Researching the research

About Researching the research

A podcast about research and researchers; outbreaking discoveries, academic and industrial research and everything around; from idea conception to its publication, patent or company, how to apply to grant calls and raise funding, interviews to researchers to understand their lives and motivations, and more! Contact me at: https://Horacio-ps.com

Publisher

Horacio Pérez-Sánchez

Category

science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 Aug 2021

Latest episode

28 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

15 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Sept 2026

   14. Nikos Apostolopoulos: What farmers need to learn for the bioeconomy

   What farmers need to learn for the bioeconomy: the process behind a four-country study of digital and entrepreneurial skills in agriculture, with Nikos Apostolopoulos. Four countries, four languages, four education systems, and one question: how do you compare them? More than half of the people who work in the European bioeconomy work in agriculture. So what do farmers, agronomists, consultants and policy makers need to learn to be part of that change? A team from Greece, Italy, Portugal and Sweden asked them, using two European Commission frameworks as a common language: DigComp for digital skills and EntreComp for entrepreneurial skills. I talk with Nikolaos (Nikos) Apostolopoulos, Associate Professor in European Policies in Sustainability, Development and Entrepreneurship at the University of the Peloponnese, where he directs the Laboratory of European Sustainable Development Policies. He is one of the authors of the study, published in 2025 in the journal Agriculture. This episode is not only about the results, but about what the paper does not show. In this episode: Why DigComp and EntreComp were a tool, not the object of study, and why they work together. The "hybrid" competence profile: the same person reads data from a sensor and sees value in agricultural waste. What did not go to plan: an unbalanced sample, only three Swedish farmers, and the sentence the team decided not to write. How to coordinate a European project: clear ownership of tasks, common tools and trust in local partners. The core dilemma of any multi-country study: how much do you standardize, and how much do you adapt? From the paper: 71% of respondents had no bioeconomy course in their latest qualification, and only one in three was willing to pay for that training. Advice for starters: do not spend five years writing another list of competencies. Study which skills matter for whom, how they combine in real decisions, and who trains the trainers. Recorded asynchronously: Nikos recorded his answers in Greece, and I recorded my questions separately. Guest: Nikos Apostolopoulos, University of the Peloponnese Email: anikos@uop.gr Profile: https://www.uop.gr/en/staff-memberen/anikos Read the paper (open access): Digital and Entrepreneurial Competencies for the Bioeconomy: Perceptions and Training Needs of Agricultural Professionals in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Sweden (Agriculture, 2025): https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture15101106 Chapters: 00:00 Intro: why this matters beyond agriculture 04:41 Before the paper: choosing DigComp and EntreComp 14:30 The hybrid competence profile 16:18 What did not go to plan: an unbalanced sample 23:47 Coordinating a project across four countries 32:49 Standardize or adapt: the core dilemma 37:32 Advice for starters: not another list of skills 44:44 Skill combinations and training the trainers 48:12 Outro: four ideas to take away More: https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english If you found it useful, please like, subscribe or share it.

2. 

