Customer success story with Michael Hussey

I’m from the Seattle, Washington area in the United States and have been a PhD student at the University of Washington for about the last three and a half years. I actually just graduated a couple of days ago. So technically I can’t be considered a student anymore. I have a degree in Epidemiology and my primary research focus has been on placental Epigenetics – it’s a very niche subject area.

How did you get to know Iris.ai Researcher Workspace?

I got connected with Iris.ai through a side job. Back in April last year I was working for a small startup in Seattle and they were interested in knowledge acquisition and the ways to do it effectively and efficiently. The company received some communication from Iris.ai and it sparked their interest. I joined some of the calls between Iris.ai and the company. And while they didn’t end up pursuing it, I decided to try it out for my studies. 

Could you tell me about a project you used Iris.ai for? 

The primary project that I was using Iris.ai for was my dissertation on placental Epigenetics. I was trying to find new and tangential references for unusual connections with long non coding RNAs. It’s a very niche topic and there’s not a lot of information on them in the way that I study them, but Iris.ai helped me find great articles. 

I had a list of the core papers and I used the references to branch out from there. I used the Explore tool to see what other relevant papers were out there. Then I picked out the relevant ones and followed up with another search. So Iris.ai helped me to be very efficient at finding all these potentially relevant articles. Additionally, using Explore and Analyze and looking at concepts and just the content in the search gave me more insight into what to look for first and what to approach in my normal searches, for example using Google Scholar.

What challenges did you experience using the Researcher Workspace?

Sometimes the articles you find are an important reference, but it’s on the edge of what you understand, and so that itself is a fun challenge. It’s just a matter of finding things that you need. Iris.ai does a good job of locating them in the first place, but then you gotta be the one to actually interpret it.

Why did you choose Iris.ai over other options?

I have not necessarily looked at all that many other options in terms of search platforms. I have seen some but they were not reasonably priced for a PhD student. I also haven’t gotten on the Chat GPT train or anything along those lines. I’m a bit more analog. I like to read my own papers. Iris.ai was interesting and very effective in what I needed to do, and it plugged in pretty well with my information infrastructure and so I haven’t really needed to go looking for something else.

Would you recommend the Researcher Workspace to other people and would you consider using it later on with your new job?

Absolutely yes – to both questions! I would certainly recommend it in terms of just how helpful it was for my PhD and I would totally recommend it to other students.