I was recently at a conference – the friends-and-family kind. International, sure, but mostly populated by academically 'related' researchers. A chance to get all together, talk about new projects, showcase current research, see if there is a possibility for interesting collaborations. A nice sense of community, lighthearted and caring.  This conference also had a student track.

Ein effektives Forschungsdatenmanagement (FDM) erfordert diverse Kenntnisse und Fähigkeiten: beispielsweise wie man digitale Daten dokumentiert, archiviert, publiziert und nachnutzen kann, und auch die Kenntnis der  FAIR-Data-Prinzipien (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) und das Wissen um forschungsethische sowie rechtliche Vorgaben sind wichtige Aspekte.

Seit Januar 2025 macht das Bildarchiv Foto Marburg rund 1,2 Millionen digitalisierter Fotografien aus dem eigenen Bestand verfügbar. Die Dateien sind kostenlos unter offener Lizenz beziehungsweise Public Domain Mark erhältlich. Darunter befinden sich unzählige Aufnahmen aus der europäischen Kunst und Architektur. Direktor Christian Bracht erläutert die Hintergründe der Open-Access-Initiative.

A primer on the growing importance of biotechnology in the 21st century intended to be a complement to the upcoming final report of the U.S. National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology

It’s April Cools! Last year I wrote about parenting, in 2023 about friendship bracelets. and in 2022 about cocktails. This year it’s a bit of a meandering stroll through some ideas around mutual aid and self-reliance. Maternity wards If you walk around the maternity ward at Kaiser Permanente’s Sunnyside medical center outside of Portland, Oregon, you might notice the same two things I did.

A world-class wildlife biology degree awaits at these top US universities, where research opportunities and field experiences shape tomorrow’s conservationists.

Autoscaling geospatial computation with Python and Yirgacheffe This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Michael Dales. Python is a popular tool for geospatial data-science, but it, along with the GDAL library, handle resource management poorly. Python does not deal with parallelism well and GDAL can be a memory hog when parallelised.

Battery-free wildlife monitoring with Riotee This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Dominico Parish. It is co-supervised with Josh Millar. Monitoring wildlife in the field today relies heavily on battery-powered devices, like GPS collars or acoustic recorders.

Effects based scheduling for the OCaml compiler pipeline This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Lucas Ma. It is co-supervised with David Allsopp. In order to compile the OCaml program foo.ml containing: Stdlib.print_endline "Hello, world" the OCaml compilers only require the compiled stdlib.cmi interface to exist in order to determine the type of Stdlib.print_endline.

Bidirectional Hazel to OCaml programming This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Max Carroll. It is co-supervised with Patrick Ferris and Cyrus Omar. Hazel is a pure subset of OCaml with a live functional programming environment that is able to typecheck, manipulate, and even run incomplete programs.

Using graph theory to define data-driven ecoregion and bioregion maps This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Daniele Baisero and Michael Dales.