In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool to run the ‘Research in Verse Poetry Competition’, open to staff and postgraduate research students across the university to submit poems about their research subject. The competition saw poems addressing all sorts of topics, ranging from gravity to slavery to life in the lab.
Dr Kate Baker’s nostalgic haiku on the perils of academic career progression was a notable entry:
Yearning
Test tubes and pipettes?
A life spent on email
yearning for the bench
Background
It’s not so much my research as the transition from postdoc to principal investigator that inspired my poem.
Dr Kate Baker is a Senior Lecturer and leader of The Bakery – an applied microbial genomics laboratory at the University of Liverpool. You can connect with her on Twitter here: @ksbakes.