In this episode of Enterprise Sessions from the University of Bristol, Professor Michele Barbour speaks with Dr Rebecca Shepard, Senior Lecturer in Anatomy, whose unconventional journey from NHS histology labs to ivory identification expert has sparked a thriving research‑led enterprise.
What began as an enthusiastic promise to TV anatomist Professor Alice Roberts during a book‑tour lunch has since evolved into a sophisticated service using Raman spectroscopy and machine learning to distinguish between elephant and mammoth ivory with remarkable accuracy. Along the way, Rebecca discovered a surprising global demand — from auction houses and museums to conservation organisations and private collectors — for non‑destructive, reliable ivory identification.
In this captivating conversation, Rebecca shares how an academic side‑project became a conservation tool, a business opportunity, and a deeply interdisciplinary research endeavour drawing on anatomy, chemistry, data science, archaeology and physics. She also reflects on learning to navigate pricing, legal frameworks, client relationships, and the unique opportunities that arise when curiosity meets enterprise.
🔍 In the episode:
- Why anatomy is far from “all discovered”
- How a chance email to Professor Alice Roberts changed Rebecca’s career
- Using Raman spectroscopy to analyse ivory — and pushing accuracy to 99.7%
- Collaborating with chemists, data scientists, conservationists and museums
- The ethics, laws and complexities of the ivory trade
- Building a research‑based service within a university environment
- The practicalities of pricing, insurance, safety and client negotiation
- How enterprise influences — and enriches — academic research
- Advice for researchers thinking about commercialising niche expertise
🌐 About the Enterprise Sessions
The Enterprise Sessions bring together founders and researchers to share candid insights on spin-outs, start-ups, raising capital, and translating research into real-world impact. Our goal? To inform, inspire, and challenge myths about research commercialisation.
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Connect with our Guests:
Dr Rebecca Shepherd – LinkedIn
Michele Barbour – LinkedIn
⏱️ Chapters:
00:00 – Introductions: Rebecca’s path from NHS labs to anatomy
02:33 – Why anatomy still has plenty of discoveries left
03:41 – How Rebecca “accidentally” became an anatomist
04:51 – Bone biology, fat cells and musculoskeletal research
05:59 – From teaching to research to enterprise
06:40 – The story of the ivory rings — and emailing Alice Roberts
07:17 – Raman spectroscopy: how shining light reveals molecular secrets
08:31 – Early successes (and relief!) in distinguishing ivory types
09:47 – The value of side‑projects in a PhD
12:41 – Turning ivory identification into serious research
13:31 – Using machine learning to hit 99.7% accuracy
15:11 – Existing ivory‑testing methods — and why they fall short
16:35 – Why a non‑destructive method matters
17:33 – Who needs ivory identification: archaeologists, museums, auction houses
18:48 – Being contacted by WWF and frontline conservation teams
19:44 – The global ivory trade, legal and illegal
21:12 – Mammoth hunters and shifting market dynamics
22:03 – The surprising range of ivory objects — bows, instruments & artefacts
23:30 – How demand for Rebecca’s expertise grew
24:24 – Applying for the University Enterprise Fellowship
25:21 – Pricing, clients and learning the business side
26:24 – Navigating legality, insurance and risk
28:01 – Academia vs enterprise: mindset shifts
29:39 – Feeding research with real‑world samples
30:24 – Saving up for a handheld Raman spectrometer
31:04 – Future ambitions: scaling, training others, developing new methods
32:43 – New analytical techniques on the horizon
33:42 – Radical interdisciplinarity — and loving it
35:49 – Reception within the university and encouraging others
38:23 – The power of networks and Enterprise Fellowships
40:00 – Advice for researchers considering enterprise
43:19 – Becoming a beginner again: learning business skills
44:38 – Growing demand for specialist scientific services
46:20 – Final reflections: what past‑Rebecca would think today
Transcript:
00:00:09 Prof Michele Barbour
Welcome to another enterprise session from the University of Bristol. My name is Professor Michele Barbour, and today I’m very fortunate to be talking to Doctor Rebecca Shepherd, who is senior lecturer in anatomy in our School of Anatomy. Rebecca, I’m really grateful to you for finding the time to speak with me.
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and your day job before you move on to the enterprise elements of what you do?
00:00:29 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So as you mentioned, I’m a senior lecturer in human anatomy here at Bristol School of Anatomy and I’m the deputy program director for the Applied anatomy degree schemes. So a lot of my day job involves teaching during anatomy students and then across teach and on medicine dentistry, sometimes veterinary sciences, although that’s not always my background, and I have research interests in bone biology and in ivory identification.
00:00:54 Prof Michele Barbour
Fantastic. So it’s the teaching aspects of it are fascinating and my dental students benefit from some of your teaching, but it’s the research that’s more the subject of today’s discussion. So let me drill into that a little bit.
I guess for those who aren’t anatomists or familiar with anatomy. What does research look like in anatomy and what is not known that we still need to find out in anatomical sciences?
00:01:13 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So it’s a common misconception in anatomy that we’ve discovered everything and that there’s no research left to do, and this is, in fact, one of the seminars that I’ve run with my third years. So there’s all sorts of research that happens in anatomy and it can be from looking at what people might typically imagine as anatomy research. So looking at variations in humans when some people’s blood vessels do strange things. Or their body parts might be on the wrong side of the body. There’s that sort of gross dissection, and describing new things found in the human body.
There’s also lots of other things that might surprise people. So for example in I think it’s 2018, there was a paper published that describes the fabella, which means little bean bone, and this one is found at the back of the knee. And although it had been characterized about 100 years ago, it’s thought to becoming more prevalent in people as we’ve got better nutrition and we’re generally a bit heavier. And it’s thought to develop at the back of the knee to help stabilize the knee joint. So there’s things that pop up that you might be surprising.
00:02:11 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
There’s lots of other things that anatomists do, though, so we have veterinary anatomists and they do research in a wide range of things. So from sort of paleontology through to animal conservation. And my own interest, research interests are in musculoskeletal anatomy, particularly in bone biology, which is where everything stems from. That was my PhD. I spent lots of time petting small liquids from one tube to another.
