In this episode, we interview Dr. Ross Cloney, a Senior Editor at Nature Communications, focusing on the areas of synthetic biology, genome engineering, and therapeutic biotechnology. We talk with Ross about: how a manuscript becomes a publication; what it’s like to be an editor; how to make scientific publishing more diverse, equitable, and inclusive; what the future of scientific journals looks like; and more!
For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!
Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.
In this episode, we interview Dr. Ross Cloney, a Senior Editor at Nature Communications, focusing on the areas of synthetic biology, genome engineering, and therapeutic biotechnology. We talk with Ross about: how a manuscript becomes a publication; what it’s like to be an editor; how to make scientific publishing more diverse, equitable, and inclusive; what the future of scientific journals looks like; and more!
For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!
Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.
Hello, and welcome back to EBRC in Translation. We are a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Catherine Brink, a postdoc in Megan Palmer's group at Stanford University. And I'm Cook Zili, a postdoc in Fuzhong Zhang's lab at Washington University in St. Louis. Today we are joined by Ross Clooney, a team manager and senior editor at Nature Communications, who will hand us papers related to synthetic biology, genome engineering, and therapeutic biotechnology. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me, and thank you for inviting me on to the podcast. To get us started off, can you tell us about your journey to becoming a journal editor? Sure, I'd be happy to. I'm going to start off that it's probably a very cliched story. Most editors you ask, how did you become an editor, they're going to tell you something very similar to what I'm going to tell you right now. So I started out in academia. My PhD and my postdoc were both focused in how you repair DNA once it gets broken. My PhD specifically was looking at nucleotide excision repair and where it sort of meets up with the translesion synthesis polymerases to fill in little gaps once you've taken out a piece of damaged DNA and what sort of conditions they're operating under and why you'd prefer one polymerase over another, for example, and the sort of molecular aspects of the protein that were important for that function. Then the postdoc area, I sort of kept up with the DNA damage and repair field. One postdoc was looking at telomeres in a mammalian cell context, and then another one was double strand break signaling with 53BP1 and the architecture, the structure of that protein that's important for that process. So I was very much in what I kind of refer to now as traditional molecular biology. That's all very basic research. How does something work at the molecular level in a cell and all within this DNA damage repair side of things? As you do when you're a PhD student and more so when I was a postdoc, I started thinking about what did I want to do long term and what were the aspects of my career that I loved to pieces and what were the bits? I was like, I'm less in love with these aspects of being a postdoc. Where did I see myself going? I think fairly early on, at least on a sort of subconscious level, I kind of knew I didn't want to lead my own group one day. I wasn't sure whether I was going to stay in academia, in the sort of traditional career path of, you know, PI, lab head and all that. And what I did find myself doing was I kept reading around the topic I was working on. This is not to say that DNA damage is not an interesting field. I love DNA damage to this very day. But I kept reading papers from other fields on stuff I was never going to work on in a million years in the area I was, you know, employed as a postdoc to be doing stuff in. There's this real developing sense of there's so much interesting science out there. There's so much fascinating research going on, but I didn't really think I wanted to be dealing with one aspect of it forever. You know, there's some actually fascinating, brilliant stuff going on in all sorts of different fields. And I was like, well, my job is to look at these four amino acids and they were four great amino acids. Don't get me wrong, but it felt a little bit highly focused for where my interests were taking me. And so when postdocs come to an end as they do, I seriously thought, where do I want to go and what do I want to do and what really is engaging me? And the answer I kept coming back to increasingly was the science and the broader aspects of science across lots of different areas. And so there was a point where I made a choice, slash was slightly pushed, because a postdoc comes to an end as they do. And I was like, right, as opposed to looking for another academic position or something along those lines, I am going to apply for other jobs, which is terrifying when you're an academic. You're like, right, OK, cool, cool. That's done. Time to go try something completely different now. And editorial kept attracting me because there was very much this idea that editorial keeps you very close to the science, you're still engaged with the science, but you're now in a slightly different relationship with it than doing it directly at the