2024 in review

Each year, I quickly review science, lab, life and everything. See 2021 in review, 2022 in review, 2023 in review.

Last year, I…

• wrote down my thoughts on modelling and understanding different kinds of temporal structure in across-trial variability (in perceptual decision-making): preprint here.
• was a co-author on Robin Vloeberghs’ first preprint, where he shows how we can model trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion
• taught at the great BAMB! summer school in Barcelona
• was happy to welcome many students to the lab, and together do a big push to collect human behavioral, eye-tracking and facial video data. Special shout-out to Camilla Enwereuzor (who is now off to VU Amsterdam for a PhD project) for leading and coordinating the study
• continued a fun collaboration with Alex Fengler and Kianté Fernandez to fit sequential sampling models on mouse behavior
• was proud to see many projects from our lab presented at conferences, workshops and talks
• protested the proposed budget cuts to Dutch higher education
• continued learning from and with the Young Academy Leiden
• was awarded an SSH-XS grant from NWO, written together with Philippa Johnson, to explore video-based early warning signals for behavioral state transitions
• started our lab’s first experiments in social tipping games, the beginning of an exciting collaboration with Jan Willem Bolderdijk and Zan Mlakar.
• enjoyed talking science in joint lab meetings, watch parties and conferences. Special thanks the Paris Qlife winter school, CuttingEdgeEEG and the Marseille crowd for having me talk about both my neuroscience work and climate activism.

For the year to come, I look forward to

• taking a short family sabbatical, and hopefully reflect on the upcoming year
• welcoming Isabelle Hoxha as a postdoc in Leiden, to work on an exciting project on using disentangled RNNs to capture trial-to-trial structure in perceptual decision-making
• hosting a workshop to write an Academic Green New Deal for Dutch higher education, with Sanli Faez and Sascha Janz
• teaching my new MSc elective course Psychology of the Climate Crisis for the first time
• writing several papers on the work that’s been cooking since I’ve joined Leiden
• helping the CCN 2025 communications team to setup distributed meetups next to the main Amsterdam event
• continue thinking about ways to integrate, or at least foster peaceful coexistence, between my neuroscience and climate action work