University of Oxford: broken contracts, broken backs and broken wings (part 1)

The fact that the great resignation hit academia and many people don’t find academia a sustainable workplace anymore is not news anymore. At the end of April this year, I also left my five-year ongoing project at the University of Oxford and, consequently, academia.

Since June 2020, a lot of my colleagues left the Centre for Medicines Discovery (CMD), formerly known as Structural Genomics Consortium Oxford (SGC Oxford), within the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine (NDM). The NDM is the department that developed the Oxford COVID19 vaccine, among many other contributions towards solutions to the COVID19 pandemic. But how does the NDM treat the researchers making these great medical achievements possible? This blog will try to answer this and other questions.

How we brought about improvements in the health and safety policy at the University of Oxford: Training matters for success

Summary

We are facing an ongoing pandemic and the government is minded for return to on-site work. Universities are deemed ready for an academic year for which face-to-face teaching is still the plan. This is why we need more trade union health and safety representatives. We also need to catch up with a lot of training and knowledge about the SARS-CoV-2 virus that evolves every day. Here, I will talk about the struggles we faced in Oxford UCU but also about the success we had once we started organising ourselves to recruit and train a new generation of health and safety (H&S) reps.