00:02:33 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s PHD’s for you. Fascinating. So before we get into your research, how did you get into and ask me was something you always knew you were interested in or something you found along the way?
00:02:43 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
I fell into it completely accidentally. I was never really sure what I wanted to do at university. I ended up studying biomedical science as my undergrad.
During my undergraduate degree, I took a placement and I spent a year working in NHS Laboratory where I gained institute by Medical Science accreditation to call myself a biomedical scientist or a healthcare scientist when I graduated.
So on graduating from my undergrad, I did go and work in the NHS for a few years, where I worked in a Histology lab, so slicing tissue very thinly and staining all sorts of pretty colours, doing lots of the is this cancer, is it not cancer diagnostics?
And I enjoyed that, but I sort of got to the point I’d always wanted to do postgraduate study. I couldn’t necessarily afford to go to master straight after my undergraduate, and I was just really fortunate that a PhD close to the hospital I was working at that was very Histology based in techniques was being advertised. So I applied for that and I got it.
And so it was. Through doing my PhD, I got involved with anatomy demonstrating and I was teaching medical students first year medical students. I was teaching them gross anatomy, Histology and that’s how I fell into anatomy teaching initially.
00:03:53 Prof Michele Barbour
Fantastic. So your anatomy teaching led you to anatomy research, and you’re interested in bones. Tell us a little bit more. What about bones? What interests you? What you’re trying to learn or find out?
00:04:03 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So my PhD was based on studying the fat cells inside your bones so you have lots of bones in your body, some bones, big bones like the femur. So your thigh bone is described as being a long bone. And what this means is that it’s got a hard outer layer and on the inside we have like a spongy honeycomb bit of bone, and in there that’s where blood cells are made and it’s where we store up to about 10% of our body fat is actually found inside our bones.
00:04:31 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So my PhD was looking at what happens to the fat cells inside your bones and whether or not this influences the progression of bone disorders such as osteoarthritis. From there, my interests really have looked a lot at the extracellular matrix, so the bits in between the cells of the bones and sort of collagens and how those change with disease.
00:04:51 Prof Michele Barbour
Fascinating. And I can see how that must have bearing for a lot of science beyond anatomy. I mean, this is relevant for medicine. I imagine you must have to collaborate with other types of biological scientists in That kind of endeavour, right?
00:05:00 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Yes. I’m really lucky in that. I’ve made lots of really good collaborations. I worked closely with the hospitals my previous university, and yes, I so I worked with people from biology to chemistry and data science.
00:05:14 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s fantastic. A nice interdisciplinary start to our conversation, but I have a hunch just going to get more into disciplinary as we go.
All right, so your research is broad and has lots of fascinating medical implications, but you’re also one of our university enterprise fellows, which means you must be doing something entrepreneurial.
So tell us a little bit about what led up to you becoming an enterprise fellow and you’re pursuing a sort of entrepreneurial angle to your research.
00:05:40 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So during my PhD I had lots of ideas and I was always starting little side projects. But while I was doing my PhD, there weren’t. There’s not many famous anatomists in the UK. And I noticed that Professor Alice Roberts, who is TV anatomist and head of public engagement at Birmingham, she was doing a tour of one of her books that she had just published. And being a fan and having read all her books, I decided to send her an e-mail and invite her to come for lunch with the anatomy team at Lancaster.
I kind of thought that my e-mail would just go straight into a spam box and I’d never hear anything back. But to my surprise she did reply and she came and she had lunch with us. Over lunch, she mentioned that at a dig site, an archaeological team had found some ivory rings and they didn’t know whether these were made of mammoth or of elephant ivory, and because their interest in archaeology, which isn’t something I’ll pretend to know anything about. This was interesting to them because it would tell them whether it came into the UK via an African or European trading route, at a time when they’re not really sure how things were traded.
I would have said absolutely anything to impress Prof Alice Roberts. So I piped pp with “I’m sure we can do that for you, but I’ll need some reference material.” So Alice Roberts kindly put me in touch with Professor Adrian Lister from the Natural History Museum, who gave me access to some woolly mammoth ivory, some African elephant ivory and some Asian elephant ivory.
And there was a technique that was being used within my research group at Lancaster called Ramen spectroscopy. And this is a non-destructive technique that basically uses energy in the form of light. So you shine a laser at the sample. What this does is it makes the bonds between the molecules in a sample vibrate and spit that energy back out at either a higher or lower or the same wavelengths than the energy that went in. And you can detect these differences and these different changes correspond to different molecular bonds. And so from shining just a bit of light at sample, you can get really detailed biochemical information.
So I decided that we would have a go and see if this could tell the difference between different species of elephant, and thankfully it worked because otherwise that would have been embarrassing to just to have to give all the material back and go. No, I was just wrong.
00:07:56 Prof Michele Barbour
So when you assured TV’s Professor Alice Roberts, you could tell it to your ivories. Did you, in the heat of the moment, over lunch with your celebrity hero, did you have a plan that it would be ramen, or were you just thinking, I’m gonna throw a bunch of techniques at it and see what I get?
00:08:10 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Very much the latter.
00:08:12 Prof Michele Barbour
I love it, but it’s the optimism of the sciences, particularly the young scientists right? Yeah I can do that. Don’t know how yet, but I’ll find a way.
Alright. So you got ahold of these specimens in the National History Museum. You were able to take some Spectra in the first instance. Could you just see that the Spectra were different? Or could you already see what the differences signified in some way?
00:08:31 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
We could see there were differences. Surprisingly, we thought with the mammoth ivory that it would be the collagen cause we thought, obviously mammoths, very old, some of them 10, 20 thousand years old. But because lots of the mammoth ivory had been perfectly preserved up until only about sort of 100 less than 100 years ago. The collagen signals that we were getting still really strong, but there were differences we could see between sort of the mineral component of the ivory and that collagen components, there were differences we could see.
So I did some fairly standard techniques for analysing differences and we were just really lucky that it showed we could quite accurately tell the difference between species.
