Rewire Your Career: Emily Clements

Rewire Your Career is a new interview series that highlights the many routes people take into and through neuroscience. From moving between academia and industry to shifting across disciplines or starting in a completely different field, these stories show that there is no single path to building a career in science. Through sharing experiences, challenges and advice, we aim to showcase the flexibility and resilience of neuroscientists, while inspiring our community to explore the possibilities ahead.

Emily Clements, lecturer at University of Exeter and founder of Mind Brain Body.

We interviewed Emily Clements, cognitive neuroscientist lecturer at the University of Exeter and founder of Mind Brain Body, a company that uses neuroscience-backed approaches to help you get ‘unstuck’ through the power of yoga. She shares her journey navigating a PhD while freelancing, how to stay resilient, and how to avoid burnout during your PhD.

Section Contents (click to jump to a section):

1. A unique career journey, including freelance consulting

2. PhDs and the potential for burnout

3. Advice on balance and resilience in academia: yoga for escapism, learning when you work best, and detaching your identity from your PhD!

4. How to get involved in scientific editing to supplement your PhD

5. Emily’s future plans, including blending the worlds of entrepreneurship, yoga, and neuroscience.

A Unique Career Journey

Please could you briefly summarise your career progression, from what you studied at A-Level, through to what you're doing now.

School and A-Levels

I've always had an interest in science; at primary school, science was my favourite subject. At that stage, until you go deeper into it, there's a right and a wrong answer; it’s a bit more concrete. For A-Levels, I did Chemistry, Biology, Maths, and Sociology - so not light subjects! I think I was just more attracted to those subjects, which is ironic, really, because then when you go further into academia, it's all writing!

I was diagnosed as dyslexic during my A-Levels, so I did pretty badly the first year. When they finally diagnosed me, I then got extra time, and I did a lot better.

Undergraduate

Then I went to university at King's College London doing Biomedical Science. I knew that I liked learning about the human body, and I knew that Biology included plant biology, which I didn’t want to learn more about! That's why I think I went specifically for biomedical sciences.

At King’s, everyone did a common first year in Biomedical Science and then you could choose to specialise in a particular area in your second year. And it just so happened that pretty much all the modules that I chose were on the Neuroscience course. Psychology was really interesting to me - how people think, how their minds work. 

I attended a lecture from an academic who actually ended up being my second supervisor for my PhD, six or seven years later! I believe it was part of the intro to Neuroscience module, and he gave a lecture on how you can read people's minds with brain scans. It's funny now when I look back; I remember at the time thinking, “Wow, there's people in the world that scan people's brains and there's these people that are called cognitive neuroscientists - that sounds so cool, I want to do that!”. I never really thought that it would be something that I would do because it just seemed like something other really smart people do. No one in my family was a scientist so I didn't really know that it was a job role. 

In my third year, I specialised in neuropsychology and then I did a final project in cognitive neuroscience. I was quite lucky because I was on an integrated master’s which was a four year degree. I got to do a master’s in the fourth year which was mainly a research project. I would not have been able to afford to do a master's otherwise, and I'm gutted that they've cut a lot of those programmes because it gave people the opportunity, who otherwise couldn't afford to. If you're then going on to do a PhD, it is so useful to have a master’s. 

Master’s

My master’s research project used computational modelling to look at social decision making in people. The models are built from algorithms based on how they think people behave and make decisions. You get people to play games and then you can model and quantify their cognition from the outputs and behaviour that they demonstrated, for example: how much did they use the social advice that was given to them when making this decision?

I loved neuroscience and I still do - I find it fascinating. But I think that year gave me a really good experience of what research is like. And funnily enough, I decided at that point that I didn't think research was for me. I found it a little bit too isolating and as anyone in research knows, so much goes wrong and so much gets delayed during a project. There's this constant battle to keep your project running and to try and get some results from it at the end. I think I found that process really frustrating.

