Behind the CV

Story from a Physicist

Members of IoP at different levels of their careers share their personal journey behind the CV. In an informal atmosphere, they discuss how they became the physicist they are today, and reflect on their path and the challenges they encountered. They discuss the choices they made, their successes and failures, the detours and key events that shaped their career, their insecurities, the obstacles they faced and the people who supported them to become who they are today. Their story behind the CV.

This seminar series is open to all students, PhD candidates and postdocs at IoP and related institutes. We hope that these conversations on the unspoken challenges of life in academia will inspire you, and help you with the decisions and challenges you will face in your career.

This seminar series is inspired by “Growing Up In Science” and other similar events in research institutions abroad. We are very thankful to the speakers for sharing their stories with us.

Upcoming: discussion with Flavia de Almeida Dias, Tuesday 10 February 2026, 17h00

Science Park 904 - C1.112

On the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we are pleased to invite you to a special event with Flavia de Almeida Dias.

Flavia de Almeida Dias is an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam and at Nikhef (the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics). She is an experimental particle physicist who has been working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, CERN) since 2008, as a member of the CMS collaboration until 2013 and as part of the ATLAS experiment after that. She has made leading contributions in analyses involving pairs of vector bosons, searches for extra Higgs bosons, and dark-matter mediators. She obtained her PhD degree in 2012 at the São Paulo State University (Brazil), in association with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the United States. She was then a postdoctoral research fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the University of Edinburgh. In 2020, she obtained the competitive MacGillavry Fellowship at UvA and has been dividing her time between Switzerland and Amsterdam since then. You can learn more about her in this interview. Besides her research career, she also takes the time to raise awareness about the situation of women in science (see this article). You can learn more about her group and her research on her website.

Science Park 904

Room C1.112
Science Park 904
1098 XH Amsterdam

Past Events:

9 April 2025 – Special events for master students "What I wish I had known about doing a PhD!": a panel of 5 PhD students at IoP working in different fields of physics answers all your questions about doing a PhD. Thank you to Bauke van der Vorm, Jared Popowski, Rittick Roy, Jildou Hollander, and Kelly Weerman for taking part in the panel!
26 February 2025 - on the occasion of International Day of Women and Girls in Science we invited Sera Markoff, Professor of Theoretical High Energy Astrophysics at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy (API) and GRAPPA (center of excellence in gravitation and astroparticle physics). Sera works at the interface of Astrophysics and Astroparticle Physics, and is interested in a variety of problems relating to the accretion process especially around black holes, both big and small. You can learn more about her group and her research on her website.
10 April 2024 – Special events "What I wish I had known about doing a PhD!" – Special events for master students: a panel of 5 PhD students at IoP working in different fields of physics answer all your questions about doing a PhD. Thank you to Heleen Mulder, Omar Ould-Boukattine, Farhan Tanzim, Elham Mirzahossein, and Ludovica Guarneri for taking part in the panel!
12 February 2024 - on the occasion of International Day of Women and Girls in Science we invited Samaya Nissanke, Associate Professor at GRAPPA (center of excellence in gravitation and astroparticle physics) and at the Anton Pannekoek Institute (API) and the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEF), and a member of Nikhef. Samaya works on gravitational-wave and played a founding role in the field of multi-messenger astrophysics. In 2020, she was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize for "the development of novel techniques to extract fundamental physics from astronomical data". You can learn more about her on her website.
12 October 2023 - Peter Schall, is a Full Professor at the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute (WZI) for experimental physics, and investigates the physics of soft and condensed matter at the micro- and nanometer scale.
18 April 2023 – Special events "What I wish I had known about doing a PhD!" – Special events for master students: a panel of 5 PhD students at IoP working in different fields of physics answer all your questions about doing a PhD.
5 December 2023 – Shin’ichiro Ando is Associate Professor at GRAPPA (center of excellence in gravitation and astroparticle physics) and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITFA). He is currently the coordinator of the GRAPPA track in the MSc Physics & Astronomy, and a member of the IoP Diversity and Inclusion council.
11 February 2022 – During the Faces of Science Park 2022 we held a special edition of Behind the CV with Carina Hoorn (IBED) and Martin Fransen (Nikhef).
3 November 2021 – Noushine Shahidzadeh is full professor at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) working at the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute (WZI) in the soft matter group; she is also currently a member of the board of directors of the Interpore foundation and the scientific board of the Netherlands Institute for conservation, Art and Science (NICAS).
11 June 2021 – Alejandra Castro (University of Cambridge) was at the time an associate professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITFA), in the String Theory group.