Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on academic research and being demotivated

World has been struggled with COVID-19 pandemic since December 2019 and numbers of infected people are still increasing every day worldwide Since there is no cure or treatment against COVID-19 self-isolation and protection are strongly recommended 1,2 Universities all over the world suspended their academic activities and PhD students working at the laboratories have been dealing currently with the most challenging situation Academic mobbing is ganged-up behavior among co-workers characterized by repeated emotional abuse, humiliation, inaccurate accusations, harassment, and verbal abuse as thoroughly described by Khoo, 2010 and those behaviors are 'hidden' to other people except the target, thus hard to prove 5 Interestingly, targets are generally successful, intelligent, innovative, and highly motivated people with good integrity, where bullies can be described unmotivated and incompetent individuals using academic mobbing to hide their incompetence and weakness in their fields 5,6 COVID-19 pandemic may evolve behavior of the academic mobbing into a more aggressive nature because of the suspended experiments, disrupted mental health from COVID-19, pressure of successful co-workers, lack of authority, reduced numbers of witnesses to mobbing, limited and restricted laboratory organization enabling more offensive work environment Acknowledgement: The authors gratefully acknowledge the use of the services and facilities of the Koc University Research Center for Translational Medicine (KUTTAM), equally funded by the Republic of Turkey Ministry of Development Research Infrastructure Support Program