SciCommConnect three-minute talks — Interview with Rachel Mckeown

In June, the Node, preLights and FocalPlane organised SciCommConnect, an online event all about science writing and presentation. As part of the day, we hosted a three-minute research talk competition. We heard 12 fantastic talks on a wide range of topics. The talks were all so engaging that it’d be a shame not to share them more widely, so here is one of the talks from Rachel Mckeown, and a short interview about her research and her science communication experiences.

What is your background?

I’m from a small village in Aberfan called South Wales, a beautiful and peaceful place. I’ve always had a deep love of science, biology in particular, which led me to study Natural Sciences at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. In my final year I joined the Franze lab for my undergraduate research project, which is where the field of axon guidance was first introduced to me. I was fascinated by the idea that physical properties of the brain can guide neurons through the developing brain. I’d never really thought about the mechanics of the brain before, but with hindsight, it makes perfect sense that it’s an important factor. There’s so much we don’t know about how mechanics regulates development, disease and injury in the nervous system. This is why I wanted to stay in the Franze lab and extend my project into a PhD, which is where I am today.

Can you tell us a bit more about the research mentioned in your 3-minute talk?

Sure! It’s been known for decades that chemical cues are important regulators of axon guidance, but physical cues like tissue stiffness are new to the game. I’m particularly interested in how chemical cues and physical cues ‘talk’ to each other during nervous system development, and why this might be important to ensure that our brains are wired accurately and reproducibly.

In my experiments, I culture retinal ganglion cell axons (that send visual signals from the eye to the brain) from Xenopus frog embryos on gel substrates that ‘feel’ like soft and stiff regions of the Xenopus brain. We can measure brain stiffness in living embryos using atomic force microscopy and also see how it changes over time. This is how my lab first showed that a stiffness gradient forms in the brain as the retinal ganglion cell axons are navigating, and that they turn towards the softer tissue. I can expose neurons on these gels to different chemical guidance cues that they might encounter in the brain and see if their physical environment affects how they respond.

I’m also interested in exactly how these neurons are able to sense the stiffness of their surroundings. There are plenty of candidates for mechanosensing, and I’m working on introducing CRISPR-Cas9 technology to the frog model to test which are important for this process. This is a challenge because the Xenopus species I work with actually has two genomes, but there are tips and tricks to get around this.

How did you approach preparing for the 3-minute talk?

I knew summarising my research in just three minutes would be challenging, so I first sat down and wrote notes on what I thought was the most important information. I first had to set the scene and introduce the field of research. Then I had to show where I come in and what I’m doing to contribute to the picture. To round off, I wanted to get across the potential significance of this work and give the listener a message to take home. My draft was initially way too long, but I edited and edited again, cutting down words I realised weren’t needed and finding ways to shorten sentences. I timed myself while talking to myself a lot, until I was happy that I could speak calmly and clearly and still keep within the time.

For the presentation slide, I wanted to include only information that was directly relevant to the talk. I kept the structure simple and made sure that there was nothing that went unexplained or that I did not reference in my talk. I tried lots of different arrangements, adding things in and taking things out, until I was happy with the level of detail.

Finally, I had a run-through with a fellow PhD student in my lab, who gave me some great feedback. I changed a few things based on his comments, and I was ready to go!

What are your key takeaways from SciCommConnect?

For me, the main highlight was just how important it is to be able to explain the science that you do to anyone, whether that be at a specialist research conference, to other scientists outside the field, or to the general public. You need to adapt to each of these audiences, which is such a critical skill that I think is often overlooked. Sometimes, I think we are trained to think in such detail that, when communicating, the core messages can be lost in the technical details. SciCommConnect was about exploring ways to get our message across effectively, which a 3-minute presentation is great for. It challenges you to take a step back from an area of research you know so intimately and think about how to express that to someone who might have never heard about it before.

Another fantastic part of SciCommConnect was the sense of community across the entire world. There were participants from all over the globe, all brought together by a love of science communication. Everyone was so enthusiastic and engaged, with a real positive atmosphere throughout. I’ve found Zoom workshops in the past to be very draining, but not SciCommConnect, where we all took a very active role.

Have you been involved in other SciComm activities?

Absolutely. For a year I was President of Bluesci, the science communications society of the University of Cambridge. This was an incredible opportunity to gain insight into all areas of SciComm; working alongside a dedicated and motivated team, I was involved in commissioning, designing and producing magazine articles, writing several features myself.

On top of Bluesci, I’ve also written several posts for preLights, one branch of The Company of Biologists involved in organising SciCommConnect (along with The Node!). Here I get to write for a slightly more technical audience as most readers will be fellow researchers, and I get to ask questions directly to the authors of the preprints that I write about.

Finally, I’ve written a few blog posts for Women in Neuroscience UK which are more casual in style – less about the science itself and more about my experiences as a PhD student and researcher. Again, this is a really different style of writing, much more relaxed but hopefully just as informative and interesting to read!

What are you currently working on? And what are your future plans?  

I’m currently taking some time away from the lab in order to focus my attention on my PhD thesis, where I’m putting some of the skills from SciCommConnect to use. Writing up four years of work in the lab is going to take some time, but reviewing everything I’ve done over the last few years has given me a sense of pride. Even when things were not going right, resourcefulness and resilience helped me push on to the next experiment. It certainly hasn’t been a smooth journey – that’s how science goes – but now is the time to turn it into a complete story.

As for my future plans, I’m glad I have a little longer to figure that out! I’d love to find a career that brings together all of the things that I’ve found most enjoyable about my PhD years – communication, collaboration and creativity, as well as fascinating science.

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