00:09:08 Prof Michele Barbour
I love this idea of I sometimes fear that PhD students now and you and I both have PhD students, are so focused on their core projects and what’s going to go in their thesis that they either don’t feel motivated or don’t feel empowered to go off on these little side quests. If I can call it that. This wasn’t part of your PhD, and yet you had the wherewithal and the determination, and the interest to go and do something with your time, that was a little bit on the side. I mean, I don’t want to say is that important because it’s a bit of a leading question, but can we reflect on that cause I worry that that’s being lost. And I think that’s such an important part of being a researcher.
00:09:47 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Yeah, I agree. I think in a way, I’m really glad that I went back to do my PhD after working for a bit because I came in that just a little bit older, having got some confidence already. I had semi established a career that I knew I was good at, so I think it was coming with that confidence.
And so I actually started my PhD when my eldest son was one years old and so there was an element as well that my PhD couldn’t be the be all and end for me, and I had to be fairly disciplined in that. So there were some some nights I worked late and particularly the nature of my PhD, I was collecting specimens from hospitals. Of course, the surgeon’s going to take someones far more. Head at 5:30 on a Friday, and that’s when it needs collecting. But on the whole, I was fairly disciplined in working 9:00 to 5:00, because that’s when I had childcare. Yeah.
So I think it’s just a mixture of that confidence and just having been in a working environment, I was happy in saying no, these are my boundaries. Also, I know I can get that done. There’s spare time here or ohh wouldn’t be fun if we could just fit that in as well. And I suppose my biggest tip PhD students would be. I wouldn’t necessarily go for the most famous supervisor. I would interview your supervisor. So when you’re going for the interview, make sure that this is someone that you could work with for the next three years?
I absolutely love doing my PhD. I had two fantastic supervisors who I’m still really close with, and I think that makes all the difference. They quickly realized that I like to be left alone, and I could just crack on and do things. I would ask for help if I needed.
Occasionally they’d say, OK, Rebecca, that’s a great idea. For after the PhD. So yeah, it’s I think it was just a confidence thing and I was just having come to the PhD a little bit later than a lot of students. It’s just that confidence.
00:11:37 Prof Michele Barbour
I recognise that confidence and I reckon I think there’s also the the part of it I recognise is the the will the wish, because I think what we sometimes paint as a successful academic career, which one thing is not what a lot of peer to graduates will actually do or want, but even those that do a successful academic career is rarely these days, on a single research question, we need that ability to go what’s adjacent, what’s new and interesting, what are the opportunities they’re coming my way.
So I do think it’s kind of on our generation now is not your generation and my generation. And same with same generation, but it’s kind of on us now to try and instill that in our PhD students PhD and listen to their supervisors more than listen to anybody else. So how we get them to go to. “Just lift your head” on a Friday afternoon, maybe, not when you’re collecting things in the hospital and see what else is out there. And that’s something I think is just so important and something I fear we’ve come back a little bit and need to push back on that.
But that’s a few years ago. Yeah. So that was during your PhD. You were able to fulfill your promise to TV’s Professor Alice Roberts. Yeah. Fantastic. Must be a great moment for you. Where did you take that next? You can tell the difference between different kinds of Ivory. What does one do with that observation?
00:12:41 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So the first thing I then wanted to do was I had a chat with a data scientist, because although I was doing some fairly basic for the field statistics in MATLAB to tell the difference between species, I wanted to be able to basically just put a user friendly interface on this so that other people could use it.
That’s where my mistake with talking to a data scientist happened. Because although we’ve had a cool project since then, I still do not have a user friendly interface. And they looked at what I’ve been doing and went. “No, no, no, we can do so much better than this.”
And so one of the problems with my data is that I probably have the largest collection of ramen Spectra in the world on ivory samples. And although I’ve collected a lot over the years, it’s in terms. Of statistics. Obviously, the bigger the better for reference Spectra.
So, what the lovely Agil who’s master student at Lancaster – we had a chat and basically we came up with the idea of using machine learning and we trained this on a geological data set. So it’s actually the original data is taken from like Mars Rover and things like that, because obviously bone and ivory has a mineral component to it.
So we trained use machine learning and trained it on these geological samples trained it to separate them out into different classes, and then we fine-tuned it on the ivory data, and Agil was able to push the accuracy of our previous statistics up to an axis of around 99.7% accuracy in identifying ivory from Brahman Spectre.
00:14:13 Prof Michele Barbour
So this is, let me just make sure I understood you were in a position where you knew quite a lot about your specimens. You knew that this was over. You just didn’t know exactly its classification and you were taking Spectra. But what you wanted to do, if I understood you correctly with your student, Agil was be able to give your specimens without having prior knowledge and let it infer what it was likely to be from the spectra?
00:14:36 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Absolutely. Yeah. So we ran some tests with some samples that we knew and we then just let the algorithm that Agil had written classify it and we were getting really, really accurate sort of classification.
00:14:55 Prof Michele Barbour
The 99.7% is the kind of number we can brush over. We shouldn’t rush over it. It’s amazing. It’s extremely high. You can’t be the first person that’s ever wanted to tell apart different types of ivory because there’s lots of ivory out there. So are there other ways that one can distinguish between different types of ivory?
00:15:11 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Yes. So when looking at a whole sort of, if we think about elephant mammoth tusks. If you look at a cross section of it, there’ll be some really pretty like cross hatching some lines that intersect and these are called stragir lines, and these were traditionally used in telling the difference between whether something was elephant or mammoth, because the in the outer layers of the Tusk, they have different angles that they crossover at.
This isn’t foolproof, and it does require you to have a whole cross section so you know exactly whereabouts and the tusk you’re looking at – this becomes a bit of a problem. If an object is worked or carved.
00:15:45 Prof Michele Barbour
Like the rings that ballast had found in the dig, because that’s not going to be. Presumably there were rings for a finger, not rings that are gonna take in an entire Tusk sort of diameter.
00:15:53 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Yeah, exactly. So once your object becomes carved or worked into something, it becomes harder because you don’t know exactly where you are and it’s harder to orientate where you’re where you’re looking at. So there are other techniques. And so CITES, which is the international trade people for endangered species, they then recommend a sort of gold standard. You do either DNA analysis, which will always tell you exactly what species it’s from, or they recommend doing radiocarbon dating just to give the age of the sample.