bench. And I was applying for jobs and Nature Communications offered me one about seven years ago now. And that's where I have been ever since. And it's a very similar story with 99% of all my colleagues. We all come from this academic background, we all did these like PhDs, most of us did postdocs, and we all hit a point where we're like, I love the science, how do I stay engaged with the science if I'm not at the bench doing it? So out of curiosity, how did you end up in charge of a synthetic biology genome engineering biotechnology portfolio coming from a molecular biology background? Through a bit of a combination of they needed someone at the journal to handle these areas. And I was really interested in them. So even when I was doing, you know, quote unquote, traditional molecular biology, a lot of the papers I was reading were in synthetic biology in like the emerging idea of genome engineering and to give an idea of how long ago I left academia, this was pre CRISPR. And I always found this idea of like, we know what these proteins, these components are from molecular biology, but what can we do with them is a question I found really interesting. And so yeah, when I joined the journal, we were a much smaller journal back then. So I was handling a sort of group of topics related to the fact that I had this background in molecular biology. And one of those topics was synthetic biology and genome engineering, because it was an molecular biology based field with just the question being, how do you apply molecular biology as opposed to how do you discover molecular biology? And since then, I have ruthlessly whittled down what I'm interested in to get this. And also we have grown as a journal and it's allowed others to come in and to take over aspects of the things I had been handling to allow me to specialize a bit more. That's great. Your path has been one that is new to me, even though it's maybe very cliche for the 99% of other editors that have taken a similar path. Well given the idea of most editors, I'm living in an echo chamber here when it comes to how did you get into this job? Oh yeah, that sounds really similar, yeah. So speaking of the job, what does a day in the life of an editor look like and what do you find to be the most exciting parts of your job? So a lot of the job is reading, evaluating, contextualizing. I think when you're an editor or a senior editor, your job is manuscripts come in, you read them, you evaluate them, you put them in the context of what's been published before and what is the journal looking for in the areas you're handling. And then based on that, it's either a, this will go out to peer review or it's time to be awesome being like, it's not for us. And then the decision to turn a paper away is like, it's not a, your paper's bad. You should feel bad about it. It's not for us. Based on the criteria by which we are evaluating papers, we think it's better suited for a journal elsewhere. Obviously, when things go out to review, reports then come in. So there's reading the reports, there is balancing the various options that are being put forward by the reviewers, the various opinions. There's a lot of mediating as well between what the reviewers are asking for and what we consider to be important as a journal in the context of what we have published and what the field is working on. And then even sending the decision to the authors, what the authors think is important for their manuscript and what can and cannot be done in revisions. There's quite a lot of discussion and back and forth to ensure that everyone is more or less on the same page and the paper is hopefully heading toward direction as something that we could publish post-revision. Sometimes there is a parting of the ways, things that we might consider to be very important are not considered as such important by the authors and we're like, okay, another journal might be a better home for it in that case. And there's also times where the reviewers are like, authors should do X, Y and Z and we're like, no, no, you don't need to do X, Y, do X, X is fine for us. And then the whole process is basically really trying to, I think, find the best home for a particular piece of work through a process of revision and review and evaluation and discussion and contextualization and whether that home is with us or one of our sister journals. Yeah, that's fascinating. So can you tell us a little bit more when you receive a manuscript? So what are some of the things that you are looking for in the manuscript? So how does this differ from what other editors and other journals might look for? Oh, that's that's a really interesting question, partly because I've never worked for any other journals. So the criteria they apply is not necessarily the same ones I would apply because every journal sort of is looking for different things based on where they sit within the field of the community. I'd say for me, a synthetic biology paper, Nature Communications usually has some aspect of you're doing something quite cool. I am such a like, oh, the cool factor gets me every time, or something interesting, something that's not been done before or not being done in that way before or as well before. Very often, there is some degree of application demonstrated. And I'm not asking for, you know, this is ready to go out the door. I