Category: Writing

Call for Postdoctoral Fellows

Join the DoubleLayer hub as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Latvia!

If you are a post-doc seeking independence through training skills & gaining knowledge in a supportive environment, then this post is for you. That is an opportunity to advance your career through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) by focusing on competencies – academic writing, research methods, and supervision – essential for succeeding in academia and industry.

You need to submit just one proposal on 9 September 2026 to participate in at least three funding calls. The proposal is only 10 pages long. The first application is for the MSCA or MSCA4Ukraine postdoctoral fellowship, which provides funding for up to 24 months of research and training. To get this prestigious grant, one must gain more than 96% in the evaluation. However, passing the 85% threshold already opens the opportunity to be funded through the ERA Fellowship. Moreover, passing the 80% threshold makes you eligible to be funded by the state of Latvia. Submitting to all these 3! opportunities per 1 proposal increases your chances of fulfilling your research idea and advancing your career. These fellowships include funds for salary, mobility, research, and allowances described in the following table.

Disclaimer: The data in the table might be incorrect. CCC value is taken form 2026–2027 program. Salary is estimated using this calculator.

MSCAERA
Submission90th Sept 20269th Sept 2026
DecisionFeb 2027Feb 2027
StartMay–Dec 2027May–Dec 2027
Threshold / %9585
Linkec.europa.euec.europa.eu
Duration / M12–2412–24
Total salary / €/M5990*0.8565990*0.856
Minimum net salary / €/M27602760
Research / €/M10001000
Overhead650 €650 €
Mobility / €/M710710
Family / €/M660660
Move / €67006700
Secondment / M(optional)(optional)

Why University of Latvia?

  • Great working conditions at a new campus (house of nature) in the heart of Riga.
  • The Chemistry department is part of the Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences.
  • Attention to work–life balance, safety, and DEI.
  • Systematic support throughout the application process, such as a summer writing camp.
  • No teaching obligations for PF fellows with personal funding.
  • Regulated work-week of 40 hours from Monday to Friday only.
  • At the same time, the possibility to access research infrastructure at any time and to work from home.
  • 2 months vacation.

Why the DoubleLayer hub?

  • The DoubleLayer hub is an emerging excellence center for modeling scalable chemical processes involving the electrical double layer.
  • It has a horizontal hierarchy and focuses on process-oriented research, with an emphasis on excellence and collaboration.

Why Vladislav Ivanistsev as a mentor?

  • An active tenure prof. with main task of establishing a research group, i.e. minimum teaching load and time for supervision.
  • A chair of the Baltic State’s MSCA alumni association.
  • Research experience related to the electrical double layer, see list of publications.
  • Experience in supervising dozens of postdocs and BSc–PhD students as well as mentoring over 100 members of the Estonian national team at the international Chemistry Olympiad.
  • Experience in obtaining MSCA PF, national and EU grants.
  • Personal support during the application process.
  • In the 2024 MSCA call, I consulted for 5 applicants: 3 received the MSCA PF, and 2 received the Seal of Excellence. In 2025, I consulted 8 applicants: 3 received ERA PF (one eventually got MSCA), and 2 received the seal of excellence.

Further details

To be considered for the opportunity, you will undergo a pre-selection process based on your CV, project idea, and motivation letter. There are three main eligibility requirements:

  • You must hold a PhD and up to 8 years of full-time research experience by the time of the application. Check the eligibility calculator.
  • Applicants of any nationality are welcome, but they must not have lived or worked in Latvia for more than 12 months during the 3 years leading up to the closing date of the call on 10 September 2025.
  • Applicants must choose the Chemistry Department at the University of Latvia as their host institution.

For any other further questions, please contact vladislav.ivanistsev@doublelayer.eu. Prefix your email subject title with “DoubleLayer hub:”

List of banned tells for GPT

1) Just watched Andy Stapleton youtube-video about echo technique for working with chatGPT. After that I have made my list of banned tells for GPT. Here it is.

