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Almost a year ago I started collaborating with the Compiler Research group through the Google Summer of Code programme. What I expected to be a technical collaboration quickly turned into a real cross-disciplinary adventure. This time I found myself advising not only on programming and mechanistic models, but also on the biology behind the system — a beautiful reminder that the most interesting scientific problems rarely belong to just one field. Together we built CARTopiaX, a platform that combines my agent-based model with BioDynaMo to explore biological questions, with the long-term hope that this kind of work might one day help guide therapies all the way to the patient. It was one of those projects where physics, computation and biology kept talking to each other until something meaningful started to emerge. They kindly invited me to write a blog post about something I care deeply about: the importance of cross-disciplinary research. The piece was published on their website, but I wanted to share it here as well for those of you who wander through this corner of the internet with me. Writing it was a real pleasure. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting those thoughts into words. 
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Hi there, I'm finally back. After a few months of silence, I’m ready to talk about why I disappeared—and what I’ve learned about burnout along the way. This post isn’t just about stress or exhaustion; it’s about the small, quiet signs that show up before things fall apart. The ones we often ignore. With help from therapy, my brilliant mentor Julia, and some painful trial and error, I’ve started learning how to spot those early warnings—and how to protect the space where creativity, clarity and joy can actually survive. If you’ve been feeling a little off lately, maybe this post is for you.  I had the pleasure of being invited by the Institute of Genetics and Cancer in Edinburgh to write for Ada Lovelace Day. The post can be found here, but I thought about sharing it here as well. Coming from a computational background, Ada is a huge inspiration to me—she taught me to pair imagination with method, and to fight for the time and space ideas need. In this piece I talk about the conditions that make creativity possible—and how often they’re withheld, especially from women—and share practical ways to open up space and time for each other. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I loved writing it. If it resonates, get in touch—I’m always up for this conversation.  Being cross-disciplinary is a gift but it can also trigger a deep identity crisis. Am I a physicist? A biologist? An image analyst? An expert… in what, exactly? Here I dive into what I think it really means to be an expert when you work between fields, and how I’ve learned to stop apologising for it. If you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite fit, this one’s for you.  Hi there. I’m back. I’ve been trying to write this piece for almost two months now. I’ve started and deleted and started again so many times. I knew what I wanted to say. The truth was never the hard part—what was hard was allowing myself to say it. Every time I sat down to write, I felt the sting of old wounds rise up again. I had to stop, breathe, cry, walk away. Because remembering isn’t neutral—it hurts. Revisiting the things I’ve been through was like touching bruises I thought had faded. But today, I’ve decided: enough. I’m letting it go. I’m telling the story—not because it’s easy, but because it matters. It’s time to speak.  I could start this by listing my credentials, my achievements, the institutions I’ve worked at, the awards, the papers—all the usual stuff people parade around to prove they’re worth listening to. But honestly? That’s not what I want this space to be about. So let’s start again. Hi, I’m Lu.  |
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