can go buy it in a supermarket tomorrow type application, but a sort of, you know, proof of principle, proof of concept. What can this be used for? Or if you're presenting like a method or something like that, you know, how does this compare to previous methods? You know, what is the case you're making? Because effectively, the case you want to make when published is to go to the readership going, do this over what anyone else has done. Can you show that it does perform better on some metric, for example? But beyond that is very much a case by case basis of, you know, what is a relevant application or what is the right metric? And it varies. You know, I've handled papers that make methods more accessible to the general scientific community. And so even if they don't necessarily outperform existing methods, that accessibility is a really helpful metric to consider them on. Or, you know, we've handled metabolic engineering papers that have produced an end product that's been produced before, but can do it, you know, in much higher titers or faster or in a much more tractable organism, for example. So, yeah, one of the things I really love about nature communications is because of how broad scope we are as a journal and because of kind of, I think, where we sit within fields, there's a lot of opportunity for us to go, cool, this paper has shown this, it's not necessarily shown that, but this is also incredibly interesting. And how does the whole package sort of come together to tell what the authors are wanting to say? And, you know, where does that fit within the context of what's been done before? So following up on that, what do you personally find to be really cool and really interesting? Like, what synthetic biology advances are you most excited about? And would like to see more work in? This comes dangerously close to a call for papers. So I'm going to, I think I'll step back slightly from what I want to see specifically in papers to what I'm finding really interesting in synthetic biology at the moment. One of the themes that has sort of captured my interest a bit in published work and some commissioned content stuff I've been involved in is I'm trying to get really interested in what does everyday synthetic biology look like? You know, once it's out of the lab and into day-to-day life, what does that like? And what does accessible synthetic biology mean? And what does synthetic biology look like in places sort of outside where we consider it to be the traditional centers of work? And I think one of the things I'm finding really interesting is this idea of like, how will synthetic biology adapt to deployment in areas that are not necessarily the Bay Area or Europe or Singapore? You know, what does it look like in areas that are perhaps under-resourced or with infrastructure restrictions that we don't see in other places? And I think that's one of the areas that could be really interesting, the power of biology to fill in these infrastructure gaps or to enable on-site production of things that would previously have required a whole industrial apparatus to do. Those are certainly exciting aspects of synthetic biology for me as well, considering how it can be translated to other parts of the world. Maybe bringing things back to the review process and sort of the manuscript acceptance and so on. After you receive a manuscript, I think the next step might be to consider different reviewers for the manuscript after you've decided that it's something that Nature Communications might be interested in publishing. How do you go about choosing reviewers and what would an ideal reviewer look like for you? So the ideal reviewer for me is going to be somebody who returns a constructively critical evaluation of a manuscript. It's often one of these things that if a review comes in and it says, everything's fine, it's as unhelpful as a review coming in going, no, don't accept this paper. Particularly in the first round of review, if by the second or third round, I think a review says everything's fine, I'm like, okay, everything's fine now. But what we really want to do with the review process is give the authors constructive feedback on how to improve their manuscript. And so even if the result of that review process is us going, based on the feedback we've got, we can't consider it further at this point. Hopefully, the authors can take the reports and use that to better their work. Even if it ends up being published somewhere else, it's a better manuscript than before it came into the review process. So what I look for in reviewers is somebody who's going to be able to provide that sort of constructive engagement in a sort of more technical side of things. We obviously like screen out reviewers for conflicts of interest. We try to ensure a diverse pool of reviewers represented from different geographic, different institutional settings, a balance of reviewers along gender lines to ensure the sort of diversity of voices, because you don't necessarily want to be going back to the same people over and over, because eventually what happens is their thoughts become the guidelines while papers are evaluated. And by bringing in the diversity of voices, by bringing in a selection of reviewers, you get different insights and different perspectives that ultimately serve to make a manuscript better and also to, in a