00:16:20 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
The problem with both of these is that they are destructive, so particularly if you’ve got a very old or a quite priceless artifact, it’s not going to be something you are going to rush to do.
00:16:30 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m gonna take a chunk out of. So yours is yours is a non destructive technique. Rather. This is a non destructive technique?
00:16:35 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Yes. And also radiocarbon dating requires very specialist facilities, so some countries don’t. And have somewhere of their own to do that. DNA analysis? Well, much more widespread, a bit easier to get your hands on. Still requires some sort of specialist facilities.
Raman spectroscopy has the advantage in that it’s actually already used in quite a lot of places, so it’s used quite a lot in the Pharmaceutical industry. So particularly for motoring purity of samples, f you’re in a factory, or for checking, I know it’s used in the aerospace industry for just checking that like material is homogeneous is no sort of imperfections or impurities in it,
And it’s already used a lot by border force. So airports cross country will have one for drugs identification. Because it can pick up on those biomolecular differences between samples, so you can put something in it and it can tell you whether it’s paracetamol or something a bit more interesting.
00:17:21 Prof Michele Barbour
Interesting – that is fascinating and I guess as well as the interesting applications that means that ramen kind of probes and setups are more commonplace in some of these more sophisticated measurement techniques.
Brilliant. OK, so we’ve established that archaeologists might want to establish whether this is mammoth ivory or elephant ivory. Who else wants to know?
00:17:40 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So it was after I sort of published some my papers that the WWF got in touch with me and if somebody was based in Hong Kong and obviously in Hong Kong and China, they’ve got a long standing sort of history of placing cultural importance on Ivory as a symbol of wealth and prosperity.
So my contact over there is Jovi Chan, who is Wildlife Conservation manager, and she basically said to me so I see you’ve been doing this for archaeology purposes, have you thought you could actually do some good with it?
And up until this point I had been running the project mainly to impress Prof Alice Roberts. But it was then that I thought, oh, actually there might be some wider implications of how this could be used.
So from then it kind of snowballed and I was invited over to Hong Kong, and I’ve given some talks about how my research could be used. I had some really interesting chats about how Raman spectroscopy could possibly be used for other conservation things as well, with some people from the states to watch this space when I start scanning eggs.
But uh so I was invited over to Hong Kong to talk about my research and that was really helpful. And because I was getting to talk to people that are actually working in frontline conservation and some of the issues they face.
And so the idea that we could use ramen spectroscopy although it might not still be the gold standard, so if you want to actually convict someone for a quick test where you don’t need an expert there to identify some ivory, it could be used sort of in the field. And there are handheld ramen spectrometers. They’re becoming cheaper in price, good ones are still fairly pricey. You can get very cheap ones for around £10,000. You can get a good one for about £50,000, but as the technology has developed they are getting cheaper. They are getting smaller, they will become more accessible and future.
00:19:16 Prof Michele Barbour
Fantastic. So what you’re describing to me is a creative scientist at the start of their career. That season, opportunity runs with it and has built this into a set of like research questions that could certainly furnish quite a chunky research career. You’ve got lots of interesting questions. I’m sure. If you pursue those ones, you’d find more. But you’re taking this now in an entrepreneurial direction. So what’s that angle? What? Why did you do this? Why didn’t you just stay on the research track?
00:19:44 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So again, it kind of found me. So after I published the papers and I got started working WWF, I started getting lots of media interest – the BBC the tech their technology show ‘click’ did a feature on me and I appeared in lots of news and radio sort of outlets. And from there people started contacting me saying I’ve got this bit of ivory. I would like it identified.
Initially I was quite short sighted and sent back snotty messages saying I want to stop the ivory trade. I think every looks better on the animal, but after I became involved with a group called the meeting, the challenges of the Ivory Act group, it was then I sort of learned about what is legal and what is illegal to trade in the UK. So it might come as a surprise to learn that it’s not illegal to trade mammoth ivory. It’s very illegal to trade elephant ivory, and as we’ve spoken about, it can be hard to tell the difference between the two.
00:20:33 Prof Michele Barbour
And why is that?
00:20:35 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Well, it’s an interesting question. So there are some scientists that think mammoth ivory should be included in the society’s list of endangered animals, but basically, cause you’re not killing the animal, it’s not illegal.
00:20:46 Prof Michele Barbour
Fair enough, it’s already added by some wide margin, yes.
00:20:50 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
And there’s actually a lot of it out there. So there are people in Russia who call themselves mammoth hunters, and in these summer months they go out with, like, pressure blasters and they deliberately melt the ice to uncover these perfectly preserved mammoth carcasses, and they harvest the tusks to go and sell them in the legal ivory trade. It’s really interesting in Hong Kong. So it’s in 2018 that Hong Kong brought in a more strict Ivory ban – and all of a sudden all these shops that had been selling elephant ivory overnight started selling mammoth ivory instead.
00:21:22 Prof Michele Barbour
Yes, OK. One has to wonder, yeah.
00:21:25 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So obviously there’s really important use for this in telling difference between the two, but when I get people contacting me in the UK, actually a lot of them, that it comes from different the sort of three main areas that I get requests from, some of from private individuals, it’s often they’ve just inherited something, and they don’t know what to do with it, or a quite common story of some that’s stationed in India. You know, they’ve had a loved one that’s just died, and they were stationed in India. And they brought back this item and maybe a relative in another country wants it, and they need to know exactly what it is to be able to get it over a border. So sometimes it’s from private individuals.
Sometimes it’s from big auction houses. So I do get requests from big auction houses. Quite often that’s to do with antique instruments, so things like violins like bits of their bows might have bit of ivory on or something called the saddle, which can sit on top of the bridge of a violin. Those can be made of ivory, bits of guitars, bagpipes have a lot of ivory on them.
00:22:17 Prof Michele Barbour
So that’s what the White Board about bagpipe made out of. Is it OK? Right. I never really thought about that.
00:22:20 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Yeah, traditionally. So sometimes it’s from auction houses, and that’s often to do with musical instruments. And then sometimes it’s just request for museums. And they’ve got something, they have a policy. They’ll only display certain type of ivory. Sometimes. It’s just really interesting. Like I got a request which did ring a few alarm bells when I had to ask to bring a gun on campus.
