In this talk, I will give a very personal view on how one finds a research topic to work on short-medium-long term.

Alexandra Silva is a theoretical computer scientist whose main research focuses on semantics of programming languages and modular development of algorithms for computational models. A lot of her work uses the unifying perspective offered by coalgebra, a mathematical framework established in the last decades. Alexandra is currently a Professor at Cornell University, and she was previously a Professor of Algebra, Semantics, and Computation at University College London. Previously, she was an assistant professor in Nijmegen and a post-doc at Cornell University, with Prof. Dexter Kozen, and a PhD student at the Dutch national research center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), under the supervision of Prof. Jan Rutten and Dr. Marcello Bonsangue. She was the recipient of an ERC Consolidator in 2020, the Royal Society Wolfson Award 2019, Needham Award 2018, the Presburger Award 2017, the Leverhulme prize 2016, and an ERC starting Grant in 2015.