   16 Jul 2023

   13. The Archaeology of Language: Place Names and Endangered Languages in the Search for the Origins

   In today's episode, historical linguists and language documentarists Francesco Perono Cacciafoco (Associate Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, https://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/study/departments/school-of-humanities-and-social-sciences/department-of-applied-linguistics/department-staff/academic-staff/staff/francesco-perono) and Shiyue Wu (Linguistics' major at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) discuss their research on Historical Linguistics and endangered and undocumented languages. Francesco provides us with background on his work reconstructing, documenting, and analyzing place names (toponyms) in languages from all over the world. He explains how place names can give insights into prehistoric languages, since they are more stable over time than other words. His recent book "Place Names: Approaches and Perspectives in Toponymy and Toponomastics", published by the Cambridge University Press (https://bit.ly/3NZc2I2), aims to be a comprehensive guide to toponymic research, the first academic handbook on Toponymy ever published in single volume. The process of analyzing place names involves documentary research and etymological reconstruction, comparing toponyms among related languages, belonging to the same language families, recovering possible earlier 'proto-forms', and giving back to those special names their often long-forgotten morphological roots and original meanings. Challenges include to deal with unsolvable prehistoric / ancient place names and with toponyms connected with 'itinerant' and undocumented oral traditions and language contact in Aboriginal contexts. Shiyue shares how she conducts her Language Documentation fieldwork, interacting with indigenous speakers to understand and record words, names, grammatical elements, concepts, and cognitive processes behind their languages. She is, currently, studying number systems and counting among the Abui, Kula, and Sawila peoples from Alor Island (Southeastern Indonesia), documenting and safeguarding their languages and discovering cultural connections, naming processes, and oral traditions. The two linguists explain also the use of computational tools in their attempts to better understand and, ultimately, decipher undeciphered ancient writing systems, discovering the languages that they 'hide'. Their work focuses on Linear A, a Bronze Age script from the island of Crete, in the Aegean Sea, 'concealing' the so-called (unknown) Minoan language, and on the writing system of the Singapore Stone, a puzzling, fragmentary epigraph from the Lion City, in Southeastern Asia, which carries a script that is unique in the world (never found in any other inscription). Shiyue's and Francesco's main goals are the reconstruction of prehistoric languages, following the 'dream' of 'giving back the voice' to our ancient ancestors who had not the technology of writing yet, and to document endangered and undocumented languages and cultures from around the world, to prevent their (often very high) risk of extinction and disappearance and to safeguard them for the future generations. Overall, the episode provides an insightful look at the linguistic detective work involved in reconstructing, analyzing, and documenting place names, oral traditions, and endangered indigenous languages and, ultimately, at what Historical Linguistics and Language Documentation are. The researchers aim to preserve linguistic diversity and study how language evolves over time and intersects with culture, history, and thought. Shiyue and Francesco can be contacted at Shiyue.Wu21@student.xjtlu.edu.cn and Francesco.Perono@xjtlu.edu.cn. Links to some of the commented papers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024384116301784 https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/7/211 https://geografie.uvt.ro/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/08_III_CAC_2.pdf https://brill.com/view/journals/ow/1/1/article-p1_1.xml?language=en

3. 

   17 Dec 2021

   12. How can you be more productive in your research using consolidated apps: Akiflow

   If you want to go far in your research it is crucial to be productive and nowadays there are many interesting productivity apps and systems that you can use for that. But the problem is that there are many! And it is very difficult to find one that suits all your needs. Another problem in this regard is that when you collaborate with other researchers they will probably use other productivity applications, so at the end you spend a lot of time switching between productivity and time management applications. Today's interviewee has a solution for this! Nunzio Martinello: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nunziomartinello/?originalSubdomain=in (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nunziomartinello/?originalSubdomain=in) is the CEO of Akiflow, and they developed Akiflow proposing the idea of consolidated apps. Akiflow allows you to have a central dashboard with calendar which allows you to integrate and sync tasks from many different systems such as gmail, Trello, Todoist, etc, and Zapier, which allows you an even higher number of integrations. So today we had Nunzio in the podcast and he gave some very interesting explanations about Akiflow and answered our questions. We really recommend you to use it: https://akiflow.com (https://akiflow.com) If you want to continue discussion about this episode and in general about the themes we talk in our podcast (how research is made, how to do it more efficiently, interviews to researchers, etc) then join our discord community at: https://discord.gg/3dN7pQNWAk (https://discord.gg/3dN7pQNWAk) PS: Background music "Let the sunshine" from "Keep Calm and Podcast": https://pod.co/keep-calm-and-podcast (https://pod.co/keep-calm-and-podcast)

4. 

   5 Dec 2021

   11. Making it Rain: Cloud-Based Molecular Simulations for Everyone with Pablo Arantes in our Journal Club

   First journal club episode from our Structural Bioinformatics and High Performance Computing (BIO-HPC) community which you can joint at: https://discord.gg/fZyNYTsT7k (https://discord.gg/fZyNYTsT7k) where we discussed about the paper "Making it Rain: Cloud-Based Molecular Simulations for Everyone": https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c00998 (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c00998) with its first author, Pablo Arantes from University of California Riverside: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pablo-Arantes (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pablo-Arantes) It would be great to have you in our next Journal Club! PS: Background music "Let the sunshine" from "Keep Calm and Podcast": https://pod.co/keep-calm-and-podcast (https://pod.co/keep-calm-and-podcast)

5. 