00:22:42
A gun? Why was there a gun?
00:22:44 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So there was it was from a museum, and this gun had been on the Titanic and they, on the handle there was some ivory and lice and they were just interested to know whether it’s made of mammoth or elephant ivory from prosperity sake. It would have been more common and it would been more traditional on keeping with the design of the gun for it to be elephant. But the person that had this gun was known to be a bit of a maverick and maybe possibly requested it to be a mammoth, ivory instead.
00:23:07 Prof Michele Barbour
I can only imagine the paperwork and getting permission to bring that particular artifact into an academic environment. What fun that must have been, and what was it?
00:23:16 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
It so I’ve still not done that work yet. We are waiting. We’ve had to get lots of permissions to do things, but thankfully the inlays come off. We’ve found. So it doesn’t look like yes, that we’re going to have to bring a full gun on campus, just the ivory like that,
00:23:27 Prof Michele Barbour
Ok, that’s definitely gonna make your sort of paperwork a little bit more straightforward, I would say. Brilliant. So you’ve got this situation where you it’s really interesting set of research questions and methods and techniques which could quite happily absorb all your time, but you’ve got this increasing demand, your your success in your academic role has brought you to the attention of a lot of non-academic potential sort of partners customers. And I’m going to call them.
And you said initially you were a little bit resistant to this, but you started to see how it could be useful positive. So what did you do next? How did you start thinking about some of these approaches? Did you decide you wanted to work with some of them and how do you achieve that?
00:24:04 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So it was probably I was voicing my concerns over some of these requests I was getting to my line manager who’s always been very supportive of lots of the strange things that I am occasionally asked to do, and it was around that time that I saw the advert for the University Enterprise Fellowship and I can’t remember if it’s my manager mentioned to me or I mentioned it to her, but we started thinking well actually, maybe there could be some utility in sort of having the service.
And because I’m fairly new to this idea of commercialising or creating a business out of my research, I so I applied for the University Enterprise Fellowship. I’ve promised you all sorts of things haven’t quite come to fruition yet, but progress is being made and I was really grateful that you awarded me the fellowship because over the last year I have had time to sit down and think about how to do this properly.
00:24:50 Prof Michele Barbour
And what needs to be in place so universities we’re not contract research organisations but we do do contract research. It’s across any institution including ours, it’s quite variable and the the culture varies and the practice varies.
So what have you found that that works, that helps? Have you tried any roots that really don’t work? I suppose I’m sort of asking if you got someone else who wants to do something a little bit similar to you, not with ivory enrollment, but like that sort of service provision from inside the university. What kind of guidance or steer might you give them?
00:25:21 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So the biggest hurdle I’ve found is in the finance side of things. It’s just getting the pricing right in finding who really understands what I’m trying to do and actually I’ve needed to be more flexible with what I’ve thought I’ve needed.
So at the start. I was very much. I’m having a set price list. I’m not faffing around recalculating this for everyone that makes a request, but then actually some of the quests I get are so varied and so weird that they don’t all fit under 1 price thing. And then also for me as a research, obviously money is never the secondary thing we’re all trying to get money to do research. It’s being really strict that actually, for this sort of thing, I’m not doing it for fun. My time has value and it’s being strict about making sure I calculate exactly what gets included, and that that’s not come naturally to me, because I just get excited. Go. Oh, you can give me some interesting to look at. So it’s that. It’s negotiating with the clients. Those have all been big learning curves for me in how I communicate and exactly what I can promise to do.
00:26:24 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So one of the key things I needed to do and I I did at the start was I spoke to some people that work in UK policy for particularly the around the Ivory Trade Act, and I’ve spoken to people that work in AFA who are the people that regulate the ivory trade in the UK. That’s the animal and health plant agency. And I’ve spoken to a few experts that do just visual identification of ivory, and I’ve tried to figure out exactly what would be needed in a report for them to show it to somebody at any of these agencies and those agencies to go. Yeah, looks legit. And for those people not to have wasted their money in asking me to look at their ivory for them.
So I’ve had to figure out exactly what I need to include and so that does include me sort of visually inspecting the item and taking lots of photographs, both just normal photograph and then with a sort of special microscope that I’ve got looking at any visual features that might indicate, whether it is from an elephant, a mammoth, a hippo, or warthog or whatever.
And then I do the ramen spectroscopy. And particularly with my qualifications and my publication history as that’s increasing, it makes me look more like an expert on what I’m doing. And to be fair, there’s probably not many people in the world that know ivory and Roman quite as well as I do. So it’s just trying to figure out exactly what I was offering and nailing that down.
And then when the other big things I had to think about a lot was legality of everything. What was I covered to do? If somebody gives me an expensive item, how is that ensured to be on university site? If I make a mistake, I don’t want to go to prison, no and I’m not setting out to make mistakes. But you know, just to know exactly what happens in those situations and to check that I’m covered. Which all sounds quite boring, but also better than going to prison.
00:27:54 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s necessary to bolt. I mean, from the prison angle, but others as well. I do think it’s a really important observation that’s worth us kind of risk of labouring, but I think as academics, what we’re sort of praised for and rewarded for is that intellectual curiosity that’s following the interesting threads, and that’s what indeed characterized the early part of your career when you were off on these research side quests.
But if you’re trying to create something that is financially sustainable as well as sustainable in the broader sense, you can’t be doing things just because they’re interesting helps if they’re interesting, but you do need to have that costing mindset, that sort of structural mindset, that what does the client, the customer want? Even that language is alien to us as researchers quite frequently, but it is really important to this isn’t going to be just a an interesting side project that fizzles out because it’s not properly sustainable.
00:28:37 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Yeah. And all those things really important. And there were some and so obviously need to have my protocols down. And so lots of sort of the early part of the fellowship was on sorting out the admin side of what I would be doing what I needed to go forwards.
And something I hadn’t planned on doing, but I did use the Enterprise Fellowship for was identified that if I’m using different types of ramen and spectroscopy equipment and occasionally borrowing handheld to go out into the field to see people, what’s actually really valuable is that I undertook a laser safety qualification, which again just means that when I’m taking things out, I can do the safety calculations in the field make sure I’m not going to accidentally blind someone with a laser.
