You might have noticed in the past year that I have a tendency to deflect questions on what I am actually doing here in Switzerland. Please excuse me for any of my evasive maneuvers, but I find it difficult to describe my work in a clear and (sufficiently) complete manner, and I also find it difficult to explain to others what it is that I am exactly doing when I am at work. In this blog post, I decided to focus on this second difficulty, and I will save addressing the first one for later.
But first, let me start by stating that I really love what I am doing at the moment (although I also realize that my life may seem quite boring to some of you). Basically, I sleep a lot, I exercise a lot, I travel a lot, and I try to dedicate the rest of my time to working. To be more specific, I prefer to sleep 8 to 9 hours per day which is essential for me to recover from the 5 to 15 hours of exercising (running > cycling > swimming) I do in a week, to recover from the two times per month I typically travel to my family and friends in the Netherlands, and to keep my brains from wearing out since thorough thinking makes up a large part of what I am doing for work at the moment.
Hmmm, thorough thinking. I probably need to elaborate on this vague term.
During my doctoral studies (a.k.a. my PhD project), you could hardly ever catch me sitting behind my desk with my feet up on the table being lost in thoughts. Instead, you would find me sitting on the lab preparing blood samples for fancy analytical tests while simultaneously singing along (out of tune) with music on Radio Veronica (i.e. the Dutch radio station which plays at least five Toto songs per day). Or, you could find me sitting next to the analytical instrument which performed the fancy tests. Or, you could find me in the office checking out the test results that were produced by the analytical instrument. Or, you could find me pounding on the keyboard of my laptop with the aim of writing an article about the test results I had just obtained.
Still, even in those years, I needed to do some occasional thorough thinking because I was working with tests that no one had ever used before (as these needed to be developed by me first) and because we wanted to answer questions that no one had ever answered before. Thinking about which method to develop and which question to answer was, however, not part of my job as such thinking had already been done by my supervisors long before I started as a PhD student.
By the end of my PhD project, I realized that I also wanted to get experience with designing research projects and securing research funding. Therefore, I set out to become a postdoc in a topnotch research group abroad. I did, however, not apply to “existing projects”, as I had decided that I would only go abroad (and leave my partner behind in the Netherlands) if I could work on a project which I had designed myself and which would be submitted for funding by (inter)national funding agencies.
Well, I discussed previously that the road towards securing research funding was a bit longer than I initially had hoped for. In retrospect, however, I am glad that everything turned out the way it did. Because if my first grant application would have been successful, I would currently be exactly halfway the two requested years of funding, and I should already have submitted multiple grant applications (and likely even secured one of them) for performing next-stage research projects. In such situation, I would have had limited time to actually work on the project I intended to do here in Geneva, since I would have needed to spend a great portion of my time in the past twelve months on writing research proposals. I am confident that I would have managed to find a good balance between conducting research and planning research. Nonetheless, I believe that the quality of my current work while also that of my future work will benefit greatly from the fact that I could already start my project in Geneva well before switching to my current research funds.
Back to my work activities, I am still preparing samples, testing samples, analyzing test results, and writing articles about test results, just like I did during my PhD. However, I am currently dedicating most of my time to reading articles from other researchers, watching online scientific conferences, and thinking thoroughly about how I can best address my current research goals and how I might make relevant contributions to the advancing of science in future projects.
These sentences are still quite vague, so I tried to come up with an example of a challenge relevant for my current work.
As you may know already, I am particularly interested in developing blood and/or urine tests which can tell us something about our lifestyle habits. These bodily fluids contain a lot of information on who we are, what we do, and how we live, and I could, for example, develop tests that could tell us whether or not we recently consumed fruit. Eating fruit is something we generally consider to be a good thing, so these tests could potentially help us to learn more about a good lifestyle habit. However, such tests will not be able to differentiate between a person who eats a lime, a tomato, some pineapple chunks, and an orange per day and a person who drinks a Margarita, a Bloody Mary, a Piña Colada, and a Mai Tai every day. We thus need more information about these two persons in order to make meaning out the test results obtained using my (hypothetical) tests. Fortunately, we can often learn from the work of other researchers who experienced the same or similar challenges, which they described in their publications. This would be the reading part of my work. However, the work of others cannot always be translated to the research work of others, and in many cases, we need to devise rational plans to deal with our own, unique challenges. This would then be the thinking part of my work.
I will stop here for now, but not before emphasizing that I am not a Sheldon Cooper (i.e. character in the American television sitcom The Big Bang Theory) type of scientist. I am involved in experimental research, so I always need to go to the lab to demonstrate that my thoughts can be put into practice. Luckily, I am getting better and better in coming up with relevant and feasible thoughts, but I still get caught up in circles on a regular basis causing me to move from thinking to testing to failing to thinking to testing to failing… until I finally reach my goals which may take days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years (and which I hope to be able to continue doing for many years to come).
analyzed-by-frank.com 