   26 Nov 2021

   10. Molecular Dynamics with Hugo Verli from UFRGS, Brazil

   In this episode we focus around the computer simulation technique Molecular Dynamics (MD), which allows the study of the dynamics of systems of biological relevance. For such purpose we have the pleasure to interview Prof. Hugo Verli from UFRGS, Brazil: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fB-31L4AAAAJ&hl=es and you can contact via email in case of questions at: hverli@cbiot.ufrgs.br or hugoverli@gmail.com We also talked about his research career, his views about the research process and many other interesting topics. If you want to continue discussion about this episode then join our discord community at: https://discord.gg/3dN7pQNWAk

6. 

   20 Nov 2021

   9. Nanotechnology and research in graphene with Romain Danneau from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

   Interview with key topics in nanotechnology and graphene research with Romain Danneau from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology: https://www.int.kit.edu/1244_romain.danneau.php you can contact him directly through his email address (link below) if you have questions about his very interesting research. We also talked about his research career, his views about the research process and how to manage a research group. If you want to continue discussion about this episode then join our discord community at: https://discord.gg/3dN7pQNWAk

7. 

   19 Oct 2021

   8. Why multitasking can be efficient (I): multiple difficult projects or creative processes

   This is an episode in the productivity for researchers series. Today I explain why multitasking can be very efficient or perhaps the only way to work on multiple difficult research projects or creative processes, taking advantage of our subconscious mind to find solutions or unblock us. Contact me at: horacio (at) horacio-ps.com if you want to join our webinar where I will live and interactively explain the technique. If you want you can continue it here in our public Telegram group at: https://t.me/researching_research (https://t.me/researching_research) Thanks for listening! PS: Image taken from: https://thenounproject.com/term/multitasking/995438/ (https://thenounproject.com/term/multitasking/995438/)

8. 

   12 Oct 2021

   7. Research groups vs startups

   This is the first episode about startups, where I comment main similarities and differences between research groups in academia and startups. It is based on a very interesting blog post from Charl Both, from Delft University: https://cpbotha.net/2012/07/24/startups-vs-academic-research-groups-fight/ (https://cpbotha.net/2012/07/24/startups-vs-academic-research-groups-fight/) At the end of the episode there are some open questions for discussion. If you want you can continue it here in our public Telegram group at: https://t.me/researching_research (https://t.me/researching_research) Thanks for listening! BTW: Spanish version of the episode: https://anchor.fm/horacio-ps/episodes/Grupos-de-investigacin-y-startups-similitudes-y-diferencias-e17b92q (https://anchor.fm/horacio-ps/episodes/Grupos-de-investigacin-y-startups-similitudes-y-diferencias-e17b92q) PS: Image taken from: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/businessman-startup-success-arrow-2330853/ (https://pixabay.com/illustrations/businessman-startup-success-arrow-2330853/)

9. 

   30 Sept 2021

   6. Modeling water in biomolecular systems with Maria Bzówka from Tunneling group, Silesian University of Technology

   Maria Bzówka is a PhD student from Tunneling group, Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, Poland, working on developing computational methods and their application to biomolecular systems. She visited our research group in September, and we learnt a lot of things from her! In today’s show, we talked about her career, research and views about science If you want to know more about her, please check the following websites about: a) her research group: http://www.tunnelinggroup.pl/ (http://www.tunnelinggroup.pl/) http://www.aquaduct.pl/ (http://www.aquaduct.pl/) https://twitter.com/tunnelinggroup (https://twitter.com/tunnelinggroup) b) the software Aquaduct: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/36/8/2599/5682414 (https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/36/8/2599/5682414) https://www.livecomsjournal.org/index.php/livecoms/article/view/v2i1e21383 (https://www.livecomsjournal.org/index.php/livecoms/article/view/v2i1e21383) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HKtINTemsI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HKtINTemsI) c) her COVID papers: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/9/3099/htm (https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/9/3099/htm) https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/4/2065/htm (https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/4/2065/htm) d) her hsEH Review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135964462100252X (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135964462100252X) You can contact her at: m.bzowka@tunnelinggroup.pl or maria.bzowka@polsl.pl https://twitter.com/BzowkaMaria (https://twitter.com/BzowkaMaria) The recording of this episode was performed at UCAM thanks to the audio recording and edition assistance of UCAM’s Unit for Scientific Culture and Innovation (Unidad de Cultura Científica e Innovación). Special thanks to Francisco Ruiz. And last but not least, you can continue the discussion about the show in our Telegram group: https://t.me/researching_research (https://t.me/researching_research)

10. 

