Journey in words
If you’re here for the science and prefer the minimal story (in a traditional CV style), you can find them here. Conversely, if you’re here to hear how I’ve ended up doing what I do, here’s the narrative version. With a background in elite sports and sports science, working on understanding animal minds is quite an unlikely path.
Elite sports
I’ve grown up in the world of athletics, and my discipline was the triple jump. My time as an elite athlete was short, but brought me some great experiences; most notably I moved to Cuba in 2010 to train with the Cuban jumpers (if you follow athletics, you may know my former team-mate Pedro Pichardo). But after a few years I realised that, despite my efforts, I wouldn’t make it to the international stage, so I quit. But I wasn’t done with elite sports. I had already as an athlete read all the research I could get my hands on, from specific triple jump biomechanics, periodisation, human physiology, and trainng theory. So the switch to coaching was a small one. Coaching elite sports was also the reason I enrolled in my undergraduate (see above). I started as a junior jumps coach in Sparta, the largest Danish athletics club, where I had the privilege to coach some amazing young athletes, and soon after, the Danish athletics federation hired me to coach at their regional youth talent centers. Working with all these super passionate young people was such a joy. (funnily enough, my biggest experience as a coach came slightly later when I was asked to be the delegated jumps coach for the Danish National team for the 2019 Universiade in Naples - also known as the Olympics for university students).
Science 101
One of our courses in the undergraduate was “Motor Learning”, or “how we learn movements”. Until now, my focus had been on muscle physiology, but here I was introduced to the study of the brain, neuroscience, for the very first time, and instantly my interest was piqued! I took all the related electives I possibly could and got more and more fascinated. I did my first research project with Jesper Lundbye-Jensen on cortical excitability during motor learning, which included a bunch of techniques, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG). It also included behavioural work in the form of teaching participants to play a game by squeezing a small metal block (which was a force transducer, so it measured how hard they were squeezing).
After having spent the first 20+ years of my life thinking that sports was life, I was now at a cross-roads. I had found this thing that made me more excited, intellectually stimulated, than I had ever experienced before, but if I was to pursue that, it meant leaving all of my sports-life behind (or at least on the shelf). I had never even considered that I could be a scientist.
After finishing the undergraduate, I buggered off to Australia for a year. To get away, get some perspective, and discover who was without athletics in my life. The plan was to work at coffee shops and banana plantations, but, well… things turned out differently, and I ended up working in two labs at University of Queensland. My first couple of months I spent in a Neuromechanics lab supervised by Luke Kelly, working primarily on foot biomechanics assisting with processing a large data set containing 3D bone models and X-ray scans, and developing a setup that combined ultrasound imaging, force application and local anaesthetic to nerves in the lower limb (along with being Guinea pig for a bunch of other studies). After my contract in the lab ended, I travelled to Tasmania where I spent a wonderful couple of months, ruminating my trajectory in life. I returned to work with Tim Carroll who worked on motor control. Here I also got the chance to work on a variety of setups, most of them reaching. But it was also here I realised that every living organism has to sense their surrounds and take action to make the best of the situation.
Non-human?
One morning I went to jump on my bike when I noticed that a sling plant had wrapped itself around my bike frame. Not being trained in “allround” biology all I knew about plants was that they grew towards the sunlight. But that could surely not have been causing this wrapping!? I was perplexed. It was a moment which made me realise, at least in retrospective, that there were so many scientific avenues about which I knew nothing; and that, in some way, they were all intertwined. I started reading about information theory, comparative neuroscience, quantum physics. In a sense, the scientific journey on which I find myself now started, to me, here. It was an exciting time, but also a time during everything became engulfed in uncertainty. The winter was spent alone in Tasmania working odd jobs for food and accommodation, and lots of reading various philosophy books and other classics, which also lead to deep introspection (as an aside, I was also reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence, during which I started to feel like Phadrus; if you have never read it, it comes with my highest recommendations).
After returning from Australia I knew studying neuroscience at this level would be too specialised for me at this stage, and instead started my MSc degree in Human Biology (I applied to do a MSc in Biology, but was not accepted due to missing courses… instead I met my now wife and am enormously grateful for the way things worked out). I had previously been recommended to read Principles of Neural Design by Simon Laughlin and Peter Sterling and now finally got around to it; the search for organising principles resonated deeply with me and was formative for the questions I have since pursued. For my thesis, I defied the Human of Human Biology and instead reached out to Jeremy Niven, a former post doc of Simon Laughlin’s who was now running his lab at the University of Sussex, who was working on insects to better understand the computations of nervous systems and their evolution; and luckily he would be happy to take me on.
I remember the first day I showed up at the office for a chat with Jeremy about what I was going to be doing the following year; we had previously loosely discussed some ideas, and I imagined him to have a thought out project plan I could follow. Instead I was met with this: “So, what do you want to work on? Do you have a question or animal in mind?” I remember being taken aback by the trust I was met with and the freedom it promised. Humbled, I had to admit that I didn’t quite know and that I might need a few weeks to figure it out. After some time to do a bit of initial research, I settled on doing a project on motor learning in locusts. To make this long story short, it miserably failed (which Jeremy had seen coming a mile away, but wanted me to have the experience of what research is really like, not just what it’s like when you’re served a ready-made, cannot-fail project). In the disappointment I teamed up with PhD student Sofia Fernandes and together we built a virtual reality setup for ants and we had an absolute blast in the process!
PhD
For the PhD I knew I had ideas of my own I wanted to explore. Although it would be a financially prudent decision to pursue a PhD in Denmark, the freedom I had experienced working with Jeremy kept tugging. I applied for funding through a Leverhulme grant focused on funding PhD projects related to sensation, perception and awareness broadly. My project was supposed to record brain activity from wood ants during sleep and wakefulness to try to link brain states to behavioural states; something which had previously mostly been done in vertebrates. Well, in short, it didn’t work out the way I had planned (does a PhD ever?); instead, the difficulties I encountered prompted me to learn new skills, new scientific areas, and discover new and profound questions.
Next?
At the time of writing my PhD is almost done. What comes next is a chapter yet to be discovered. To follow what my research interests are at the moment, you can find more on that here.