By Research Scholar Oumaima Ben Amor What we innovate, invent, advance, or know today started off as research fueled by our curiosity. Research is an essential phase in the understanding of problems and challenges which involves the development of new ideas and solutions. It has long shed light on the global threats that we are …
By Research Scholar Bryan Quoc Le I had the extraordinary fortune of having the opportunity to publish a book on the topic of food science while completing my Ph.D. program – 150 Food Science Questions Answered. The book was published in 2020, right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. The experience of writing the …
Read more “A Young Scientist’s Journey: There and Back Again”
By Research Scholar Kathleen Stein-Smith Languages offer benefits and opportunities for those who can learn and use additional languages in their studies and professional lives, and in their roles as citizens both locally and globally. Language learning and language use also offer cognitive benefits at all ages. Unfortunately, US students do not always have the …
Scholarship Values Summit 2021Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Identifying our values as scholars is the first step toward making needed change in our academic culture (see Part One of this three-part blog series). In this second blog post of the series (cross-posted on IGDORE’s Medium), we provide a summary of scholarship values …
By Ronin Research Scholar Rami Saydjari I recently joined the Ronin Institute. Although I am a newcomer to the organization, I wager I am among the group’s older members. I am a physician, and in my early years, I focused on cancer research in a traditional academic university environment (grants, politics, publish or perish, etc.) …
Read more “A newcomer’s perspective on joining the Ronin Institute”
Scholarship Values Summit 2021Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The context for scholarship has changed. The cultural norms and incentives for scholarship today (e.g. ‘publish or perish’) were established during a now-outdated context for traditional academia (see Lancaster et al 2018). Such framing and assumptions no longer work in today’s mainstream academia, let …
By Ronin Institute Research Scholar John LaRocco (Jave Harron) I’ve had the dubious honor of living in rough parts of the world, and speculative fiction helped me survive. As a researcher at the Ronin Institute, I do not have a conventional university as a safety net or resource to draw upon, so I turned to …
Notes from the Big Brain Collective as summarized by Research Scholar Emily Monosson The last Big Brain gathered around the idea of success. What does success mean and what are some challenges for reaching success? Ask a bunch of Ronin Scholars and you’ll get a bunch of different ideas; that’s part of what Ronin is about. …
Funding models and the slowing down of revolutionary ideas. By Ronin Research Scholars Jose Luis Perez Velazquez & Susan Khor The history of science tells us about major findings in the understanding of natural phenomena that prompted scientific revolutions or substantial changes in perspectives. Somehow, it seems to me that these ground-breaking innovations, the great …
Read more “Whatever happened to the great scientific breakthroughs?”
By Research Scholars Emily Monosson, Arika Virapongse and Judy Daniels At the Ronin Institute, we’ve been working on a Big Brain project that intends to collect and share experiences and insights by scholars operating outside of traditional academic institutions. Our Big Brain project got off to a great start in early March 2021 with two …
