Lately, I’ve come to realize that when certain things are left unsaid openly un-documented, well-meaning people1 will bend the story according to how it fits their narrative, regardless of what actually happened. For more than a year I am fighting against someone who systematically tries to damage my credibility.
Because of that, I’ve found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to share more personal details online than I normally would, just to preempt false narratives or quiet insinuations2.
One such case involves a recent group photo uploaded from a retreat organized in April 2024 by my previous research group. I am not pictured in that photo. And given past patterns, I expect this absence will be used, subtly or not, to imply that I didn’t participate in the retreat at all.
So, here is what actually happened.
The retreat took place from April 17–19, 2024. I was actively involved: I prepared a flash talk on my own work on identifying plasticity rules that explain differencial responses on visual stimuli depedning on familiarity, and co-prepared a joint talk with my colleagues Matt Getz and Pablo Crespo on our low-rank learning framework (presentation). First part was covered by matt, second by myself, and third by Pablo3.
Just five days later, on April 24, I was scheduled to give a talk at the Flatiron Institute in New York (see here) on a completely different project (an independent one), this one was a continuation of my PhD work, focused on inference of latent stochastic low-dimensional dynamics from spiking neural activity.
As you can imagine, time was tight. I would return on Friday 19th evening home, and then depart on Monday 22th of April for New York. On April 18th, the group went for a walk, after which the photo in question was taken. I stayed back in the seminar room to prepare for my upcoming talk. So, obviously I am not in the photo, not because I was not in the retreat, but because I did not have free time for a walk4. In fact, we even joked at the time that one of the window reflections in the uncropped version of the picture looked vaguely like a human silhouette, so we could always say I was in the photo, just inside the building :).
Here is a message I later found from my former colleague, Betsy Herbert, calling me down to join the group photo. I did not see it at the time, my phone was on silent, as it almost always is.
Footnotes
or not so well-meaning ;)↩︎
For instance, in May 2024, the administrator responsible for handling my PhD documentation at my awarding institution contacted me to ask why people had recently reached out to verify, whether I had in fact earned my doctoral degree. This was puzzling to me, as my thesis had already been officially published online since December 2023 [thesis], I was actively holding a postdoctoral position, and even before I joined that lab, I had received an official preliminary certificate confirming the successful completion of my PhD with summa cum laude, with only remaining step the formal uploading of my thesis in the library, a purelly procedural step, not a condition for the degree itself. There was no indication whatsoever that the final degree could be withheld/not awarded etc. Indeed, when I eventually received the final diploma in January 2024, the document was dated early April 2023 (just a couple of days after my defense) [degree], aligning with the completion timeline. Nonetheless, during that period, when I was applying for postdoctoral positions and grants, and was in conversation with several labs, it became clear that someone had actively seeded doubts or vague insinuations suggesting, that I am leaving my postdoctoral lab because I do not have a PhD or some other degree. In the meanwhile, getting hired for my postdoc required submitting all my academic degrees, even my high school diploma, and both my first EE degree thesis [not so proud but here it is] and my doctoral thesis [PhD thesis] are available online ¯_(ツ)_/¯.↩︎
This was work done for the Master’s thesis of Pablo, who was co-supervised by me and matt. Pablo was performing the computations and was also providing ideas, and me and matt both were shaping the scope of the project and were formulating the specific questions Pablo tackled.↩︎
Fortunately, the talk wasn’t on work-life balance, because I’m clearly still working on that :)↩︎