An essential element of a grant application is your description of yourself. How people describe themselves differs markedly across cultures and depends on their audience. You won’t know exactly who will read your application and there will be different audiences through the application process, but you may be able to understand their cultural biases in […] … learn more→

Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted. We spend our lives portioning it into work-time, family-time and me-time. Rarely do we sit and think about how and why we choreograph our lives through this strange medium. A lot of people only appreciate time when they have an experience that […] … learn more→

Funders can seem a little like the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. For four centuries, supplicants approached the Oracle, seeking wisdom and hoping for prophecies of good fortune. No one was entirely sure how she arrived at her decision. All were slightly fearful. None looked too closely or too directly at her. But all […] … learn more→

There’s a lot of information out there about the differences between working as a researcher in an academic context compared with an industry one. However, most of these articles (like this recent one) tend to focus on the ‘hard’ sciences and offer insights into the differences between working as a scientist in a university versus […] … learn more→

What is the current situation of educational reality? How to establish what should be intervened in and how to enhance, modify and improve educational practices? How do you know if a teaching methodology works? These are just some important questions of educational research that seeks to advance in this sector and, in this way, improve as a […] … learn more→

Despite the fact that grantseeking is an embedded part of contemporary academic life, researchers are often unpractised and insecure about asking for money. They may feel the awkwardness of asking for money, or uncertainty about the value of their ideas or track record as a researcher. We can reassure you that this feeling is common. […] … learn more→

The agonised cry of a researcher worried that they are going to be scooped. Pipped at the post. Someone else is going to get in and do what they are doing and publish beforehand. OK. It’s alarming at first. But someone doing what you’re doing is not necessarily A Bad Thing. Even in blue skies […] … learn more→

Learning to summarize research papers profoundly is crucial for researchers or professionals out there. In doing so, in the right way, readers could get a quick preview of the main points without covering the whole paper. Previously, research paper summarization was conducted through manual techniques, but this work has been made simpler with the onset […] … learn more→

Once again, this week, I was asked to replace someone for a presentation. After the session, my colleague said “Wow, you were [unexpectedly?] good, we should have thought of you earlier”. A similar scenario occurred earlier this year when I replaced a superstar in my field at a conference where ministers and government officers were […] … learn more→

Since Galileo, research in physics has followed a well-marked procedure, structured by three precepts: observation of natural phenomena, conceptualization of a law underlying them, verification of the predictions that result from them. This approach has borne many fruits and we now know in detail the laws that apply to the world between the scale of […] … learn more→