This pandemic has been a terrible tragedy on so many levels. The awful toll in terms of lives lost, livelihoods destroyed, and permanent losses of health has been immense and sobering.<\/p>\n
Yet humans are a hardy bunch, and the ways that we are coping are instructive. One thing I’ve noticed, as an academic, is that I am giving a lot more invited talks, and I am also inviting a lot more luminaries to give invited talks to our lab.<\/p>\n
In a world where Zoom is the norm, “visiting” does not require flights, hotel rooms or meal expenses. You can simply invite somebody to your lab to give a talk, and they will usually say yes.<\/p>\n
I’ve started a practice of inviting very high powered people to give talks to our students, and then to hang out afterward for Q&A. People who would formerly have been far too busy are saying yes.<\/p>\n
Our students are benefitting from this. Mentorships are starting and connections are being forged that would probably not have happened in normal times.<\/p>\n
Of course none of this begins to compensate for the enormous tragedy of the COVID pandemic. But perhaps it shows that even through the darkest of clouds, you may find a ray of sunlight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This pandemic has been a terrible tragedy on so many levels. The awful toll in terms of lives lost, livelihoods destroyed, and permanent losses of health has been immense and sobering. Yet humans are a hardy bunch, and the ways that we are coping are instructive. One thing I’ve noticed, as an academic, is that … Continue reading “Invited talks during a pandemic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22466"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22467,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22466\/revisions\/22467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}