Please could you introduce yourself and your professional background?
My name is Dr. Suze Kundu, and I am what I would call a "recovering academic." I am a nanochemist by training with a background in teaching and researching nanomaterials for generating hydrogen from water using solar energy with a photocatalyst I designed. I am also a science communicator, giving demo lectures, doing stand-up comedy, presenting science TV shows, and writing about popular science for a range of magazines. I am also a Trustee of the Royal Institution.
I now work in industry at the amazing Digital Science, where we create tech solutions for different stages of the research cycle to help researchers and others working in the research ecosystem do the best research they can with the fewest hurdles to negotiate.
What inspired your career in the scientific field?
I have always had a fascination for how things work and was often found in the bathroom or kitchen mixing things together in a sink to see what happened. I would dismantle most things as a child, as I wanted to know how everything worked. Somehow I managed to turn that destructive curiosity into a career in science, which has worked out nicely for me. I still take things apart; the only difference is that I now have access to tools that can help me find answers.
As Director of Researcher and Community Engagement at Digital Science, you are a vocal ally for better representation of people in science. How do you, and Digital Science as a whole, help to recognize the barriers to diverse inclusion in research processes and recommend solutions to overcome these limitations?
As part of our Community Engagement efforts, we love to showcase stories from our research community. These stories could be about the people impacted by poor representation in research or about the people shaking things up for the better by creating solutions to the challenges we face. We also tell a lot of stories underpinned by research information and data.
You can gauge a lot from data if you know what questions to ask and are able to easily slice and dice it. We are so lucky in research that we have so much information available to us.
Unfortunately, it can take a lot of effort and energy to connect these otherwise disparate pieces of information and wade through such high volumes of published research. Which grant led to which patents? Which cross-disciplinary research collaborations are the most fruitful?
This is where data science know-how, machine learning, and good metadata come in. We can not only make connections between these individual pieces of information but can also start to spot trends over time, and we can do that quickly and efficiently, identifying and highlighting aspects of research culture that may not be supporting levels of openness, inclusiveness or collaboration required for the advancement of science for society.
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Another way we contribute to this discourse is through the Research on Research Institute, or RoRI. We are one of the four founding members of this global research effort to better understand how efficient science is, what is holding it back, but also how these challenges can be overcome.
What is Dimensions, and how has it transformed the way research is discovered, accessed, and evaluated?
Dimensions is the largest linked research database. Thanks to the detailed metadata that helps us make connections between pieces of research information, we can analyze so many things, from where a piece of research sits within the wider context of the research landscape to emerging research topics.
In research, we often create complex search queries based on what we know already exists already - for example, nanomaterials that we know behave as photocatalysts. But what if a new material in a different area of research can also work as a photocatalyst, but we don't have the capacity to look outside of our own fields due to time and other resource constraints?
With our in-built analytic tools, we can remove those limitations to our search results.
Dimensions can be tailored to help you discover what you didn't know you didn't know - which, when we think of sustainable research, is a really powerful tool for researchers in the chemical industry.
For example, this technology can be really invaluable to a chemist working on renewable plastic packaging. Say they were unaware of a specific type of seaweed that grows abundantly and possesses material characteristics that make it the ideal candidate for an alternative sustainable packaging material. They may not think to search within the realm of marine biology as a chemist, but Dimensions can help identify those exciting areas of research that may be overlooked as they are beyond a researcher's sphere of knowledge, and I think that is really exciting.
How does Dimensions compare to other AI databases already on the market?
I would say it is the breadth of our data.
Dimensions is the world's largest linked scientific research database, with a wide and inclusive range of data sources from grants and data sets to publications, patents and policy documents.
With the launch of our modules and apps, like Dimensions Life Sciences and Chemistry, we have built solutions with our users and their specific needs in mind, and with solutions like Dimensions Research Integrity, users can ascertain author legitimacy and ensure compliance. AI is a powerful element of Dimensions, but there's more to Dimensions than just that.
What industries and sectors would benefit the most from using your novel AI database?
