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Today, I am interviewing Dr. Diogo Aguiam in the "How I Work" series. Current Job : In between jobs in research Current Location : Braga, Portugal Current mobile device : Nexus 5x Current computer : Macbook Pro (Mid 2012) Can you briefly explain your current situation and research to us? Nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars. Two light atoms fuse together to form a heavier atom, while releasing energy. If we could control this reaction here on Earth, we would be able to produce electricity from the excess energy! But this is very hard to do... We must heat a plasma to millions of degrees to get the conditions required for the fusion reaction. We can do this using special donut-shaped devices called tokamaks, which use strong magnetic fields to confine the plasma without touching the walls. Still, getting more energy out of the reaction than what we use to get it going is still a few decades away. My research is focused on developing radar-like diagnostics to measure the d...

I recently ran a poll on Twitter on the use of first person in academic writing. This poll was by large the most-voted poll I've ever organized, and the discussion was lively as well. The majority of the people that voted in the poll use "I" in their academic writing. For me, this fact is rather surprising. In my field, it's quite uncommon to use first person in our writing. I tend to use it in some of my reports, to emphasize that I did the calculations, but in most cases (as you may have noticed from the abstract that I've published on this blog) I leave myself out of my writing. Perhaps it's related to my type of work as well - it's quite clear to write something like "The bridge has a length of XX m". Here's the poll and its wake:

I recently ran a poll on Twitter to learn more about the most common career paths after the PhD. While three of the options that I listed are perhaps the textbook options (postdoc, assistant prof - directly assistant prof - postdoc, industry), I learned that there are a variety of options out there. As a result, 1/3rd of all correspondents selected the "other" option. Some clicked on other because they just wanted to see the results, but the majority explained the different career path they followed. I also learned that in the humanities, postdocs are much less common. Here you can find the wake of this poll:

My colleagues and I published two papers in the recent ACI SP-323 "Evaluation of Concrete Bridge Behavior through Load Testing – International Perspectives", of which Dr. Pinar Okumus and myself were coeditors. The two papers are: SP-323—1: ASSESSMENT OF SLAB BRIDGES THROUGH PROOF LOADING IN THE NETHERLANDS Eva O. L. Lantsoght, Cor van der Veen, Ane de Boer and Dick A. Hordijk Abstract A large subset of the Dutch bridge stock consists of reinforced concrete slab bridges, for which assessment often results in low ratings. To prioritize the efforts of the bridge owner, more suitable assessment methods for slab bridges are necessary. Research efforts over the past years resulted in the development of several methods, at levels requiring increasing costs, time, and effort for increasing accuracy. The last option, when an analytical assessment is not possible due to uncertainties, is to use proof load testing to evaluate the bridge directly. To develop recommendations for the proo...

For some reason, I always thought a doctoral thesis is about 100,000 words in length (and I've taken that number as a reference for my book as well). However, I wanted to test this assumption, so I ran a poll about the topic. From the comments, I learned that word count limits are common in the UK (mostly), and that they differ across disciplines. You can find the poll and its wake here:

Together with Miguel Abambres , Tiago Ribeiro , and Ana Sousa I've recently published a preprint titled "Research Counts, Not the Journal". As we're exploring post-publication peer review and the use of preprints, working only open access and bypassing for-profit publishers, this paper is on OSF Preprints and open for discussion on ResearchGate . I'd be grateful if you find a moment to read the paper and share your thoughts with us on its contents! Here's the abstract of the paper: If there is one thing every bibliometrician agrees, is that you should never use the journal impact factor (JIF) to evaluate research performance for an article or an individual-that is a mortal sin'. Few sentences could define so precisely the uses and misuses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) better than Anthony van Raan's. This manuscript presents a critical overview on the international use, by governments and institutions, of the JIF and/or journal indexing informatio...

Together with Miguel Abambres , Tiago Ribeiro , and Ana Sousa I've recently published a preprint titled "Ineffective Obsessions in Brazilian Academia and Proposals Towards Meritocracy". As we're exploring post-publication peer review and the use of preprints, working only open access and bypassing for-profit publishers, this paper is on OSF Preprints and open for discussion on ResearchGate . I'd be grateful if you find a moment to read the paper and share your thoughts with us on its contents! Here's the abstract of the paper: Albeit its constitutional claim for quality, Brazilian academia has largely been referred to as unmeritocratic and academic hiring is still inward-oriented. Lattes platform, a public curricular information system, reflects elements of this protectionism. This article assesses two ‘obsessions’ in Brazilian academia: (i) the ‘mandatory’ Lattes CV, and (ii) the candidates’ assessment criteria in public tenders for faculty positions. Severa...

Some PhD students wait until the very end of their studies to spend three (miserable?) months writing their thesis. Others work in a more gradual way. I spent about 1,5 years on writing (while still finishing up research tasks as well). To have an idea of which method is most common, I ran a poll on Twitter on this topic. You can find the wake of this poll here:

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer , your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands. These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands. If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better - and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic! As a post doctoral researcher, you can be hired on a project for 1 or 2 years, on a topic that is different from the topic you worked on during your PhD years. It may feel daunting to start all over again, and do it in less than half of the time you needed to do your PhD. As I've worked on a number of different topics during my post-doc years in Delft (including my "new" research line on load testing), I'm here to demystify the process. First of all: remember that you ar...