Inspiring people @WUR: Saminathan Sivaprakasham Murugesan

“I still have to do a lot of stuff for my PhD until the ceremony in March. My entire PhD was around fundamental genetic research: RNA sequencing and polyploidy in animals, to understand evolution. In November I’m moving to Thailand. I'm very excited to go back to Asia. That has always been in my head. It is also the courage to start something completely new. I always like going head on. I'm going to start a plant genomics company for Asia, because there is quite a gap in advanced technology. A lot of Asian companies come to the Netherlands for these kinds of things, but I think starting there will help a lot of local people.”

How do you get from fundamental genetics to the Safe Space Initiative?

“Studying DNA in wasps is a tiny part of the PhD. People are the biggest part. There is much project management in a PhD program. When you're doing research in Wageningen, you organize people, you bring in people from different places, you travel and meet new scientists. There are also a lot of lab people, you have a lot of students. That is how it started. Because when you meet all these people from different cultures, you hear very similar ‘baseline problems’ that people face on a daily basis. That became an effort to go towards the Safe Space Initiative.”

What is the Safe Space Initiative about?

“Wageningen has quite some safety nets: if there are huge, difficult problems, then people can call to some phone number, talk to a counselor, whatever. But there are not many support nets for the lower threshold problems. Let's say you are just uncomfortable with something, and you don't know how to speak up to your professor or how to speak up to your immediate boss. The easiest thing they can do in the Safe Space Initiative, essentially, is to have discussions with their own people. It’s a platform with people talking to other people they are more comfortable with. It's a support group of sorts for many different tiny problems.”

How did it start?

“With my friend Dr. Shaphan - who left last year back home to Cameroon – I sent out a survey for just our group on the subjects we could cover. The top three was stress management, talk to my supervisor and problems like the imposter syndrome – which is very common among scientists, especially people who have advanced knowledge of anything. All real regular things that people feel on a daily basis. Talking about it brings down the threshold. It helps you if you understand that you’re not alone in this. The entire world has been going through it.”

This formula you developed, would you call it a success now?

“It created a common framework, not just for this department. I had meetings with a lot of research groups, with people from different student associations. They created their own Safe Space Initiatives, with different names, tailor made for their own groups. This is a great baseline to start, because any support system should come from within. There's no way these things can go top down. A lot of people use it for very particular contexts. Some groups, for example, have once a month meetings on how life is going on within their group, as an evening pizza-set up. Some groups have a dedicated person in the group who you can go to and talk to for these kinds of things. The same problem can be faced in so many different ways, this framework creates the opportunity for people to think, okay, how do we solve this, how do we create something like this for our own? There's no silver bullet. At the end of the day, all these tiny grassroot movements is how anything gets done.”

What role do cultural differences play when speaking about ‘safe spaces’?

“Culture is a very big part of this. In the Netherlands or in any other part of Europe, when people talk about a certain thing, it's not the same as somebody would perceive it from another continent. These kinds of things can be a hindrance for both people. The whole idea is to reduce these hindrances.”

Wageningen is very interested in taking diversity pictures. Whenever we sit in a sunny place, with people of five different origins, they're very happy to take diversity pictures, post them here and there. But there is a lot beyond diversity pictures that is needed for integration. Because Wageningen is so global, it has a huge responsibility here. That’s where this low threshold problem support comes in. Because for the high threshold problems there are already solutions in place.”

Can you give some examples of the cultural differences and the hindrances that that come with it?

“For example, workplace hierarchy, addressing your professor or the immediate supervisors in the workplace. A lot of my friends from Asia and other parts of the world have grown up in a very hierarchical place. It's a cultural thing to not go directly against what your immediate supervisor says, out of respect. Telling them they don't have to do that, is not helping them in any way. It doesn't work because that's their culture, that's how they have been brought up.”

“Netherlands is in many ways a closed place. You have Dutch people's friend groups and then there are ‘rest of the world's’ friend groups. Because of cultural differences. So, it's also a matter of how do we create more integrative places, opening up pipelines. There are a lot of people who are working on creating these pipelines, which I think is great. What helped one department a lot was just having a potluck very often. Everybody bringing food from different places. Really very simple, but it creates an opportunity for you to open up a bit more when you know your colleagues better.”

WUR’s vision is that it doesn’t matter who you love, what language you speak, where you were born or what you believe in. All the same you thought it was necessary to start this initiative. So apparently Wageningen can do a lot more to promote integration and diversity.

“Wageningen has done a lot of good work in bringing people here and attracting clever people from so many parts of the world. But then you have people from 110 countries in one place, which means there are 110 small islands which are integrated with some 15 or 16 bridges. But obviously there are so much more support systems that are needed. How do we help people stay safe, stay supported. That is where I think there are still a lot of steps that can be taken. For example, with programs like DARE[1], but it's not there anymore. There are many new programs which are coming up for diversity and more inclusive steps that can be taken. But most steps are from the top down. From a PhD perspective, support within the research groups would be quintessential, as essential as support from top down.”