HyperScience

Where my students go:

Sometimes I’m asked by prospective students where previous PhD students have ended up. This can be difficult to answer, and ex-students and ex-postdocs move from place to place, particularly in the early part of their career. Some of the first jobs that my PhD students (those I have been primary supervisor for) have landed are:

  • Researcher at ISL Saint Louis in France (Robert Hruschka, 2012)
  • Postdoc at the University of Queensland and Rocket Labs (Stefan Brieschenk, 2014)
  • Postdoc in laser diagnostics and hypersonics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, followed by another postdoc on clean combustion diagnostics at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Yedhu Krishna, 2016)
  • Engineer at SpaceX (Tremayne Kaseman, 2017)
  • Postdoc funded through Australian Academy of Science and Japan Society for Promotion of Science in Japan, working on hypersonic experiments (Rounak Manoharan, 2017)
  • Postdoc in hypersonics research at Oxford University (Laurent Le Page, 2019)
  • Postdoc in photoacoustic spectroscopy for biomedical applications at a Chinese Research Institute (Rongkang Gao, 2018)

So it seems that most students have gone on to do science/engineering research and at good institutions. I’m proud of what they all have achieved both during and after their PhDs.

Research notes

One of the problems I have been engaged with for many years now is the idea of how to keep a consistent record of my research that I can come back to years later and pick up where I left off.

Having thought a lot about this, I have some important criteria for such a record.  Lab notes must be

  1. Future-proof (not dependent on proprietary software);
  2. Based fundamentally on ASCII text;
  3. Flexible enough to cope with a variety of experiment structures (one-off experiments, repetitive experiments, numerical experiments etc);
  4. Easy to input and maintain;
  5. Able to time-stamp the state of an experiment at the time it was performed;
  6. Able to incorporate the source code used to analyse the data;
  7. Able to facilitate collaboration with my group members and external colleagues;
  8. Easy to transform into outputs like papers and presentations;

I have tried many different notetaking systems to achieve this, including commercial systems like LabArchives, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft SharePoint, My own TikiWiki webpage, Zim desktop wiki, Tiddlywiki and others I have forgotten, but none of them could give me what I need according to the above 8 points.  I believe I now have a system that works the way I need it to for lab notes, though I know it is not for everyone: emacs org-mode.  I hope to write up a little more about org-mode in the future, and why I think it’s a great way to produce consistently high-quality, self-documenting research outputs.

New Year, New Blog Entry

I have set up this new blog to share some of the results our research group has achieved, and to share some thoughts on research more generally.