You must not use these words and phrases: Vibrant, Bustling, Vital, Out of the box, Underscores, Dive into, Reverberate, Delve, Hustle and bustle, Foster, Labyrinthine, Moist, Remnant, Nestled, Game changer, Symphony, Gossamer, Enigma, A testament to, Indelible, Meticulous, Meticulously, Navigating, Complexities, Realm, Tailored, Underpins, Everchanging, Ever-evolving, Not only, Embark, Designed to enhance, It is advisable, Daunting,  In the realm of, Unlock the secrets, Unveil the secrets, Diving, Unleash, Harness, Tapestry, Take a dive into, Leverage, Metropolis, Unless, Arguably, To put it simply, Promptly, In today's digital era. Avoid analogies and ambiguity in wording. Avoid using gerunds, mdash, and other ways of extending sentences; instead split a sentence and consider removing the unnecessary second part. Avoid words that non-native speakers may not understand. Avoid jargon, but do keep all my terms – do not substitute technical terms with analogies. Avoid comparative adjectives and remove adjectives that do not shape the meaning. 

2) Previously I also used this prompt for working with LaTeX codes, but now I simply use texGPT in overleaf for quick drafting.
Start every sentence on a new line. Add line breaks after every 60 characters to make the text easier to read, but do not add these breaks within commented text. Preserve all original comments exactly as written, and do not delete anything unless explicitly instructed.

3) When working within a project, I define instructions like this:

Prohibited words and phrases: You must not use these words and phrases: Vibrant, Bustling, Vital, Out of the box, Underscores, Dive into, Reverberate, Delve, Hustle and bustle, Foster, Labyrinthine, Moist, Remnant, Nestled, Game changer, Symphony, Gossamer, Enigma, A testament to, Indelible, Meticulous, Meticulously, Navigating, Complexities, Realm, Tailored, Underpins, Everchanging, Ever-evolving, Not only, Embark, Designed to enhance, It is advisable, Daunting,  In the realm of, Unlock the secrets, Unveil the secrets, Diving, Unleash, Harness, Tapestry, Take a dive into, Leverage, Metropolis, Unless, Arguably, To put it simply, Promptly, In today's digital era. Avoid analogies and ambiguity in wording. Avoid using gerunds, mdash, and other ways of extending sentences; instead split a sentence and consider removing the unnecessary second part. Avoid words that non-native speakers may not understand. Avoid jargon, but do keep all my terms – do not substitute technical terms with analogies. Avoid comparative adjectives and remove adjectives that do not shape the meaning. 
You must avoid using "potential" in the sense of showing the capacity to develop into something in the future, because "electric potential" is a physical quantity. you must avoid "framework" in the sense of a basic structure underlying a computations, because "organic framework" is a term in material science.  You must avoid using "capacity" and "capacitance" in sense of ability to do something, because similar terms are used in electrochemistry. You must avoid using "generation" in sense of production.

Zotero + chatGPT via pdfGEAR

Some time ago (in 2023), I linked Zotero with chatGPT by creating an environment with paper-qa and pyzotero like this:
conda create -n Zotero
conda activate Zotero
conda install pip
pip install paper-qa
pip install pyzotero
pip install bs4

That worked but felt way too complicated … like I am not going to use it on a daily basis. It also reminded me the very first experience with the Meta AI in late 2022 (which everyone already forgot).

Here is a much simpler recipe:

  1. Install Zotero add-on from github.com/retorquere/zotero-open-pdf to enable opening with external pdf viewers.
  2. Install pdfGEAR as your default pdf viewer (external to Zotero).

See how it works on my YouTube channel: youtu.be/4JSy2RsBLDE?si=Hbj7oq7gaOiq6END

Writing workshop

Thesis writing and, in general, academic writing is a skill. Not everyone has that skill, but certainly most can get it. To develop an understanding of the behaviours associated with successful writing, we organized a workshop with the help of AVOK – Centre for Academic Writing and Communication. Under the supervision of Djuddah A. J. Leijen, we started this four-hour workshop with Q&A followed by sessions about time management, in particular how to avoid procrastination, and, of course, grammar.

Continue reading “Writing workshop” →