I’m a sucker for end-of-year reflections, and this year brought no shortage of memorable events, unanticipated challenges and new life chapters. So here goes: my year in review, in pseudorandom order of my associative memory.
Good things
- Survived a global pandemic
- Kept a small, embodied biological neural network alive, fed and mostly happy. Motor control going well, language will be next
- Bought a house
- Awarded a Veni grant from NWO, to pursue my research on neural and behavioral noise in ageing
- Saw my temporary contract turn permanent, thanks to a new national collective labour agreement
- Published 9 papers and preprints
- I’m especially happy to have finally submitted the last paper from my PhD, which I started in 2013. Hopefully 2022 will see it published!
- Co-organized my first conference: very proud of having made a small contribution to NeuroMatch 4.0
- Spoke at 2 virtual conferences, 1 summer school and 1 panel, and gave 9 virtual talks.
- Reviewed 8 papers
- Started supervising 3 student projects
- Served as an examiner for four PhD theses
- Designed and taught my first course
Not so good things
- Survived a global pandemic
- Increasingly desperate about the point of neuroscience in a world on fire
- Spent several months so sleep-deprived I could hardly think
- Failed to make any meaningful progress on analyzing all the beautiful postdoc data I collected
- Rarely found time to read in depth
- Wrote five grant proposals that were rejected
- Registered for too many virtual meetings that I then failed to attend (or tried to catch up on half-heartedly)
- Bid on four different houses, each time losing out from someone who put more money on the table
- Promised to take a proper summer holiday, but got interrupted to write a rebuttal to grant reviewers
CoCoSys lab 