LGBTQ+ in Academia: Challenges and Prospects

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Prof Ewan St John Smith; Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge
• Friday 09 June 2023, 09:30-10:30
• King's Hedges Room, Babraham Research Campus.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Bobbie Claxton.

This seminar will take place in the Kings Hedges Room please contact seminars@babraham.ac.uk to request site access

This talk will firstly look to address some of the challenges faced by LGBTQ individuals within academia. Secondly, the talk will discuss what individuals and institutions can do to ensure that the academic workplace, for staff and students alike, is an inclusive and welcoming environment that enables all individuals to thrive and reach their full potential. Summarising some of the important research in the field, the talk will also draw on personal experience of being an LGBTQ academic, from student to postdoc to faculty, and on to holding positions of leadership.

Ewan completed his undergraduate degree in pharmacology at the University of Bath and then received a Medical Research Council studentship to conduct his PhD with Peter McNaughton at the University of Cambridge working on the activation and modulation of acidsensing ion channels. He then moved to work with Gary Lewin at the Max-Delbrück Centre in Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, where he began working on pain peculiarities of the naked mole-rat, examining their acid insensitivity and diminished inflammatory pain. This was followed by a 1-year stint with Niels Ringstad at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at NYU as a Max Kade Foundation Fellow, where he worked on CO2 -sensing in C. elegans. In 2013 he was appointed to a Lectureship in Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge where his research group focuses on understanding the molecular basis of nociception using both mice and naked mole-rats as model systems, as well as investigating the cancer resistance and healthy ageing of naked mole-rats. Work in the Smith lab has been funded by the Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Versus Arthritis, and the Dunhill Medical Trust with significant collaborations with Astra Zeneca, Beiersdorf and GlaxoSmithKline. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017, Reader in 2019 and Professor in 2022, and has been Deputy Head of Department since 2020, as well as Co-Director of Cambridge Neuroscience since 2022. In addition, Ewan is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College where he is Director of Studies in Biological Natural Sciences, a Tutor, Custodian of the Corpus Chronophage Clock and LGBTQ + Champion.

This talk is part of the Babraham Seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Babraham Seminar
• Graduate-Seminars
• King's Hedges Room, Babraham Research Campus
• se393's list

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.