What is the topic of your PhD project and how does your work look like in practice?
The overarching topic is the control of reaching movements in naturalistic settings. So far, my work has been largely to read and digest literature, in order to understand how different aspects of reaching control are being researched and modelled, and what the gaps are. Soon, it will shift towards setting up experiments, building the corresponding pipelines for data analysis. Other than that, there are also activities that are not directly related to my project, for example, a book club where we (in a small group) systematically go through a book that teaches us new skills.
What has your career path been so far and how did you come to your current position?
I did my undergraduate degree in Exercise Sciences at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and then a Research Masters in Human Movement Sciences at Vrije University, Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Since my undergraduate degree, I knew I wanted to go into academia and so I looked through advertisements of PhD positions, applied, and luckily got accepted.
What aspect of your job do you excel at?
In scientific research, you necessarily have to make simplifying assumptions which creates uncertainty that propagates to your results. I think it is important to be explicit about such assumptions and communicate the uncertainty clearly. I don’t know if I ‘excel’ at this, but I’ve certainly improved over the past years.
What aspect of your job is or has been a challenge for you?
Often, you can approach a problem in a systematic way, and measure your progress towards solving it. For some problems, however, coming up with a systematic approach is difficult and measuring progress is near impossible (e.g. coming up with a new research idea or a new perspective on a line of research). In such cases, it usually feels like you are somewhat randomly exploring options without measurable progress, and the solution or answer may or may not ‘come to you’. Despite being aware of this, these situations can be frustrating and hard to deal with.