Until I found myself close to the deadline, trying to understand what each one was for, what was missing, what needed updating, and how my research identity actually appeared to other people.
That was a useful wake-up call.
These profiles are easy to treat as admin.
But they are not just admin.
They are part of your scientific infrastructure.
Today I updated mine again, and it brought me straight back to that moment.
So if you have never created yours — or if you have not updated them in a long time — let this be your reminder to do it.
Which one do you always forget to update?
The problem was: I had never really paid attention to them before.
For the previous four years, I had focused on what most of us focus on:
doing the experiments, writing the papers, preparing presentations, meeting deadlines, and moving from one task to the next.
Do you think scientists are given enough space to learn how to share their work well?
That is one of the reasons I want to start sharing more consistently here: to get better at translating complex science into something clear and useful.
Because learning how to communicate research is part of doing research well.
Three years ago, while writing my first individual fellowship, I discovered a part of scientific life nobody had really taught me to take seriously.
As part of the application, I realised I needed to have things like ORCID, Scopus and Google Scholar properly in place.
We do research to generate knowledge.
So why is it still so hard to talk about what we do?
But there is something uncomfortable about that.
Too often, the most we share is just: “Here is my new paper.”
And that is where it stops.
If research matters, it deserves more than a title and a link.
One of the things I hear most often — and I include myself in this — is that sharing our work feels like one more task on top of everything else.
Experiments, writing, meetings, deadlines, supervision, admin.
So when social media appears, the reaction is often: I do not have time for this.
Bacterial glycans are a nightmare to model.
Unusual sugars, missing parameters…
I’ve been working on extending the GLYCAM builder to include them — together with @robertamarchetti.bsky.social, @olivercgrant.bsky.social and the group of Prof. Woods.
Preprint👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...