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<b><h4>What broader responsibilities, apart from your research, have you taken on over the course of your career, both within your university and externally?</h4></b>

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<b>Dr Pete Etchells, Reader in Psychology and Science Communication, Bath Spa University</b>

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I do a lot of things in terms of extra responsibilities beyond research and teaching. So within the university, I'm the Ethics Lead for the School of Sciences, so I deal with research, and postgraduate ethics forms for research proposals.

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Outside of the university, I've been a general committee member for the British Science Association for the past three years. I was also the Science Blog Network coordinator for The Guardian for four years. And I've done various things in the form of public engagement roles, along those sorts of lines. 
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<b><h4>What challenges and benefits did you encounter within these roles?</h4></b>

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<b>Dr Pete Etchells:</b> In terms of benefits for these sorts of roles, a lot of what I do is public engagement. It's kind of outward-facing work. And there's a really deep intrinsic benefit to that. It's another way of getting information about science and the research that you do, out there. But equally, it's about talking to other people that you wouldn't normally come across, and trying to understand what their take is on science. 

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And people come up with really good ideas for research sometimes. A lot of the stuff that I've done, over the past few years, around the effects of video games on mental health and wellbeing, and on behaviour, a lot of the kind of specific questions that we've tried to interrogate have come from just talking to people about the sorts of research that we do. 

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I think in terms of challenges, one of the big challenges is the tension between different types of responsibilities that researchers hold. So public engagement is often seen as an extra that should be tacked on, whereas I see it as something that's fairly fundamental to being a researcher. 

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Part of what we do is the science itself, but we need to communicate that science. And we do that through publishing papers with each other. But we should do that beyond the academic paper itself. So I really see it as a fundamental role, a fundamental part, of what we do. But oftentimes it's seen as something frivolous, or something a bit extraneous, that is always the first thing to go when times get busy. 

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So there's always a tension between making sure that your research programs are going in the direction that they need to be going, your teaching commitments are being met, but also the public engagement commitments are being treated as seriously as they should be, and that they're being met, as well. 
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<b><h4>What advice would you give to new researchers regarding such roles?</h4></b>

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<b>Dr Arturo Hernandez-Colina, PhD Researcher, University of Liverpool</b>

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I would say that anyone that has opportunity of taking additional roles to research, should take them. Of course, with this balance between their own research responsibilities and these extra activities. But doing research is not only about being in a corner in the lab working really hard, or working many hours on a desk. It also has to do with management of the institution, which has to do with the students. It has to do with other the researchers, and learning from others, and sharing our knowledge with others. So all these extra activities are excellent opportunities for doing that. 