more overarching grandiose scheme, improve scientific discourse. Bringing more voices into the conversation allows you to evaluate things from perspectives you've not considered before, and that enriches the whole aspect of it. Well, those are definitely good reviewers. I want for my manuscript. However, we know that sometimes the review process can be rather fraught. And when that happens, so how do you handle the disagreements between authors and reviewers? So the one thing I like to or when I can remind authors and reviewers is that this is a collegiate process. This is professionals discussing science with each other. There's never really been, in my opinion, any reason to get personal about anything. And I think it's really important to remember that, you know, you might be writing a review report or writing a response letter and assuming the person on the other side is a rough and tumble PI who's been doing this for 50 years and, you know, has a really thick skin. And it could be a PhD student. It could be somebody who's starting out in their career. And even if somebody has been doing this for like 50 years or so, then I still don't think there's a reason to like, you know, be anything other than professional and respectful. You know, you might disagree with the reviewer. You as a reviewer might not think that the authors have really addressed the question properly, but this is a conversation. It's not an argument as far as I'm concerned, which is also one of the reasons why I like I don't really tend to use the term rebuttal letter anymore when we're talking about, you know, the you're submitting a revised manuscript. How do you respond to the reviewer's points? Because I had this really enlightening conversation with a colleague of mine and she was like, it's really it's setting up this confrontation. It's like you have to, you know, head to head rebut and fight back. It's a response. And, you know, we say you can disagree, you know, or you can say, I'm sorry, I think you're mistaken and then lay out your response logically and backed up by experimental data or the scientific literature or analysis to illustrate why. And then sometimes there is a difference of opinion on a work. And I think that's also one of the points where as an editor, I step in and be like, OK, there's a difference of opinion here. How do we mediate this and what is important for the claims of the manuscript? That sounds like a productive way of dealing with these conflicts. I try my best. Switching topics a little bit, one of the things that you mentioned with respect to choosing reviewers is diversity and thinking about one aspect of diversity in particular, we found that last year, Nature published an editorial about tackling systemic racism in science and outlined a few steps that nature and some of its subsidiaries like Nature Communications are taking to address this issue. And I wanted to know a little bit more about those programs and how they might be developing and what Nature Communications might be doing specifically on this issue. Sure, I'd be happy to. So I think starting off at the sort of level of the editor, you know, the bit I'm most heavily engaged in is, as we were talking about earlier, we are very keen on expanding the diversity of our reviewer pool, reaching out to our reviewers and saying, you know, if you can't review this paper, or sometimes I've reached out and said, I don't want you to review this paper, but I want you to recommend people who can, because unfortunately, I can't know every single researcher working in the field at the moment, but reaching out and ensuring that our reviewers are distributed equally and equitably across different institutions, different geographic areas, along gender lines, is something that's really important. I've also been involved personally with some really interesting discussions around, you know, acknowledging authors who are not in the sort of traditional university or institute based scientific structure. For example, if you are working with Indigenous communities, how do you properly acknowledge their involvement in a piece of research? At a sort of like journal level, these are discussions that the editors are having a lot. We have an internal diversity, equity and inclusion working group at Nature Communications, which is also working very closely with our initiatives in early career researchers to bring people into a discussion, into the review process, into the publication process, as well as looking to areas where we can reach out to underrepresented communities, both to tackle issues of systemic racism, but also the gender imbalance in science, as well as the underrepresentation of LGBTQ plus individuals in science. And some of this has seen published pieces already being put out. For example, there was a piece on Q&A with LGBTQ plus researchers in the geosciences that we publish, I believe it was last year. And this isn't just a journal thing either. This is something that is taken very seriously by the company as a whole. There's initiatives and sort of external commitments that we have made to diversity, equity and inclusion in the field of scientific publishing. And then also internally, you know, I'm involved in the LGBTQ plus group to ensure that internal company practices are developed to the highest standard and how that feeds into