Sanger Institute members. Image credit: Anderson Photography Limited/ Wellcome Sanger Institute
Work led by the Academic Programmes team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, in collaboration with Wellcome, concluded that early career faculty positions needed to be longer. These posts have now been extended from six to eight years, to fulfil the science at scale happening at the Sanger Institute.
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The Wellcome Sanger Institute has three levels of Group Leader. Group Leader-1 (GL1) faculty positions are the first step in the Sanger Institute’s faculty career framework - a position for researchers to establish their independent group. Extending group leader one faculty position contracts aligns with the Institute's mission of developing ambitious science at scale. Dr Alice Mann, Head of Academic Programmes at the Sanger and her team conducted a review benchmarking against similar institutions, such as the Francis Crick Institute, EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona and the Janelia Research Campus in the US.
The Academic Programmes team worked in partnership with Wellcome, to understand Wellcome Career Development Awards (CDAs), the equivalent within Wellcome’s new Discovery Research Open Mode schemes to the previous Henry Dale fellowships. Wellcome recently removed the review point five years into the fellowship, on which a possible three year extension depended, and the Career Development Awards are now awarded for up to eight years without review.
“We want our award holders to deliver significant shifts in understanding as they undertake their research. By offering CDAs up to eight years, they are empowered with the freedom to take more risks and find bold and creative approaches to progress their research and careers. At the start of an award the plans for years six to eight will be less defined, but we’re confident in backing those individuals and their growing teams to continue to follow their vision and become leaders in their field."
Dr Ben Murton,
Head of Early Career and Career Development Researchers, Wellcome
Dr Josie Bryant, Group Leader one at the Wellcome Sanger Institute within the Parasites and Microbes Programme, welcomes the extension.
“I have just started setting up a consortium called NTM Africa, which aims to study non-tuberculous mycobacterial infections occurring in people across the African continent. It is now a bigger and more ambitious project than I had originally envisioned due to the contract extension, which gives us more time to fully set up and deliver results within the new time frame. Before the extension, I was thinking of a smaller, more limited project. Since the extension, I’ve been expanding on the project, and involving more countries."
Dr Josie Bryant,
Group Leader One, Wellcome Sanger Institute
Non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) can cause serious respiratory infections, which are often misdiagnosed as tuberculosis. The vast majority of current information and clinical guidelines for NTM infections are based on data collected in high-income countries.
“Understanding the genomics of these bacteria across Africa is vital - it tells us about disease transmission, allows us to discern bacterial species, the diseases they can cause and how to correctly diagnose them,” Josie adds.
Dr Emma Davenport, Group Leader one within the Human Genetics programme, celebrates the extension for several reasons: “Firstly, when you're new to the Institute, and it's the first faculty position, it takes time to hire, to set up collaborations, legal agreements, recruit samples, generate data and conduct analysis. All of it can take five or six years to get big projects moving. The extension gives me and the team more flexibility to get those initial projects established and written up and then be able to delve deeper into the results.
"Another challenge is being a primary PhD supervisor. We need a contract that's the length of time that a PhD student needs for their PhD. If you have a six year contract, it's only in the first few years that you can be a primary supervisor without requiring another science supervisor. This adds more complications when recruiting students, who might be more cautious about joining if your tenure is uncertain."
Dr Emma Davenport,
Group Leader One, Wellcome Sanger Institute
For Emma, the extension also means she can continue with her research. “We've got a new collaboration with Michael Levin, Professor of Paediatrics and International Child Health at Imperial College in London, who has generated a dataset called Diamonds, from patients presenting to the hospital with suspected fever. We're very interested in how to use gene expression data to improve our understanding of the types of causes that might be underlying fever. At the moment, it can be quite hard from clinical data alone to differentiate various infections and inflammatory syndromes.”
Emma and her team’s work has had a major focus on sepsis, a dysregulated response to infection. Most of the samples her team have worked on have been obtained from adult patients in Intensive Care Units and with this new bioresource comes the opportunity to find out how her work translates to other patient groups. “We have the chance to start looking closer at the gene expression differences between individuals fighting a bacterial infection or a viral infection, and build up our understanding of how host genetics might influence this response. This is now possible thanks to the contract extension, allowing us to delve deeper into our research, ask the tough questions and find clinically relevant insights. If not, my focus would have shifted to what’s next in my career.”
The Sanger Institute's unique core funding allows for more impactful science
Through the Sanger Institute’s unique core-funding from Wellcome, there’s the opportunity for scientists to think long-term rather than be restricted by delivering grant-funded projects on pre-assigned time frames.
Alice Mann, who spearheaded the Group Leader one extension project, says: “We realised, after conducting the external review and collecting internal feedback, that six years was short given the scale of science that our Group Leaders do at Sanger. It takes time to set up and be productive, and many rightly pointed out that by the time they were looking to move, they had only just hit their most productive point.”
The career framework for Group Leaders at the Sanger Institute is known as the Faculty Model. This model articulates Sanger’s views on its core funded faculty positions and identifies the Institute’s faculty as the intellectual thought leaders who conceive and drive Sanger science.
At the end of their positions, Group Leader ones (GL1) can apply to open Group Leader two (GL2) positions at Sanger or move elsewhere. Not all GL1s stay and this is part of the Sanger model, as it looks to bring in new scientific talent and ideas to remain at the leading edge of genomics.
Excelling in how science is conducted and evaluated is an important part of the research environment at the Sanger Institute. Sanger is a signatory of DORA, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which means that Sanger’s Leadership Team is committed to employing best practice principles in its research assessment at both Institutional and individual levels.
It also highlights, among other things, the need to assess research quality considering all research outputs and a broad range of impact measures. Under the Declaration, research excellence has a broad definition and values other elements such as societal impact, translation and public engagement. The GL1 extension is seen as a clear step towards implementing these values.
"We are delighted to support our early-career group leaders in moving to a longer term position. Our ambition at Sanger is to enable sustained ambitious scientific thinking alongside a supportive environment that focuses on our scientists’ development. These were our main motivations for bringing in this extension. We want to be world-leading not only in the science we produce but on how we produce that science - that’s why this extension matters."
Dr Alice Mann,
Head of Academic Programmes, Wellcome Sanger Institute
