, PhD (Senior Editor, Nature)

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland is a senior editor at Nature where she handles papers whose topics span the social and behavioral sciences. Initially trained in cognitive neuropsychology at McGill, she continued integrating neuroscience and psychology in her postdoc at the Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile. She then spent a brief stint as a professor at that same institution before moving to an editorial position at Nature Communications where she handled papers in cognitive neuroscience and psychology. After two years, she joined the editorial team at Nature Human Behaviour where she grew her knowledge of the social sciences, adding computational social science, behavioral economics, political psychology, and developmental economics to her remit. She moved to Nature nearly 4 years ago to fill a new editorial position created to expand Nature’s coverage of the behavioural and social sciences.

Speaker 2 – Valda Vinson, PhD (Executive Editor, Science)

Valda Vinson is the Executive Editor for the Science journals. In this role she oversees research content strategy and editorial policy, at Science, Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine, Science Immunology and Science Robotics. She started her career in publishing when she joined the Science staff in 1999 as an Associate Editor handling research papers in the areas of structural biology, biochemistry, and biophysics. In 2013 she became Deputy Editor, overseeing research content in the areas of cellular and molecular biology and biomedicine, and in 2018 was appointed Editor, overseeing research content in the life sciences and social sciences at Science.  She earned an M.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Natal, South Africa, in 1987 and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1992. Her postdoctoral studies were also undertaken at Johns Hopkins University, where she focused on structural and biochemical studies of cytoskeletal proteins. Before joining Science, she spent two years as a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.