Blog

(It had been a while since I managed to find the time to write something worth posting in the blog. Since I had to anyway write a speech for my inaugural lecture at the VU Amsterdam, let me post it here and hopefully motivate me to write more frequently. The slides and the recording of…

These are certainly complicated times for early career researchers (ECRs) in all domains of science. To begin with, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has slowed, when not ground to a halt, a significant fraction of all research activities, and has affected in particular laboratory-based work. These COVID-related restrictions will inevitably cause important delays in the ECR…

My parents always liked to tell me about their time as university students, in the Faculty of Law in Barcelona in the 1970s. Those were interesting times, towards the end of General Franco’s dictatorship, when students could be found more often than not trying to get away from the political police after one of the…

On Wednesday the Dutch government announced a further softening of the corona-prevention measures. From secondary schools to cinemas, gym centers, cannabis cafes, and sex clubs, there is not a more or less clear roadmap for their calendar towards reopening and trying to recover part of their pre-corona activities. This said of course most the safety…

Today a very special event took place in Barcelona: the LatorreFest, a celebration of Jose Ignacio Latorre’s 60 birthday. Jose Ignacio is of course a very important person in both my scientific and personal history, having been my PhD supervisor and then collaborator and friend for almost 20 years now. So together with two other…