I spent six months in 2019 in Melbourne working with Adam Morris (and others) on marmoset electrophysiology. I worked on two projects that looked at the interaction of the temporal and spatial dimensions in the processing of visual information in area V1. The resources at Monash allowed me to get data on this from animals under anesthesia as well as from awake, behaving animals. I spent much of my stay on developing novel analyses to extract stimulus-related information from these neural signals. For this, I benefited greatly from the scientific environment at Monash, in particular the weekly seminars, discussions and journal club. 

Apart from the science, what helped me a lot was that for my first couple of days I overlapped with David Engel, also from our group, who was just finishing his time in Melbourne. With him having been in the same situation a few months earlier, I was able to benefit first-hand from his experiences and got used to everything pretty quickly. But, then again, Melbourne is a very convenient city to live in. The only thing I (coming from Germany to Australia after all) underestimated was how uncomfortable winters in Melbourne can get…

– Jakob Schwenk