Melanie Stefan leads a computational neurobiology lab at MSB Medical School Berlin. But as a postdoc 16 years ago, a failed fellowship application prompted her to write an article in Nature. In it, she called for researchers to keep a ‘CV of failures.’

Stefan says: “The idea would be that the successful people in science would actually open up about the failures that they had on their way, and how many jobs they didn’t get, how many positions they weren’t admitted to, how many grants they failed to receive, how many papers were rejected, things like that, so that younger scientists (like I was at the time) could actually take heart and see that this is actually a normal part of the process and that they’re not alone.

“So that was the idea. And since then, I’ve kind of become the poster child of failure a little bit.”

This is the second episode of a six-part podcast series about failure in science, pegged to a conference held in April at Imperial College London, in partnership with Nature.