Job Searching and Transitioning to Consultancy

I’d decided that I loved neuroscience, but that I didn’t think research was for me. A lot of science graduates go into consulting, so I was having a look at those roles. However, there was no need for neuroscience in these roles, which was frustrating to me. I’d just spent several years accumulating this knowledge, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go into a job where I wasn’t using any of it.

I searched for consulting roles that required neuroscience knowledge, but I couldn't find anything. That was what sparked the idea that I could provide a neuroscience consultancy service to teach people how the brain works in the future. Work is what we spend most of our time doing and I don’t think that neuroscience is used a lot to improve this experience; I find that quite fascinating. We use it to understand diseases and when things go wrong, but I don't think it's necessarily used to understand when things go right. How can you use information about the brain to perform better at work or understand what kind of work and roles suit you?

So I left the master’s thinking that I was going to work in a business role to gain business experience and then later combine neuroscience and business together - I had met a dead end and needed to pick one or the other. 

But, before that I did the classic thing and went travelling for a few months around Southeast Asia, came back, had no job, and lived with my parents. I applied for hundreds and hundreds of jobs. I think I got back from Southeast Asia around the end of September/October time and I didn't get a job until January. I was just spending all day, as if it was a full-time job, looking for and applying for jobs. I know that the job market at the moment is probably even worse than it was back then, so I sympathise and understand the pain. 

I ended up taking the very first job that I got offered. I took a job in scientific communications in an agency that did PR work for pharmaceutical companies. In my head I was excited about the science! I knew they worked with things like Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and Parkinson's disease. I thought that I could use my knowledge.

It was about two weeks into that job that I realised that the job wasn’t for me. You don't realise what a job is going to entail until you start it, but all I was doing was analysing tweets - saying if they were positive or negative. I wasn't using any skills that I'd gained, or any neuroscience knowledge. Maybe I would have done if I had stayed longer in that role, but I wasn’t enjoying it enough. It was also really badly paid as an entry level role, and it wasn't enough to live on in London. 

PhD and Freelance Consulting

The night before I had started the PR role, I had seen a job advert for this research project in the neuroscience of entrepreneurship, which was the mishmash of neuroscience and business. I spent the night before starting the PR role - I think until 1:00 AM - just sending in that application. A few weeks into the PR role, I had the interviews. Luckily, I got offered the role and was given the option to do a PhD alongside it. I remember at the time thinking, "Me? A PhD?..." I did the PhD for four and a half to five years. I had a research assistant role and did the PhD part-time, but they were on the same project, so I was essentially a full-time PhD student. It worked out quite well for me; I think I was quite lucky in that regard. Then, because of the topic, which was neuroscience and entrepreneurship, I ended up doing a lot in the startup entrepreneurship business space as well. I started writing blogs about what I was doing. At one point I was just trying to recruit people for one of my studies so I wrote a blog post for the Centre for Doctoral Training.

Things like that created quite a lot of interest around the research that I was doing. I did more talks, workshops, and I was a guest speaker at other universities. I would talk about the research we were doing and why we were interested in the brains of entrepreneurs; the aim was to understand the brains of entrepreneurs so that you could train other peoples’ brains to work in a similar way. Through my talks and blogs, I started attracting some freelance work. When you're a PhD student, if you work for a university, there are two options for consulting work: you can either do it as a consultant for the university, which means the university gets paid and you do it as a representative for them, or you can do it as private consultancy and it's all on you (you don't use the university name, resources, or equipment). 

I went down the scarier route of doing private freelance consulting. I freelanced for a business, which was a leadership consultancy company, and they then offered me a job at the end of my PhD. I did that job for a year. I was given a really good opportunity and I am incredibly grateful for it. However, as often seems to happen in my life, every time I stray a little bit too far away from neuroscience and try to go towards the business world, I miss the real brain science. That's still something that I'm trying to figure out; I know I love the entrepreneurship world, the startup world, and doing my own freelance consultancy work. It's really cool to work with businesses and also see how you can apply science to real life. That's a big thing that I want to carry on doing, thinking about how we can take neuroscience and help people apply it to their life: their productivity, their well-being, and their fulfilment. So that role, for me, didn’t feel right.

