Author Archives: anneurai

Writing the acknowledgment section of my PhD thesis felt like a reward at the end of a long journey: taking the time to highlight everyone who contributed, and appreciating the importance of humanity in science. While there is no such thing as a postdoc thesis, it feels just as significant to wrap up the lastContinue reading “Post-postdoc acknowledgments and sentiments”

A long-ish Twitter thread on the dangers of conflating credit and responsibility assignment in scientific authorship.

I’m a long-term fan of inventor Ellen McHenry’s brain hat: print out a simple template, cut and fold, and wear neuroanatomy on your head! Ideal for those who are not as brave as Nancy Kanwisher. The photos below show me, with the brain hat I made during my studies at ENS Paris. I’ve asked studentsContinue reading “Brain hats”

Since Tweets tend to get lost/unfindable, I’m putting the links for self-organized NMA material study groups here. I’d be happy to hear back (comment on this post) if you’ve found a pod. How are your experiences going through the materials? As there is overwhelming interest in a slower version of #NeuromatchAcademy, see here: the slowContinue reading “NeuroMatchAcademy self-organized slow pods”

How would you generate a sequence of random numbers, if you didn’t have a computer or calculator? Each time you typ rng default or random.randint, numbers get drawn from precise observations of some natural process or special algorithms to produce sequences of numbers with certain properties of randomness. But what if your laptop died, yourContinue reading “Being the RNG”

The last few weeks in the US have been a political and emotional tornado. As protests spread around the country and beyond, I compulsively read the news, went to a local protest and watched Ava DuVernay’s chilling documentary 13th. I also thought a lot about the different ways in which societal and systemic racism manifestsContinue reading “#ShutDownSTEM; fighting racism in academia”

Update [13-04-2022]: my pledge to flying less. Update [19-11-2021]: see the new Green Neuroscience page for more writings, recorded talks, and slide decks on this topic. Note [December 2020]: this blogpost led to an SfN petition, and then to an opinion paper that lays out in more detail what neuroscientists can do against climate catastrophe.Continue reading “Climate action for (neuro)scientists: a concrete guide”

Preparing images for a talk, I was using the great bioRender to grab some images of brains-in-heads in humans and mice. Putting them on my slides, I found the left-facing much more pleasant to look at. Why?

Although we’d all like academia to be a true meritocracy, ample research shows that implicit biases create significant hurdles to achieving diversity in our communities. Here is an overview of the data (showing both the extent to which gender biases cause problems in science, and the different factors that may be significant contributors) and possibleContinue reading “Gender bias and diversity in academia”