About a month ago I was presenting at the annual conference of the Dutch Physical Society Fysica 2021. Now, I got the June issue of their magazine, in which they look back at the highlights of the conference. I was in a good company indeed!

In the Young’s Speakers Contest I ended up closely second with 34% of the votes from the 700 people listening to the story of my research. (The winner got 38%.)

Although I did not win the contest, I was presenting at the same stage with two Nobel Prize winners in Physics and got a brilliant response from the audience. This meeting will for sure stay in my memory and the magazine page goes directly on a display in my home office. I am immensly proud of myself and take this achievement as a great motivation to keep doing what I love — high quality research.

– You need to come every other day to feed them, otherwise they die or differentiate. – You have to come on weekends too. – If you are not super super careful, some bacteria or yeast will eat them up. – Even if you are super super careful, some bacteria or yeast will sometimes eat them up. – In experiments, there are huge differences in the behavior of cells so you will have huge errors and have to repeat the experiments multiple times to prove your point.

+ You have to do it, so your other studies are tested on something alive and thus are proved relevant.

Cosmic clouds form fantastic shapes in the central regions of emission nebula IC 1805. The clouds are sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from massive hot stars in the nebula's newborn star cluster, Melotte 15. IC 1805 is located about 7,500 light years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia.

Messier 42, The Orion Nebula

A new paper shows a statistics on where hundreds of Biomedical Sciences PhD graduates eventually ended up 10 years or more after graduation.

What strikes me there:

1. Sooo many postdocs go to administration positions after their postdoc is finished.

And it's true! I know so many people in administration who were good scientists before!

The following graph shows that from 418 PhD graduates, 325 went for a postdoc and 93 didn't. 145 administration/management/operation (AMO in the graph) positions in the end is for me a bit shocking.

2. The time for a postdoc in academia to actually get a permanent/non trainee position can be up to 13 years!

Only half of the people makes in in 6 years after OhD graduation. That's much longer than getting a permanent job in administration. I do not want to be 13 years postdoc. This is also one of the reasons people quit academia.

...to be honest I probably should really tell myself that at this point I really am the professional in this method. After 4 years of working with 2 different atomic force microscopes, now I started with a 3rd one, again a new type from a different company.