Uzma Zahid | The ACCESS Assembly is not just an event, it’s more like a community

Last year, I didn’t just feel tired – I felt burnt out.

There’s a version of the postdoc journey that looks neat on paper, you do a PhD, stay in the same lab, build on familiar questions with familiar people. That hasn’t been my story. My path has been more zigzag than ladder, moving across topics and disciplines. I did my RA work on cortisol and stress in psychosis, my PhD on glutamate and antipsychotics, then a postdoc in Oxford on syndemics and cultural inequalities, and now I’m in a five-year postdoc on a wearable relapse prediction study.

In some ways that variety has been exciting. In other ways it’s meant I’ve often felt like I’ve been finishing one thing and starting another without much breathing space in between. Early on, a lot of decisions were shaped by what I needed to do to keep working, because rent exists and contracts end. This time was different, I’d started a five-year postdoc, so I finally had time. And yet by 2024 I could feel myself burning out.

Going into 2025, I wanted to do things differently. For the first time, I could prioritise what I wanted. I knew I wanted to apply for a fellowship, and I wanted it to be in something I genuinely cared about. I wanted my next thing to be chosen, not just necessary.

Part of doing things differently meant stepping outside my usual circles. I’d spent much of 2024 surrounded by the same group of people at work. In 2025 I wanted to reconnect, to network, and to feel part of a wider community again.

That’s also how ACCESS entered my life. I’d first chatted with Patrick Devine-Wright about sustainability at the end of 2023 on a ferry to Ireland, and then I reached out in mid-2024 when I was setting up a sustainable travel initiative at King’s. He was incredibly helpful – he connected me with Stewart Barr at Exeter – and through that conversation he invited me to the fourth ACCESS Assembly. I’d had the date in my diary for months. Exeter sounded calm, and being invited felt like a small vote of confidence at a point when I needed one.

In the weeks leading up to the Assembly, my fellowship idea started to take shape. I wanted to look at the effects of air pollution on chemical changes in the brain, specifically chemicals implicated in the pathophysiology and onset of psychosis. Suddenly there was a deadline, and it felt real. I could feel the pressure building -but honestly, I was excited. I wanted the Assembly to be a boundary from day-to-day lab life, a different set of conversations, and a reminder that academia can be bigger than the room you spend most of your time in.

A few days before, the organisers sent an email saying, if there’s anyone you’d like to meet, tell us and we’ll try to introduce you. It’s the kind of message I usually ignore, but something about it felt sincere. So, I replied – which I almost never do – saying I was interested in connecting with anyone involved in air pollution research, because I was putting together a fellowship application. They wrote back and said they’d make introductions, and that alone made me feel happy in a way I wasn’t expecting.

And then the Assembly happened, and I remember these very specific moments where it stopped feeling like an event and started feeling like a community. I remember the exact moment I spoke with Hannah Devine-Wright about wanting to submit my fellowship. She literally steered me by the elbow to people doing air pollution research – not “email them later”, but right now, come with me. At the dinner, I was sitting with the Sarahs and they were casually listing air pollution experts and professors they were going to connect me with. I remember thinking: come on –  where does this actually happen? I was so happy. I felt invited in. Properly invited in. Then, after the dinner, Sarah Baker connected me with Gary Fuller and Heather Price.

I also learned about the ACCESS Guiding Principles – Environmental Sustainability, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and Knowledge Co-production – which are woven through the whole programme. They gave me a language for something I’d been trying to articulate, that good research isn’t just about impact, it’s about how we work – who we include, how we share knowledge, and how we reduce our own footprint in the process. I ended up referencing these principles in my fellowship application because they genuinely shaped how I wanted to work, not just what I wanted to study.

After the Assembly, I turned a few days in Cornwall into a quiet writing retreat. And later, when I got the email saying I’d been awarded the fellowship, it felt like more than relief. It felt like a new beginning I’d chosen on purpose. The fellowship is for two years, and I am going to be collecting pilot data in South London, inviting people from high pollution and low pollution areas in for a brain scan. The project itself is called Human Air pollution exposure and Variation in neurochemical Activity Study, but I have taken some of the letters from this long title and have given the study an easier name, HAVA, which conveniently and coincidentally means air in the Punjabi/Urdu dialect I speak.

I’m genuinely grateful to ACCESS. I came back to London and to King’s feeling lighter, happier, and excited – not just about the fellowship, but about the community I’d found around it. I already can’t wait for the next Assembly.

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