I initially started this blog with one goal in mind: get better at writing. Writing has never been a strong suit of mine, and I’ve always felt dread when I had to do it. For me, I tend to get in my head about these things:

Will people judge me and intelligence on my crappy writing style? This is an internal question I used to/still struggle with a lot, this idea of projecting intelligence.

Will people understand the message I am trying to get across? …

The March actually happened! We managed pulled it off 🎉, which was no small feat. Things operated at a frenetic pace from late January til the summer, supported wholly on volunteers. With respect to the DC march, we had around 50 people who really dropped pretty much everything they were doing and working on to orchestrate an event that was larger in size than we could have imagined. That same story was echoed all around the world with volunteers stepping up and organizing over 600 marches worldwide, mobilizing over a million people to stand up for Science. With much gratitude…

A year ago yesterday, Christmas Day 2016, while waiting to see Hidden Figures, I went to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and had the opportunity of seeing an exploratory exhibition on how we document, preserve, and pass on memories generationally.

As a scientist, I have always been fascinated in the way the brain stores information and how the brain retrieves it. Have you ever stop to think how many words do I know or My research looked into the mechanisms involved in reading and how we process written visual text and retrieve its meaning from our memory store…

The Mozilla Science Fellowship applications are open until May 14th! I wanted to share a few of my experiences as a Fellow so far. Also, look out #TeonMozAMA on Twitter Thursday, May 11th (tbd). I will be responding to any questions you might have about my experience and the fellowship itself.

I know that this will sound epicly cheesy and cliché but this fellowship has truly been a once in an lifetime opportunity, especially after spending a lifetime in the academy. It started in September and we were whisked away to Toronto where twelve strangers: four science fellows and eight…

Originally published at science.mozilla.org. Cross-posted with permission.

Bruno, Danielle, Kirstie and Teon, fellows of Mozilla Science Lab, are now over halfway through their Mozilla Science Fellowship so we all came together for a workweek in San Francisco in February to share skills, give and get feedback on our projects, and inspire each other with new ideas. By pure coincidence it also gave us the chance to attend OpenCon SF.

On the face of it OpenCon is a conference for early career academic professionals who are passionate about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. It runs for three days each…

This weekend is a kick-off to a lot of cool hackathons I’m involved with such as the BrainHack Global, the first-ever Docathon, and a Working Open Workshop (WOW), all related to Open Science.

For BrainHack Global, we have scientists, engineers, designers, and enthusiasts get together to work on interesting projects related to neuroscience. I am co-organizing the SF site with a great team and we had a fun kickoff celebration last night.

I thought it would be a great time to repost this blog post (a few minor updates) we did at OpenBCI a few years ago that was…

While I was writing my dissertation, I wanted to ground my research in some real-world, tangible context, mostly in response to the pointed way people often asked me: why is my research important? Or why am I interested in understanding how people read? What is the broader impact of this research?

This was initially included in the thesis but it didn’t fit the scope of the topic, so I decided to turn it into a blog post. Also, today is #WorldBookDay so it is a fitting topic.

So why is the study of reading essential? According to the United States…