This post started out as me typing up some notes I made during and after the recent virtual 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society. But they’re only sort of about that meeting. They’re the culmination of both attending and organizing scientific conferences in virtual spaces over the past year, and of a more-or-less impromptu […]
My (Evolving) Guiding Principles for Hiring
For the past three years, I led the hiring committee for the DiRAC postdoctoral fellowship at UW. Doing that job has been both an incredibly rewarding and humbling experience that I learned a lot from. Hiring is a complex topic, and a fraught one. It is also one that I am not an expert in, […]
What a Cooking Class Taught me about Teaching Computational Subjects
In August, I attended a cooking class via video call. It had been a birthday present from my partner, and I’d really looked forward to it. While I mostly enjoyed it and the food we made was tasty, it also left me stressed, really exhausted, and a bit discouraged. So what happened?
New Beginnings
I’m starting a new job today! From this week onwards, I will be a tenure-track staff scientist and NWO WISE fellow at the SRON Netherlands Institute die Space Research! Last time I changed jobs, I wrote a blog post about what I’d learned that I’m taking with me into the new role (and I haven’t […]
Translating Science Between Disciplines
When I was a new PhD student, my advisor gave me my first project: find the signatures of starquakes in the remnants of stellar explosions called neutron stars. The data was public, and she handed me the statistics reference for finding periods in astronomical time series, written by my other advisor, Michiel van der Klis. […]
Data Science Benefits from Interdisciplinary Research
In 2009, the University of Amsterdam opened its new Faculty of Sciences building, which would house all of the natural sciences under one roof. When we moved in, one thing became immediately clear: they had forgotten the walls. Except those required for structural necessity, there were no walls between offices, no walls toward the busy […]
Failure and criticism in Academia
This might not tell you anything new; I’m sure other people have written much more eloquently about this than I have. But I’ve received a paper rejection today, and I’m grumpy, so bear with me (or not; your choice). Something nobody tells you about until you’re somehow knee-deep into your PhD is how criticism and […]
Lessons Learned in Data Science
I have recently moved to Seattle to the newly founded DIRAC Institute, which means that my three years at NYU’s Center for Data Science (CDS) are coming to an end. I thought I’d take this opportunity for a little actually quite long (sorry) retrospective and summarize those three years in this post. Coming to CDS was […]
Workshop Participant Selection From Start To Finish: An Example
Ever since organizing Astro Hack Week last year, I’ve been thinking about how to improve our process for selecting participants. Because we knew from the previous year that Astro Hack Week would likely be oversubscribed, for this year’s workshop we were aware that we would have to put some thinking and some effort into how to […]
Astro Hack Week and the Impostor Syndrome
At the first Astro Hack Week in 2014, our resident ethnographer Brittany Fiore-Gartland (whose blog post on Astro Hack Week is a fascinating read, please go and check it out right now!) pointed out something in her field notes, which she presented at the end and which I think stayed in all of the organizers […]
Notes to my future self 