My PhD project is an interdisciplinary endeavour to work alongside researchers in an effort to revolutionise academic culture. Exclusionary and toxic cultures persists in many sectors, academia unfortunately, is no exception. Fortunately, there is a willingness and desire for change, to better serve the entire community.

My thesis will be led by the voices of practicing chemists and physicists; sociological approaches will be embedded to add meaning and offer explanation to the lived experience we observe in today’s academic workforce that is calling for real change. These accounts report on the fragility and tenacity of the research community, its infrastructure, and its culture. In creating an academic culture that can truly serve its existing and future members, everybody, every governing body, and every institution of higher education can make meaningful changes to the way we do research.

Those most immobilized within society and among scientists, are those of who exist in cross-sections of marginalised identities, those who are a minority in more than one sense, by race, gender, class, sexuality, religion...  Therefore, whilst advocating for each of these groups, attention must be turned onto the individual as a whole and their layered identities.