I just wrote a LinkedIn post, copied below:

Life & contacts update!

I’m excited to share that I’ve officially started my new position as a Research Fellow in Computational Proteomics at UCL Cancer Institute. The first week has been great, discovering the labyrinths of the institute and the campus, already being included in all meetings and projects from the start, learning about cool new bioinformatics tools like COSMOS and INDRA, and setting up with a nice London view (one of my previous workplaces, LMB, is hard to beat on many fronts but I have to admit the view from our terrace here to London Eye and Shard beats the flat fields of Trumpington that we enjoyed from the LMB canteen).

This is perhaps an uncommon opinion on this particular platform (or even generally), but I am happy to be back in academia after my brief stint at a company. I learned a lot at RxCelerate, about how both proteomics & biotech works, but there are many things about academic environment that I love and missed. There are things that I don’t, of course, but that is one of the cool things about the new job: I’m working as part of the Proteomics Technology Platform & the Bioinformatics Hub, to collaborate with other researchers at the institute and beyond to help them design, deliver and analyse proteomics and multiomics experiments. Therefore, there is a great diversity, it’s all about collaboration, and I personally don’t have to worry about publications that much.

I am very grateful to Silvia Surinova and the team for a warm welcome. I am also particularly happy that they have agreed for this position to be 4 days a week, allowing me time to continue my work at Cell Ag UK, as well as other exciting projects (e.g. the interdisciplinary school at INTP – link int the comments). I do feel that the many  things I am doing now are more linked, at least in my head, than they were before, in kind of an overarching themes way. To help me bring them together, I’ve now created a website (and even a blog!) – feel free to check it out at www.complexbroadcast.com

It’s all been very exciting but also very busy. You know these people you see in movies, or on LinkedIn in fact, that wake up at 6am, work on their presentations, papers and meeting prep on their laptops during the commute to their job in central London, book international travel incl. flights last-minute (e.g. when something urgent has come up with their collaborators or friends), have 5-6 meetings a day, scrambling to reply to emails from their phone in-between, then go to some cool event in the evening, meeting “important” people like senior government civil servants and leaders of the city council, and fall asleep immediately upon arriving home, so they don’t even get to talk to their partner as they’d need to leave again at 7am the next day and the partner is also busy with cool “important person” stuff. I never thought I was one of these people, or would ever be in fact, but that was literally my week. I’m really enjoying the ride, but do have hope that it will stabilise at a somewhat less intense level in the near future.

Finally, you know I mentioned a blog? So there is a more expanded and less formal version of this post there, linked in the comments.

To be honest, I have to overcome some social anxiety to post these sort of things, as I’ve always found talking about myself and my achievements publicly kind of icky. In some ways, LinkedIn is a bit less icky to use than Facebook, which I occasionally did use in the past and will close down from June. There I would always be anxious sending friend requests (“who is this weirdo?” I’d imagine people would think; also the notion of a “friend” is quite different in Russian/the East compared to the UK and even more so the US), but have less of that with LinkedIn – it’s literally designed for networking, and “connections” is a much more appropriate term. At the same time, techbros giving life advice and people moaning about academia there is also not my jam.

Back to my crazy busy life. Another thing that comes to mind is something  my brother likes to say: “Adult life is great! You don’t have to ask permission, you can have lots of fun, do whatever you like… on the way to your 3 jobs”. This was true for many periods of my life, but at the moment feels like it’s at most extreme so far.

I’m on my way to Gothenburg now to help friends in an emergency (something that I only booked on Monday), next weekend is surprisingly free, but then two full-day meetings for the new job, then at the weekend it’s the EA Global conference, the weekend after Eden Festival in Scotland where we are organising a cell ag panel talk, then I’m running Refugee Week events, then my parents are visiting, then possibly Metascience conference, then possibly integral altruism meeting/conference, then Cultivate (UK cell ag conference), and then I’m off to ABFS science summer camp. That’s all in the next 2 months. And bear in mind (I clearly often don’t…) that I’ve just started an 0.8 FTE job which I’m really keen to hit the ground running with too.

Anyway, finally a couple of thoughts on this website and blog. I’m kind of happy how it turned out, and how it can be (I think?) both a professional-ish shop front, and a more informal and flexible space for me to put out things. And indeed creating it helped me bring the various things I do together, and see the common threads. Any feedback is welcome and actively encouraged!

I’m really surprised how much I’m using the blog side of it. I thought of writing blogs over the years, but it wasn’t a plan for this, my primary goal was a static personal page. But I’m finding myself really enjoying writing here too. Does anyone else? Is anyone reading this unless I send them the posts directly? When I did it with the communities post to a friend, one of the comments was along the lines of “why you’re choosing the most obscure platforms if you’re trying to sell things”. To which I replied (realising it only then) that I don’t think I’m actually trying to sell anything here, even in the broader sense, but rather to boast about how cool I am into the void, which wouldn’t work if this blog actually had subscribers. That said, there is a subscribe button at the top, and I am planning a couple more posts already in the near future, so you’re welcome to subscribe, and that will undoubtedly boost my ego too.