Any opportunity is good to visit the Netherlands (good cheese and even better bike lanes there). The first couple of days I spent at the NCC 2026, the Nederlands Contactlens Congress, which brings back good memories from my PhD days, since this was one of the first conferences where I presented an oral talk. This year my talk was about a topic we are currently working on “A new method to characterize scleral shape: tracking the radial evolution of decentration and toricity using Fourier analysis”.
The second part of my stay I spent in Rotterdam. My PhD mate Danilo Andrade de Jesus, assistant professor at the Erasmus MC, invited me to deliver some seminars at The Rotterdam Ophthalmic Institute (R.O.I.), the scientific research institute of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital. In the first seminar, “Nonlinear careers: From dark matter to the eye”, I spoke with PhD students and early-career researchers about my career path and how I ended up moving from astrophysics to vision science. In the second one, “Corneal Biomechanics: where we are and where we are going” we discussed the current state of the field together with corneal specialists from the hospital.
It was a pleasure visiting, thanks a lot!