Lectureship

I then applied for a lecturer role at Exeter and got that, so that's where I am now. My main role is teaching neuroscience, so I’m back to brains! 

How do you feel that your experience in consultancy changed how you viewed academia?

The consultancy company I worked for worked with CEOs and executive teams of big businesses. They either helped them through business transitions or provided leadership development training.  We helped people improve their mindset, bringing in psychology and neuroscience insights.

One thing that has been so valuable for me from that experience is that when you have clients paying for leadership training, the standard of the content that you deliver has to be so high and the way it's delivered must be very good. The consultants are amazing at what they do and when you compare that to the way lectures are taught in university, it can be completely different. In the consulting world, most of the thought process when you're creating something is: how is this going to be perceived? You're putting yourself in the other person's shoes and considering if they are going to understand what you’re saying. Are they going to care about it? Is it important to them? What's the most important thing that we want them to take away from this? How can we make it interactive? How can we create an experience for someone?

With lecturing, it's how do I tell a group of 100 students everything I know about a topic for an hour? That is how I see a lot of lectures are prepared, dumping a lot of information in one go. And I think if I had never left academia, and I didn't have the experiences in entrepreneurship, startups, and the consulting world, I wouldn't necessarily have had that knowledge.

How did your background in science help you in the consultancy world?

A lot of companies are experts at what they're doing and they have years and years of experience in it, but they don’t know the best way to collect data. As a scientist, you come in and ask where the data is. You think, “Okay, so if we're collecting responses like this, where are we storing it, why aren't we analysing this, and why aren't we taking pre- and post-measures?”. You have this researcher mindset. For example, in the business world they think, “I'm going to deliver this course or programme and people at the end will tell me that it was good, so it was great and it worked.” And then we come in and we ask them how they know that it worked - what did they measure? How did they assess this? How are they then iterating and improving it? I think that was a real advantage coming from a scientific background.

I think you also become very detail-oriented during your PhD - where other people might gloss over the details, you don’t. There are definitely a lot of transferable skills that you gain.

PhDs, Burnout, and Attaching Your Identity to Your Research

Can we talk about your PhD? In your blog post, you discussed attaching your identity to your PhD, struggling with that, and having cycles of burnout. Can you tell us a bit more about that, how you felt navigating it, and what you did to combat it?

Oh, I love that. I’m really happy to be open about it because I don't think enough people are. I think it's a conversation that often happens behind closed doors, but no one wants to openly say, “Hey, I'm burnt out. I had to take a month out because my mental health is really bad”. No matter what we want to say, there is stigma attached to it. The first time I burnt out was during my PhD and I really felt that stigma. At the time, I felt like it was because I wasn't suited for academia. I felt I wasn't smart enough and that there were qualities about me that weren’t resilient enough to be able to cope with academia. But it was because of a lot of things: just before this, my funding had been cut from the project, so I had a bit of job insecurity and I wasn't really sure if I was going to be able to continue. Then Covid hit, so it was just an incredibly stressful time. It's funny, with retrospect, you look back and you think, “Yeah, of course you felt that way”.

I don't know if this is the case for everyone, but for me, I think one of the things that really leads to burnout is almost feeling like you are the problem. You think that you can't cope with it and that leads to you being unable to make the changes that you need to notice the signs early and prevent it - you bury it down and you try to ignore it. You try to pretend you're not feeling anxious all the time and that there's not all this stress. You anchor yourself in the PhD work and this leads to burnout for PhD students, but it could also apply to any job. You tell yourself, “If I just keep doing the work, then I'll stop feeling so anxious about it because I'm progressing and I'm doing something”. I think it creates this cycle where you end up overworking and not listening to the signs your body is giving you that you're very stressed.

