Jennifer Fowlie
@jennifer_fowlie
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Condensed matter physicist, materials girl. *Assoc. Scientist @SLAClab + @stanford *Asst. Prof. @NorthwesternU MSE 🏴➡️🇨🇭➡️🇺🇲
Palo Alto
Joined August 2020
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Apologies to the astrophysics student I met at a party years ago. When you were telling me how many hours a day you were using 4chan and how much you love it, I gave you a funny look and walked away. Now, a decade later, I realise you were talking about Fortran.
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They say dress for the job you want so today I dressed like a tenured professor of physics
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My University is hiring postdoc fellows in the field of quantum *whatever*. At least they're honest about it!
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Fun physics fact of the day:
Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is one of the most in-demand materials for solid state research but there's basically no market for commercial crystals because one group in Japan makes high quality hBN that they send around the world for free.
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Behind every successful experimentalist there's a theorist patiently explaining how physics works
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Academics: you can't do your PhD in the same place as your undergrad, that's bad
Also academics: *trying desperately to recruit the best undergrads from their school into their group for a PhD*
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What?! No but I have a synchrotron beamtime coming up 😭😭😭
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Me to my boss: I'm interested to learn how to write grant proposals.
My boss, eyes lighting up: You're going to wish you hadn't said that.
Long story short, I'm writing part of a grant proposal.
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Amazingly this is my first official SSRL beamtime and my first ever where I can go home and sleep in my own bed and cook my own food. I sort of miss the full beamtime experience of noisy guesthouses and surviving from vending machines. Good night/morning 😴
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Where would condensed matter physics be without high energy physics and astronomy to hook high school students into undergraduate degrees just for them to realise they don't want to spend their lives doing high volume data analysis and turn to our side instead!
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My favourite part of introducing people to Raman spectroscopy is when we have a random spike and I get to tell them "yep, that's a cosmic ray from outer space". It's pretty exciting for a materials physicist.
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Second day of a tenure-track interview with all the candidates present. It's been pretty fun to meet them actually, it turns out we have a lot in common
like we all want the same job lolll
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Sometimes I'll read a sentence in a paper like "emergent magnetic monopoles manifest as hedgehog singularities joined by Dirac strings" and for a moment question if any of our field of physics is even real
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After 9 years I've been invited back 'home' to give a seminar tomorrow.
Any advice for speaking in front of the same people who used to grade my undergrad exams?
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What do you mean students these days aren't learning semiconductor physics from Britney Spears
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In my field of physics there's a Nobel Prize winner who believes in parapsychology. He's basically the reason I don't put any faith in awards or accolades of any kind.
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If I've seen you within the last 4 months or so then this will not be news to you.
But for anyone who doesn't already know, I get to start my own group as an assistant professor in materials science & engineering
@NorthwesternEng
!
[oscars acceptance speech follows...]
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1/4 My first paper from my postdoc is published today in
@NaturePhysics
!! 🥳
A year ago today I was frantically making samples, doesn't time fly!
Collaboration by
@Stanford
@SLAClab
@psich_en
and
@unige_en
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Room temperature superconductivity is here 🙌
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One of my tangential takeaways on this LK-99 SC claim is that the general public seems oddly pumped about how "easy" the 4-day, multi-step, small batch, solid state synthesis is. Some of you haven't had blisters from overusing your pestle and it shows.
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Telling people I make films and do modelling as a job and then seeing their disappointment when I elaborate ✌️
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This is a poor take when there are super polished papers in fancy journals with less credibility than this work.
I don't think you have to be a physicist to see that the new "room-temperature superconductor" preprint looks dodgy as hell.
Poorly-written and formatted, typos, ridiculously overblown language like in the screenshot below.
This is not a serious study. Sorry!
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At a postdoc social.
Physics postdoc: I'm working on the electron-phonon problem.
Engineering postdoc, suddenly panicked: wait, there's an electron-phonon problem?!
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Anderson once wrote a set of articles on spin glasses for
@PhysicsToday
and the titles make it look like a seven part epic fantasy series. I particularly like the ominous tone of part III.
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Why do professors post print-outs of their papers on their office doors? Stick them up in the bathroom stalls I say, that's going to get a much higher casual readership.
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Every year at around this time I remember the well-known physics professor (condensed matter, because of course) who told a prospective postdoc "the only thing I care about now is getting my Nobel prize" and I hope that this person never receives a Nobel prize.
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I have recently been accused of being a "physics influencer".
Awesome. I'm using my new found influencing power to get you all to stop using upper case M in moiré like it's a person's name.
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True story, in undergrad I loved Lagrangian dynamics so much it made me think for a fleeting second that I might want to be a theorist. So I 100% relate to this.
had to christen the whiteboard with the best equation in physics
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(1/3)One of the goals I set myself for 2022 was to learn how to make passable computer graphics. It turned out to be quite fun and my highlight after ~2 days of learning and practising was producing this image to go with the press for my
@NaturePhysics
paper in August.
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During my travels this autumn I met a cool PI and we chatted a bit. Now there's a new postdoc in our department who did his PhD in this PI's group. Apparently his advisor told him to look out for a "nice postdoc from Hwang lab" Guys, it's me, I'm the nice postdoc from Hwang lab!
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Is there a University that's nicer to run at than this one? It's big, well-lit, paved, scenic, we have a 100m ascent hill and now (for the moment anyway) we even have a lake.
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Postdoc life hack no.24: choose a paper for your journal club for which you were the reviewer. Divides your work by two.
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Did a practice talk for a seminar a little while ago and the main feedback from my test audience was
1. Drop most of the jokes and
2. Drop all of the group theory
I don't know which I was more sad about.
