John Hammersley
John Hammersley has always been fascinated by science, space, exploration and technology. After completing a PhD in Mathematical Physics at Durham University in 2008, he went on to help launch the world’s first driverless taxi system now operating at London’s Heathrow Airport.
John and his co-founder John Lees-Miller then created Overleaf, the hugely popular online collaborative writing platform with over eleven million users worldwide. Building on this success, John is now championing researcher and community engagement at Digital Science.
He was named as one of The Bookseller’s Rising Stars of 2015, is a mentor and alumni of the Bethnal Green Ventures startup accelerator in London, and in his spare time (when not looking after two little ones!) likes to dance West Coast Swing and build useful things out of wood!
Articles by John Hammersley
Building a platform to prevent procrastination…to put off writing up my PhD!
Dr Elisabeth Essbaumer, co-founder of ConcentrAid, speaks to John Hammersley about her innovative new platform helping academics convert time from unproductive meetings into time spent on useful, focused work, and to meet new people in the process!
FuturePub Berlin – Special Edition
#FuturePub headed to Berlin for our fourth and final event of the year, during Berlin Science Week and ahead of the inspiring Fallings Walls Science Summit 2023. We had a lovely venue -- the Hotel Palace Berlin -- located in the vibrant heart of the city between the Ku’damm and Zoological Garden, which helped set the tone for a thought-provoking evening.
Implications of AI for Science: Friend or Foe? An impressive opening to the Falling Walls Circle 2023
Well, Falling Walls certainly lived up to expectations! It’s six years since I was originally slated to attend but had to hand presentation duties over to my cofounder due to the birth of my youngest daughter, Annabelle.
I was fortunate to be able to attend in person this year, and today started with a wonderful panel session on the “Implications of AI for Science: Friend or Foe?”, chaired by Cat Allman who has recently joined Digital Science (yay!) and featuring a brilliant array of panellists. Here's my notes from the session.
FuturePub London – The AI Edition
#FuturePub returned to London for a special AI edition, and this one was on a whole new scale...180 people attended -- a new record -- and we had a much wider mix of attendees; government representatives, researchers, research administrators, healthcare professionals, publishers, finance & technology experts, and of course, start-up founders! Here's the lowdown on what went on...
From open science to project management and back
In this guest post, Joyce Kao, co-founder of the Swiss-based Open Innovation in Life Sciences Association, takes us through what motivated her and her cofounders to form the association, how it helps early career researchers find out more about Open Science, and how it's led her to her latest initiative, the Digital Research Academy.
Celebrating the women of TL;DR
Women have been historically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), both in education and in the careers that follow, and one of the things that we strive to do at TL;DR is to amplify amazing contributors from across the breadth of the community we work with.
It’s fast approaching six months since the TL;DR site launched at the end of April, so we thought it was a great opportunity to look back and celebrate the amazing women who have been at the forefront of the conversation on TL;DR so far.
World Mental Health Day 2023
Suze, John and Danielle chat about the link between mental health and physical health, the challenges we must overcome to destigmatise mental health, the need for awareness days, and the initiatives that Digital Science have implemented to help both our internal and external communities.
A good time to be working on AI: an interview with Professor Sue Black
"Because of my background, I'm always interested in how technology can serve the underserved in society, and how it can empower people to live their best lives. With AI, I'm not worried about robots taking over the world. I'm more worried about people using technology to do bad things to other people, rather than the technology itself.
One of the biggest issues we've got with technology is that most people in society, particularly those who aren't in tech, think that they can't understand it. I want to help change that, on a global scale."
Dr Jessica Miles: From Michael Faraday to Microbiology to AI & beyond
This is the story of how a school science fair inspired a passion for science communication, a PhD in microbiology, and a valuable perspective on the current AI debate.
Dr Jessica Miles recently participated in the SSP2023 panel on AI and the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing, the writeup from which has just been published on the Scholarly Kitchen.
I caught up with Jessica to chat about how she came to be on the panel, her background in microbiology, and her thoughts on the future of scholarly publishing in an AI world. I got a Barack Obama impression for free 😊
CERN 2070 – The Next Generation
Last week I was in London for CERN FCC Week 2023, an event which brings together the people – scientists, engineers, researchers and more – working on CERN’s Future Circular Collider (FCC) project to present and discuss the latest details from the ongoing feasibility studies and planning assessments.
CERN is an inspiration to people worldwide, and I'm always excited to hear the latest on their plans for the future. Here's my take on CERN FCC Week 2023.
Fruit flies and maggot brains – the magic of Soapbox Science
Soapbox Science is a novel (and very popular!) public outreach platform for promoting women and non-binary scientists and the science they do.
Ahead of their upcoming London event, we caught up with Isla Watton, who is responsible for recruiting and training Soapbox Science Local Organising Teams and supporting the delivery of Soapbox Science events globally, and Hui Gong, a neuroscientist at The Francis Crick Institute and one of the London speakers for Soapbox Science 2023!
Here's what we covered in our hour-long chat!
Seven million open research objects and counting – a conversation with Figshare founder Mark Hahnel
On April 13th 2023, Mark tweeted that Figshare had reached seven million outputs, a significant milestone in anyone’s book! He and I jumped on a quick call to discuss what that achievement means for Figshare, and before we knew it our chat had meandered onto what it was like in the very early days of Figshare and Overleaf, and how milestones and celebrations change as the numbers keep going up and to the right! :)
We hope you enjoy where the conversation takes us.
From research diary to Paladin AI
Ten years ago, in 2013, I wrote about using WriteLaTeX (now Overleaf) for academic research. At the time, I was a graduate student in computational astrophysics at McMaster University, studying the formation of massive stars using large-scale computer simulations. In addition to doing cutting-edge research, I was also trying to build good habits as a scientist, which meant keeping detailed notes and tracking experiments. Today I work in applied machine learning and have founded my own start-up, Paladin AI.
FuturePub is back! Here’s what happened on May the 4th
Our write-up of the night! We take a look back at a successful FuturePub event, our first since the pandemic. FuturePub took place on May the Fourth (be with you) at The Royal Institution in London, the historic home of engaging people with research. Read on to learn about the event, discover who gave a lightning talk and how you can watch them on-demand, and check out our photo gallery.
Down the rabbit hole – exploring inequalities in funding of climate change research
Misha’s article “A tragedy of inequalities” - highlighting differences in research funding of climate change research -- was recently published on the Dimensions blog. I chatted to Misha about how the article came about, what she learned whilst writing it, and the most surprising thing she found out -- that STEM fields get 770% more funding than humanities, and only 3.8% of funding is allocated to climate research on Africa.
Pivoting to COVID research during lockdown – an interview with Professor Rudo Römer, theoretical physicist
The worldwide COVID pandemic was a crisis unparalleled in recent history. The efforts of scientists and researchers around the world in mobilising to find vaccines, treatments, and explanations were equally unparalleled. In this article, we tell the story of one such research collaboration using their collective expertise in protein-modelling to help build a picture of the SARS-CoV-2 virus structure. Moreover, using modern collaborative writing tools, they were able to write up and publish their work during the height of the pandemic.
Our new avenue for interesting things
Welcome to Digital Science TL;DR, our new avenue for interesting things!
We bring you short, sharp insights into what’s going on across the Digital Science group; both through our in-house experts and in conversation with amazing people from the community. And we’ll keep it brief!