I'll always remember the conversation I had with my supervisor when I had to ring him one day and say, “I can't do this. I don't know if I can continue the PhD. I feel completely broken right now”. It's so sad, but that’s genuinely how burnout makes you feel. You just feel like it's this slow build up and then all of a sudden, you hit this point where you think, “No, I can't continue like this”. I just remember my supervisor's response: “Emily, I had absolutely no idea that you were feeling this way. Why did you not tell me this, why did you not come to me?”. He was grateful I was telling him then, but he was pleading with me to tell him in the future. 

I think now I'm a little bit older and I've had those experiences, I know that I would go to someone and tell them when I started to feel that way. But it’s hard in the moment. I did take a month out; it must have been two years into the PhD, so the halfway point.  At the end of the day, it was my inability to be able to look after myself, slow down when I needed to, say no to things, and take breaks. It was an accumulation, and it wasn't really anyone else's fault. It was mine. But you can't blame yourself because you don’t have the experience, so you don't realise.

I think it's difficult in academia, particularly, because overworking is common and people tell you that they’ve never taken a sick day or they don’t take all of their holiday. Sometimes you even have bosses that frown on you taking your holiday. I think we have developed an unfortunate culture that you get sucked into, especially as a PhD student because you're one of the lowest rungs of the ladder; you feel as though you have to keep going and saying yes to everything.

Exactly. A lot of my friends and colleagues have told me that they work evenings and weekends, and so you get this idea that that's what you have to do to succeed. Funnily enough, I've always been a very strong boundary setter with that - it’s actually a technique I learned during my undergraduate and then master's degree - I always treated university as a 9:00 to 5:00 job. Even as a student, I would revise from 9:00 AM in the morning to 5:00 PM and then stop. I think it just created a routine for me. 

When I went on to do a PhD, there were multiple times where I had to do a bit more than the 9:00 to 5:00. For example, the thesis write-up stage - my boundaries went out of the window completely. But for the majority of the four and a half-five year project, I told myself that I wasn’t going to work myself into the ground, and I think that helped a lot. I think the burnout came because I was trying to do lots of extracurricular things – all these science communication opportunities and other things. I enjoyed doing them because they were different, but it all accumulated. 

So that was the first time; I burned out once during my PhD and I nearly quit it. I was trying to find people who have quit a PhD to ask them if they regretted it. I wanted someone to tell me that they didn’t regret it. Funnily enough, I couldn't actually find anyone that felt that way. And once I started to feel a little bit better, I thought, “Okay, I can do this because I actually want to do this and I'm interested in the topic”. And the thing that got me back into it was focusing on what I liked doing and trying not to focus too much on the things that went wrong, because everything does! I realised that I was tying a lot of my identity to the PhD. When things went wrong, they hit me hard emotionally, and I think I had to make this slight mindset shift that what was happening in the PhD was not a reflection of me. If the project's failing, I’m not failing. I pretty much had to separate the ‘me’ from the research.

I like to say to people that “the science just isn't sciencing”; you might really want an experiment to work, especially if you've got a thesis to work towards, but it might not! It's not always about bad experimental design. It could just be that that's not the mechanism.

I think we have that pressure, not just for papers, but for the write-up at the end - you don't want it to all be negative data and to only have that to talk about in your viva. You might even have supervisors that are really pushing for experiments to work, but it's not on you, is it? 

You have to tell yourself that that's the process of research. It's an experiment; it's not a perfectly designed thing that's going to go 100% right. I don't even know if I should say it, but caring less helps a lot. I think I'm naturally inclined to care a lot about everything that I do. And if you have a natural tendency to do that, I think you're more wired for burnout, because whatever work you're doing, you care a lot about it. I had to consciously care a little bit less so that I could see it as work and as something that needs to be done, without the emotional investment. 

Balance and Resilience in Academia

When I look back at the first year of my PhD, I'd get upset when an experiment didn’t work or my cells died. But now, I would say that I may still be disappointed if things don’t work, but it wouldn’t ruin my day.