external practices as well. For example, we recently published, or not published, we announced a trans inclusive name change policy for our authors. And, you know, these are various aspects that are being further developed and further built upon as part of the journal and then the company's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Thank you for Nature Communication for doing such a great job on tackling the systematic racism in science. Speaking of the journal, Nature Communications is an open access journal. Could you tell us more about the decision to be open access and how you view the future of open science? So the decision to be open access, does that predate me at the journal? No, I think when I joined the journal, it was a mix. But very shortly after I joined, we went fully open access, and I've been open access ever since. So I've very much grown up in scientific publishing in the open access model and way of doing things. I think it's important that open access is one aspect of open research, open science way of doing things. So one of the things I'm really, I find really amazing about Nature Communications, I've really enjoyed being a part of at the journal, is we like to do initiatives on transparency in science and aiding reproducibility. And many of our sister journals also do similar initiatives or even predated us on a few of them. But you know, we're an open access journal, articles are readable by anyone. In addition, we offer the option of making the peer review reports available. So the reader can see the process by which a paper has gone through the different rounds of review and the review and response dynamics between the reviewers and the authors. We give the reviewers the option of being acknowledged by name on a paper, you know, Professor so and so and two other anonymous reviewers are thanked for their assistance to peer review reports here. We publish what we call checklists, reporting summaries, which break down the study design of a paper, and often ask or require that the raw data underlying the figures in the paper are provided and are on some data sets, you know, insistent that they have to be uploaded to a publicly available database and accessible. And in others strongly encourage our authors to make these data sets available. So it's not just here's the paper, please read it. It's the whole package of the paper and the data and the peer review reports to understand kind of the journey a paper has gone on from submission through to publication, and as much as possible, make everything transparent and available for the reader to then be able to go in and go, okay, cool. They show that in that figure, I can actually get the data set out, I can look at it myself, you know, is that reproducible? Or I understand why they've done that now, because in the review reports, you know, there's this discourse around a particular point. I'm very much of belief that I don't think editorial or publishing should be a mysterious black box where papers go in, paper comes out, hopefully. And of course, there are other issues around confidentiality and what can and cannot be disclosed depending on a data set and stuff like that. But as much as possible, I think it should be a process that is broadly transparent, you can understand why decisions are being made and how a paper goes through the process. On this topic of transparency, do you find that transparency in the review process affects the way that reviewers and authors engage with you? You know, I don't think so, actually. There's often this fear that, oh, if they know who I am, I can't be honest in my report. So first of all, that's why we separate out the two aspects, you know, if the reviewer wants to be acknowledged, that is a separate thing from do the peer review reports get published. And though we encourage reviewers to sign the reports if they feel comfortable, the two aren't linked, you know, you can't go, Professor so-and-so helped us review this paper and link it back to any given report. I think a chunk of this goes back to what I was saying about this being a discussion among colleagues. And I said this is someone who's now out of the whole process and doesn't have to review papers. I think if what you're saying is constructive and helpful, even if critical, that is the spirit that should be taken in. And there shouldn't be any concern with revealing who you are as a reviewer and all that. But I really understand it's very much a personal choice about revealing anonymity. And I've not noticed any substantive reduction in quality of the review reports since we started offering transparent peer review or recognition or anything like that. I'm not necessarily saying I've noticed more people signing the reports either. But again, that's very much a personal choice. And like with a lot of things, the degree to which somebody feels comfortable relinquishing anonymity is not something I'm going to insist upon. I'm not going to say you must sign your reports or this must all be kept very secretive. It is up to the reviewers. The same way, you know, it's kind of author's choice how much they want to reveal about the review process through the publication of peer review reports and stuff like that. I'm very big on author choice. At the end of the day, it's not my manuscript. It's not the reviewer's manuscript. It