From February 2019 to January 2020, I’ve been based at UCL funded by the EU Marie Curie fellowship CARBS (grant code 795119). In this post, I summarise a few aspects of the experience.

First of all, a year-long fellowship seems to sit uneasy with a clear sense of time. One of the things I had planned to do is to write regular blog posts about the results of the project; now I find myself writing a post in the very last weeks of the project. Indeed, this ending caught me by surprise. I remember, early on, consistently thinking I was still at the beginning of the project – one month, two months, three months … – until suddenly we’re in the very last bit of it.

On the other hand, looking back it feels like ages ago when I moved to London to start the project. It’s been a very busy year: with happy, intense collaboration with my group at UCL, working at numerous exciting topics (modal logics, behavioural metrics, learning, Kleene algebra), while pursuing my own research agenda; giving frequent talks, going on several research visits. A highlight was the two-week visit to Tokyo, working in the group of Ichiro Hasuo, which has led to intriguing new work and several new collaborations. We continued the line of research that led to one of the main results of the Marie Curie project: expressivity of modal logics with respect to coinductive predicates.

Marie Curie fellowships allow to focus fully on research: no teaching or administrative tasks. Indeed, the aforementioned mix of topics, collaborations and travelling are part of standard academic life, at least in my area, but the fellowship has accelarated these things, by providing me with the needed time and resources. This is fantastic – but it also drove me to near exhaustion. Why? For several years, I did not have this kind of resources at my hands to pursue interesting research ideas. I grabbed every opportunity, and with a full year, thought I could handle all that! So the assistant professor post that I’ll return to in Nijmegen feels almost like calming down, even though I start with a busy schedule including teaching two courses. Altogether I survived, and think of all this as positive: there’s plenty of stuff I finished this year but also lots of half-finished, good research ideas to work on.

Finally, a more scientific point. The project proposal was written in the summer of 2017 – I happily worked out a detailed research plan at the time. At the start of the project, some things had changed – part was already carried out unexpectedly by others. Moreover, during the project, we made slight shifts of focus several times, motivated by the progress and intermediate results. This confirms once again that research in this area – theoretical computer science – does not easily let itself be planned. Perhaps this is less so in certain other fields, where one fixes specific experiments and there is less room for change. Dealing with these issues in a more flexible way has yielded a succesful completion of the project.