00:29:12 Prof Michele Barbour
That would not land all that well with the customer. No. And I can see the importance that and yes, it might be the admin bits, but actually those are the barriers to you achieve what you want to achieve. They gotta be done right. And the at least the fellowship gives you some time to do that.
So this is obviously you taking your research in a more commercial direction. But is there a sort of feedback loop – do any of the specimens that you’ve been asked to look at or just the proposals that are put to you, do they ever give you research ideas? Do you ever feed that back into your sort of creative research process?
00:29:39 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So I do have a line that anything identify that spectrum gets to be included in my database. So obviously that then feeds on into being able to work on the more conservation, the more those sorts of sides of the research. And then just improving the data set that I have available at the moment and some of the profits from what I’m doing at the moment, I have my discretionary account, which I describe as my Piggy Bank and I’m saving up for a handheld ramen of my own. So eventually I will get to there, and then I think that’s when it will be much easier for me with the business is when I’ve got my own bit of equipment.
And increasingly what I find is that the customers, the clients, they want me to be able to go to them. So some of these items, they are really expensive, they might be weird and bulky in size and it’s just better for some clients if I can travel to them, and do the inspection with them.
00:30:27 Prof Michele Barbour
So you’ve got interesting research questions and interesting research findings coming out of it, and you’ve got hopefully a little bit of like revenue a little bit of surplus coming in that can help you buy your own piece of kit. Where do you see this going in the longer term when you want it to go in the longer term, does this remain within the university does this I don’t know. Does this feel like a spin out or a startup or is it something different?
00:30:47 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
I don’t know. It’s been interesting events recently where I’ve had people sort of encourage me to think a bit bigger at the moment. I’m quite happy with the idea of it staying under the University of Bristol umbrella. I’m quite happy with that.
I would really like the idea that we could train up more people to be able to do what I’m doing. So ivory identification in the in the UK or worldwide, it’s really shortage skill set, there’s not that many people who are appropriately qualified to look at ivory items and accurately say what they are, so I think it would be lovely if we could start training up a few other people to work in this.
I would love it if the business could become sort of self-sustaining. So my aim for just this year was that one day of my time could be accounted for in sort of the profits from it. It’s we’ve not quite got there yet, but we are getting there. And so my aim would be able to employ somebody, and then maybe have a few students doing research things related just so we’ve got a small group of people who are all capable to do it. Because one of the problems with the business, as it were at the moment is that it is a that there is one point of failure and that is that is me.
00:31:52 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So obviously for it to be more sustaining, we need to sort of look at where points of failure are and to train other people up just for the sake of this niche skill set that it would be nice for more people to be able to do.
00:32:06 Prof Michele Barbour
But also that lets you scale a little bit, right? You know if you were able to get to the point where you had three or four, you know, couple of technicians, 3 or 4 postgrad or something like that doing this. It also means you can take commissions in more than one place at the same time, right? You not having to sort of try and distribute yourself all over the UK and beyond. And I’m guessing this is beyond the UK, right, this this can’t just be a domestic market?
00:32:19 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So I do get emails from people overseas at the moment, I do have to turn them down. But just because of the issues with getting ivory Cross borders.
00:32:29 Prof Michele Barbour
But if you had a portable setup that would be a different matter, yeah.
00:32:30 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Exactly. Yes. I would go visit them. And there are other things I would like to be able to include in the service. So I would love for us to just be able to do our own DNA analysis if required. There are other techniques I’d like to explore a little bit. So there is a what’s described as being minimally destructive technique which uses proteomics. So you just take just a little surface scraping and look at the collagens. I would like to explore that a little bit more as sort of hybrid between just doing the ramen but not actually have to destroy it entirely to do the DNA testing.
And then there are some other techniques that might be able to give us some complementary information about of exactly the geography of where samples from. So X-ray fluorescents may have some utility in that. So there’s other techniques as well. I’d like to explore and see how they can be used to build up a bigger picture.
00:33:17 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah. Augment your service, as it were, yeah.
00:33:28 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, you started as a biomedical scientist. You moved into an ASME through your PhD, and here you are using some proper hardcore physics with some meaty data science in these sort of analytical sides to look at specimens that sit across Archaeology, heritage, which, you know, music. I mean, this is talk about interdisciplinary. This is radically interdisciplinary stuff.
How is that for you? Do you find joy in that? Do you find challenge in that? Do you find sort of different practices between the physicists that you work with and the archaeologists that you work with and the anatomists you work with? How do you get on with that?
00:34:02 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
I love it. I just like learning about new things. I like talking to people about what they do. I love being able to set up a new collaboration with someone. It keeps me excited, it keeps me enjoying my job as a researcher.
And there are challenges with the some of the data science team I was working with. Obviously in chemistry, when you talk about organic materials and inorganic materials, they have particular meanings. The data scientists didn’t understand this and so they kept on referring to the mineral, the geological data set as the inorganic, and then anything that was to do with an elephant as the organic because it’s coming from a living thing because it’s an Organism which you.
00:34:39 Prof Michele Barbour
I can see where they’re coming from, but yeah.
00:34:40 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
You can absolutely see and I am sure that there are lots of terms that I used in statistics and data science that they were laughing at me about. So there, there there’s sometimes sort of literal language challenges, sometimes it just takes a little bit longer to figure out what’s actually possible. Because you can have lots of ideas, you can sit, you have coffee and go. Yeah, let’s do that. And then actually realise that. Ohh no. When they’ve said that, they might want to destroy a little bit and you can’t do that in museums.
But on the whole, I think science is better for getting other people from different disciplines to give their point of view, because everybody will look at it from a slightly different angle.
For example, I Refer to the handheld Rahman as like being the equivalent of point of care testing. If you’re in hospital. Yeah, because that’s the terminology. That’s the way of thinking that I’m familiar with. So I think that everybody should strive to work with people that aren’t necessarily in their discipline, or at least occasionally have a chat with them.
00:35:30 Prof Michele Barbour
I wholeheartedly agree, and I like to find ways to encourage and reward people doing that. Looking at, I suppose, from the other side though universities cause they’re usually large and fairly complex organizations, we still have to sort of compartmentalize people and put them in their boxes. However much we might not like to.