    20 Sept 2021

    5. How to explore research ideas just recording a podcast episode

    This is the second episode about productivity hacks for researchers, recorded on the street, in which I explain how to explore (and develop new )research ideas just recording a podcast episode. If you want to get more information about all these steps or are interested on my research consultancy services, you can contact me at horacio (at) horacio-ps.com or: https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english/ (https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english/ ) Finally, you can engage in further discussions about the podcast episodes in our public Telegram group with other users at: https://t.me/researching_research (https://t.me/researching_research ) Thanks for listening!

11. 

    12 Sept 2021

    4. How to (we) perform computational drug discovery (I): Blind docking

    In today's episode I introduce one of the ways we can use computers in order to discovery new drugs. For that I talk about the necessity of multidisciplinary research between structural bioinformatics, high performance computing, and computational drug discovery, just to name a few. Next I explain the Virtual Screening (VS) technique idea and how it is divided into SBVS and LBVS. Focusing in SBVS I explain what a molecular docking simulation is and how a database is processed using it to prioritise compounds for experimental testing. Nevertheless molecular docking can be vastly improved with the Blind Docking (BD) technique and implementation we have developed in our group, BIO-HPC at UCAM, and which is called Achilles Blind Docking server: https://bio-hpc.ucam.edu/achilles/ (https://bio-hpc.ucam.edu/achilles/ ) this technique is also implemented in our GPU software METADOCK 2: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article-abstract/37/11/1515/5711286?redirectedFrom=fulltext (https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article-abstract/37/11/1515/5711286?redirectedFrom=fulltext ) and here I mention two key publications that have used our BD technique: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aba6617 (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aba6617) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-019-0278-6 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-019-0278-6) And last but not least, you can continue discussion in our Telegram group: https://t.me/researching_research (https://t.me/researching_research)

12. 

    25 Aug 2021

    3. How the apps installed on your smartphone can influence your productivity as researcher

    This is the first episode about productivity hacks for researchers, recorded on the street, in which I explain how the apps installed on your smartphone can influence your productivity. If you want to get more information about all these steps or are interested on my research consultancy services, you can contact me at horacio (at) horacio-ps.com or: https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english/ Finally, you can engage in further discussions about the podcast episodes in our public Telegram group with other users at: https://t.me/researching_research Thanks for listening!

13. 

    19 Aug 2021

    2. Intro to research grants calls

    This is the first episode about research grants in which I introduce what research grants are and how are grant calls usually structured. I talked about: How research grant calls are structured Advice for the preparation of documents The reality of rejection Resiliency and feedback If you want to get more information about all these steps or are interested on my research consultancy services, you can contact me at horacio (at) horacio-ps.com or: https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english/ (https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english/) Finally, you can engage in further discussions about the podcast episodes in our public Telegram group with other users at: https://t.me/researching_research (https://t.me/researching_research ) Thanks for listening!

14. 

    6 Aug 2021

    1. Structural bioinformatics, scientific career path and advice for PhD students

    In this episode I was recently interviewed by Eva Lantsoght and Rico Massa in their podcast PhD Talk: https://www.evalantsoght.com/podcast.html (https://www.evalantsoght.com/podcast.html) where we talked about: My scientific career How structural bioinformatics and supercomputing works Advice for PhD students General productivity tips You can contact me at horacio (at) horacio-ps.com and you can engage in further discussions about the podcast episodes in our public Telegram group at: https://t.me/researching_research (https://t.me/researching_research ) Thanks for listening!

15. 

    6 Aug 2021

    Introduction and podcast trailer

    First and introductory episode of the podcast in which I briefly explain what the podcast is about and what I think you can expect from it, how it will be recorded, produced and organised, and how to you can give feedback and engage in further discussions.

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Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.