An ant stands on top of a trackball in the Antarium, which Zoltán Kócsi helped to design in his PhD programme.Credit: Zoltán Kócsi
I am not a typical graduate student. An engineer by training, I have designed electronic control systems for more than 30 years, and I had expected to do so until I retired.
My wife, Krisztina Valter, is a clinician-turned-vision scientist at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. One year, I accompanied her to a scientific retreat. Most of the biology flew over my head, but one speaker captured my interest. Jochen Zeil, a neuroethologist at the ANU who studies animal behaviour, presented a model of how insects could work out a route to a target (which might not even be directly visible) despite having small brains and low-resolution compound eyes. Although he was talking about vision, he was speaking my language: pixels, functions, vectors, gradients. It was a neat hypothesis, too.
At lunchtime, my wife introduced us — and, after a 15-minute crash course on the fundamentals of insect vision, Zeil and I had a long and very enjoyable discussion about his idea. When we parted, I joked that if he wanted another PhD student, he could count me in. About a month later he e-mailed me: “Haven’t heard from you. Have you enrolled yet?” And that’s how, at the age of 53, I became a part-time doctoral student in biology at the ANU.
Back to the lab
It was not my first foray into postgraduate research: in 1985, I received a master’s degree in electronics at the Technical University of Budapest, now called the Budapest University of Technology and Economics — and, after emigrating to Australia in 1990, I worked for several research institutions before starting up my own company in 1995. In the early 2000s, I co-authored two papers1,2 about work that I had done on a microscopy image-analysis program for an Alzheimer’s disease researcher. But when you sport a silver mane, it gets harder to move out of your comfort zone.
My background in biology was decades out of date, so I needed to learn the basics, fast. Diving into textbooks, I went through an expedited ‘undergraduate course’ in my spare time. It was intense, but between other laboratory members and my wife, I had a lot of help. After a while, lab meetings made sense, and I could follow the papers I read. But the more I learnt, the more I realized how little I knew: every paper triggered the need to read more. It was tiring, and at times frustrating, but fun: you read, and read, and think, and suddenly things fall into place.
The outside of the Antarium.Credit: Zoltán Kócsi
Like most scientists and engineers, I’m fascinated by the unknown. Studying biology opened the door to a world with incredible complexity. But the cultural differences took some getting used to. If you repeat an engineering