You’ve said before that you’re really into yoga and that you think that it got you through your PhD. Can you talk a bit about that and how important you think it is for people to maintain other hobbies outside of PhDs, even if they feel like they don't necessarily have time in their schedule for them?

Yoga is the thing that got me through. I know yoga doesn't suit everyone, but I think there's something really special about it because it combines exercise and mindfulness. If you tend to get stressed or anxious about work, or your PhD, it's the perfect antidote.

I'd done yoga for quite a few years before, but I really got into it during the PhD. I can remember days where things in the project would feel like they were going so wrong. I'd go to my yoga class and by the end of the class I’d think, “I don't care!”. And then the next day I’d go to my desk and I did still care. I had to create separation between my life and the PhD. I think hobbies, interests, and things outside of work really help because they create that boundary that you need. It might not work for everyone because people work very differently; some people are 9.00 to 5.00 and others want to work a little bit more sporadically. It was good for me to have that 9.00 to 5.00 where I did the work and then I left.

Yoga also has such physical and mental benefits. A lot of what you learn and teach, as an instructor, helps to create separation in your mind. It helps you to be more present and to stop you dwelling on things in the past or worrying about the future. I do now teach yoga and a phrase that I say to my students is, “This too shall pass.” It doesn't really matter what you're feeling or what kind of day you're having. It's going to pass. You could be having a great day, that will pass. You could be having the worst day ever, that will pass. Getting unstuck from a problem and knowing that when an experiment doesn’t work, or when a paper gets rejected, that it will pass and you will move on from it.

That’s fantastic, I do think trying to be in that mindset is very important in academia. There are so many things that don’t work and for the number of grants that people successfully receive, they miss out on so many more. It’s very competitive! There are always things that will build your resilience. 

I agree, my resilience has built a lot over the years. However, I also have a slight caveat to that; when people say, “Get through this and it will build your resilience”. I want to say that there's a balance. Do things that build your resilience, but also don't let people use that as an excuse to overwork you. I think that's where it becomes really important. 

Another thing about yoga: it allows more introspection. The scientific word is interoception, which is essentially that awareness of your body and how you're actually feeling; that ability to reflect on it and know that you are in a very heightened state right now and need a break, not to work harder. I think that's a really important thing. We do build resilience through challenging things, but everything in life needs balance. You need challenging times, but then you also need rest and recovery.

That is a really important distinction. I think we joke too much about how hard PhDs are, but I think then it creates a situation where people suffer in silence because they think that it is part and parcel of a PhD. I think it should be enjoyable. You’ve essentially signed up for a passion project. Yes, it should be difficult at times and it should test you because you're building as a person and as a researcher, but it shouldn't feel so terrible that you want to quit!

That's really interesting. I think that because it has a time limit, people think, “Well, I’ve done three years, so I've only got to grin and bear this for another two years”. It's not a very nice way to live your life, wishing the years away. This speaks to the piece I wrote about purpose:  you have to find the things that give you that feeling of purpose and joy every day. Being able to enjoy the work that you do is so important. Sometimes you can't get out of the situation you're in, or you don't want to. I didn’t in the end, you don't want to quit your PhD. So how can you make it work for you? - I think that is the question really.

I’ve definitely had a mental battle with myself during my PhD. These are my early 20s - I see people settling down, getting promotions, earning a great salary, and buying houses. And then on the flip side, I also see people going out, having fun, and enjoying time with their friends.

But there’s the reality of my PhD. I’ve always had this looming deadline - the thesis - and I’m constantly trying to figure out how to balance working hard with actually living my life. 

You’re told to focus and to treat these four years as a time to fully apply yourself. Everyone’s experience is so different; some people have unpredictable, intense experimental blocks; others are constantly busy; others might be bioinformaticians who work from home on their own schedule. Every project is different, and everyone manages their time differently, so comparing yourself is almost impossible.

