I hereby commit to flying less. This means that if you invite me for a conference, talk or visit that requires flying, I will likely decline. I am happy to travel by train and to give virtual talks.

This not only reduces my carbon footprint, but also aims to question the social norm that scientists need to jetset around the world to be successful. Empirical work even suggests that academic air travel has limited influence on professional success.

More:

• The Flyingless website, Twitter, and podcast
• Overview pages on climate action: here and here.

The Covid-19 pandemic has propelled the scientific community into a world devoid of in-person conferences. Traditional ‘legacy’ conferences, which have long been the mainstay of academic networking and crucial for catching the latest science, have been largely replaced with virtual events. Moving conferences online is pandemic-proof, and brings myriad other advantages: reduced cost and travel-related carbon emissions, global reach, and increased accessibility for diverse groups. For instance, virtual conferences remove barriers caused by visa restrictions, expensive travel, disabilities, and caring responsibilities. Taken together, these factors can increase the virtual meetings’ diversity, from including students and young parents to attracting scientists from low-income countries and from adjacent research fields.

Continue reading “Hybrid meetings and distributed local meetups: the good, the bad and the ugly”

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.

Continue reading “2021 in review”

Over the years, I’ve accumulated thousands of notes and a personalized GTD system (with tags and notebooks) in Evernote. I use my own flavor of the Zen to Done method, where I capture pretty much everything (from recipes to articles to read, and from project notes to grant deadlines). I’ve come to heavily rely on this second brain, both professionally and personally.

Evernote has served me well for almost a decade. However, the latest update is so annoying (app is super slow, note export to html gone, ) I’m planning to abandon ship. For now, I’ve downgraded to the last useable version on my devices (thanks, reddit!). Getting some great advice from Twitter, I decided that this is the time to invest in a note-taking solution that’s sustainable for the future.

Continue reading “Note-taking 101: from Evernote to Obsidian”

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 last 2.5 years of my life and career. Since I’m a sucker for end-of-year lists and reflections, these December days of 2020 (what a year it’s been) seems like as good an opportunity as any to reflect on the many people who shaped my postdoc years. Here goes.

Continue reading “Post-postdoc acknowledgments and sentiments”

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

Continue reading “Authorship: credit vs. responsibility”

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 students who attended my lecture on neuroanatomy to send me theirs, and I’ll update this page as responses (hopefully) come in.

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?

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, your phone had no reception, or you’d suddenly find yourself transported 50 years back in time? How could you approximate random sampling from different distributions just using pen, paper, and whatever you could find in your house?

I thought of three categories (to start with): A. human-made randomization gadgets, B. measurement, C. just you in an empty room.
Rules: Please share your best guesses and intuitions and limitations of each method. If you know what exact distribution can be approximated with each process, please let me know – I’ll update the post as more ideas come in. Do not Google (or be honest if you did). Let’s play!

Update: see the Twitter thread for a bunch of interesting responses and suggestions – I’ve copied some of those into the list of suggestions below (no guarantees).

Continue 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 manifests itself in the US vs. in Europe. I’m most familiar with the situation in The Netherlands, where (after some initial squabbling about social distancing during a large Amsterdam protest) there has been a more serious conversation about structural obstacles facing people of color and those without traditional Dutch last names (see e.g. here and here).

After a week or so, the conversation among academic on Twitter rightfully shifted. People went from focusing their outrage at police brutality, to examining the many problems with racism that take place in our own professional spheres. On Twitter, #BlackInTheIvoryTower launched a much-needed, painfully honest conversation about the many ways racism pervades academic culture.

I’m here sharing my thoughts, personal commitments to fighting racism in science, and resources.

Continue reading “#ShutDownSTEM; fighting racism in academia”