\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage[colorlinks = true,
            linkcolor = blue,
            urlcolor  = blue,
            citecolor = blue,
            anchorcolor = blue]{hyperref}
\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}
\usepackage{eso-pic}
\AddToShipoutPictureBG{\AtPageLowerLeft{\includegraphics[scale=0.7]{powered-by-Authorea-watermark.png}}}

\renewenvironment{abstract}
  {{\bfseries\noindent{\abstractname}\par\nobreak}\footnotesize}
  {\bigskip}

\titlespacing{\section}{0pt}{*3}{*1}
\titlespacing{\subsection}{0pt}{*2}{*0.5}
\titlespacing{\subsubsection}{0pt}{*1.5}{0pt}

\usepackage{authblk}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[space]{grffile}
\usepackage{latexsym}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{tabulary}
\usepackage{booktabs,array,multirow}
\usepackage{amsfonts,amsmath,amssymb}
\providecommand\citet{\cite}
\providecommand\citep{\cite}
\providecommand\citealt{\cite}
% You can conditionalize code for latexml or normal latex using this.
\newif\iflatexml\latexmlfalse
\providecommand{\tightlist}{\setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}}%

\AtBeginDocument{\DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.pdf,.PDF,.eps,.EPS,.png,.PNG,.tif,.TIF,.jpg,.JPG,.jpeg,.JPEG}}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}
\usepackage[ngerman,polish,english]{babel}



\begin{document}

\title{Authorea Researcher Spotlight: Achintya Rao}


\author[ ]{Josh Nicholson}

\affil[ ]{}
\vspace{-1em}


\date{}

\begingroup
\let\center\flushleft
\let\endcenter\endflushleft
\maketitle
\endgroup




Achintya Rao, a science communicator who works with the
\href{https://cms.cern/}{CMS Collaboration} at CERN's Large Hadron
Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, is currently pursuing his PhD in
Science Communication. We first met Achintya when chatting with him
through our support chat and then later in person at OpenCon 2016, where
he gave a \href{https://youtu.be/vOnTRKqNJkI}{talk on Open Data and
Culture Change at CERN}. We're pleased Achintya uses Authorea and we
enjoyed following up with him here to learn more about his research and
how he uses Authorea for it.

\par\null\selectlanguage{english}
\begin{figure}[h!]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.56\columnwidth]{figures/rao/rao}
\caption{{Achintya Rao%
}}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

\section*{You're currently pursuing a degree in science communication but
you work at CERN. Is this a typical path for a science communicator? Can
you describe your research a bit and how your program
works?}

{\label{925323}}\par\null

That's correct -- I'm pursuing a PhD from the
\href{http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/research/sciencecommunicationunit.aspx}{Science
Communication Unit at UWE Bristol}, but my research is on the Compact
Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at CERN. Specifically, I'm studying
the attitudes of the members of CMS towards public engagement with
research (sometimes called ``outreach''). I have also been working as a
science communicator for CMS since 2010.

I don't think there's necessarily a typical path to becoming a science
communicator or pursuing a PhD in the field. I started out with a BSc in
physics from St. Xavier's College in Mumbai University, before getting
an MA in science journalism from City University London. I then moved to
CERN to work for the CMS Communications Group. Somewhere along the way,
I considered a PhD and received support from my employers to pursue it.
It's been a very fortunate journey, and, I should admit, more than a
little serendipitous.

My research relies on the analysis of quantitative data collected from
an online survey and qualitative data collected from personal
interviews. I'm trying to ascertain how attitudes towards outreach might
vary (if at all) across nationalities, ages and academic positions, and
if they're influenced by the attitudes of one's peers, superiors and
funding agencies. I am a distance-learning, part-time research student
(a horrible combination, indeed!), and am quite fortunate that I'm
allowed to take my courses remotely via video-conferencing if needed.
I'm almost at the very end of my data-collection phase and will be
immersing myself into thesis-writing mode very soon.

\par\null

\section*{How did you become interested in science
communication?}

I think I've been interested in science communication as long as I've
been interested in science: even in primary school, I used to talk
endlessly with my friends about whatever science books I read. I began
to seriously consider it as a career possibility when I felt, in my
second year of studying physics at university, that I might not be cut
out for research itself. Admittedly, I wanted to pursue theoretical
physics and in a sense it was the right call! I looked around at courses
on science communication and finally decided to take up one in science
journalism.

