My name is Yiannis and I like to write to express and communicate things I find important or interesting.  I work in biomedical research and I also teach.

From early on I tried to develop a sense about the world and myself, so that I could get my bearings.  I studied widely formally and informally, across disciplines.  I initially studied Physics (I have a degree from the University of Athens), and then Biophysics (I have a PhD degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).  During my graduate studies, I was profoundly vexed by the need to validate the new knowledge that I was trying to come up with in my research.  To this end, I studied extensively epistemology and sociology of science, but also ventured into anthropology, literary theory and cultural criticism.   In the end, the first part of my PhD thesis described the research in Biophysics I had carried out, but I also included a second part, which was a sociological analysis of that research.  Later, after postdoctoral training in Neuroscience (at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), I also studied Sociology (completed the required coursework for a Master’s at the University of Colorado at Denver).

Scientific research aims to generate new knowledge, new ways of doing and perceiving, new ways of experiencing the world.  I always assessed what I learned from my forays into different disciplines in the light of my experience with scientific research.  It is this experience, my experience of generating new knowledge, as well as articulating and communicating it, that informs the perspective of this blog.

Here is a link to some of my work.