is the author's work. And what they think is best for their work is probably the best way to proceed. And we can encourage and I do encourage a lot of these things because like I said, I do think editorial publications shouldn't be a mysterious process, but I respect it if other people kind of like actually know why they don't necessarily want to be all out there at the moment. It's an exciting change in the way that publications might be happening and the way that a manuscript goes from just a manuscript to a peer reviewed publication. Another change that I've observed in publishing over the past many, many years is the idea of preprints. So preprints have been increasing in popularity. It's related to this idea of open science that we were just talking about. How do you see the future of science publishing changing with the rise of preprints? So I love preprints. And I should probably point out that, you know, it is official policy that, you know, we encourage authors to put their work on preprint servers. I find preprints very exciting because they're very good for the rapid dissemination of scientific discoveries. I find them very exciting with a pinch of salt, I think, because they've not gone through peer review either, you know, formally in a journal structure or in any other sense. And so I tend to view preprints the same way I view it when people talk about unpublished data at conferences. And I think I've broadly kind of started to view bio archive as one giant conference, where you can see really interesting work that's being done, stuff that's not yet gone through the sort of more formal submission, editorial evaluation, peer review process and everything. It's really great to see what is up and coming with a slight caveat of this might not necessarily pan out as originally put forward in the paper, though to also say peer review is not a perfect process. And I'm very clear that a paper that's gone through peer review and has become published is, to me, one that is now good enough to hand over to the community for wider discussion. But yeah, preprints are cool. I like them. I can definitely see an emerging world where most stuff goes up on preprints before submission to a journal or, you know, even a much more active role from the journal point of view of identifying potentially interesting preprints to then have peer reviewed. I do that on occasion already. Like if I've got some spare time on a Friday, I've been known to go through bio archive, find really cool looking preprints and write to the authors going, I don't know what you want to do with this. But if you were interested in sending it my way, I think it's really neat. So moving away from the publishing process, from the perspective of researchers or reviewers or publishers, for you personally, how do you manage work-life balance? We know a lot of graduate students and postdocs struggle with work-life balance. And we're wondering, does it get any better as an editor? So it is definitely a bit more of an office based, structured job than necessarily a postdoc might be. I mean, it's not like science is busy. Science is always busy because there's a lot of science happening. I think one of the things I have learned is to be much stricter with myself about work-life balance. When I've done career talks in the past, I've joked that I think work-life balance is very important because I have no concept of it and it fascinates me. So I might be the worst person to ask. Yeah, from an editorial perspective, your day starts around, well, my day starts around 8.30, 9 ish and we'll typically wrap up about somewhere between five and six in the evening, to a big extent because I know after 6pm my brain shuts down and I couldn't make a sensible decision if I tried. There's also much more degree of like, I'm not beholden to cells anymore. This is one of the things when I was a postdoc and it's like, you're beholden to cell cycle dynamics and things like that. And I'm like, okay, but that's no longer a problem. I don't have to wait eight hours for this experiment to complete. I really love what I do and so therefore I have a tendency to kind of throw myself into it. And particularly when I have something really engaging that I'm working on, some commissioned content stuff, an exciting idea for collections or something like that, I can see the hours stretch on. But on a good day, it's a much more, let's call it nine ish to six ish job than a lot of postdocs can be. You know, based on what you have talking about the editor job and also the work like dynamics, some of the audience might be interested in becoming an editor. What would your advice be for them if they want to become an editor like you? So I, when I get asked this question, people are like, oh, I do a lot of like science writing, I do a lot of science communications. And I'm like, I mean, that is absolutely fantastic. You know, that's amazing. It's not necessarily what we require for an editorial role. I mean, look, it's great. And it looks great as well. But often what we are looking for when we advertise for new editors and we hire new editors is we're looking for your scientific expertise, you know, which areas are you working in? How well do you know them? What is your depth of knowledge? And also your breadth of knowledge, because you won't just be handling one topic as an