We spoke to Dan Lester in our Research Technology Platforms (RTPs) about his promotion to Principal Technical Specialist, supervision of PhDs and writing his application.

What does your role entail on a day-to-day basis?
These days I spend far less time in the lab and more time managing projects that my team will work on. This involves engaging with customers to scope out projects and identify costings. I have other responsibilities such as marketing, making sure that from a compliance view we’re up to date so liaising with estates, with health and safety, with external audits and making sure that the training and booking forms are up to date, relevant and reliable. I do a lot of teaching related activities with my own students as well as other peoples and I try to make time to do outreach too. When I get chance, I do still enjoy being in the lab and am still a dab hand at maintaining the equipment.

What was your journey into becoming a technical specialist?
So I started on the fairly traditional route of going to university, getting a Master’s and then a PhD. The job market wasn’t great at the time and I applied to be a research technician in Dave Haddleton’s group here at Warwick. When Science City finished there was a lot of equipment that I had expertise in and we still had a customer base that wanted to use it but nobody to run it. I started managing this equipment and eventually we made a case to become a Research Technology Platform. From there we’ve expanded and increased our staff so we now have two Senior Research Technicians which meant that we could expand our capabilities from a technical point of view and also engage in activities, such as teaching and outreach, that we didn’t really have time to do before.

You’re one of the first Technical Specialists to be a PhD supervisor, can you tell us a bit more about how that came about?
Many of the RTP managers have doctorates and some have postdoctoral experience. We are all scientific researchers it’s just that the research we do tends to be supporting other people’s but there was nothing from a knowledge point of view that would mean I wasn’t qualified to supervise students. I originally got involved in supervising students through the analytical CDT in Senate House. When they had MSc projects, I would bid for them and it meant I got to know all these people involved like Professor Steven Brown (Physics) and Dr Nikola Chmel (Chemistry). AstraZeneca then approached them wanting to fund a heavily analytical PhD project and, as they had been happy with my supervision of the MSc students, they recommended that I be the supervisor for the PhD project. Although it wasn’t necessary to have a traditional academic also on the project, we did bring Professor Paul Wilson in as a co-supervisor to provide the experience of the synthetic element of the project, and by default he has also been my academic mentor at the same.

What would your advice be to anyone else that's considering applying?
People tend to not recognise their own accomplishments and may not consider many of their activities meet the criteria. We sat down as a team to remind each other of all the things we have done that would count towards this. It’s easy to forget that training users is still training and teaching. As this was the first time we’ve been able to apply I had 10 and a half years’ worth of activities and achievements and there were things I had forgotten that my team reminded me about. It’s quite easy as a scientist to have imposter syndrome and not to recognise that some of the things you do/have done are really good achievements.

Even though I started as soon as this pathway was announced it was still challenging to make sure everything was done to the correct level and submitted on time. So I would recommend keeping a log of everything you’ve done and your personal achievements to remind yourself.

Also, make sure to ask for advice. The academic matrix has existed for years and everyone has access to that so I made sure to engage with people who had gone through it from an academic perspective and get their tips on how best to write the application and what’s considered high impact and then prioritising these on my application.