Hello, tenure!

I’m excited to announce that as of 1st of February 2021, I will start as a tenured associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen!

How?

This is an unexpected turn of events, even for myself. When I announced I was leaving my tenure track position in May, I was not planning to look for a faculty position. I was still interested in doing research, but also thought I’d look at positions in data science or research support.

My announcement led to a lot of people on Twitter suggesting different (both academic and non-academic) positions to me. Among these were three faculty positions that were strongly recommended to me AND which seemed to have better conditions than my tenure track. As I already had an updated CV, I decided to apply, and was successful in getting an interview at all three. In two cases, the conditions were not as I imagined after all, and I stepped out of the interview process.

At ITU the process was a lot slower than what I’m used to, so I sort of forgot about it. Instead I was focusing on positions related to open science, and got to know a great community in the Netherlands, which I would still wholeheartedly recommend. Just as I decided this would be my next job, I got notified that I qualified for a tenured associate position.

Why?

This is a big deal! But given my experiences in academia, I was still quite skeptical whether this was something I wanted to do at all. But, still hurting from failing my tenure track, I was also intrigued to find out why they wanted to hire me 🙂 What’s another virtual interview, after all?

The interviews changed my mind. I haven’t felt this much “at home” in a while – I could just be myself, with all my opinions about machine learning and academia, and they still wanted to have me. About half of the interview time was spent on values, which tells me this is a good place.

So although I never searched for this, feeling valued like this gives me motivation to try again. It’s ironic that all of this happened while all Dutch universities are discussing “recognition and rewards” and how to increase the numbers of women. It turns out you can just do it. Of course I can’t predict how things will be going forward, but I’m grateful for the support and trust I received from ITU so far.

What’s next?

Going forward, I will still do research on learning with limited labeled data, but I will be focusing on understanding similarities and differences between datasets (meta-learning), but also on a more abstract level, between communities (science of science or meta-science). I believe it’s important to understand what is (not) being studied and why, so that we can make science more open and inclusive.

I will also still be continuing with workshops on failure, although things might be a little slower as I get settled in. And of course, you can always following my updates on this blog and on Twitter.