\par\null

\section*{What do you see as some of the problems today and where do you
think science communication will change in the near
future?}

Science communication, as I see it, is doing well. The academic field is
thriving and is gathering valuable empirical data that has helped define
scicomm policies at institutional and government levels. There is a
growing self-awareness within research communities that they (we!)
cannot work in isolation from the rest of society and that meaningful
two-way communication is crucial to tackling the intellectual,
technological and societal challenges we face. I see science
communication playing a crucial role in science itself becoming more
open in the future, ensuring that the knowledge we as researchers gather
and produce on behalf of all of society remains accessible (in every
sense of that word) to the whole of humanity. I'm aware that there is a
certain na\selectlanguage{ngerman}ïveté in that statement, but I have reasons for being
optimistic.

\par\null

\section*{You created the PhD starter kit. Can you tell us how this came
about and what you hope to accomplish with
it?}

Honestly, I'm not sure I can satisfactorily answer either of those
questions. The
\href{https://raoofphysics.github.io/phd-starter-kit/}{PhD Starter Kit}
was the result of an e-mail I started composing to a friend who was
about to start a physics-education PhD at CERN about a year after I had
started mine. Like me, he's based full time at CERN. But since CERN is a
research facility and not an educational institution per se, we don't
get a lot of training in the ``how''s of doing a PhD. And without
wanting to complain about my situation, it is true that those of us not
pursuing technical PhDs (physics, engineering, computer science etc.)
don't really have cohorts at CERN we can turn to for support or
guidance. Over the course of my first year, I had cobbled together a
list of tools and workflows that might help answer some of the ``how''s.
I decided to send my friend a list of all my suggestions, but then felt
that it might be better off composing a public piece that any other PhD
students might benefit from, if they found something of value in it. I
didn't expect it to be read by many people and I was taken by surprise
at how well it has been received. I've been sent a lot of warm feedback
and suggestions for improvement from people who've come across it. It
was even featured on Software Carpentry and shared on Twitter by the
Mozilla Science Lab.

As to what I hope to accomplish with it, I haven't a clue! If it can
help even one doctoral researcher in their research, I will consider
that a win. I didn't start out writing the piece with any specific aims
in mind other than to share what I had learnt with others.

\par\null

\section*{Can you talk briefly about how you use Authorea in your
workflow? What are the advantages of writing with a git
interface?}

I love git and I make that known all the time. I began using it when I
first started working on the
\href{http://\%20http://opendata.cern.ch/}{CERN Open Data Portal}. Our
development team was using GitHub to host the codebase and I quickly
found out that I had to learn at least the very basics of git and GitHub
in order to contribute to the project. With the help of some truly
fantastic mentors within the project, I got to grips with git (via the
CLI, which is quite an achievement for someone with minimal development
background) and was exposed to its power. I felt that we as researchers
weren't fully exploiting this power in our non-code workflows. So I
began looking at available tools and came across Authorea.

I don't use it nearly as much as I would like to (for various reasons),
but so far I've used it to author my conference papers, a book chapter
on open data (on which I collaborated with my colleagues from the CERN
Open Data Portal) and parts of my thesis (although this one is private
at the moment). My workflow is a bit convoluted, as I prefer to work
with local files (sometimes while travelling) --- so, I set up a project
in Authorea, link it with a GitHub repository and then clone the repo to
my machine. I do my writing in markdown using Atom, and then push my
changes to GitHub when I'm satisfied. Authorea then assembles the
assorted markdown files into a single document, which I can export into
whatever format I need at the time. The advantage of having a git
backend is that I don't have multiple files with appropriate version
names appended to them --- I can work with individual files for
individual chapters/sections and have their full history stored in git.
When I need feedback from my supervision team, I simply use Authorea's
web-based frontend to export the document to Word and circulate it for
comments. The whole process works like a charm, and I wrote about my
use-case for others to read:
\url{https://github.com/RaoOfPhysics/modern-research-publishing}

\par\null

\section*{Do you have a favorite
quote?}

A quote I turn to quite often is from the verse 47 of the second chapter
of the Bhagavad Gita. In the original Sanskrit, it reads:
``\selectlanguage{english}krmnnyevaadhikaarste maa phlessu kdaacn \selectlanguage{english}\textbar{}'' (Or
``karmaṇy-ev\selectlanguage{polish}ā\selectlanguage{english}dhik\selectlanguage{polish}ā\selectlanguage{english}ras te m\selectlanguage{polish}ā \selectlanguage{english}phaleṣhu kad\selectlanguage{polish}ā\selectlanguage{english}chana.'') It roughly translates
to say, ``You must perform your duties, but you are not entitled to the
fruit of your actions.''

\selectlanguage{english}
\FloatBarrier
\end{CJK}\end{document}

