fancy lab

The ERC Starting Grant selection deserved some updates on my webpages...

New blog design, updated links and sponsors, and new logo !

Forget about administrative work, prepare yourself for the next Top Gun Day coming up next Friday. What is Top Gun Day ? Check the original TGD website.

Top Gun quotes to insert in your next (scientific) conference talk :

• "The further on the edge, the hotter the intensity"
• "I was inverted"
• "If you think, you're dead"
• "Reviewer, snnfffffff....      ....you stink"

Enjoy !

A little of self-satisfaction won't hurt... Thanks to all colleagues who found part of my work of interest to their research.

Check the items on the left column for latest research results and publications for download (more science to follow on this blog).

Last week, I had a (long) discussion with French colleagues about the most relevant way to show scientific independence. The issue in France is that as young researchers (age typically < 40), we are NOT intended to run our own group, but have to be integrated into a (larger) group lead by a so-called "class A" researcher (understand full professor or CNRS director). Leading his/her own young research group is not the point in France, contrarily to colleagues in UK, Germany or Spain.

The crazyness of this situation is that all young researcher I know are performing their research independently on their senior group leader. All this looks like mostly an obscure French administrative issue: young researchers can be scientifically autonomous within a group, but not fully administratively autonomous.

So, how to demonstrate independence? This can be a real issue in fierce funding competition at European level. The best answer I can provide is to go back to the scientific output, ie peer-reviewed papers, and check for corresponding authors and last authors. For my own case, here is the kind of graph to show my transition to independence:

Data are in % of total articles per year (for 2011 it also includes submitted and in press manuscripts). Of course, this does not constitute the sole evaluation criterion, yet combined with publications list and brief scientific achievements description, I think it can provide a fair overview.

With a title like this, I'm sure my blog will receive much visits from search engines . If you came here while looking for some h index or h factor data, then you'll already wasting your time.

Procrastinate a few more minutes to this very well written article (in French only sorry). For the English-reading only people, I've also selected this editorial. Be careful all this is highly ironic !