So we all sit in departments and schools and divisions and so on. And you sit in anatomy, which is a fairly small school. My owners, how has the reception been within your own professional environment in anatomy with us within the university or within the country to to what you’re doing, which is so radically inspiring. And it’s also quite commercially minded. Where a lot of university departments are usually quite kind of pure research and education. So how has it landed with your peers?
00:36:07 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So it is interesting. My previous institution, actually it wasn’t that well because I was based within a media small Med school and there were a few comments about how well this doesn’t really fit. You’re going to have to go in with ref with a different department and things like that.
So it didn’t land well in my last institution necessarily, obviously with the people working with, we were all quite excited about it. Moving to the school of anatomy at Bristol. One lovely thing about school of anatomy is that it’s the only place in the country that does a purely comparative degree, so we’re probably the only place in the country where you’ve got anatomists that teach both human and veterinary. And so from that point of view, my research has been better accepted. Yeah.
Within school of anatomy as well. We’re. Although I’ve not been there that long. They do have a history of commercializing certain things. So they do run certain courses. There’s a lot of different expertise in our schools. So from that point of view, it’s been quite well received. I’ve been fortunate to have a line manager who definitely encouraged me down this Enterprise Fellowship route and is very keen to encourage it where those opportunities lie.
What’s been really nice is I have had a couple of other people talk to me about whether that they should put in an enterprise fellowship application or just somebody that has a slight business outside of the university and they want to know how to bring that in. And although they’re not doing the exact same things as me, it’s just it’s as though I’ve just sort of raised a bit more awareness about what’s going on or that it is possible to do it. Even if you are doing something as weird and niche sounding as just looking at ivory with lasers that you know you can there, there might be a bigger interest in this and the university does have lots of ways in which they can support you doing that.
00:37:45 Prof Michele Barbour
I love that because that was always one of my aspirations with the Enterprise Fellowship scheme is that I can try and get into schools and go, hey, do this stuff. It’s really cool and it’s fun and we support it and we reward it and we recognize it. But it has much more authenticity and resonance if it comes from someone from within that environment. They can see it, they can trust it, they can believe it because you know they your office next door neighbors or your teaching buddies or whatever it might be, so it’s really pleasing to hear that that’s that’s working because I think that’s really powerful. You can be in lots of places that I can’t and that’s true of all of our enterprise fellows.
We talked quite a bit about impress fellowship and I’m delighted that it’s been such benefit to you. Are there other mechanisms you’ve found or particular ways of approaching your work that you found to be beneficial that, again, you might recommend to some of these peers that come to you and say, how are you achieving what you’re achieving? Are there things that are particularly useful?
00:38:30 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
I think another really useful thing that I found through the Enterprise Fellowship is because I’m still relatively new to Bristol is that it has meant I can meet lots of other people. It has meant that I can just even people are doing quite radically different types of enterprise. It’s just about having that network and they’ve all been so friendly.
So you might you might imagine that it because we’ll try and set up businesses. It’s all a bit more cut throat, but it’s not in the slightest. Everyone’s just been really helpful from whether or not they’re saying to me you know you could ask for mentor, you could get somebody. There are sort of enterprise people in residence that can talk to you about how to do this. You can think about doing a bigger scale.
And just learning. So there’s I know Lucy Cramp also has an enterprise fellowship and she’s got a much more established sort of analytical service. It’s really interesting what she’s doing. It’s not the same thing, but it is similar in sort of service style, so it’s having that network and just meeting people from across the university has been really helpful for me for the business and just as a as a newish member of staff sort of getting to meet people outside as you described, sort of my university silo.
00:39:38 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, we all, we all need ways to do that and it’s sometimes not as easy as it sounds, so it’s it’s really great to have a mechanism to try and do that. And break out of your local environment.
So Rebecca, what you’ve been describing is well, one way to describe it might be an internal service units. I appreciate it may go externally, but at the moment what you’re doing is a service within the university, but it’s very much designed and conceived to provide services to external clients.
I’m seeing a bit of demand for this. I’m seeing an increase in the interest in that kind of methodology. So if you were to meet, let’s say, one of next year’s Enterprise Fellows who is interested in doing this sort of thing, not necessarily in your area, what advice, what pointers would you give them?
00:40:18 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
So I know for myself, I still find it quite hard to call myself an expert in something, but actually by the very nature that you have done a PhD, you’re working in research in a university, you are probably one of the only people in the world that’s doing exactly what you’re doing. Or when the very few people that’s working in a broader sense of your area.
And I think once you realized that and you realize what value your expertise can give other people, it is a bit of a mindset change. And I do remember the first time that I think I was on a radio show and somebody went and Rebecca is a leading expert in ivory identification and I had a moment of ‘uh!’, Because although I do know quite a bit about it, it’s still scary being called the expert, but that if you are an expert in something, there is somebody that wants that knowledge. There is definitely something you could possibly do. You could possibly work with somebody.
And it might not always be obvious. I mean, I’m fairly lucky and that my clients mostly find me and you know that I decided to go for the Enterprise fellowship based on the fact that people were contacting me. It might be you’ve already had a couple of people say, ohh. Actually, do you know what we work doing this? And it would be really interesting if you could come and use your technology and see if if it would work looking at whatever it is they do.
So just keep open mind. Don’t be as sudden minded as I was with the first few initial inquiries I had about identifying people’s ivory, and just have that confidence to think Ohh could I actually could I do this? And it’s probably just worse at really early stage going and talking to somebody in the research and enterprise team, there’s lots of people here at the university. Bristol’s actually really good for having a whole variety of people, like, even before you start trying to commercialize something, there’s, I think a separate team for pre and post commercialization. There are separate teams for it. Even so, there’s lots of people out there that can support you. And even if it’s just oh, I’ve got a little idea. They might be able to put you in touch with somebody else that has not the same idea, but a similar idea as doing a similar kind of service or a similar kind of product. And if you just go talk to them at an early stage, you might actually be able to move on a bit quicker.
