I have been invited by Josep Vehi to give a talk about my research at the institute he directs at the University of Girona.
In this talk I have introduced for the first time the game theory model in which I have worked with people in Dresden (Andreas Deutsch, Haralambos Hatzikirou) and Bonn (Matthias Simon) in which I study Gatenby's hypothesis of acid mediated tumour invasion. I have also talked about the Cellular Automata model I have developed with Benjamin Ribba (Lyon) to study the microenvironmental influence in cancer evolution which I have previously presented in Lyon, Dundee and Dresden.
The presentation can be found here in PDF format.
Showing posts with label personal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personal. Show all posts
Friday, June 01, 2007
Friday, May 04, 2007
Cell article on science blogs
Blogs as a way to communicate science. This is quite an unusual topic for Cell that, as opposed to Science and Nature journals, devotes less space to the non-technical side of science. For those of you that are subscribed, the article is here.
According to the article there are approximately 20000 blogs with the label 'science'. That is quite an impressive number since most of my colleagues seem to be doing lots of things but not blogging. It seems that most of these science blogs are actually about pseudo science which would be the number of more conventional science blogs to around 1200 (always according to sources cited in the article). These are generally blogs like mine (of course in many cases better written and updated more often) which deal with fairly specific issues in a specific field of science.
These science blogs can be just about anything. Many do like I do and comment (what we personally find) interesting stuff in our own field of research that we find reading, mostly, papers and journals. Some do also include bits about their own lifes and produce some sort of hybrid between the conventional blog (understood as a personal diary) and the scientific blog. Some take the idea of science blog a step further and every day record their latest results online (although in some fields, like biology, this behaviour seems to be quite rare due to the extreme levels of competition between experimental biologists).
Why would any one start a science blog? On top of the conventional reasons why people start a blog (and weighted down by the fact that most of us do not carry sizable audiences) is the thought that when you write something with the expectation (as unlikely as it might be) that someone will read it that surely helps to clarify that something in your mind.
According to the article there are approximately 20000 blogs with the label 'science'. That is quite an impressive number since most of my colleagues seem to be doing lots of things but not blogging. It seems that most of these science blogs are actually about pseudo science which would be the number of more conventional science blogs to around 1200 (always according to sources cited in the article). These are generally blogs like mine (of course in many cases better written and updated more often) which deal with fairly specific issues in a specific field of science.
These science blogs can be just about anything. Many do like I do and comment (what we personally find) interesting stuff in our own field of research that we find reading, mostly, papers and journals. Some do also include bits about their own lifes and produce some sort of hybrid between the conventional blog (understood as a personal diary) and the scientific blog. Some take the idea of science blog a step further and every day record their latest results online (although in some fields, like biology, this behaviour seems to be quite rare due to the extreme levels of competition between experimental biologists).
Why would any one start a science blog? On top of the conventional reasons why people start a blog (and weighted down by the fact that most of us do not carry sizable audiences) is the thought that when you write something with the expectation (as unlikely as it might be) that someone will read it that surely helps to clarify that something in your mind.
Friday, February 23, 2007
In Barcelona
I have finished my stay in Lyon and arrived to Barcelona to attend a round table for young researchers organised by the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Interestingly enough the definition of young researcher seemed to include any researcher after the PhD but without a stable contract (that is, postdocs, non tenured group leaders and people in teaching positions).
I was a rather interesting discussion that dealt with things that I imagine are common worries for young researchers across Europe and elsewhere. Mainly the difficulty of living on short term research contracts, (for those of us postdocing somewhere else) the strain of keeping up with friends, relatives and former colleagues while living abroad, the gap between our real age (late twenties or early thirties) and how our status is perceived by the rest of the population (not like assistant professors or people with "real" jobs and more like students with a fancy "Dr." in front). Other issues that I found very relevant not only for young researchers are the link between research and teaching (in Spain, like many other countries, university lecturers are paid to teach but their progress on the career ladder depends exclusively on publications) and linked to that if the main duty of academic staff is to perform research or to teach (there seemed to be some consensus that universities should be free to chose wether to have a research profile or a teaching profile).
I was a rather interesting discussion that dealt with things that I imagine are common worries for young researchers across Europe and elsewhere. Mainly the difficulty of living on short term research contracts, (for those of us postdocing somewhere else) the strain of keeping up with friends, relatives and former colleagues while living abroad, the gap between our real age (late twenties or early thirties) and how our status is perceived by the rest of the population (not like assistant professors or people with "real" jobs and more like students with a fancy "Dr." in front). Other issues that I found very relevant not only for young researchers are the link between research and teaching (in Spain, like many other countries, university lecturers are paid to teach but their progress on the career ladder depends exclusively on publications) and linked to that if the main duty of academic staff is to perform research or to teach (there seemed to be some consensus that universities should be free to chose wether to have a research profile or a teaching profile).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)