After some careful consideration, I’ve decided to part ways with my Ph.D. studies in the Hatzakis group to pursue a position at Corti. My supervisors and colleages in the University have been extremely understanding and supportive in this transition and I’m very grateful for the time I have spent at the Institute of Chemistry.

Looking back on the Ph.D

As part of the Hatzakis group I was able to get to work on very basic science - understanding nanobiology at a molecular level - using cutting edge tech - TIRF microscopy, single-particle tracking, and deep learning. Working on these problems have been incredibly interesting, and I’ve been allowed to work with some extremely brilliant people along the way. I’m convinced the people in the group are going to one day change the way we understand conformational dynamics’ effects on biological function.

Being part of the research environment at UCPH is an extreme priviliege, for a series of different reasons:

1. Easy access to world-class researchers in almost every field.
2. Internal networking events for faculty where cross-pollination occurs
3. Frequent visits of foreign collaborators for discussions, workshops, and conferences hosted on campus.

On top of this comes the rewarding element of teaching - I’ve been lucky to TA a Nanobiology course (big success) and a Spectroscopy course (more challenging). Interacting with students like this is great and a big motivator in the day-to-day.

The less shiny parts of the Ph.D.

As many other Ph.D. students I fell victim to COVID-19’s effects on academic work. All the “fun” parts of the Ph.D. - conferences, workshops, in-person teaching - disappeared or were moved to the computer screen. Missing the human element of the research environment was very demotivating, and the digital replacements were far from compensating for the real thing. Teaching over a digital connection and trying to draw on a virtual whiteboard is a poor replacement from a classroom in a university, as I think will be evident in both schools and universities when restrictions are lifted.

The lockdowns also exacerbated another element of academic work that was demotivating to me. Broadly speaking there are two types of academic research

1. Solo projects / first author projects. These projects involve a researcher formulating the vision (in collaboration with their supervisor/group members), and driving the project. Subsequently, this entails working in the lab, testing hypotheses, going back to the lab, etc.
2. Collaborative projects / projects where you help another first author on their project. This can be discussion-based or otherwise based on partial contribution in terms of work, analyses, or other tasks.

For me, the most motivating type of work was the collaborative style of work - and during COVID that decreased to a minimum, leaving predominantly the solo style of work. There’s nothing wrong with solo projects, but to me it’s just more motivating to work closely together in a team.

Hi, Corti 🚀

Last year, I was lucky to secure an internship working for Corti, building machine learning models for hospitals and Emergency Medical Services. In 9 months I’ve been allowed to:

1. Build, test, and deploy a Cardiac Arrest model to Emergency Medical Services in Europe and the US.
2. Contribute to a team building NLP-based analytics products for hospitals worldwide.
3. Collaborate with world-class researchers working on fundamental ML research

As an intern¹ all these have been rewarding professionally - I’ve learnt heaps - but also personally; I’ve worked in tight teams with high collaboration and a clear mission. Working this close to other people has been extremely motivating, and the contrast to academic life was made all the more clear as I returned to the lab.

As I finished up my last week of the internship I had a chat with one of the founders, Lars, and we agreed that the collaboration could continue going forward. Working in this environment is still exhilarating 9 months in, and I’m excited to see where the Corti rocket takes me. 🚀