There are so many sectors within research that could benefit from the actionable insights provided through Dimensions - from strategists trying to learn about the next big breakthrough to investors who want to identify future start-ups and analyze the risk around a novel area of research and from researchers seeking out novel methods or products to funders, governments, publishers, companies and academic institutions that are all seeking to discover what is leading the way and who is working on it, and indeed how they can potentially collaborate with those leaders.
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This year at ChemUK, you presented a session on ‘Accelerating sustainability in the chemical industry with research databases.’ Could you please give our readers some insight into what you covered in this talk?
My talk introduced sustainability in chemistry and what this really means from a social perspective.
Chemists are, through their many awesome breakthroughs, partially responsible for the climate crisis we find ourselves in, but what is exciting is that they are also best placed to lead society and other research areas out of this crisis and into a sustainable future.
I also talked about the main challenges we have heard from our chemical industry collaborators and how we are helping them overcome them through technology built from and for our research community.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, we are finally regaining a sense of normality with the return of in-person tradeshows, including ChemUK. How important is this collaboration to Digital Science, and how do in-person conferences and exhibitions help accelerate industry innovation?
In-person conferences are a great way of networking and building relationships and trust. I do, however, feel that there are things that we were able to achieve during the pandemic that I would like us to hold onto as a community - for example, online conference attendance helps us overcome the challenge of caring for loved ones or children, it helps overcome barriers of bureaucracy that people from many countries face when traveling to international conferences, it allowed people to attend conferences taking place in locations where their lifestyle would not be accepted or accommodated for, and it really helped expand the number of voices in a room and broaden representation from our communities.
While organic networking remains difficult to emulate online, I hope that we can consider hybrid events as an option to keep these small silver linings from what was a very difficult time for so many people.
Research is being produced and published at an increasingly unprecedented rate. How do you see the field of knowledge discovery evolving over the next five years, and how will Digital Science contribute to this?
With more research and greater availability comes more potential risks in bad actors using research to support their particular agendas. Just look at the amount of unintentional misinformation and deliberate disinformation we see in the media. So many of these ideas are backed up by what seems like sound research evidence but delve a little deeper, and you can see the lack of scientific rigor with which these studies have been conducted and reported.
Furthermore, as more research is published, the pressure to "shine" in a saturated profession is based on how we currently reward research success, which could force some people to play the system and employ paper mills to boost their publication records.
Then, of course, there are things like the rise of AI and generative AI such as ChatGPT. What we need to do is continue to use tech for good and also to build trust and integrity in the research that we do and the work that we cite.
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Perhaps we need to address how we reward research success to make it better for researchers and the society that will benefit from it. We also need a greater diversity of lived experiences in research so that we can continue to represent all of society in the solutions we create and maintain the diversity of thought required to tackle the massive global challenges we are facing.
What is next for Digital Science? Are you involved in any exciting upcoming projects?
We have actually just launched our new TL;DR platform that gives a short, responsive down-low on all the latest developments in digital research and how this will impact the research community. Of course, we are already discussing AI and its impact on research, and we would love to hear from our community about the exciting things they are working on, the challenges they face, and how they think we can overcome them together.
About Dr. Suze Kundu
Suze Kundu (pronouns she/her) is a nanochemist and a science communicator. Suze is Director of Researcher and Community Engagement at Digital Science and a Trustee of the Royal Institution. Prior to her move to DS in 2018, Suze was an academic for six years, teaching at Imperial College London and the University of Surrey, having completed her undergraduate degree and Ph.D. in Chemistry at University College London.
Suze is a presenter on many shows on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and Curiosity Stream, a science expert on TV and radio, and a science writer for Forbes. Suze is also a public speaker, having performed demo lectures and scientific stand-up comedy at events all over the world on topics ranging from Cocktail Chemistry to the Science of Superheroes.
Suze collects degrees like Pokémon, the latest being a Masters from Imperial College London that focused on outreach initiatives and their impact on the retention of women engineering graduates within the profession.
Suze is a cat mamma and, in her spare time, loves dance and Disney, moshing and musical theatre.
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