Essay

This summer I returned to my alma mater, ETH Zurich. It’s not all sunshine and roses, of course, but one thing is exemplary. ETH takes low single digit equity in its spin-offs, usually around 2%. And this is not some oddity, in Sweden, universities do not take any equity in spinoffs at all. In contrast, it’s been with a fanfare that Dutch universities announced common spin-off terms with equity stakes ranging from 10 to 25%, often landing around 20%. Supposedly, they expect to make some money this way, extracting means from students and employees (as is already being done via tuition in the US and the UK). ...

Background: In the Netherlands, it is customary to include ‘propositions’, essentially opinionated statements defended alongside one’s doctoral work. In this post series, I am outlining the arguments supporting my propositions. Proposition #10: The benefits of Shell’s residency in the Netherlands far outweighed its environmental controversies. Introduction Shell, one of the world’s largest and most recognizable energy companies, has long been a titan in the global market. Founded in 1907 through the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum and the Shell Transport and Trading Company, it boasts a market capitalization of about $200 billion and operations spanning nearly 100 countries. Shell is synonymous with innovation and resilience in the energy sector - but also with controversy. ...

Background: In the Netherlands, it is customary to include ‘propositions’, essentially opinionated statements defended alongside one’s doctoral work. In this post series, I am outlining the arguments supporting my propositions. Proposition #9: European countries must position themselves as attractive destinations for international immigration. Hot take? Maybe. Immigration has been in the news as a political scapegoat, blamed for anything from inflation to housing prices. All of these are real and important problems. Take the Netherlands as an example of a European country. It has experienced major housing shortages recently and is projected to continue to do so for another decade. This leads to a lot of frustration among Dutch population, and understandably so. Politicians have blamed immigration as a major contributor to this, and other problems. Consequently, the general attitude of the population towards international migration has shifted, becoming more negative. ...

Background: In the Netherlands, it is customary to include ‘propositions’, essentially opinionated statements defended alongside one’s doctoral work. In this post series, I am outlining the arguments supporting my propositions. Proposition #8: Need-driven research is a better investment of taxpayers money than research driven by curiosity. Introduction Science and research are cornerstones of human progress. They enable innovations that shape our lives, help address pressing challenges and expand our understanding of Nature and the Universe. Albert Einstein once said, ...

Background: In the Netherlands, it is customary to include ‘propositions’ with one’s thesis, essentially opinionated statements defended alongside one’s doctoral work. In this post series, I am outlining the arguments supporting my propositions. Proposition #7: The foundations and practical experience of policy making must be included in graduate education. Introduction In today’s interconnected world, politicians are faced with complex decision-making, with consequences on shared resources such as the environment, as well as the national economic competitiveness and societal development. Establishing a dialogue between experts and policymakers is vital to help assure quality of these decisions. ...

Background: In the Netherlands, it is customary to include ‘propositions’ with one’s thesis, essentially opinionated statements defended alongside one’s doctoral work. In this post series, I am outlining the arguments supporting my propositions. Proposition #6: Universities should establish fellowships that fund stays of industry professionals in academic labs. Introduction In a previous post, I argued that the culture of work and research management in industry surpasses that of academia. Industry offers higher salaries and better managerial training, has a larger number of specialized support personnel, generally operates with larger R&D budgets, and implements a range of project management and strategic alignment tools. It also prioritizes reproducibility, automation, and data-driven decision-making to maintain high efficiency and competitiveness. ...

