Fellow Feature: Yorben Lodema
Every year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship yeaEvery year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship year. What better time to showcase their progress over the course of their programme.
We will present you with interviews with each of the Fellows. From creating tutorials to organizing interactive seminars, our Fellows are at the forefront of shaping the landscape of research software practices.
Keep reading to learn more about the progress of the project, ‘Increasing clinical researchers’ access to open-access, easy and comprehensive electroencephalography processing tools’ led by Yorben Lodema a PhD Candidate at Utrecht UMC.
What is the goal of your project?
Electroencephalography (EEG) is an established and easy to apply diagnostic tool to measure brain activity at a small-time scale. A constraint for researchers to apply this technique is the expertise required to process raw EEG measurements to be able to calculate meaningful characteristics of the EEG. Comprehensive software packages for EEG processing exist, which require little technical background to use but are expensive for an institution to license. This can lead to licenses for software being dropped, resulting in problems with reproducibility of research. On the other hand, high quality open-source EEG processing packages have been developed. However, these require a significant programming background to apply. Therefore, this project aims to make resting-state EEG processing made possible by the Python MNE package available to researchers by combining essential functions into an easy to use, comprehensive and free software package.
What role does research software play in your daily activities?
Most of my research is focused on EEG changes in delirium in some way or another. This also translates to computational modelling work to better understand the pathophysiology of delirium. For this research, I am mostly developing new software to meet my needs. In doing so, I can hopefully make my own and my colleagues’ future work a bit easier. In this process, I depend on open-source software developed by others a lot as well.
What initially inspired you to apply to the Fellowship Programme at the eScience Center?
I was working on my projects on my own. I thought the eScience Center Fellowship Programme would give me the opportunity to meet like-minded people and take my work to the next level.
How is your Fellowship helping you promote the use of research software in your own community?
As part of my Fellowship, I’m doing several activities to reach out to community members who might benefit from using my software. So far, the Fellowship has helped me structure this a lot more and think critically about how and in what shape to do this outreach.
What have you enjoyed, thus far, during your Fellowship at the eScience Center?
I really liked the moments where we got to meet other Fellows. We got to talk about our projects and were able to talk about some experiences that might help each other, which was very nice. Also, I really enjoy the meetings I’ve had with my eScience Center mentor, which have helped me develop as a research software developer a lot. In general, I think I’ve mostly gained somewhat of a broader perspective on my work and learned to “zoom out” a bit more so to say. This is definitely a useful skill that I developed.
What are some challenges that you have faced throughout your project, thus far? How have you overcome these obstacles?
Actually, the project has been going pretty smoothly so far. However, I am finding that it is not always easy to find enough time to spend on things that are not absolutely essential but still important like documentation or installation instructions. It can also be hard that this kind of work does not really result in tangible output, in my case for a PhD.
Keeping this project in mind, what do you hope to do after your Fellowship?
I hope to be able to keep supporting my software so that other researchers can benefit from it. I also think this is a good way to stay up to date with developments in a certain field.
What do you hope will change in the use of research software in your community after your Fellowship?
I think it would be great if sharing our work with others will be the norm, hopefully leading to less unnecessary work and easier collaborations.
What would you say to people who are interested in applying for future Fellowship Programmes?
The Fellowship Programme can really give you a nudge in the right direction if you are willing to also spend the time yourself. It is really valuable to have someone assigned to your project for a year who will get acquainted with your work and can give you good advice.
Do you have any links to workshops, events or outputs from your Fellowship project that you would like to share?
You can find the current version of our EEG preprocessing software package: https://github.com/yorbenlodema/EEG_preprocessing_UMCU
Please let us know if you have ideas for improving the software further!
Who are we?
The eScience Center is a research organization dedicated to applying research software to answer research questions in any scientific domain through project collaborations. It has the largest concentration of dedicated, high-level research software expertise in the Netherlands. The eScience Center also has a fellowship programme and makes all of its software and training materials openly available online. For more information about what we offer, visit esciencecenter.nl.