I’m about to set off to Boston for the APS March Meeting 2019 (March 4-8). I’ll be presenting my newest work on using infinite boundary conditions are current reservoirs for measuring steady-state currents in quantum wires using tensor network methods. My talk is at Wednesday 6 March at 8:48am in room 156C. If you want to chat with me at the March Meeting drop me a line.
After the March Meeting I’ll be visiting the Sandvik group at Boston University 11-20 March. I’m really looking forward to seeing all my old friends and colleagues at BU.
Established just three years ago, FECS is is dedicated to helping APS meet the unique needs of early career scientists (i.e. postdocs). Early career scientists face a number of unique challenges. They often move great distances, isolating themselves from their support networks. They have neither the protection of tenure nor the comradeship of classmates, and they often occupy temporary positions with low pay, meager benefits, and few labor protections. They must balance the pressure to publish with the constant search for their next position. All of these factors put them at an elevated risk for exploitation and harassment, the worst of which often falls upon women and minorities.
I am looking forward to working to make life better for early career scientists like myself. I want to focus especially on the problems faced by underrepresented minorities as well as mental health. In addition to my own ideas, I want to hear from you, my friends and colleagues, about issues that are facing early career scientists and ideas for how FECS might be able to address them. Please contact me or comment below with your thoughts and suggestions.
If you’re an APS member who is interested in joining FECS, you can do so for free by logging into your account on aps.org. You can also join the FECS Facebook group, even if you’re not an APS member.
If you have three minutes every month to devote to keeping up with science policy, I highly recommend subscribing to APS’s Signal Boost. Signal Boost is a monthly video update about key developments in science policy. Among other things, they provide critical information on the budgeting process for science funding in the House and Senate along with how to contact your elected officials about each issue. Scientists are a small group, so we need to speak up to be heard.
This month: appropriations and a bill to fight harassment in STEM:
I’ll be attending the March Meeting in Los Angeles presenting the latest findings in my work field-induced metamagnetism and Bose-Einstein condensation of spinons (S=1/2 bosons) in the J-Q model. This work is a collaboration with my PhD advisor, Anders Sandvik, as well as Harley Scammell and Oleg Sushkov.
