A trip to Chicago

As I've mentioned a few times before, Chicago is very high on my list of preferred postdoc destinations. I didn't get around to submitting an application until quite recently, but it has had more success than any of my other applications.

Specifically, Tom, the professor I applied to, mentioned that he (and the soft matter theory group, which is very collaborative) would be interested in having me, but they don't have funding for a new theory postdoc at the moment. So we decided that we would work together to apply for a fellowship for me.

I was expecting that I would need to write the complete application and he might give me a few comments, but no: he organised and paid for a trip for me to Chicago to meet people, tell them about my research and hear about theirs, and start writing the application together.

Max, Ray, Tingtao and Ognjen helped me prepare my talk, and I headed west on Sunday afternoon. I called Tom from the taxi on my way to my hotel, and he told me that another postdoc (in addition to the one postdoc and several professors I was already scheduled to meet) had seen my poster and was interested in a meeting. So we scheduled that for late Sunday afternoon, and I had just over an hour between arriving and that first meeting. I took the time to visit the Catholic chapel on campus, where I said a prayer for Lisa and Phil, who were undergraduates at Chicago and I guess probably met at this chapel or an associated event. I then walked through campus and by the Midway to Jackson Park, where I enjoyed the fresh air and open space.

My meeting with Irmgard (the aforementioned postdoc) was very interesting. She had an interesting result in her experimental study of polymers that had been confusing her. I think we were able to come up with a plausible explanation, and I hope that I'll be able to put together a computational model to describe what is going on. If I have time amongst all my other commitments!

It was then dinner time, with Tom, Efi and Wynton. We enjoyed sushi and chatting about life in Chicago, our respective home countries (in their cases US, Israel and NZ), and Jacobi theta functions.

The next morning began with a meeting with Ivo, a postdoc doing granular material experiments. It is nice to see physics experiments being done at relatively human time and length scales, though the lab was still a little daunting to this theorist!

It was then writing time. In fact Tom did all of the writing on that day, while I had a little search around the internet for details of Australians doing granular physics, for potential inclusions in our references.

After lunch, it was time for my talk. Matt, a recent MIT PhD graduate now a postdoc in biology at Chicago, very kindly came by to wish me luck (he had seen posters advertising my talk), though he couldn't stay for the talk itself. There was, though, a pretty good crowd: I'm guessing the audience was pretty similar to the set of those people in the physics department who would describe themselves as soft matter physicists (I titled my talk "Hard Soft Matter", which I think is an accurate description of cement).

I then went in turn to three other professors' offices to learn about their research (and their personalities). It was good to hear about their research, and excellent to get a feeling of what it would be like to work in the soft matter group in Chicago. It seems like a very friendly, collaborative group with an approach to solving problems that would suit me very well.

I then had dinner with Tom, Sid and Ed. It was good to have another chance to chat more about life than science (though there was some science mixed in there). There seems to be a uniform enthusiasm about Chicago as a pleasant place to live.

Tom went back to work that evening but I did not (I worked on the application today, after he sent me the first draft). All in all, my trip involved less work and more eating than my usual days!

I caught up with Matt for breakfast yesterday morning: he is always on campus early and we met after he set up one of his experiments. We chatted a bit about what it's like to live in Chicago (it must sound like my conversations would have been repetitive and boring, but it's an important thing to know, and different people talk about different aspects of life there), and updated each other on news of friends from the MIT Catholic community. He showed me around campus a little bit. There is much more, and more conscious, open space: any open space at MIT seems to be just because we haven't got around to building there yet. Chicago is designed to be a bit more beautiful, in its Gothic way.

I spent most of Tuesday travelling: the flights weren't long, but add transport to and from airports and layover time and it was almost 5 pm by the time I arrived home. I did still have time to do some shopping before joining Godine, Chacha and Teresa for Stations of the Cross.