Ben Britton

Senior Lecturer, Imperial College London

Senior Lecturer and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow, Imperial College London

Will robots ever truly be our “peers” when it comes to peer review?

I had a dream that bothered me. In this dream, I found out that the journal editor had rejected my paper based on an algorithm. It made me so irate that I woke up. Upon waking up, I asked myself whether this would work. Does it matter? Is machine learning already impacting our work? I decided that it 's time to write something down, before a computer beats me to it.

Peer review as a system: Can we do better?

How can we open up the scientific dialogue and enable science to push us forward? Dr. Ben Britton, a Senior Lecturer at Imperial College in London, shares thoughts on how we can improve scientific publishing as a whole.

The pressures of  life as an early career academic

As an academic, I split my time between three major activities – research, teaching, and administration. Trying to keep these balanced and striving to excel, across the board, is a bit tricky at times. I’ll confess that some bits of my life are going reasonably well, but the pressure often keeps me awake at night. On reflection, this “pressure” is both externally and internally applied. Neither of which are easy to tackle, but perhaps if I share aloud… 

When hard work turns into academic obsession

Most of our research challenges are hard work and they require tenacity. We rarely solve problems with a single “lightbulb” moment. We might fictionalise the story afterwards, often romanticised in a journal paper which provides an unconscious narrative that “it was clear that A led to B which obviously led to C (if you are brilliant like us, obvs).” But I guess that this glorious sun-blessed orchard of discovery only looks “great” on paper...