Zoltán Kócsi (Founder and Director of Bendor Research, Australia, PhD student in Neurobehavior, Australian National University)
A chance encounter in the construction of a scientific team led Zoltán Kócsi, who was engaged in the field of electronics, into the entomology laboratory.
I'm not a graduate student in the traditional sense. I've been designing electronic control systems for more than 30 years after graduating from engineering, and I thought I would do it until I retire.
An ant on top of Antarium's trackball. Antarium is a research device that Zoltán Kócsi helped design during his doctoral program.
Source: Zoltán Kócsi
My wife, Krisztina Valter, was a clinician at the Australian National University and later became a vision researcher. One year, I accompanied her to participate in a scientific research team building. I didn't understand most of what they were talking about biology, but one speaker piqued my interest. His name is Jochen Zeil, a neurobehaviorist at the Australian National University who specializes in animal behavior. In his talk, he used a model to explain why insect brains are small and compound eye resolution is low, but they can always find a route toward a target (sometimes the target is not even in sight). While he's talking about vision, he's using all the words I'm familiar with: pixels, functions, vectors, gradients. Moreover, the whole hypothesis is also very concise.
At lunchtime, my wife introduced us to each other. After a 15-minute crash course in insect vision fundamentals, Zeil and I had a long and pleasant exchange of ideas. When we parted, I jokingly said that if he was still missing a PhD student, he could consider me. A month later, I received an email from him that read, "I haven't heard from you. Have you been accepted? "At that moment, at the age of 53, I decided to start pursuing a working PhD in biology at the Australian National University.
Back to the lab
I am no stranger to PhD research: I got a master's degree in electronics from Budapest Technical University (now renamed Budapest University of Technology and Economics) in 1985, and after immigrating to Australia in 1990, I worked in a number of research institutes until 1995, when I started my own company. In the early 2000s, I co-authored two papers on a microscope image analysis program I developed for an Alzheimer's disease researcher. But when you're about to be full of gray hair, it's hard to step out of your comfort zone.
My knowledge of biology was decades old, so I had to learn it from scratch and learn it quickly. I immersed myself in hard reading and used my spare time to speed up the "undergraduate course". The whole learning process was intense, but the rest of the lab and my wife helped me a lot. After a while, I was able to keep up with the group meetings, and the papers could be understood. But the more I learned, the more I felt lonely: every paper was telling me that there was still a lot more to read. It makes me tired and discouraged, but I enjoy it: when you keep reading and thinking, at some point you suddenly realize.
The exterior of the Antarium device. Source: Zoltán Kócsi
Like most researchers and engineers, I'm fascinated by the unknown. Studying biology opened a door for me and led me into an unusually complex world. But some of the cultural differences in research also need to be slowly adapted. Suppose you repeat an engineering experiment, you'll want to get exactly the same results. But behavioral biology is not like that. Your subject has its own mind, and you can put an ant on a trackball, but you can't force it to walk on it.
In addition, products designed by commercial engineers need to meet certain standards and requirements. Your goal is to guarantee the reliability of the product and the lowest cost. You'll take every opportunity to test your ideas, but often you don't dare to take risks: failure is not accepted. In basic science, failure is acceptable — and if you're lucky, you can write about your failures.
Based on experience
I mainly study the neural basis of insect visual navigation. For example, what neurological techniques do these insects have that can help them accurately extract directional cues from low-resolution images? One difficulty in answering this question is that insects evolved to adapt to the natural environment, not the laboratory environment. You can show insects black and white stripes and they will react, but that doesn't tell you how they know where a tree is from a distance or hide a nest. Also, you can't study how the animals' behavior will change by changing the skyline at will.
One day, my mentor said during a coffee break that if we could create a virtual reality scene based on ant vision, put ants on the trajectory ball in this scene, everything would be easy, and we could project a controllable 3D simulation of the ant's natural environment. This ignited the heart of my engineer, and I thought very deeply about the problem. A few weeks later, I said to my mentor that we might be able to build this scenario, but the cost might not be low.
Our prototype, Called Anarium, cost $35,000, a one-meter-wide polyhedra full of circuits. My responsibilities include prototyping, finding parts, scheduling machining, writing control software and debugging circuits. It worked out in the end, but with some serious limitations.
When I designed this prototype, some aspects of Ant Vision had not yet been clarified, so I could only guess. According to Murphy's Law, I guessed wrong. Not only that, but budgets also limit what we can do. Still, the experiment showed that the whole concept was fine, which gave us the opportunity to apply for more funding to build an upgraded version of Antarium.
"Boosts self-confidence"
In 2020, I presented my research in Futures in Behavioral Neuroscience[3] and submitted my PhD thesis last August. The judges' opinions were positive and asked me to make minor changes. But the best part of my PhD was my oral presentation at the 4th International Invertebrate Vision Congress in Sweden in 2019: I received in-person feedback from many of the great masters in my field. I've read these people's papers and know that their research is very cutting-edge, and they actually come up to me and say that my research is very good. That really boosted my confidence.
Then again, it's not easy to study for an on-the-job Ph.D. while opening a company. I had a long time to forget what "free time" was, and my company was in financial crisis as I had to turn down clients due to reduced working hours.
Now, for me at 61, the whole process is nearing its end. I knew I wasn't going to take an academic position, and that PhD graduation itself was a stop to the experience. But I'd love to do it again. New knowledge can enrich you within, no matter how old you are. My advice: if you have the opportunity to try a new area, don't miss it.
bibliography
1. Cullen, K. M., Kócsi, Z. & Stone, J. Neurobiol. Aging 27, 1786–1796 (2006).
2. Cullen, K. M., Kócsi, Z. & Stone, J. J. Cereb. Blood Flow Metab. 25, 1656–1667 (2005).
3. Kócsi, Z., Murray, T., Dahmen, H., Narendra, A. & Zeil, J. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 14, 599374 (2020).
The original article was published in the career section of Nature on April 1, 2022 under the title of Why I got a PhD at age 61
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