By SORTEE | July 13, 2023
[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
Name: Félicie Dhellemmes (she/her)
Date: 28 June 2023.
Position: Post-Doc.
Research and/or work interests:
Behavioral ecology, movement ecology, individual differences in behavior, foraging.
How did you become interested in open research?
I became interested in ORT research practices pretty early on when it became evident to me that if we wanted the public to trust science (in the context of climate, for example), science had to be exemplary and as trustworthy as possible.
What’s an open science practice or topic that you’ve changed your views on within the last few years? Why?
The act of sharing my data was very difficult at first. I worked very long days, and very long hours for many years to obtain my PhD dataset, and sharing it online felt like giving away all this work. Now I realize that science is at its most powerful when data is shared and that contributing my data only makes the scientific process more efficient.
What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Thanks to a SORTEE conference I have gotten into version control on GitHub. I don’t use it every day because my codes are generally very well organized, but there are certainly some instances when I now rely heavily on GitHub and I’m so glad I got to learn it. Thanks, Malika!
If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
Like many of my colleagues, I think the strong incentives placed on publishing often and in journals with higher impact factors have a high potential to lead to poor scientific practices. I wish we could re-balance incentives and promote scientific outcomes differently.
What’s an ‘ORT’ subject or practice that you think deserves more attention?
I have never pre-registered a study, but I wish for this to become more common. Maybe in the next few years, we will find ways to incentivize the use of pre-registration and make this an integral part of the scientific process.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born and raised in Lille, France, where it rains all the time and the people are the friendliest of the whole country.
Where is someplace you’ve never visited but would like to? Why do you want to visit there?
I’ve always wanted to travel on the Trans-Siberian railway and do the 9000km of it with lots of stops. This feels very remote and very outside of my comfort zone, and I think I’d absolutely love it!
Tell us about one of your hobbies.
I like to play with tools and one of my preferred handy activities is fixing bikes. Bikes are wonderful, they’ll allow you to go very far, stay in shape and discover new places at a different pace! Go bikes!
Do you have a favorite non-human organism? What is it and why is it your favorite?
Juvenile lemon sharks (Negaprion brevirostris). They are just the cutest little pieces of perfection while also being little terrors: beauty and chaos. I am absolutely in love with them.
What was your most embarrassing fieldwork moment?
Once during a night shark-fishing outing, I was collecting blood samples that needed to be centrifuged right away. I was at the back of the boat working a manual centrifuge to separate the red blood cells from the plasma and for some reason fell out of the boat in very very slow motion. I started leaning forward more and more and was unable to regain balance, but extremely slowly. The samples, the centrifuge and I ended up in the water. Whoopsies.