Hi there, David here. You might know me personally, you might know my name from conferences or papers. Or you might not know me at all. I've been around the academic data visualization community for a while.

This summer has been pretty eventful, as I moved with my family from Boston back to our home country of Czech Republic. For some reason, I have an urge to write about it.

Disclaimer: All the text in this post has been written manually by me, without any help of an LLM. At best I might have used a spell/grammar checker, but don't count on it.

I've been a postdoc at Harvard Medical School for the past three years. Started there in summer 2023, roughly a year after welcoming our first child. We've had an incredible time living in Cambridge, MA. Not knowing anything about the Greater Boston area when we moved, I've made strong friendships both with some of my coworkers, and other families with small children who moved to Cambridge around the same time.

Obviously these three years have also been challenging. It was simply not fun to be an immigrant biomedical researcher at Harvard. The academic landscape has changed significantly, and if I may say so, the academic job market in the last two cycles have been some of the worst in recent years. If you've spent your PhD working on topics around ML and AI, congratulations! For the rest of us, tough luck. We're all just scrambling, trying to figure out how we fit in this new status quo.

For me personally, the outcome of all of this, in combination with other family factors, has been that I've wrapped up my postdoc work pretty much at the 3 year mark, and moved back to my home country. I moved without any concrete plan, without a job lined up, without an apartment, still not decided where we might settle. So the main topic of this post is what that's been like.

Moving out

Clearing out our Cambridge apartment has been one of the most emotionally challenging tasks of my life. A combination of a lot of stress, nostalgia, and saying goodbyes that I wasn't ready to do yet. We've arranged it so that Gabi (my wife) and Nina (our 3yo daughter) flew back two weeks before me. I still don't know if that was a good idea. On one hand, I had time to do everything that was needed without worrying about anybody else but me. On the other hand, however, it also brought a lot of lonely moments during this two week period.

Although my move didn't align with the typical Boston moving day, it was the usual lease ending date for our Harvard-affiliated apartment complex. There were so many people moving, trying to sell stuff or get rid of them in any other way.

I tried to take many walks around our neighborhood. It was the peak of summer, absolutely one of the nicest seasons (on par only with the fall), and it made me so heart-wrenchingly sad to be leaving this place. There was also an element of suddenly feeling out of place. We've been hanging around Cambridge as a family, and suddenly half of the typical spots, like playgrounds, had no meaning for me. I was not welcome there. Even though I loved the city, I realized that what's more important are the people—your family—that you shared that place with.

I said goodbye to our friends. What hit me especially hard was seeing Nina's friend group, playing and having ice cream, just without her.

My flight back was on June 30th, the very final day of our lease.

Back to your parents house

After reuniting with my girls, I got to live out an almost quintessential millennial experience: moving in with your parents. There's something dissonant and humbling about suddenly finding yourself back at the house where you grew up. It was both the combination of being back in Czech Republic and staying at my childhood home.

There's a stark difference between how I feel in public in Cambridge versus anywhere in Czech Republic. I'm probably used to it again by now, but I remember being shocked initially when we passed people by in a park and didn't get acknowledged at all. I just love casual interactions in public. I was especially used to chatting people up when we walked with Nina.

Being in this small town also reminded me how much of a city person I still am. Even visiting Brno, a city of 400k people, felt so good. I just love hustle and being surrounded by people who're trying to accomplish things, not just survive from one day to another.

I did spent a moderate amount of running during our stay in the little home town. There's a nice bike path along a river. The annoying part is that I had to drive to it (or risk walking next to high speed traffic).

Now in Brno

When I left on the plane, I had no idea where we would end up. We knew that we'll stay at my parents' house for a bit, let them enjoy some intense time with Nina, and figure out both my job and where we would settle.

We initially aimed to move to Prague, with the hope of a more international environment, job opportunities, and a new adventure since neither of us lived there before. Because of that, however, we also had very little knowledge about Prague, while we already had a pretty good idea about the different neighborhoods in Brno. Prague is also pretty far from both of mine and Gabi's parents, meaning that even though we'll be closer, visiting Nina's grandparents would still mean driving 2.5-3 hours. So we started looking at apartments mostly in Brno.

Next to figure out was my job. Since the beginning of the year, I've been applying to various job postings, mostly in the industry. I've sent out about 20 applications, which is not that many by today's standards. Reflecting back, I should have started way earlier, and been more active in applying, especially if we would have wanted to stay in the US.

I thought for sure that this is the point in my career where I let go of research/academia, and just find a software engineer position. Ideally I wanted to work for a US company remotely. But nothing materialized.

Back in Czech Republic, I randomly came across a job posting for a research position at CEITEC in Brno. Ended up applying maybe two days before the deadline, got invited to an interview pretty much immediately, and got an offer the day after. All this was happening as we were making apartment visits. We ended up liking one just as I got this job offer. Signed the lease some time in August.

