Dr Christopher Race reflects on his experience of working part-time in the Office for Science at the Department for Transport (DfT) over five months in 2021.
In 2017, the Royal Society launched a fully-funded Science Policy Secondment scheme offering its Research Fellows the opportunity to gain policy experience at the heart of government. Below, we hear about Dr Christopher Race's experience of the secondment. Dr Race is a Royal Society Research Fellow, and leads the Atomistic Simulation of Materials group within the School of Materials at the University of Manchester. Dr Race is also a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield.
Background
I have long admired the selfless dedication of the civil servants amongst my friends and family, and after attending the Royal Society's Policy Primer course I was keen to experience for myself a little of what work in government means for a scientist.
I started my secondment in the middle of a lockdown and during the second bout of home-schooling in February 2021. I joined the Central Research Team in the Office for Science at the Department for Transport, working three days a week over five months. My role was to assist in getting the ball rolling on the Tees Valley Hydrogen Transport Hub. The full scale of the project is huge, with aspirations to build an internationally significant living-lab for green hydrogen production and use across all modes of transport, at a scale that does not currently exist in the UK.
What was the scheme like?
My main task was to work with Innovate UK to run a funding competition for pilot projects demonstrating hydrogen-powered vehicles in the Hub region. It was fascinating to be involved in an R&D funding competition from the other side, and I now have a much better understanding of why things look the way they do from a researcher's perspective. In particular, the tight timescales that we are often asked to meet as applicants are at the end of a long chain of skilled people doing their best in small, dedicated teams all the way from treasury, through the government departments and out to the funding agencies.
I also got involved in a wide range of other activity, for example, writing submissions and a speech for our minister and drafting a press release. I met with representatives of businesses engaged in developing hydrogen-based technology and it was invigorating to see the level of enthusiasm and depth of knowledge in the private sector.
One of the similarities between work as an academic and as a scientist in the civil service is the broad range of the work that we do – using skills as an organiser, writer, synthesiser of information and so on.
Perhaps the biggest difference was the immediacy of the challenges that civil servants must meet. They often work in a highly reactive way to genuinely tight deadlines (as opposed to the artificially tight deadlines we set ourselves in academia by leaving everything until the last minute!). The work is fast paced and it took me quite a while to get used to strings of back-to-back half-hour meetings, run highly efficiently, and all with a clear purpose. In the academic world I'm used to everything being scheduled in multiples of whole hours with plenty of chit-chat scattered amongst the business of a meeting - there's less time for that when someone else is dependent on you for delivering something at pace. The flip side of this pressured environment is that impact is realised faster. The work I did in the civil service made things happen, whereas the impact of my teaching and research, when there is any, is generally many years away and often invisible to me. This made the work I did on secondment particularly rewarding.
The environment in the department that I worked in was genuinely supportive and collegiate and the senior leadership gave the impression that they recognise that success is utterly reliant on the dedication of the department's staff and, by extension, their well-being. It was really good to see so many interesting and diverse roles for scientists in government. I think that often in academia we fail to see career paths beyond our own or those in the industrial partners with which we work. There are so many more ways for scientists to make a difference in the world and I now feel much better equipped to talk to my students and colleagues about them.