Very true. When you were saying that, it made me think about how you have the opportunity during a PhD to manage your own time and work. You have a period of time to learn a lot about yourself and how you work best, just as entrepreneurs do. Some people have pressures from supervisors, but it is mostly self-driven. Like how I was saying that I like my 9:00 to 5:00, that's what I learnt about myself through the process. I figured out my purpose, my values, and what I cared about: what work I wanted to do, how I wanted to work, and who I wanted to work with.

When you leave your PhD, whether you stay in academia or move away, you're a little bit more attuned to what roles suit you and what environments you work best in. A lot of PhD students will find that they work best when they have more autonomy. If they move into a role where they are micromanaged, it's going to be very difficult if, for the last four years, they have run their own project. 

If I was going to pose a challenge to a current PhD student, it would be to work out how they work best during this time. Don't follow what other people do and work all your evenings and weekends because that's what you think you should be doing. Don’t think that there's this endpoint and that once you get there, then you'll start living a normal life because you won't! You will train yourself to do whatever you're doing and you're going to lead yourself towards burnout. That is, in some respects, what happened when I went into my next job. I think I was still carrying a little bit of burnout from my thesis writing. 

During my thesis writing period, my 9:00 to 5:00 went out the window. I just worked 14-hour days writing. I buried myself in a cave. I had no social plans and I wanted to write it as quickly as possible (have a read of our advice piece on thesis writing). I had the pressure of my next job’s start date, so I needed to finish as soon as possible. I think I was so burnt out once I submitted and then I started this new role, that I just carried that burnout with me. I was not working in a way that was healthy and good for me either. In that job I was working way too many hours. You have a period of time to build a good way of working and then carry that on into your career. The likelihood is that the patterns that you have are not going to just go away because the PhD ends.

A PhD is uniquely flexible - it’s that strange in-between stage where you’re no longer an undergraduate but not fully in the world of work either.

Before my hand-in at the end of September, I still didn’t want to give up all my evenings and weekends. I was trying to be as efficient as possible during the working day so I didn’t burn out.

The writing period for a PhD is something else entirely. It is a period of intense work for a while. I don't know if I dealt with it the best way, but I would argue that I don't think anyone feels like they did. I haven't met anyone who's been super healthy, happy, eating well, sleeping well, doing their exercise routine, doing their yoga meditation every morning, and then bashing out their thesis! But, it doesn't last forever. 

Scientific Editing Experience to Supplement Your PhD

Could we talk a little bit about your scientific editing? 

I started editing during my master’s for a bit of extra money. The company that I worked for gave me papers that had been translated into English. I had to do proofreading and editing, and make sure that the translation was grammatically correct. I also had to check that the formatting was correct for the journal as they were papers going for publication. There were different levels to it; for the premium one, you also wrote the cover letter to the journal for them. I wish someone else could write my cover letters to journals for me! When I did editing, you got paid by the number of words that you edited and it could be done remotely. When I came to write my own papers, I already had a little bit more experience. It also helped with job applications.

I think it would be good if there were more opportunities, or more awareness of opportunities, for PhD students to get involved in things that give them relevant experience, such as freelance editing. It is also, importantly, paid work! There's a balance here because supervisors and universities don’t want you to be doing lots outside of a PhD, so that you're less focused, but there's also the reality that you don't get paid a lot. I did my PhD in London and so I needed a bit of extra money. 

A lot of PhD students do things for companies and academics for free. I think PhD students should try to be paid for things more often! If you guest lecture, help out with teaching or demonstrating, those things are always paid at universities. However, if you go and work for other companies, especially if it is for a profit company and you are giving them insights, knowledge, and skills that you have, I think you should be getting paid for that. What you can do is set yourself up as a freelancer (self-employed) and charge a rate. It can be an hourly rate or it can be a project-based rate. I had a bit more confidence doing it because someone that I shared the lab with already did it. I didn’t know what to charge someone as I'd only ever done part-time jobs, like working at a supermarket getting paid £10 an hour.

