KOSEN 한인과학기술자네트워크

We are a family of ecologists who chose the path of harmoniously "building a family and a career at the same time", following the steps of the famous and the more "regular" scientists, hoping that inequalities in "academia" will gradually be removed. Students' work is merged with our own research, and, as far as the teaching schedules allow, we do field, lab work, analyses and paper-writing alongside students to contribute fairly to the co-authored papers, and we hope to avoid situations described here: (academic authorship; the white bull effect).

Avoidance of the "white bull effect" can only be achieved properly if all participating parties take the responsibility to act properly. Particularly, all students must regularly consult with us, present all plans, discuss all preliminary and partial results, discuss all methods of data acquisition, look at any intermediate and final data analyses, accept our own analyses, accept and follow our experience-based advice in manuscript preparation. By such frequent interactions with both of us, the students are obliged to let us contribute to the stages of the scientific process towards a publication (1) conception and design, (2) acquisition of data, (3) analysis and interpretation of data, (4) drafting the article, (5) revising, re-revising and re-re-revising (etc) it critically for important intellectual content, and (6) final approval of the version to be published. Students of papers prepared in this way are the first authors. Students who did not take effort to prepare manuscript submission, and are not going to do so, may or may not (depending on the relative contribution estimated after the whole submission is prepared) become the first authors of any publication that may be prepared by us later from their data.

We address questions that expand our understanding of animal behavior, its evolution and relation to human behavior. For PhD students, we attempt not to put narrow restrictions on research methods, study subjects or study locations, allowing the student to choose her/his favorite approach to the scientific endeavor, within the framework of our long term goals. Master research is much more tightly linked to our current research and restrictions differ from year to year according to the research stage of our long-term programs. We stress integrative, interdisciplinary and collaborative approach as well as globalization of geographical area considered in our research.

We focus on:
(1) conducting the studies in the field, whenever possible, where animals behave in their natural surroundings (Diamond, J.); we do not want to end up like this
(2) thinking outside the box and using variety of methods, including those borrowed from other disciplines such as neurobiology, molecular biology, physiology, geography, computer science, etc.; we try to keep your university from being like this and from becoming a mere "knowledge factory"
(3) helping students to conduct well focused projects, which are related with each other to resolve broader questions, and which end up in publishable manuscripts.