editor, you'll be handling quite a lot of different things and sometimes quite a lot, a lot of different things depending on the day. So we were kind of looking for scientists who will be comfortable with that sort of diversity of scientific engagement. So if you want to become an editor, the best way is to stay engaged with the science, read on your topic, read around your topic, follow where your interests take you into different areas, see what is interesting and what is developing in the field, what the trends are, what is hot, what people are talking about, and also the stuff that people aren't chatting about anymore. And I find that really interesting. You know, I handle genome engineering, which is very heavy, CRISPR dominate these days. And sometimes I still get really excited reading about zinc finger nucleases and other old school ways of engineering the genome, because they still can be really interesting. It still can be utterly fascinating. So yeah, stay interested in the science, stay engaged with it. And then if you see an opportunity come up, send in your CV and then show why you find the scientific discourse so great. I think that's how I became an editor. It's worked so far. So you've told us a lot about your job as an editor, and that you really enjoy this job. But if you weren't an editor, what might you be doing instead? What would your other career choice have been in an alternate universe? Oh, God, what am I doing on a different timeline right now? That's a really, that's a really, really interesting question. Actually, it's been a while since I thought about what I would do if I wasn't an editor, maybe a very ill known writer, a very well known, churning out Pope sci fi type writer. Yeah. I think there's a certain glamour in that actually. I don't know, like I've utterly loved science and the molecular biology side of science since I was way too young to even put it into like, you know, these terms. I distinctly remember, I saw Jurassic Park in the movie theater, and I was like, this is what I want to do. And people are like, be a paleontologist. I'm like, no, I don't want to be a paleontologist. I want to like, be the people in that lab cloning those dinosaurs. Is that an option? Can I be a dinosaur cloner? Well, it ended really well in the movie. So yeah, I mean, those movies, if nothing, are not a parable for how well these things can end. Yeah, I don't know, something like that. I think one of the things that sort of like gets under my skin a bit is when you see science inaccurately portrayed in TV or movies, it gets under my skin and it really gets under the skin of my friends, because that's the moment when suddenly I suspend my disbelief and I'm like, no, that's not accurate at all. And they're like, you accepted zombies up to this point, but because they did the PCR wrong, you think it's now unrealistic. I'm like, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I would love to like be able to critique scripts going, that's not how you do a Western blot. Well, maybe in an alternate universe, we'll see you on bookstore shelves or in Hollywood credits. Yeah, I bet that Ross is having such a great time. So, before we end the interview, is there anything you would like to promote? Oh, I don't know. Promote? Read Nature Communication, kids. No, I don't think I've got anything necessarily to promote or to shout about that we've not covered already. It may have come across, I really enjoy being an editor and I encourage anyone who is interested to drop me a line. I'm happy to talk about the job, about what it means to work for a journal like Nature Communications, or, you know, give any sort of guidance that I can. Yeah. I mean, because at the end of the day, I was a postdoc, I know what it's like, and I know that it can be difficult trying to figure out what you want to do with your career. I remember really, really distinctly, it was in my PhD and I went to my PI and I was like, what are my career options? And he looked at me, he was like, I don't know, Ross, I did a postdoc, I became a PI and I've been here ever since. And I was like, okay, okay, I need to figure this out. And then, so if anyone ever wants career guidance, I'm always more than happy to impart what I have done and how I got to where I am. So, thank you for, you know, opening your time and space for us. If we want to reach out to you, what is the best way to reach out to you for the best? I say DM me on Twitter, Ross Clooney. I thought it would probably help if you want to DM me. Yeah. Well, it's a very kind offer to make to our listeners and we really appreciate the time that you've taken to speak with us today. It's been a fascinating conversation on our end and really enjoyable to learn about your process and your work. Well, no, thank you for having me. It's been great. This has been another episode of EBRC In Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association. For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are a student or postdoc interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application linked in the episode description. A big thank you to the entire EBRC SPA podcast team, Catherine Brink, Fatima Naam, Andrew Hunt, Kevin Reed, Ross Jones, Kokesy Lee, and David Mai. Thanks also to EBRC for their support and to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.