About

Akif Khan spent the first half of his working life chasing questions inside a laboratory, and somewhere along the way decided the far more interesting question was why so few people ever get to hear the answers. He holds a doctorate in the natural sciences and currently works as a Marie Curie Fellow in Germany, one stretch in a twenty year path that has carried him back and forth between academia and industry without ever letting him fully choose one over the other.

Writing turned into the second half of the job. He appears regularly as an Op-Ed contributor in national newspapers, and here, on his own blog, he gets to write without an editor looking over his shoulder, moving between popular science, the odd machinery of society, literature, linguistics and whichever film has recently refused to leave him alone.

He also spends time on the other side of the table, mentoring students and early career researchers on scholarships, fellowships and the career decisions nobody quite teaches in a classroom, which he does openly through topmate.io/akif. Everything else he makes lives at bio.link/akifkhan: a podcast that digs into social issues and the news of the day, and a YouTube channel of lectures on science and its philosophy, both linked in the header above.

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