2019 in numbers
2019 top 10 posts by view:
- Parasites of parasites: blood-sucking bat flies infected with enigmatic Laboulbeniales fungi
- Genetische modificaties: voor of tegen?
- Exserohilum rostratum, the killing fungus
- Forensic Mycology: Taking Hebeloma to Court
- Has evolutionary history led us to today’s rapes?
- Sea turtles under pressure
- In the field: bats in Panama
- Great research, unexpected conclusion – Why fish is so good for you (?)
- New fungal taxa from a Panamanian cloud forest
- Parasite host specificity related to host susceptibility to be killed?
16,568: the highest number of impressions received by one of my tweets in 2019. That top tweet was about our massive review of the Basidiomycota that had just been published.
8,031: funding received in 2019, from the Indiana Academy of Science, Purdue University, and SYNTHESYS+ (European Commission). That’s not very much, but I only applied for one larger grant (as a Co-PI). I did, however, win a Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek), which caused quite some stress. The anticipated starting date was October 2019 and it was almost ‘expected’ that I was to give up my current position at Purdue, which I thought was a bit strange. I ended up postponing until November 2020, but I was only able to do this by giving up one year of the funding I had just won 🙁
7,478: number of visitors to my website. I started my website in April 2015 (with the help of Marianne Lourens of ML media) and received 1,375 visitors during that year, followed by 3,488 in 2016; 6,030 in 2017; 5,012 in 2018; and 7,478 in 2019. The drop in number of visitors in 2018 is explained by the fact that I did not post anything on the website that year, I’m surprised anyone visited at all. It is quite interesting how in these days of social media a single tweet can have a much larger effect compared to posts on a website, but I enjoy writing non-academically and so I will keep the website active.
310: number of citations. That’s more than any year before! I never imagined writing scientific papers, let alone being cited by other researchers. Total number of citations has increased to a little above 900. These are just numbers but I am excited about passing the milestone of 1,000 citations.
210: number of co-authors. This number is particularly dazzling because of the two multi-author papers I was involved in. Since a few years, these multi-author papers seem to be a new trend in mycology. When not accounting for these two papers, the number decreases to 73, still a decent amount of co-authors in one year. Thank you all for collaborating!
37: days in the field. Most of these (31) were in Cusuco National Park, Honduras where I joined the Operation Wallacea-managed surveying project as a chiropterologist. I also did an opportunistic fungal survey and will continue fungal sampling efforts in 2020. So. Much. Undescribed. Stuff! I also did fieldwork in Indiana (5) and in Belgium (1).
19: posters and presentations, including invited talks. I especially liked my poster with graduate student Alden C. Dirks from the University of Michigan, which we had submitted as Diversity on the continental edge. We presented this poster about a group of poorly known crust-like fungi from the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area at the annual meeting of the Mycological Society of America.
16: papers published in peer-reviewed journals, of which 4 as first author and 3 as senior author. I think everything came together in 2019, one of my core PhD papers, side projects (some of which had been on the back burner for years), and larger papers that I somehow stumbled into. Highlights are the description of the third order of Laboulbeniomycetes (Herpomycetales) [pdf] with long-term Hungarian and Polish collaborators, my first paper as a Purdue postdoc in which I helped graduate student Blaise Jumbam to describe his new Hericium from Cameroon [pdf], and my friend and collaborator Jasmin Camacho’s first chapter paper about the role of peramorphosis in the amazing skull diversity in phyllostomid bats [pdf].
4: number of formal affiliations in 2019: Purdue University (postdoctoral research assistant), University of South Bohemia (10% researcher), Harvard University Herbaria (associate researcher), Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí (associate researcher). Oh, I was also contracted by Operation Wallacea as a chiropterologist in Honduras for one month. During my first job interview, I was introduced as the young man who was looking for yet another job [everybody laughs].
1: I wrote an op-ed with Dr. Adriana Romera-Olivares from the University of New Hampshire, about challenges during fieldwork for people who identify as LGBTQIA+ or who are gender-nonconforming.
