Green Research
I strongly believe that, as scientists, we have a big responsibility to act and inform on the climate crisis. Particularly, as academia is part of the problem and createS its own carbon footprint.
In 2023, we funded the Green Team within my institute to act on sustainability at the departmental level. Our main tasks are to calculate and create awareness about the environmental footprint of our research/academic life, and suggest individual and collective actions to minimize it. Among our main projects, we tracked the travel behaviour of the whole department for the last 3 years, calculated the carbon footprint of the department’s wet lab and installed a carbon footprint calculator on the Donders’ High Performance Cluster to monitor the computational footprint.We also organize events, push for greener policies and raise awareness about relevant topics for academia. In 2026, I was awarded the Donders Cube for this work.
Since 2023, I have also been a member of the OHBM Sustainable and Environmental Action Specific Interest Group, for which I was elected Chair in 2024. The group works with the neuroimaging community to develop tools and educational materials that help researchers be aware of their environmental impact and make changes to minimise this. This includes working directly with OHBM to advise on how the annual conference can be made more sustainable.
Outreach
During my PhD, I got invested in several outreach activities with the aim to bring science outside of the lab. I participated in Open Days, events organised for students, visits in classroom, Brain Awareness Weeks to talk about brain structure in human and non human.
Pint of Science
The Pint of Science Festival is an international yearly event aimed at bridging the gap between the scientists and the public. Researchers come talk about their research in lay-man terms in a bar/cafe/public area to meet a larger audience. I have been part for four years of the Nijmegen committee. This year, I will present research on my PhD with a talk titled “Grey or white, does it matter?”.
Fresco/Cognivence
During my master and my first year of PhD, I was heavily invested as a treasurer and then vice president in the two French associations Cognivence and Fresco. A few highlights among all the projects we organized:
- Cognitive Science Forum project: I was in charge of creating and organizing 6 forums in cognitive science in 6 different cities in collaboration with local associations. These events allowed researchers, students, companies and the public to meet and learn more about specific topics in cognitive science. Every events were different to highlight the specific ecosystem of each city but all events were punctuated by talks, stands of labs, associations and companies, and alumni roundtable.
- Creating an alumni directory in cognitive science and a job ad page on the website
- Promoting and organizing interaction and collaborative projects between the different associations in the federation. My favourite being this collaborative escape game that we created for the Brain Awareness Week (only available in French).
The platform PhD et al.
From my struggle understanding how to create collaboration as an early career researcher, I created PhD et al.
The aim of PhD et al. is to create a space to foster collaboration between PhD students around the world. The output will be a website with two main features:
- a repository of all the projects uploaded and the possibility to apply for collaboration to any project
- a PhD directory with the profiles of every PhDs that upload a project or that apply to collaborate
The project received a grant from The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and was presented as a hackathon at the SIPS conference 2023 in Italy.
Unfortunately the project got put on the side due to lack of time with my PhD. However, I still believe such a website would be beneficial to the broader PhD community and I’m searching organisms that can use this idea and develop it.