Axel Masó completed his PhD in physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, studying stochastic processes with resets, mathematical models that describe random movements that repeatedly return to a starting point. “The inspiration was the movement of birds around a nest,” he explains, “a stochastic movement around a point, but with a return always to the same point.”
The week he defended his dissertation, he started working at the CRM Knowledge Transfer Unit. “I went from being in one very specific project for four years to being in three or four projects over two years, very diverse ones within the transfer unit,” Axel recalls. The shift was drastic: from the extended timeline of doctoral work to shorter research cycles, from a single theoretical question to multiple problems requiring tailored mathematical solutions.
“Looking back now, those two years feel like an entire training period,” he reflects. Even in his final months, starting yet another new project, the learning curve remained steep. The work fulfilled something his doctoral research hadn’t. “I had the birds in mind, but I was making my models thinking someone else would use them,” he says. “In contrast, at the KTU, I felt there was much more accountability; we were making models that were already grounded in very concrete situations. That gave me a lot of enthusiasm and really motivated me to work on something like that.”
“I don’t just need to do research, I need the research to matter. Doing research is a way to impact things I care about.”
The position required expanding his mathematical toolkit and working with diverse collaborators. Each project demanded not only different mathematical approaches but also different ways of communicating them, from private investors without scientific training to research centres requiring statistical or mathematical tools for specific projects. The challenge wasn’t merely technical; it was about translation. “Mathematics is probably the most rigorous thing humans have created,” Axel observes. “So, stepping outside that rigour to explain something, it’s an exercise.”
He describes a tension familiar to many researchers: mathematical work values complexity and precision, but external partners need clarity and utility. “When you’re doing it for yourself, you appreciate the difficulty, you explore all the complexity it has,” he explains. “But when you have to explain it to the people who will use it, you have to bring it down without it losing its value.”
After two years, he left CRM. Took a gap year. During that pause, something crystallised. “I’ve always had a very academic profile,” he says, “and I feel there’s a kind of wave or narrative around academic profiles that you’re wasting your time if you stay in academia because companies value you much more, you’ll have a much more stable, much calmer life, and here things go from two years to two years.” The thinking was compelling, and he considered opportunities outside academia. But after the break, “I feel I want to do what I want to do, which is research on something that motivates me.”
Return to CRM: The Neuromunt Project
Now he’s back at CRM as a postdoctoral researcher on the Neuromunt project, joining the Mathematical Biology research group in a shared position with the Knowledge Transfer Unit. Neuromunt is a three-year interdisciplinary initiative studying physiological responses to mountain risks. The project brings together mountain guides, rescue teams, university researchers, and sports science specialists. Partners include the Institut Nacional d’Educació Física de Catalunya, universities in Perpignan and Toulouse, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and CRM.
Field expeditions will collect electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram data from subjects facing winter mountain conditions. Axel’s work, working with the rest of the research team, centres on analysing these physiological signals. “We’ll try to study these electroencephalograms, for example, to see if there are signals of the risks that occur in the mountains in the reaction or activation of the brain,” he explains. The research connects directly to the mountain guides and rescue teams who will be among the study subjects. “The research results will have almost immediate impact because they themselves will be the subjects.”
The project also includes training programs for mountain guides, professional athletes, and rescue teams like GRAE (Grup d’Actuacions Especials dels Bombers), with mountain safety as a central focus. “It’s a very good project because of the diversity of people involved, from the most scientific part of research to people who are really in the mountains every day earning their living or facing these risks,” Axel says.
The move to Neuromunt represents a shift in research timeline and focus. “I don’t think I just need to do research, I need the research to have meaning,” Axel says. “I feel that doing research is a way to impact things that matter to me.” His time at the Knowledge Transfer Unit shaped this perspective. Working with different types of stakeholders reinforced that impact matters as much as methodology. “What I needed now was for the impact to interest me, not just that the research generates impact, but that I care about the impact.”
After experiencing different research contexts, from theoretical physics to applied mathematics with external partners, Axel has chosen to focus on a single project. “One thing that working at the transfer unit and all that diversity of projects made me realise is that I needed to return to a single project that really motivated me,” he says. “More than several projects that motivate me quite a bit.” When the Neuromunt position appeared, “I felt there would be nothing that would motivate me more than this right now.”
Like the stochastic processes he studied during his PhD, Axel has returned to his starting point. But the path matters. The bird doesn’t circle back to the nest unchanged. The detour through diverse projects, external partners, and that deliberate pause reshaped what he was looking for in research. He’s back at CRM, but with a clearer sense of what makes the work meaningful: not just the mathematics, but the impact it creates and whether that impact matters to him.
Sometimes you need to leave to understand why you came back.
