Philosophy
Group research culture
I value trust, freedom, creativity, and a healthy work-life relationship. I value qualitative rather than quantitative advances. I support intellectual courage and open-mindedness to ideas and hypotheses outside the norm. I strive to be a PI in the mold of late Auguste Gusteau, whose philosophy was beautifully articulated by his once harshest critic, Anton Ego:
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.
Last night, I experienced something new: an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: ‘Anyone can cook.’ But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
Reproducible research
We conduct our work to be reproducible in practice, not just in principle. We achieve this by automating the workflow from raw data to a finished manuscript using GWF, Jupyter, and Quarto.