“Nomem est omen”
“The
value is in the name”
Roman playwright Plautus in his play Persa
Here we
are again, on the EEP blog. After a long silence (the last post dates back to
last year!) I have finally decided it was about time to have a fresh start and
bring things back to life in a new form and with a new approach. After all, my
life is about to change substantially (again!) and it is probably time to get
things moving. We say back home in Sicily that “chi si ferma e’ perduto”.
Hence, let us keep moving!
Things have
changed so much in the past 2 years that it is difficult to find somewhere to
start from. Having been post-docching (is that a word?) in Australia first, and now in
Berkeley, and having been exposed to different scientists with very different backgrounds,
meant it was almost inevitable that my perspective and research interests would
change dynamically. And as this blog has always reflected my passions and interests,
it was unavoidable that the focus of the blog would change accordingly. So why
not starting from the name? After all, as Plautus said, Nomem est omen…I therefore introduce you to the new Environmental
and Thermal Neurophysiology blog. As the title of this post says, we have a
different name, but we keep the same spirit.
A bit of background
After
its foundations in 2012, the now ex-EEP blog grew rapidly and created a modest community
of casual and more frequent readers interested in sharing information and research
findings in environmental physiology. An average of 500 visits a month was soon
the norm. The blog was born soon after the beginning of my PhD at the Environmental
Ergonomics Research Center (Loughborough University, UK). Full of enthusiasms
for this new adventure, and after an infatuation with outreach in research sparked
by many years spent with my long-time mentor and friend Dr Antonino Bianco (see
his historical fitnessa360 blog here: http://www.fitnessa360.com/),
I decided to get my word out there about the sciency stuff I was interested in.
The first post on The XV International
Conference on Environmental Ergonomics (ICEE 2013) was out soon after. In
the first few months of life of the EEP blog, I even managed to involve some colleagues
that at the time agreed to collaborate an article (little note: one of them, Dr
Victoria Kendrick, is now my wife J). Now the blog enjoys an average of 3000 visits a month and despite my "low productivity" visits keep going up.
A new
start
While the
initial enthusiasm for the blog was plenty and pointing upwards, after few years the time available
to write posts started to go in the opposite direction. In no time, I indeed found
myself juggling to finish a PhD and looking for post-doctoral opportunities. I
was lucky enough to get 2 opportunities one after the other (a fellowship at
the University of Sydney and post-doc position at UC Berkeley) and things have
since moved on. In the meantime my work and interests have evolved and I am now
stuck trying to bring together environmental physiology and somatosensory
neuroscience into numerous clinical and no-clinical research projects :). Would this work? We shall see…in the meantime, as I think this
area of research has the great potential to bring together scientists with multidisciplinary
backgrounds, I thought I would re-launch this web-platform to spark some novel interest
in the area of Environmental and Thermal Neurophysiology. A number of posts are
now ready to go online and hopefully this new start will bring to the blog new
readers, new contributors, and new ideas.
Stay
tuned.
Davide
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