We spoke to Yisong Han in the Research Technology Platforms (RTPs) about his promotion to Technical Support Specialist, his outreach demonstrator and his role!

What does your role entail on a day-to-day basis?

My current responsibility can be divided into roughly 4 parts. Firstly, I oversee the transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) in the EM RTP and part of my role is set-up and maintenance of these machines. We’re lucky to have one of the finest TEMs in the country, the JEOL ARM 200F, and I spend a significant amount of my time making sure it is working at its best condition.

Secondly, I am the principal trainer of the TEM technique in the EM RTP. This may be for users with no prior experience or for those needing training on different advanced techniques on our TEMs.

The third part of my role is to get involved in research projects. I currently spend one day a week on an EPSRC funded project led by Southampton and I am also involved in many projects internally at different levels. Often researchers will seek advice on how they can utilise the TEMs to solve problems and to advance their research. I either conduct TEM experiments for them or help them with their experiments. I also support with advanced data processing and interpretation.

Finally, I provide services to external customers too. Most of these customers are from industry and come through Warwick Scientific Services. I discuss their requirements and work out a plan. I also receive requests from PhD students through the Warwick Analytical Science Centre. There is a Seedcorn programme funded by the EPSRC where postgraduate students from across the UK can submit a proposal to the Warwick Analytical Science Centre to use our TEM services. I have been involved in many interesting and challenging projects through this.

What was your journey into this role?

I came to this country to pursue a Master’s degree and ended up completing my PhD focusing on using TEM to characterise semiconducting materials. After a few postdoc stints in places such as Sheffield, Cambridge and Birmingham I was offered a position in industry. However, I enjoy the atmosphere of working in universities and the flexibility over research interests. When this role at Warwick came up I didn’t hesitate to go for it. Having worked at many different Universities I feel Warwick has a better working environment than others. I’m very happy in my role here.

What would you say is the thing that you're most proud of from your application?
There are a few stand out things I am most proud of. One is the VR demonstrator outreach project. I wanted to get involved in outreach but I didn’t have a ready-made idea. After some research and inspiration I came up with the idea of using VR to visualise electron microscopes. My proposal was funded by Warwick through a Research England Research Culture fund. I did not have any VR experience at the time and I had to learn some very complicated new software. It took all three of us working as a team (including Steve Hindmarsh and Andrew Unsworth), using our different experience, strengths and ideas to bring this fantastic project to reality. The University Council has even tried out our VR goggles. We are still progressing this project and hope to secure more funding to upgrade our hardware to allow for more complicated rendering.

Secondly, I have undergone formal teacher training, and have become a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. This training in teaching has really helped in my role and in the development of a Moodle course to give new EM users knowledge before their hands on training.

Finally, what would your advice be to anyone else considering applying for a future round of this?

Getting promoted is something we naturally want, but the journey is more important than the final result. Even before I applied, I was thinking of areas or skills I could improve. Obviously, you need to meet the minimum threshold in each area and also consider pushing yourself in areas you are stronger in. So, somebody who is strong in terms of research may look to write a proposal to get funding, get involved in PhD supervision or get more papers published. Also, if possible, getting training on how to teach can be very useful. Most of our teaching responsibility as a research technical professional is training people on how to use an instrument but we can think of new ways to make training more interesting and more effective for different learning needs.

There’s lots of ways of increasing impact, for example going to conferences, delivering talks and doing outreach activities. And in terms of collegiality and leadership you can get involved in lots of departmental activities and make sure you speak to your managers about how you can be involved within the departmental activities and take more responsibility.