About

Hello and welcome to Simplifyd.

We like to keep things simple.

We started this podcast with the aim of making academic research more accessible. Our USP is that we focus on keeping our conversations simple and easy to understand so that anyone regardless of their background can comprehend and feel involved. Thus all our questions come from a näive, outsider’s perspective.

We like to talk.

A couple of interviews in we begun to realize that there was a lot to learn outside the university as well; and that we just really liked to talk. So we decided to set up a sub-series called Cool Stuff where we talk to anyone who makes us go - “Wow that’s so cool”. Enterpreneurs, creators, artists… if someone’s got something really cool to show us or tell us, we try our best to talk to them and learn about it.

We are curious.

We do not wish to be constrained by the subject specified on our diploma certificate and rather aspire to learn about everything that catches our fancy because everything is so interesting! Each interview we do makes us realize that there are so many things we did not know existed. We hope that each conversation we have on our podcast widens the listener’s horizons and perhaps provides them with the motivation to get their hands dirty in academic research or start their own ventures, or just satisfies their curiousity.

We are human.

In the conversations we have on our podcast, we try to keep things human. Our interactions with our teachers at university are mostly limited to the few hours spent in the classroom, leaving little room to go beyond the curriculum or talk at a more personal level. We try to fix that. We believe that there is more to a scientist or an enterpreneur than their work and we hope that by the end of the episode the listener feels like they have learned something new from a real person and not just another voice on the radio.
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Most academic research is hidden behind paywalls and what makes it worse is that journals charge a higher price (sometimes twice as much) if the authors wish to publish their papers with open access. However, at the same time there also exist a lot of peer-reviewed open access journals (you can find one in your field of interest in the Directory of Open Access Journals) and quite often researchers provide pre-prints of their work on Arxiv or on their personal webpages. To add to this, online social networks such as ResearchGate and Academia also promote free access to academic papers. We hope to contribute to this movement by providing a Simplifyd introduction to university research. On the technical side of things, we host our website on Github which is an open source alternative to traditional web hosting.

We believe in privacy.

There is enough snooping on the web already. So we do not use any analytics tool to monitor user behaviour or demographics. This means that the user’s browsing session on our website is completely untraced from our end. Further, we do not use social share buttons and instead rely on good old hardcoded hyperlinks. This adds a layer of privacy whereby no information from your session will be transferred to the social media website without your knowledge. Plus all our website’s code is freely hosted on Github which allows anyone to take a look and see that we aren’t doing any funny business.
Take a look at our Privacy Policy for more details.

We want you to get involved.

You can have a look at our list of upcoming interviews and send us your questions. Or if you know someone who you think we should get on our podcast, send us an email and we’ll figure it out with you.

Who are we?

Gurjot Sidhu is a masters student in physics with research interests in computational social science and data-driven modeling. He does stand-up comedy and theater, and spends most weekends cheering for Liverpool FC. He has quit the social media nonsense and now exists solely on his website as a sentient cyberbeing.

Michael Yared is a mysterious Space Photon. That’s all you need to know about him.