It’s taken the private sector only six months to give me something that 20+ years in academia didn’t provide: a permanent position.
Continue readingApotheosis (a riff on permanent positions in science)
academia
In and out of love (with academia)
Only in the abstract
I do miss academia, but only in the abstract.
Continue reading2023: TIR’s year in review
A riposte to the Red Queens
Mr Smee finds a home (a riff on preprints, peer review, and undergraduate research)
I don’t usually blog about my actual research, but this week one of my last papers was published, a characterisation of the protein TbSmee1 in the unicellular eukaryotic parasite Trypanosoma brucei (here). “Mr Smee” has had a long and painful genesis, and in many ways the story of this paper is the story of my own research group, and one I definitely plan on telling at a later date.
For now though, the paper is worth highlighting because I think it illustrates a number of features of contemporary publishing dynamics, peer review, and the importance of frontline research to undergraduates.
Continue readingMySciMoment – Ko-Fan Chen 陳克帆
Ko-Fan Chen is a lecturer in Neurogenetics at the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology, University of Leicester (UK). He also runs a research lab to understand sleep. Here, he describes the moment ( his #MySciMoment) that set him on the path to a research career in academia.
Continue readingScience and narcissism (an interview with Bruno Lemaitre)
TIR talks to immunologist Bruno Lemaitre, a key figure in Toll research, about science, academics, narcissism and narcissists. He is an observer and commentator on the dark side of success in scientific research.
Continue readingShutting up shop (a short guide on how NOT to start a research group)
In January 2023, I resigned from my position at the Department of Cell & Developmental Biology at the University of Würzburg. Here are some of the things that I think I should have done differently when I moved there in 2015 to start my junior research group.
Continue readingSpeaking up, speaking out (the 2023 Lindau Nobel laureate meeting controversy)
A Nobel laureate’s insistence that he feels discriminated against as a white man illustrates how far STEM fields still have to go when it comes to gender equality.
Continue reading
Total Internal Reflection 