Scientific interaction

I have complained about the lack of scientific interactions in my lab. Here on my blog, to my network colleagues, to my fiends and family. Initially I thought that I miss a lot of the interactions because I don't speak fluent French, but my boss claims that that is not the case; there's basically not much going on. What I generally miss are the journal clubs, research seminars where people present their ongoing work and seminars by people from other labs. Some of it is compensated by the frequent meetings of the network I'm part of, but the day-to-day interactions which make me a better scientist is virtually missing.

A couple of months ago, I spoke to one of my colleagues about it and he agreed that something should be done. And apparently the big guys decided that it's time for the established researchers to look in their drawers and old disks for data. Usually they produce reports and then move on to the next project without publishing in scientific journals, so there are heaps of data that are just lying around waiting to be re-analysed and written up. The first meeting was held last week. The aim was to see how 7 years of ecosystem surveys can be analysed and presentedin a publishable way. The researcher in charge of the data apparently does not know many of the new ways of analysing and presenting data, so she got some valuable help with statistics. She will redo the analyses and there will be a new meeting after the summer to have a final look at the data and brainstorm ideas for writing up.

Very exciting. I am not sure if my questions / complaints triggered the actions or if they came up with it all by themselves. It doesn't matter, it is all of a sudden a much more interesting place to work.