Speak to people! You are welcome to reach out to me (contact at the bottom of the article) if you’re reading this article and it's something you want to do. It’s been a bit of a taboo topic; how much do you charge? But, I'm happy to talk about it with PhD students because I think we should be charging a little bit more for our expertise. 

Future Plans

Could I finish by asking you what you want from the future for your career?

I think this ties back into the whole purpose piece. I wrote it to demystify the idea that everything, and everyone's lives, are perfect. On LinkedIn and other social media, you only see people's successes and shiny outcomes. One of the things that we think we need to have is a goal, or at least an idea of where we want to be with our careers; I need to visualise it and I need to manifest it. 

During my PhD, I had a clear goal in mind, to become an expert in neuroscience and entrepreneurship, so that I could combine neuroscience and business. I don’t want to sugarcoat it, but leaving your PhD is really hard. You’ve gone through schooling, then you’ve gone to do a  degree to become a neuroscientist and then onto a PhD. I got what I thought was my dream job offer in the consulting world and I was doing everything that I had planned for and thought I wanted. But then it turned out that I didn't want that and I left that role and I entered into a bit of a spiral: “What do I do now? Who am I? How do I feel purposeful and happy when I don't have a clear goal or certificate to work towards?”. And I started to feel lost and unsure. I had a firm grasp on who I was and what my values were, but in terms of my career, I didn’t know where I fitted anymore if I wasn’t going to be in academia. It just goes to show that plans don’t always work out!

When I ‘left’ academia, everybody was making a point of saying, “Are you leaving academia?”. It's the language and the terminology. They talk about it as if you’re breaking up with it and it’s irreversible; as though you haven't gained years of experience. Equally, when I got the job at Exeter, I had people messaging me about ‘coming back to academia’. They’re seen as separate career paths.

I don’t think you need to have a clear goal to have purpose. You need to find the work that you actually enjoy doing every day. Relating it back to what you learn in yoga: it's about being present in your day-to-day life. Do you enjoy what you do? And for me, I knew I liked neuroscience. I knew I liked teaching. I also liked my yoga teaching. I'm hoping to find a way in the future to bring together all of my expertise: neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and yoga teaching. Maybe they will be separate pockets, or maybe they will come together as one thing, I don't know. I'm embracing uncertainty at the moment and I don't have a completely clear goal of where I want to be.

I love my role at Exeter, and I plan to stay here for quite a while. It's not going to be a short stint and then leaving to do something else. The thing that's really important to me is a lifestyle that I enjoy. I get to live and work in the South West, rather than the time when I was living in the South West but working in London and Surrey. Being able to do the yoga teaching and being able to have a bit more work-life balance is something that's really important to me. I get to write about topics I care about and work on the brain.

I talk a lot about innovation and creativity. I want to carry on doing talks and workshops! For Mind Brain Body, I give workshops or talks to people like business owners. I held one about how they can think more disruptively. I bring techniques from yoga, like mindfulness, breathing, exercise, and visualisation. I know scientifically why that's working and can explain that to people. I'm finding ways to bridge the worlds a little bit. 

I do actually have a vision for Mind Brain Body, which is that I’d love to run retreats for burnt out professionals and business owners where they get to come and reconnect and learn about themselves: learn about their brain, their body, and why they're in such stressed states, how they can learn to notice those signs quicker, how they can use techniques and tools to realise that, and how they can start to think about their values, their purpose, and what they really care about. I’d like them to leave refreshed and clearer in their mind about who they are and where they want to go. That's my grand vision. But, I'm a full-time lecturer right now, so trying to find time to create retreats is hard work!

To get into contact with Emily, you can find her here:

• LinkedIn: Dr. Emily Clements

• Instagram: @mindbrainbody

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This interview was conducted by Rebecca Pope and edited by Rebecca Pope and Rachel Grasmeder Allen, with graphics produced by Suzana Sultan and Rebecca Pope. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.