Hello World! Hope this finds you well! My name is kevin. I am a new PhD student (yesssssss!!!!!) and i’m really lucky to be part of EvoCELL 🙂 (there’s a lot of amazing scientists – at least in my view – and i don’t feel like one of them but i’ll do my best to keep up).

This is my first time blogging and so i feel very awkward but it is my understanding and feeling that maybe this is a healthy part of sharing scientific (as well as non-scientific) viewpoints of what life is “like” for a budding scientist. As I’ve been attending a two-months long course and i only began 3 months ago, i currently have zero data or science to share with you. As a first blog, i suppose i would like to state upfront what i’m most grateful for:

1. Thank you to EMBL (wonderful science venue) and the Arendt Lab (amazing people overall despite being great scientists) for welcoming a naiive student into the wonderful world of evolutionary-molecular (and hopefully) neuro-biology.
2. Thank you to EvoCELL for being an amazing group of people that i can’t wait to learn from and be friends with (if that’s ok with them of course :-)).
3. Thank you to Marie-Curie ITN funding for providing the means for me to dare to study things that i’m interested in. Without the funding which also comes from EU tax-payers, i would not be so fortunate to pursue such an undertaking.
4. Thank you to the wonderful animals (mostly annelids) i hope to study during the course of my tenure. I vow to do my best to respect and cherish lives that are no less important than mine (after all it has been said once that “Man is but a worm”).
5. Thank you to all the loved ones, for putting up with a confused-and-sometimes-dramatic-but-well meaning-”scientist”-wanna be 🙂

I hope future blogs will be more creative than this. I also hope that i have a bit more science to share with you. As for now, please enjoy this video of two adult Platynereis dumerilii (marine annelids i.e. segmented worms) playing in a plastic cup – The bright yellow one is female whereas the bright red is male. In my view, these animals are pretty and exhibit remarkable behaviours (more remarkable than just spinning in circles, i promise). Plus they are located at an interesting position along current models of the evolutionary tree, making them interesting candidates to explore further, in an attempt to draw out or model how animals evolved.

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