Work With Me

A professional relationship is a relationship. No more, no less.

General Philosophy

My hot take is that everything we do in our life is about connection, and by connecting with others we form all kinds of relationships. At the end of the day, we are our relationships.

Speaking from my personal experience, the professional relationships I form during work has been playing a significant role in my life: My research view, taste, skill, path has been and is being shaped by those experiences. So I do take my professional relationships seriously, in the sense that I try my best to make my side of the contribution, learn from others, and be constructive whenever possible.

When it comes to research, I feel compelled to try my best sticking to the highest professional standard, i.e., no bullshit. Indeed, I am deeply fortunate to have my current position – a job to work on genuinely fun stuff while getting pretty well paid and having surreal prestige. Most people in this world do not have such a privilege. So let’s try to do stuff that actually makes sense – this does not mean we always can, but at least, let’s try.

What To Expect From Me

  • By default one-hour meeting time each week for every ongoing project. We can change according to the lifecycle of a project, e.g., shorter meeting for project kick-off, longer meetings for checking proofs, more than one meeting per week before submission etc.
  • Direct and transparent communication. I am straightforward: I ask for clarification when I do not understand; I praise when I see amazing progress; I disagree when something does not make sense for me etc.
  • Being prepared walking into a meeting. If I am the one sharing my side of results, I will brief about the main points at the beginning, then go into the details of each point. If I am in a supportive or supervision role, I will think about next steps and potential issues in advance.
  • Timely feedback. During work hour, I am always happy to give fast input for any problem encountered, just knock my office door or drop me a message.

What I Expect From You

  • Passionate about what we work on. I assume that you would not commit to working on a project that is not interesting to you. Passion is not about what we say, it is about what we do: Passion means we are always motivated to make our contributions through the execution of a project.
  • Know where we are heading to. I expect you to have a view of what phase our project is at, what is the short-term/medium-term/long-term goal from our latest understanding, and what you would like to get out of a meeting. We all hate the meeting that runs forever without any concrete output. We only live once and our time is limited.
  • Low-context communication. I take your words as what they mean literally. If you see something is not working, please tell me as soon as possible in a direct way. Only in this way, we can trust each other to speak from their heart in an efficient and constructive manner. I do not take critical feedback personally and I appreciate your honesty.
  • Respecting each other’s time and efforts. I do not expect you to reply to my message outside work hour, and it is the same the other way around. Please be aware that, while we do live our life during work, our life is bigger than work, and we all have our own shit going on. Let’s plan ahead so that we have enough input to each other before the work hour elapsed.

Contact Me

If all the above sounds reasonably good to you, I really appreciate your willingness and initiative, please write me an email. I provide some tailored instructions/questions for work in different natures:

For Collaboration

  1. Do you have an idea already? Or you would like to brainstorm together to find something intersecting our research interest?
    • If you have an idea, please describe with a few sentences.
    • Otherwise, please elaborate your research interest and previous work.
  2. How do you envision the outcome of this collaboration?
    • Are we aiming for a publication? To which type of conference/workshop?
    • If not an academic publication, how it would make impact in which format?
  3. How do you expect me to contribute to this collaboration with respect to expertise and workload?
    • How could I help? Is the needed skill shown in my previous work?
    • Who would lead the collaboration? Or how to share the work?

For Project Supervision

If you are a student from EPFL or ETHZ looking for project or thesis, please follow the instructions on our lab website.

If you are a student located in Bochum or interested in an in-person internship at MPI-SP, please email me with:

  1. Your CV
    • Could you demonstrate your related experience? Like transcripts and/or reference to previous project?
  2. Your research interest
    • What kind of research questions makes you excited? Or better, what concrete idea do you have?
    • How is your interest matching well with mine?
  3. Your timeline and expected outcome
    • How many hours would you work on the project? For how long?
    • Which phase are you at? Are you looking for a thesis project or a on-the-side research project that can support your PhD applications?
  4. Additional support
    • Do you want/need to combine the project with a paid internship?
    • Do you need visa application support? In which format?