Background: In the Netherlands, it is customary to include ‘propositions’, essentially opinionated statements defended alongside one’s doctoral work. In this post series, I am outlining the arguments supporting my propositions. Proposition #5: The culture of academic research is not keeping pace with advancements in the for-profit sector. I am sure I wrote the concentration somewhere… (feverishly looking through a mix of paper and electronic notes) … I can’t get your environment to install on my machine… (I might if I try very hard, but didn’t you say it should just work?) … You should send an email to Tracy if you’d like to get trained to use this instrument… (she works Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, but might be on vacation; anyway, she’ll send you a test, and after the training is over, you’ll fill out a form and be good to go!)… In academic research, we are often in the business of trying to do something for the very first time. This fosters a culture where unique solutions and one-off tricks are common and celebrated. And honestly, that’s probably unavoidable and mostly alright. In many cases, that’s what I personally love. What’s not alright however, is our tendency to extend this artisanal approach to everything we do. The examples at the start of this post will be familiar to most academic scientists. There are countless others. At the university where I did my PhD, orders for laboratory supplies had to be manually reviewed by no less than four people, causing week-long delays. If you didn’t manually enter the item into the ordering system, it would never arrive. Automatic stock monitoring for common chemicals? Forget about it. Here are more examples: Want to keep your lab notebook old school, pen and paper, scribbling illegibly? Be my guest! Manually entering work hours for every day of 4+ years? Sure - great use of time! (And let’s not forget about somebody having to send reminders about it every month!). I’m far from the first to argue that research needs a productivity boost: 1 ...

To-do lists are great, but not sufficient Writing a to-do list is a practical and effective way to free mental capacity and avoid forgetting tasks that you may have to execute at work and other domains of your life. To-do lists are great. In fact, and I am very sure I would be incapable of keeping track of all the tasks I may have to do, wasn’t it for keeping a to-do list. I may not have even written this post. To-do lists are probably one of the simplest productivity hacks out there. You should absolutely write them. But you should NOT write them unless you write a different list first. It’s what I call to-be list. ...

Curiously, the model can provide an answer for many country pairs. Some are, however, censored out. Several things happened over the course of this Christmas holiday. First, Russia carried out the largest air attack on Ukraine since the beginning of their offense. Second, a man shot fourteen university students dead, wounding 25 and killing himself in Prague mass school shooting. Third, I read a poem that tied the events together in an unexpected way. ...

Photo by Alvaro Serrano on Unsplash. Hey, hi there, This is me, I mean you, but from the future. I have been out and about collecting some experience in the past few years and now I am coming around to share it with you such as you don’t have to spend so much time wondering in the dark in the coming decade. Where do I even start, you have just turned 20 and started a university, moved cities started meeting lot of new people. It’s great. Or is it? I know how you are feeling, you don’t like the degree major and are thinking of switching programs. Well my advice is, do it and don’t look back. There is so much to do, so why dwell on things you are not really excited about, with people that are not really your bunch? I know you will argument about “loosing” a year, but don’t worry! If you are putting yourself in a place of higher satisfaction and curiosity, you can hardly call that a loss. ...

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash. This year was the year when I started reading lot of essays. An essay is somewhat neglected writing form - it’s basically thinking laid bare, with an attempt to figure something out. The word essay itself comes from the French essayer which means to try. Now unless you are a philosophy geek, that does not sound terribly interesting. But wait, good essay happens to have one more important feature – it comes up with something surprising. Consequently, it is a (relatively) short form that reveals new ways to understand the world around you. Being a short form, it not only means you don’t have to deal with a whole book (and there is lot of them that waste 300+ pages to get one page worth of a point across), but also that authors who do not write books still can get a shot at expressing their thoughts through essays. ...

The holiday season is coming, and the cultural message is that we need to host amazing dinner parties and buy expensive and well-thought-out gifts. While that certainly won’t hurt, it takes the attention away from why we are doing this in the first place. For this holiday season, I am deciding to focus on something that actually matters to me, namely on expressing gratitude and appreciation to people that touched my life this year. I am going to make this really easy. Imagine an advent calendar (a sort of bonbonniere where children and adults alike eat one piece of chocolate for each day in December before Christmas Eve), but in inverse. ...

I celebrated my birthday past weekend and wanted to use this moment to reflect on how the year has been. Here is a list of twelve lessons the year taught me. Admittedly, I am not the best student so I have to keep relearning them as I go, therfore writing them down. Couple of them should be useful for you as well! If a particrular one resonates, I would be happy to hear about it! ...