💡 This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. Reading my emails from when I started my PhD, I see that I was full of a different kind of energy. Naive energy, sure, but also unencumbered by how things “were supposed to happen” or the ‘just’ in the “just the way things are.” I recently discovered an email that I received only two months into my PhD.

Yesterday was the first of four listening sessions by the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. These are specifically geared towards Early-Career Researchers (ECRs), which I guess I technically would still be had I stayed in academia. I had the opportunity to briefly participate and share some prepared remarks. Sharing those here to document my own thoughts and make them more accessible.

I admittedly love it when pet peeves show themselves. That's when I know something is tickling my brain repeatedly and it wants to come out.

💡 This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. In 2017, I received a Mozilla Open Science Fellowship, which ended up becoming a career defining opportunity. I was able to expand my horizons beyond the academic statistics work I was doing, and started germinating ideas that, after cultivation, resulted in ResearchEquals. This fellowship, however, almost did not happen.

Over the past decade, the increased attention for questionable research practices (QRPs) and their origins led to the (Dutch) narrative on Recognition & Rewards (R&R). Very bluntly put: Incentives pressure researchers to do things that don't benefit research, so we need to change the academic incentive system. ^[1] It is a good thing the incentive system is changing.

Startup Therapy series As write more on this blog, I have come to the realization I thoroughly enjoy coming up with themes to coalesce my writing around. Themes create a certain mass for my activities, reflections, and thoughts to gather around. As a result, things collect in a way they would not without the theme being present. Themes help me write.

💡 This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. I have been to a few dozen dissertation defenses over the past decade. As a result of attending PhD defenses on a fairly regular basis with the same folk, their procedures got discussed. A lot. This story is about a situation where a university's own arbitrary regulations are arbitrarily not applied.

💡 These are prepared remarks for the Choice Hackathon on March 18th, 2023. Find the recording on YouTube. When we think of gender gaps in academia or society more broadly, we may think of very specific issues. But gender gaps are mere symptoms, with a common cause: The patriarchy. This is a system where maleness ultimately dominates, at the cost of everyone.

I used to think I was a man’s man and heterosexual — but why? Where I grew up there was little public exposure beyond the traditional gender roles and heteronormative behaviors.

💡 This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. As a researcher you are bound to uphold certain standards of conduct. When I defended my PhD, I was reminded of that rather explicitly with the following statement before being awarded my degree: This statement was only introduced in the past decade, but I think a reminder like this is a simple and effective idea.

💡 This is an idea I've toyed around with for a few years, but never wrote down. I would love to hear your feedback! Competitive research processes lead to many perverse incentives - incentives that put the researcher and the research process at odds. For example, because of selective publication pressures researchers primarily end up publishing those research processes that end up in significant or novel results.