Computer Vision News - January 2017

the sense that you don’t stop thinking when you get home vs. the 9-5 job where you leave your keyboard and enjoy your private life. You still have things in the back of your mind. I think many people in other jobs have this now as well. Is it because of your duties or because of your passion that your job stays on your mind? I think it’s because of our passion that we often take on more than we can chew. Our passion leads us to accept more students than we have the capacity to supervise, which adds hours to the day. Do you ever think of stepping back and making it easier for yourself? [ laughs ] Well, there is a fantastic thing called a sabbatical . I’ve done that once, and I think it was probably one of the best things I have done. After 6 years at Oxford, I took the foot off of the gas and went on sabbatical. I was not doing any teaching or any exams. I was not on any committee, and I was not expected to attend any faculty committees. All of a sudden, I had all of this time. I could supervise my students still, and I was visiting labs. That year I went to Japan for one month, and I was a visiting professor at a lab there just to do something new. I also didn’t take on as many reviews anymore. After that, you are not immediately put on all of these committees again. I still had this sort of honeymoon period. They had forgotten about me for a bit, but after about a year or so they remembered that I was there. This opportunity is one of the most important things we have in academia. I’d love to see that in industry too, actually. What would you like to achieve in your career overall? That’s an interesting question, but I can’t look beyond next week in terms of what I am doing. These are quite busy times right now. One thing is that I became more interested in is to promote more women scientists. I’m not such an active driver, but it’s something I would like to see more. In biomedical engineering and medical imaging, it’s actually quite good. I think half of our students and half of our postdocs are female. There is a very good gender balance there, but they don’t go into academia that much. If they enter academia, they don’t become very senior that easily. There is still some work to do. That is something I want to take on as part of the MICCAI society which I think is important 1 . Also, I would like to see that one of the methodologies that I have developed is used in the clinic and makes a difference. Do you have a candidate for that? I have done a lot of motion correction using image registration where we have been looking at more plausible deformation modeling. For example, sliding motion when you breathe: your lung is actually sliding against the pleura. It’s really hard to model if you 1 Julia has just been elected to become MICCAI board member from February 2017 and will be MICCAI18 program chair . Computer Vision News Women in Computer Vision 23 Women in Science