Katie LanginWhen COVID-19 hit the United Kingdom in March, Michele Veldsman—a postdoc at the University of Oxford—took her 2-year-old daughter out of day care.
She and her husband split child care responsibilities so they could each work half days. However, by the time she responded to urgent emails and questions from students in her lab, she had little time left to dive into the data analyses and writing she’d hoped to make progress on. “A lot of the scientific work I’m doing really needs sustained time to be able to focus,” she says—time that was sorely missing.Veldsman, a cognitive neuroscientist, also saw lost opportunities for career development.