What I most remember about this time period is how chaotic and unrooted everything felt. We had no home of our own, I had no job lined up, Nina didn't have a kindergarten, our stuff was in a bunch of suitcases, and our hearts were still in Cambridge. It totally didn't feel like coming home, except that we kinda knew the place.

Even though it was stressful, it also makes me proud of how we managed to solve everything within a month or so. And to some extent, restarting your life is a helpful exercise. I can't even imagine how entitled and complacent I might be if I never experienced so much moving between countries and apartments. Now I'm just so incredibly grateful for everything: that we get to rent this very nice apartment, in a fancy part of town; that Nina has her own room that she loves and can decorate however she likes; that I can make money by reading, talking with people, and typing stuff on a computer.

During July, I still worked on a paper submission, and originally had a plan to take it easy afterward. I romanticized the idea of wrapping up things at HIDIVE, moving into a new apartment, settling in, and working on some personal projects while exploring my job options. But the reality check was brutal. As it turns out, moving countries is expensive. Double if you're not alone but have a family with a small child. Not only is it simply expensive to exist, but it bothered me to be somebody who's not working. It weighted on me heavily.

It has now been the second time when I was in a similar transition: first time I experienced that was when my PhD contract ran out before I graduated. That time, I also finished my PhD without a position lined up, and experienced similar internal pressure to find a way to be useful again.

New job

I accepted the job offer at CEITEC. I'm now a Senior Researcher at the Bioinformatics Core Facility. It's a pretty big step to the biological side, and with it comes a number of insecurities that I'm slowly learning to ignore. I've been on the intersection of software development, visualization research, and biomedical research for a couple of years by now. I might be wrong, but a certain soft skill that I've found valuable is being able to always be a beginner, be willing to learn and communicate with people with deep expertises.

The job description just hit so many marks that it made a lot of sense to me. First of all, it specifically called for somebody with a CS background, who would be able to speak the language of biomedical experts. There's a component of genomics data, something that I've been very close to during my Harvard post-doc—even if I didn't specifically work with raw sequencing data but rather genome structures—and facilitating storage, sharing, and analysis of such data. The position also called for somebody who'd be involved in coordinating multinational projects, which is something I'm really excited to do.

Second, for a core facility, there's a number of PhD students (7, with 3 finishing soon) and my role includes a fair bit of co-supervising. That's something that I haven't had much chance to do at my previous role.

Third, a big focus of this role is involving AI agents in analysis of genomics data, which are considered sensitive, personally identifiable information. As I've learned after I started, there's a nice infrastructure set up for academics in Czech Republic that allows you to play around with LLMs without having to pay for tokens for the inference APIs by the frontier labs. I get to catch up on all the agentic coding stuff that I've only registered on periphery the past 2-3 years.

Finally, I'm kind of glad that this is not a visualization position. I've always been interested in using visualization as a tool to solve problems, and when you're solving a problem, you have to reach for the best tool. But too often I've seen people (myself included) start with the goal of using a particular tool (data visualization) and searching for a problem that fits the solution.

As a consequence, I've spent way too much time trying to frame my work as a solution for some abstract task. Now I feel much more problem-rich. I'm incredibly excited about the fact that I'm now surrounded by so many interesting problems that are just waiting to be solved. And perhaps, when appropriate, I can now use my secret weapon of interactive data visualization!

After working from home a lot, it's also nice to go to the office most days. I adopted a new routine where I commute super early in the morning, and get to take some cool photos on the campus.

What now?

It's safe to say that we're still adjusting. Suddenly we're both working and Nina goes to kindergarten. With the exception of some rare work travel, we've spent almost 4 years being together every day. Now we're separated for a good chunk of the day. I'm not surprised that Nina took a while to adjust to going to kindie every day.

I'm incredibly thankful for all that we've experienced during our time in Boston/Cambridge. It just has been so good to our little family. In fact, I probably have a 'love letter to Cambridge' blogpost in me. Because of that it also hurts quite a bit. But it also makes you understand the cliches: the only constant in life is change, and what makes a home is not a specific place but rather your closest people.

People who've had a similar experience as us with living abroad will understand the situation that we're in right now: you simply don't feel like you belong anywhere, not your home country, or any other. You'll always miss some aspect of one or the other. The best I can do is to stay open to the experiences afforded by being back in Europe, and the advantages that go with it.

My last thought is about career paths. I used to look at some people's straightforward careers and wondered what made them. I'm sure there are people who are incredibly talented, driven, and hard-working and that helps. But I also now lean toward the idea that for every aspect that you can influence there's probably just as many that revolve around luck and timing. You also rarely know the internal twists and turns of what seems on the outside as a very clear path.

So the best that we can do is to never compare yourself with somebody else, embrace whatever path you're on, and have a little fun.