I hope I never become one of those people who promises to review a grant proposal or a manuscript and just never does (or makes only grammatical changes). I will end up doing it at some stage (I hope by accidentally missing a deadline). But not someone who consistently does it.

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If I had an ACF interview tomorrow (and I know some of you do), then I would: - Carefully prepare my 'opening' answer to include a bit about me, why specifically this job/location, and what I intend to do - Have a clear idea for the initial steps in research I plan to take, but not necessarily map out the entire next 5 years - Prepare a paper that I (hopefully, genuinely) find interesting - Plan how I will respond to a question about combining clinical-academic time And then get people to ask me practice questions

Life is the process of working to exchange one problem for another: - Old problem: I am not getting enough research done - Solution: I get a grant that allows me to hire someone to help with my research - New (better) problem: my workload increases as I am now managing someone and doing more research

New from us: Pruritus is common in primary sclerosing cholangitis, persists over time, and its intensity is associated with disease severity A prospective observational study (ISRCTN:15518794) Thank you @HEP_Journal for your continued interest in PSC! journals.lww.com/hep/abstrac…

There's something a bit magical about the feeling of having submitted a paper. For a brief moment, it's no longer your problem. It's someone else's job to take it forward. Completely removed from the to do list. ... [Until you get an editorial desk rejection three days later, of course.] But this weekend is a moment to appreciate that relative sense of peace in the knowledge that the papers are submitted and off my pile.

And just like that... two papers submitted in a day 🙌🙌🙌

George Davey Smith's acceptance speech for the MRC millenium medal. youtube.com/watch?v=-zPqS3hV…

Delighted to have been asked to write this article by @PhilSmithIsBack for @FrontGastro_BMJ Hopefully useful for residents and some familiar themes for career academics. Reflecting on a career as a clinical academic in gastroenterology fg.bmj.com/content/early/202…

Point yourself in the rough direction you think is best and keep working on meaningful stuff: good things will happen.

I often end up with an accidental ‘cohort’ of research papers/project that seem to be reaching conclusion at the same time; it is absolutely not the plan. Perhaps I will get better at spacing things out. Perhaps not. Or perhaps the reviewers will do that service for me.

Good day today: - Finished a draft of a paper that has been 2 years in the making - pre-print will follow soon - Our group is getting funded for a big project on paediatric MASLD - details to follow

⏳ I oscillate between feeling: a) I work too much and shouldn't do anything outside of 8am-6pm; and b) I am tremendously behind and desperately need to get more done. There is rarely any middle ground. I like to tell myself that this is common and means I'm probably getting it about right. If I were one way all the time I would be either spending all my time at work or I wouldn't be pushing hard on things that matter to me.

Doing research as a clinical academic is an ‘infinite game’: there is no winning, the aim is to keep playing. I.e. keep making discoveries and doing meaningful work. Sometimes it will feel like the easiest thing to do is to drop out from the game and go back to full time clinical work. But we desperately need more clinical academics in the UK. So stick at it.

What is the best clinical:academic split? People love talking about this (me included). I think it depends on [in order of importance]: 1) how you want to spend your time, 2) what your speciality is (and its associated workload), 3) what kind of research you do. What split you can actually get/do may be very different to your ideal.

Research tip of the day: Play around with your data. Try plotting it in different ways. Look up some genes you're not familiar with (in 'omics' datasets). Remove some covariates from the analysis. Of course, do not compromise the statistical robustness and be aware of adjusting for multiple tests if you re-run analyses. I have found biologically interesting results buried as significant, but not top, differentially expressed genes/pathways. I wouldn't have found them if I didn't spend time plotting it out and looking stuff up that I was curious about.

Recording of this sessions is here: youtu.be/0ZwK24VYgP0

There are so many things about this situation that are terrible. One aspect is the pressure generated to publish multiple papers: it doesn't matter what they are like and whether they took 6 months or 5 years. It disincentivises doing projects for fun, just to try something out, or long-term studies that may not be published ahead of the application deadline.

Today I’m travelling by run-train-run to Antwerp for the Belgium liver meeting ahead of speaking on ‘Updates in screening and diagnosis for paediatric MASLD’