Author Archives: anneurai

We live in times when public trust in science is under threat, misinformation is rife, AI ethics are of increasing concern and climate change is increasingly affecting communities worldwide. How do scientists see ourselves and our role in this world, and can we use our skills for social good? This session will explore ways toContinue reading “Scientists for social good: 2025 satellite event”

Two years after our article ‘Doughnut Academia’, Anne and Clare have posted a new preprint to reflect on where these ideas have brought them – and providing guidelines for others to host their own workshops. See the preprint here https://osf.io/preprints/osf/um47d_v1, and a follow-up interview with eLife here: https://elifesciences.org/interviews/1a08d974/anne-urai-and-clare-kelly

Scientific figures are essential for communicating your research effectively. This guide walks you through the process from raw data to publication-ready figures; and helps separate different phases of the research as we most often carry them out in the lab. Input gathered from a CoCoSys lab meeting in March 2025.

We have been awarded a grant from the Dutch Research Organisation NWO, to. See the announcement and other projects here.

Another review of the year (here is 2022 and 2021), this time a bit late. In 2023, I… Here’s to a 2024 with more mental calm, enough time to spend with the people most important to me, several exciting papers to write, insight and wisdom.

The lab attended the NVP winter conference on Brain and Cognition in beautiful Egmond aan Zee. Philippa, Fenying, Sonja, Adrian and Anne presented posters on their work. Anne also gave a workshop on climate action in academia (more info and slides here).

Today, I was inaugurated as a member of the Young Academy Leiden, a group of early-career academics who think and work together on questions of research policy, outreach and interdisciplinary collaboration. The theme of the inauguration was ‘Engagement’, and each incoming member made a short video on the topic. See below for my contribution.

We visited the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting in Oxford! We presented our science, met new and old colleagues and friends, and Anne hosted a workshop on climate action.

This post is inspired by my brother Max Urai, the better writer of the family – two steps ahead in his thinking, as always. Why literature is a gift-economy (Rekto:Verso, in Dutch). I shamelessly copied some quotations. The pursuit of scientific knowledge works by virtue of the work of others. We stand on the shouldersContinue reading “Science as a gift economy”