A life story in brief

ECR Forum

Gabriel Mateus Bernardo Harrington

Research Associate
Webber lab

2025-04-02

Origins

“Education”

Adventures in a PhD

graph LR
    F-->A2
    subgraph Pre-PhD 2016-18
        A[BSc: Biological Sciences<br>- Lancaster University] -->|existential angst| B(Optogenetics in Cochlea implants<br>- Bionics institute, Melbourne)
    end
    subgraph Mini-project rotations 2018-19
        B --> C(Center for Doctoral Training<br>- Regen medicine)
        C -->|One| D[Gene expression in adherent<br>and non-adherent hydrogels<br>- Loughborough University]
        C -->|Two| E[Effects of AC on interfacing wires<br>grown via wireless electrochemisty<br>- Nottingham University]
        C -->|Three| F[Viability of 'lung on a chip' model<br>- Keele University]
    end
    subgraph PhD 2019-2022
        A2[PhD: A multimodal approach to biomarker<br>discovery for spinal cord injury]-->B2[Here!]
    end

And now I’m here

ECR informatics committee

We try to serve the community of “informatics” folk (we’re very inclusive!) - website here
Current recurring events:
- Behind the P-value - A exploration of a piece of analyse someone has done (e.g. explaining how a figure was made)
- Bytes cafe - A more casual chat, starts with “discoveries” where were share handy things we’ve found (packages, functions, papers, videos, etc), then have breakout rooms to discuss topics of interest
  - Next one is later this month, sign up!

Recommendation: learn to code!

If you’re gonna be doing the same types of experiments over and over, then you’re doing the same analysis over and over
- So if you have code for that analyse you’ll save loads of time, minimise mistakes and improve reproducibility!
It’s also great for the old CV!
Some resource recommendations:
- R for data science - a nice free book
- swirl - an R package for learning R in R!
- There’re loads of YouTube videos, find one you like (here is an example)

Another recommendation

Quarto® is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc
It’s an excellent and versatile framework for reproducible and shareable articles, notes, presentations, websites, books (thesis!) and more
I wrote my PhD thesis with the precursor to Quarto (RMarkdown - it was real helpful!)

Reproducibility good!

There is the reproducibility working group, join if you’re interested!
The Turing Way is a great resource and community focused around how to do reproducible science
I’m always happy to chat and support folk in this space
- Would a bunch of you like any events related to this? A workshop, seminar, other training? Let me know!

Some examples

The FayLab Manual
- This is a website aimed at new and current lab members which outlines the culture (inclusive, reproducible and open-science) the lab want to foster and codifies the structure of projects (e.g. file naming conventions!)
My own website
- A great way of sharing methods (especially for stats)

Thanks for listening

Any questions?

Slides can be found at this link: https://h-mateus.github.io/presentations/dri-ecr-talk_2022-10-25/index.html#/title-slide

Or scan this QR code: