Tom Rodden on doing good work, metrics, failure, funding, and family

Read Tom’s podcast on the aspects of the life-academic, from work-life balance, to metrification, career progress, drivers and demotivators, to family life.

Tom Rodden is a Professor of Interactive Computing and Director of Research for the Faculty of Science at the University of Nottingham. He has led the Mixed Reality Laboratory and founded and co-directed the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute. He is currently Deputy CEO of the UK research funding council, EPSRC. In this podcast we cover lots of issues from personal career choices, what drives his research and dealing with insecurities and rejections, to bigger issues around funding models and metrics and what universities are about. He also discusses being part of a two-academic family and their strategies for managing this. “There’s always another, whatever it is, there’s always another […] and it’s only a job” “Research is never perfect, it never pans out perfectly and actually remembering the things you’ve done and the successes you’ve had is important.” “I am not an income source, I am a researcher!” He talks about (times approximate) … 01:20 Early days of the EU COMIC project