Pressure is defined as force per area, which seems to be describing my 2nd year of PhD, lots of things (force) happening in many aspects (area) of my life. Something I wish society would be more aware of is that doing research is a wild card, you experience many challenges and discoveries in ways you cannot imagine beforehand. The good ...

With Christmas just around the corner, it only seems natural to reflect on the past year. In this blog post I would like to share two of my highlights in 2022, namely attending the ULLA summer school in Uppsala, Sweden and traveling to the US for the GPEN2022 conference. I have to say that I feel lucky and grateful for ...

It has been almost a year since the last time I wrote to you. A year full of learning, exploring, conducting experiments, and the stress keeps piling up. When I embarked on this journey, I never thought I could transform into the person or the researcher I am today. Let us start from the beginning, shall we? When I first ...

LATE. This blog post is late. One of those words that makes planners and lovers of deadlines cringe and squirm with discomfort. Like nails scraping across a chalkboard, making your skin crawl… And yet – sometimes it simply can’t be helped, unpleasant though it may be. Sometimes, impeding factors are simply out of your control. Science seldom works like clockwork! ...

Some things never change… Since my college years, which were not so long ago, trains have always been a constant in my life and it seems that no matter where I want to go in Italy, Bologna FS is a nearly inevitable stop. This is one of the many things I’ve learned in this first year living in Italy.   ...

Reading my own headline, I can’t believe that an entire year of my PhD has almost passed. 52 weeks, 365 days, 8760 hours, 525 600 minutes or 31 536 000 seconds have passed since I moved here. It feels like yesterday that I arrived but so much has happened and changed in this year that my brain tells me, logically ...

I vividly remember coming to Copenhagen last year — it’s like it was yesterday. I remember it being quite cold (even though it was April…), and having a nose swollen and itchy from several PCR tests. Despite these massive setbacks (the Danes like sarcasm more than Swedes for sure), I was ready to start my new journey here, although now ...

This story starts some time ago, around May 2020. I’ve just successfully defended my master thesis online, amidst the pandemic, so no there will be no graduation ceremony, let alone any trip. Still, I have a joyful time for one day before reality hits hard: I am unemployed. Well, speaking of employment, I really want to continue on with PhD ...

It was a typical day, and everyone was working from home or enjoying so-called holidays at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Universities were closed, and I was trying to finish my masters’ project from home (How? It was based on 90% simulations and the remaining 10% in-vitro studies). Moreover, I was optimistic about a Ph.D. position abroad. However, when ...

irst of all, congrats. We made it: 2021 is finally over! I am super grateful to still be standing after another year of living COVIDly. So much seems unchanged, yet almost everything has pretty much changed. I’ve learned a lot during the last year, but in my mind, there is one lesson that cannot be ignored: how we communicate is ...