I know there have been times I’ve floundered a little bit because I’m quite pig headed and I was like well, I can solve this myself. And actually there are people who are better at business than me. There are people at this university whose whole role is to help academics get better at doing business. And so if you reach out to them, they can help you.
00:42:35 Prof Michele Barbour
I get that I have to. I have to pull you up with the big headed thing. I would call that determined and resilience. But also yes there are in our university other universes, they’re going to be experts in commercialization in collaboration. But just because they’re the experts doesn’t mean that we, the academics, can’t also become the experts in that. You know, we can all learn and then actually I think sometimes as academics, it’s my view, but we trade on our expertise in our academic discipline. That’s what that’s how we identify almost. But to be able to say actually I don’t know much about the business side, I don’t know much about commercialization. I don’t know much by contracting, but I’m willing to be a novice and learn from others. It can be quite a scary thing to do as an established academic, but it’s also really, really valuable thing to do. Something that can be very enriching, empowering to learn a new skill when you already had a bunch of other skills anyway, but you wanted a new one all the same.
00:43:19 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Yeah. And there are important skills to learn. Definitely some of the organization I’ve had to sort of get my head around for doing this when I get back into managing my lab. These are really useful skills, sort of mapping things out, being a bit more specific in my research, like so I’ve had to learn to be very direct in more time, promising to do and what I will deliver for clients. Actually that’s not a bad skill to have for your research, to be a little bit, although in research you know I’m all about fun and I don’t mind some open-ended questions, but actually narrowing things down and being more specific’s not a bad skill to have.
But also I’ve had when I first started out as a lecturer, I did have another lecturer say to me that actually being a researcher, it’s really interesting because you do all this teaching and then when you have your own lab, it’s like having your own mini business, anyway. You’ve got to bring in that income, you’ve got to manage that income. You’ll have staff, you have to manage where all that’s going. So it’s probably not a bigger leap for lots of people as they imagine it might be.
00:44:13 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that. That’s fascinating.
Just sort of staying for a moment with the sort of internal service unit that’s not very good terminology. I need a better name for it, but I am seeing an increase in demand from this. I’m seeing it from the academics because through fellowship applications and through other inquiries, it does seem to be there’s a growing enthusiasm from researchers to work in this way.
But the fact that they are approaching me, usually the ones that I’m most keen to get behind are the ones that already evidenced to need, like you did. You were able to say you don’t take my word for it, that there’s a demand for this analysis. Here are all the people that have contacted me asking me to do it so it feels like there’s an increasing demand from our side and increasing demand from industry side. Do you agree? And If so, do you attribute that to anything in particular?
00:44:59 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
I do wonder if some of the museum requests I’m getting at the moment are because of there’s less money going into museums and so actually, whereas maybe they would had a bit more expert services in house previously they now don’t, so I am wondering if it’s something to do with that.
I think in the last round of government sort of funding I know lots of museums are really struggling. Now they’re having to close down some services that they may have had previously. I think maybe just a greater awareness that universities are open and willing to engage. We’re not just these snooty people in ivory towers, literally in ivory tower, or is tower filled with ivory, but we are a bit more open. We are more accessible. There are people doing podcasts. There are people that are on TV that are more accessible.
You know you can see academics, you can see that they are just fairly normal people and you’re more willing to send them an e-mail as opposed to them being sort of these lofty, crusty old people we’re afraid of.
00:45:50 Prof Michele Barbour
We all know the image, but like, that’s not what we look like, right? You know, and that’s not what a lot of our colleagues look like as well. Absolutely. I love that. And I can’t believe Ivory Tower has only just occurred to me. It’s funny in this context.
00:46:00 Prof Michele Barbour
Thanks, Rebecca. Thank you so much. I have one final question for you, but thank you for being so generous with all your time and insights. You started off quite a long way from where you are now. You started off in biomedical sciences, you started your career in the NHS having even a placement there. And then you went back to a PhD at a brave time in your life with a very small child. I mean, goodness means no, that’s difficult enough without throwing a PhD into the mix.
So that the Rebecca of undergraduate days are Rebecca of embarking on a PhD What would she think if she were to look at where you are and what you’re doing and where you’re going with it and the impact you’re having. Would she be surprised? Would she be intrigued? What would that Rebecca say?
00:46:38 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
I think she’d be quite impressed. I’ve never really had lots of long term goals. I’m quite happy with saying yes to opportunities that come up and I have always been fairly happy with that. I’ve never mapped out my life as to what I was going to be at a certain stage.
Now I left university and went worked in the NHS. I enjoyed the job for a bit and then I wanted something else. I think Rebecca would be past. Rebecca would be impressed. I think she’d be pleased that she’s been able to sort of make the most of just random opportunities that head my way.
00:47:07 Prof Michele Barbour
And what would she say to that?
00:47:08 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Just do what you enjoying. I’ve been really lucky. I really enjoyed my PhD. I’ve really enjoyed teaching and the research that I’ve got involved with since and that really helps. And I know that sometimes you have to do bits and jobs that you don’t enjoy and there are bits of my jobs that you know, I’d sort of roll my eyes out, but on the whole, I feel really lucky because I’ve said yes to so many opportunities. I actually now get to do the opportunities that I enjoy.
Possibly I would tell past Rebecca to say no to a few bits as well, obviously when you’re an early career researcher, it’s really tempting just to say yes to every opportunity, sometimes be a bit more selective in what’s actually going to add value. There’s some society roles I’ve had that actually didn’t give me a lot of value, but did take up a lot of my time that could have possibly been better spent elsewhere. But also I suppose you don’t know that until you do them.
00:47:54 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s the thing sometimes I think you need to try these things to then look back and go. If you do it once and you don’t enjoy it, fine. Just don’t do it again. That’s my maxim. You know, you can’t always get these things right first time.
00:48:03 Prof Michele Barbour
Doctor Rebecca Shepherd, thank you so much. This has been such a fascinating and insightful and inspiring discussion. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you for your time. And I am very much looking forward to seeing what you do next. I hope you get your ramen spectrometer for Christmas, and I really hope you’re able to do that and then go out to see even more exciting specimens at bedside as it were so to keep your medical analogy.
00:48:23 Dr Rebecca Shepherd
Thank you very much.
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