Ella Gilbert

I'm Dr. Ella Gilbert and I am in London and I'm a climate scientist and communicator.

I have an interesting job because no day really looks the same.

Previously I was a climate scientist in academia, which meant that I was working at a research centre, and then I had a specific project to do, and I would spend my days either writing code, so programming, or I would be trying to share the results of my scientific experiments, or I'd be working in teams with people, or having meetings about different exciting science questions to answer.

But now I'm doing much more of the communication side. And I work for myself from home, which is a very different environment. So, what I actually end up spending most of my time now doing is thinking about interesting ways to communicate important climate science.

And that might be through things like YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or the media, sometimes I do interviews on broadcast television or the radio. So this weekend I did some on LBC and Sky News. And that looks really different every single day. So it can be very, very varied.

And that's one of the things I really like about the job actually because there are so many different things that I can do.

Maybe it's not so easy to do a typical day, but a typical week involves for sure some writing of scripts because I usually try to publish one YouTube video every two weeks, minimum, and trying to edit some of the videos that I've recorded. So I might be either writing some scripts or I might be recording a video or I might be editing a video.

And then I also work with other organisations to help them with their communication stuff. So I might be having meetings to discuss what their projects are and what kind of goals they have and how to communicate the science that they're interested in to their audience the best.

Sometimes I write documents for policymakers, which helps the policymakers, the politicians to understand the key messages when it comes to certain scientific topics so that they can make decisions about what needs to be actually done with them, so I'm writing one of those at the moment.

I also might be writing other sorts of documents, whether that's for another organisation or to be a little bit more public facing, so people can understand the science that I'm working on.

And then I also go to events and meetings in person. For example, this evening I'm going to one at the Schering Institute to hear about how they're using AI in a kind of ethical way to work on weather and climate science so it can be really really varied.

But I do spend a lot of time at my desk which is a blessing and a curse and I also spend a lot of time doing video editing because when you're making a video that's the thing that takes the most time for sure and I actually really like it because I get really into the flow zone and I can like not look up from my screen for four hours and realise it's suddenly 6pm.

So when I was in academia, I was in a very specific kind of team, and there's a more kind of structured management structure where you have like the head of department, and then you have like a subhead, and then you have lots of team members, and I, because I was relatively junior, had a supervisor and other more senior academics in my team, as well as more junior PhD students and postdocs. And a postdoc just means someone who's already done their PhD. Academia has lots of strange terms.

But in that environment, there were lots of people, and I would work on a kind of daily basis with people who were in my very small team, and that would look like maybe bouncing ideas off each other. Hey, what do you think of this figure, this chart, this graph? What do you think that means? Do you have a good way of doing X on this particular experiment? Like have you got any ideas?

So that kind of thing was really useful when we're trying to design science experiments and things like this. Or we might be sharing our work in a weekly meeting with a slightly larger team, or like monthly, we might work with the whole team, like the really big team, all working on, for me it was atmosphere in a very broad sense.

Nowadays, as a kind of freelance science communicator, I tend to have a lot of online meetings, and that would be with different people that I'm working for.

So, for instance, at the moment I'm working with the Royal Meteorological Society, which is the kind of the body that represents climate and weather scientists in the UK, and I'm helping them with some of their communication stuff.

And so I might have meetings with them fairly regularly and then I also have meetings with other people. For example if I'm making videos for another organisation or I'm talking with other communicators about how to do things.

Yes. My journey from school to the jobs I'm doing today was probably very roundabout.

I loved geography at school a lot, also drama, but geography was like my main passion project. And I've always been interested in the environment. So I guess that's the common thread.

But I did kind of more humanities at school and during my A-levels, I did too many A-levels, but I only did one science and I didn't do any maths. So I dropped maths at 16, even though I really liked it. I just I couldn't fit it in basically at A-level.

And then I got to university and realised, if I want to do anything that's vaguely physics-based, I discovered that meteorology, so the study of weather, exists at university, like halfway through, and I realised I'm gonna need some maths for this.

So I had to teach myself degree-level calculus on the fly, which was really, really hard and I wouldn't recommend to anyone. But I did manage it and then I ended up doing a master's degree and then also a PhD, and ended up in an academic research institute. I bounced around between various different universities and institutions.

I worked for a little startup for a bit that is now a multinational climate company. I did lots of freelance journalism during my master's. I also used to run music venues to pay for the master's.

So I've had a very varied career and I think the journalism has definitely held me in good stead to where I am today because I understand the kind of the theory of like trying to communicate clearly.

The academic side has stood me in good stead to have like the founding in the science that I'm talking about. And then the kind of performative element has helped with the actually delivering it.

The main thing I will never forget is going to Antarctica for the first time.

I was really, really lucky. I got to go to Rothera, which is one of the British bases in the Antarctic Peninsula. And I went there during my PhD to do some research and we got to fly around in this little teeny tiny plane collecting measurements from the atmosphere, and I was there for I think seven weeks.

Also it worked out for me because the meteorologist had to go home very suddenly, and they were like, do you wanna just stay on 'cause you're a meteorologist? I was like, you know what? Yeah, I do. Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks.

So I got to spend Christmas in Antarctica. So it was a white Christmas for the first one. It was amazing.

But yeah, Christmas dinner for fifty-three, that was pretty special.

I think we often assume that like the choices you make are just like, right, you're locked into this particular path. And actually, there are many more careers, and you will discover where you're gonna end up, maybe, on the way.

And it's not necessarily like you have to know right now what you want to do when you grow up. Like I don't know what I want to do when I grow up either.

And I think like appreciating that most of my colleagues in climate science and climate change have come at it from a different angle and we all bring different things and that's of strength rather than any kind of weakness.

And trying to do the things that you love and do the things that you enjoy is really, really important because passion really matters. And especially if you're trying to do something that you really care about, you need to be able to look after yourself and if you enjoy it it's a lot easier.