A short PhD student journey If we look at people’s curriculum vitae (CV) /résumés and career paths, we might think: Wow…their life runs smoothly. However, what we don’t see, and what, of course, no one usually mentions, are the many mistakes and failures. Let’s just dive right into one chapter […]
Opinion
First of all, I am no philosopher, I only have some notions and I will (mostly) rely on these. Now, why am I talking about philosophy all of a sudden? Because I will question the concept of academic freedom, which overlaps greatly with the concept of freedom, unsurprisingly. Freedom has […]
Some questions in science are grandiose and tackle issues of great social impact, like: how can we cure cancer? Others are less flamboyant, but not necessarily less important. For example, a question that is the focus of my PhD is how neurons code and relay the acoustic information. Literature describes […]
I was raised by wonderful people, who every time they were encouraged to learn something new used to repeat a slightly modified version of the known saying: “You can’t teach new tricks to an old dog”. Fun fact: The Latin-American version of this idiom is: “Chango viejo no aprende maroma […]
One of my earliest exposures to Neuroscience was when I read famous DNA scientist, Francis Crick’s book titled “The astonishing hypothesis”, in which he elegantly posited: “You—your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will—are in fact no more than the […]
So today is a bit special. Confinement and social distancing make it easier to think about oneself and guess what, this introspective mood also got to me. Just like everyone at some point in their life, I started wondering how I got to where I am; meaning doing a PhD […]
Thoughts during the self-quarantine period… # Find accurate knowledge Among the anxiety and distress of a new pandemic, misinformation is easy to come by. Some say that the COVID-19 has been made into a bigger hype than needful because of social media and sensationalism news. Let’s clarify that. Free access […]
I’m currently doing my PhD in the lab where I also completed a Master’s thesis. A Master’s project is generally short and succinct so that a student, an inexperienced researcher, can do the project and write it up all within 6 months to hopefully less than a year. Sometimes the […]
There is a slowly growing push from politics into anti-intellectualism. That is – that the instincts of the political leaders are more correct in a given field of science than the experts who spent their lives in ivory towers to understand their field. Distrust of science is starting to have […]