CREOL Seminar - Becoming a Faculty Member

Today Dr. Mercedeh Khajavikhan gave a brief seminar to the CREOL students about her experiences with finding a job in academia. Though I'd already heard a lot of the information she presented, some points stuck out.

The following are a few notes I made during the talk. Keep in mind that they are her ideas that I've paraphrased (so if I misinterpreted them, then I'm sorry :)

• Considering that a post-doc position is a time to build your CV and publish, a post-doc offering research problems that can easily turn into publications within a year or two would be highly desirable.
• Apply to schools where there is not much overlap between your research and that of the existing faculty. This will minimize competition for valuable resources and money within your own department.
• Related to the point above, consider emphasizing how your strengths can help other faculty while applying. This will make you appear more valuable to the committee considering you for a job.
• Letters of reference are invaluable in the job search. (I need to work on building relationships with more faculty members!)

Tommorow at Frontiers in Optics

Right now I'm in Rochester, New York for this year's Frontiers in Optics conference hosted by the OSA. So far I've attended the plenary talks, which dealt with quantum optics and thermodynamics, 2D IR spectroscopy, retinal imaging, and, of course, the Higgs boson. In addition, I visited the Omega laser facility, which was incredibly fascinating. If you're in the area and you have any interest in incredibly powerful lasers or inertial confinement nuclear fusion, then I recommend making a visit.

Tomorrow I plan to visit some talks and work at the CREOL exhibition booth from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. Additionally, I'm giving a talk for a group mate who couldn't make it to the conference on Wednesday morning at 11:30 AM and my own talk on optically-controlled active media on Thursday at 3:00 PM. Briefly, the talk deals with solutions pumped by light to expand their free energy so that they may do carry out additional work. I hope the project will eventually be applied to controlling reaction kinetics in cells.

If  you're there, let me know and we can talk over coffee or a beer!

Collaborative efforts

This weekend was CREOL's annual Optics Day, an educational outreach event for students and adults of all educational levels. The purpose of Optics Day is to educate the public about the benefits of optics and photonics-based technologies and how their lives are shaped by the science that we do. In addition to the usual day-long event, the SPIE student chapter hosted a small symposium for graduate students from nearby universities, such as Florida Atlantic University and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

During the panel discussion at the symposium I asked a question of the speakers concerning collaborative research efforts. All the panelists agreed that diversity and interdisciplinary research is very important to science today, especially given that many fields have become highly specialized and esoteric towards scientists outside of the field. However, I was interested to know what all the researchers in a collaborative effort need to have in common to produce good research.

Dr. Michael Bass, from CREOL, suggested that personalities have to be compatible. This includes work ethic, vision, and the individual desires of the collaborators. Dr. Alex Vitkin, from the University of Toronto, suggested that possessing knowledge of a wide range of topics, such as that obtained from a physics education, is very important to be able to communicate with the other researchers. However, he cautioned that we can not be generalists; we must specialize in one area. Otherwise, we risk not being able to contribute to the effort.

It seems to me that in order to contribute to interdisciplinary research, I might wish to have one niche area that I can claim a specialization in.