Earlier this year, Erin Walsh [EW] – a University of Glasgow medical student who previously carried out PhD research in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals – sat down with University of Sheffield Mechanical Engineering Senior Lecturer Candice Majewski [CM] at the request of TCT.
The pair met online while Walsh was working on her thesis. Through that research, Walsh was exploring the integration of design features into a pharmaceutical tablet, which introduced her to 3D printing technology. In need of some guidance, she reached out to Majewski, who has worked with 3D printing materials and processes throughout her career in academia.
With the PhD complete and Walsh now pursuing an undergraduate degree in the Medical field, they reconvened to share their insights on the additive manufacturing (AM) research landscape, including the culture of competitiveness and the need for more collaboration.
EW: I think it's critical that anything that you think can add value that you share, and that you share openly. Particularly with technologies that are new and upcoming people can be a little bit protective of sharing, when you're doing literature reviews, what really becomes apparent is everyone wants to share the shiny things that work, nobody will say here's the 1,000 things that we've tried in the meantime that didn't work. And by sharing those things that didn't work, those are still learnings. And that saves a lot of time for the rest of the community to say, ‘we tried that, it didn't work, this is what we learned from it.’
If someone was to publish everything that they had tried that didn't work and what they had learned from that, I think that adds more value to the community and to the technology and what we know about it than just what did work.
I always have seen that it feels as if it's my responsibility as a researcher, to not just share the successes and it's something that is made more challenging by the academic culture.
CM: I completely agree. It is part of the academic environment that I think people become perhaps scared to admit they've made mistakes. Because we think of something that doesn't work as a mistake, but if you had a good hypothesis, you test it and it doesn't work, that's not a mistake. Sometimes good ideas don't work. You learn from that, and you say, ‘okay, why did that not work?’
Now that I'm leading a group of researchers, I feel that is really important because if I don't admit to mistakes, and if I just pretend like everything's always perfect, then all those people who are coming through the system, that's all they're exposed to. I think it's important for the community to understand what's been tried and hopefully save time in the long term, but it's on all of us to make it clear that science is about trying stuff.
EW: If you were to try and name all the different subtypes of AM, you'd be here all day and it feels as if what we've done is we've went really broad, but what's missing is still some of that fundamental understanding. So, for example, I was working with liquids, so rheology is not something that's been hugely studied for liquid photopolymers but makes a huge difference to things like print quality. And that's a core chemical property. Because it's been such an explosive interest in this technology, it feels as we've almost missed that really; the lowest tier basic understanding. And it's something that people then don't study when they publish about things. So, you’re then trying to go out and looking at the research out there, and there's nothing there, which is a real challenge because that kind of study takes time. And it's the kind of study that you just need somebody to do once and do properly and share and then we're not all having to do it, but it seems as if that's an afterthought for some of these technologies.
If you've got still relatively new technologies, you need to keep figuring out where the boundaries are.
CM: I think you're right, Erin, we have missed a lot of that fundamental understanding. Because there's always this rush to be the first to get this out there, and let's get it known, and then almost backtrack to figure out how it actually works.
I think we [also] have a real challenge in terms of people. We have a real issue with early career people, there's been a lot all over the news and with the ongoing strikes and stuff about precarity in academia. It is so difficult for someone to make each career jump. You might do a PhD but that doesn't mean there's a guarantee of a postdoc position straight afterwards. And if you're a postdoc who wants to make a jump into being an academic, you get so many applications for every academic position. Again, there's so much competition there, it's becoming very difficult. Even if you get that postdoc position, you aren't guaranteed the next one. There’s this ongoing process of until you've got that permanent possession, you're always like, what's next? I've got a contract for two years, so what am I doing after that? Regardless of your situation, that's really difficult, like, can I buy a house? Can I settle down? Because of that, we lose really good people, and we lose that continuity of people.
On a positive note, there's a lot more people doing research. There's a broader range of research going on. And I think that is important because if you've got still relatively new technologies, you need to keep figuring out where the boundaries are and what we can do. I think that diversity of research can be a really good thing. We have got a lot of areas of overlap where lots of different people are working on the same thing and that has led to what I would say is a very negative competitiveness in some cases because you have two options, you say, oh this Erin person is doing some cool research that's similar to mine, I could get in touch and see if we can work together or I can say, ‘well, what I need to do is keep everything quiet.’
We definitely have more women than we did. There's a Women in 3D Printing network and all that kind of stuff. I think what we need to do next is say, who else are we missing? We still see a lot of very white panels.
That's an ongoing thing. We have issues, especially on the experimental side, for example, with disabled people. So, how do we accommodate disabled people in a way that they can do these jobs that they can be really good at? Someone said once, they were fed up with always being put on computer-based projects because there was an assumption that they couldn't do experimental work. I think we're still combating a lot of those things that we don't yet know how to fix. So, I think we have more work to do there. But we're heading in the right direction.
EW: The really critical one for me is collaboration, and that is entirely cultural, but it's something that we need to instil from undergrad. We are bringing young individuals into the world of education and academia, we are training them to be hyper competitive, to be overprotective, but it's not helping us to grow and to learn as a wider community. It is a bottleneck in terms of the amount of people that will do an undergrad, that will do a postgrad and will go on to postdoc and academia, we're filtering. And there are major issues within even that filtering process with diversity and equality. But by just filtering in that way, we are losing value. Every time you go up a level, it becomes more competitive and what you're doing is you're honing what you've taught that individual, what you've trained them to be, and then you get less and less and less communication the further up you go.
PhD students are far more willing to ask for help and to reach out the same way that I did to Candice. If I had been at academic level, that wouldn't have been as simple. I think that would have been less culturally normal. And it's almost as if the minorities in this society and this kind of culture are having to create things like Women in 3D Printing, which is phenomenal, but why do we need it? We've [also] got other groups that are not shown in the same way that they should be. We need that diversity but it's about keeping that momentum and driving it forward. And really, I think it needs to start from the bottom. By starting from the bottom and changing the culture that we have in academia, that will also spill over into industry because of your undergrads, if you teach it then a lot of those undergrads are going to go into industry. You’ve got to start there so that you get this collaborative approach across both.
Having also come from EPSRC Future Manufacturing hub, I've seen the benefit of having academia and industry work side by side. But it shouldn't have to be this fancy grant to encourage that, we shouldn't be having to have really competitive grants that are paying us a lot of money just to try and put these together, it should be becoming a standard.
[Editor: The discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity].
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