Ten days ago, I spent most of my weekend on twitter – because I was following #OpenCon, the twitter stream that kept coming from the OpenCon 2015, a conference on open science/data/access/education help in Brussels. They also had a live webcast, but for some reason Gema did not allow this to be viewed in Germany, so… Read More #OpenCon highlights
I went to yet another doctoral student conference – the NeuroDoWo (Neuroscience Doctoral Student Workshop), which was held in Cologne this year. For the first time, I travelled to a conference without a poster roll, but with a powerpoint on my laptop. I had decided to present a fairly complex but pretty cool experiment, for… Read More Giving my first conference talk
How can we assess the quality of someone’s research? It is very tempting to approximate the ‘impact’ or value of a piece of research with a number, so you don’t have to deal with the content of the research at all. Something to serve as a proxy – this is exactly what happens with the… Read More The curious case of impact factors
As always, life happens. Plus some things pop up that are actually important and need to be dealt with. Other things pop up that are maybe not important but urgent, and somebody needs to get them done. And more specifically, as an experimentalist, there is always something to do – something that requires the use… Read More Finding time to think
Reading papers is of course part of being a researcher – however, I also enjoy reading about science that is not in my area of expertise, or about meta-level science: how science is happening, and how we could make it better. So from time to time I will share bits and pieces that I stumble… Read More Extracurricular reading
Set at the beautiful Portuguese beach, students from the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown did a fabulous job of organizing a gathering for European Neuroscience doctoral students – ENCODS 2015 – hence the grand title. Overall it was a fantastic meeting with many interactions, getting to know students with different backgrounds that work in different subfields… Read More Thoughts on the state of European Neuro PhD students
Many times in my research I feel like a know too little – there are always more papers to read, more techniques to learn, more experiments to do, more conferences to go to. However, what has been nagging me for a while now is my non-mathematical background. Which is not to say that I don’t know any… Read More A biologist in biology