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Lollll the guy in the grocery store trying to buy beer and his ID is his access card from SLAC national lab and he's like "it's government issued!"
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A huge chunk of the procedures in experimental physics is managing vacuum systems.
(Also answering the question "why do you need a laminator in your future lab?")
Behold my vacuum system cheat sheet
pdf here:
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I like Ohm's law because in a standard Physics education it's one of the first laws we learn but one of the last ones we learn to derive
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👏 New pre-print! 👏
(1/4) We found that the new superconducting nickelates are intrinsically magnetic. This magnetism is based on the nickel sublattice, coexists with superconductivity and is antiferromagnetic and glassy in nature.
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- This month I have my first interviews for tenure-track positions! 😁
- They're online in European time zones 😑
- So that's why I just got up at 5am on a weekend. Acclimatising. 😎
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I hope everyone has a lovely weekend.
My current vibe is ~suppressing excitement for multiple developments that I can't talk about yet~
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(1/2) Stanford Applied Physics famously has the "KGB" (Kapitulnik, Geballe and Beasley) group. A research group with, semi-formally, three PIs. As someone who wants to lead a group one day I'm wondering why we don't do things like this more often?
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In case it's not clear I make nanometric oxide films and I do mathematical modelling.
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thrilled to announce that after only one year at stanford I have been added to my department's emailing list
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Learning how to use a piece of equipment in everyday life:
step 1, learn how to turn it off and on
Learning how to use a piece of equipment in a physics lab:
absolutely never turn it off and, if it's off, don't you dare think about turning it on again
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Today is my last ever day of being a postdoc so it seems fitting that my final task is something really weird that I neither have the skillset for nor get paid to do:
Organising and hosting a (python-generated) game of bingo for our department spring social this evening
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I don't know how everyone is making those nice mini posters (an email I haven't read??? ) but anyway I don't need to know.
Come and see my talk!
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Oh you want topological materials? Sure, all my materials are topological. Topologically trivial.
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When the grad student you're mentoring introduces you to their classmate like "this is my postdoc"
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I saw a talk where someone claimed that a pebble has the same topology as a cow (side note: in Switzerland people always bring cows into it)
I had to excuse myself from the room because I couldn't trust myself not to raise my hand and ask about the cow mouth-anus hole
Topologists and topology-adjacent physicists: the time as come. You need another analogy besides the coffee cup/donut thing.
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Obligatory aerial photo of
@psich_en
when landing in Zurich yesterday.
Exactly a decade ago I was down there as an undergrad intern doing my very first condensed matter physics experiments. This week I'm an invited speaker at their annual Condensed Matter Summer Camp.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a thin film grower in possession of good samples, must be in want of an optics collaborator
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Are you even an experimentalist if there's not a photo of you somewhere online pretending to do some lab process?
In my field it's the infamous careful manipulation of a transfer arm with nothing on the end.
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If it's useful for anyone I've written down the questions I can recall getting at tenure-track interviews and put it on a new page on my website:
Materials Science/Physics in the US and various European countries.
I'll update it if I remember more 😅
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There are things happening in my future lab!
I'm trying to record the development progress on my website
Grateful to
@Teriwri41969022
for doing the hard work here in leading the project and for keeping me up to date with photographs 🙏
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Feels like I'm holding hands with every other previous user. I call it a Lovebox.
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Little known fact: Neolithic people used the position of the sun with respect to their pulsed laser deposition chambers as a rudimentary calendar.
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On my third trip to New Mexico in the span of 5 months. So this is roughly my 10th Chile relleno with sopaipilla in 5 months.
NM is probably my favorite state that I've been to so far. Food is a large part of that assessment. Recommended.
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New academic year means new headshot. I know how jarring it is when someone you follow changes their profile photo on twitter so I'm going to ease you all into it over the next few days.
And, yes, before you ask, I was indeed a fan of Animorphs books as a child.
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I really love my research. I had an idea yesterday, grew the sample this morning and I'm measuring it this evening.
The autonomy and flexibility that comes with being a sample grower is *sweet*.
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Of course I'm into dark academia.
Our labs are underground and the students' offices don't even have windows.
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@dimi_mira
I don't think it should matter at all. It's not a crime to want a career without moving to the ends of the earth.
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Editors, when you reject my paper because it's not a good fit for your journal that's OK because maybe I totally misjudged your journal. But surely I'm not the best person to ask to review a manuscript for that same journal on that very same day? 🤔
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People who work on magnetism in moiré twisted systems, if you're not naming all your papers "A new spin on <subject of paper> with a twist" then you are bad physicists
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Sorry but there are certain physics departments in this world that are *well known* to be hostile environments for women. So to see them tweeting "happy international women and girls in STEM!!! 🎊" is just kind of nauseating
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"data available upon reasonable request" doesn't really cut it in 2022
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Ten years ago TODAY I graduated from undergrad. I got a first class degree, class medal and thesis prize. But the most important thing that happened was my thesis supervisor meeting my parents and convincing them that me doing a PhD is not the end of the world.
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Full-week conference small talk guide for those of you who need it:
Mon-Tue: when did you arrive? How was your trip? What flight?
Wed: ??? (you're on your own here, nobody knows, maybe hotel wifi signal, quality of projector etc)
Thu-Fri: when do you leave? What flight?
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Think I should organise a focus session on "hot gossip in contemporary condensed matter physics" at the next APS
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What the heck happened in 2016 that meant so many professors stopped updating their group websites?
Trying to find info about various groups and it's like a digital Pompeii. Entire research lines frozen in time.
Thank goodness for Google Scholar is all I'll say.
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Nobody send me emails for the next two days pls and thx
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Reviewer 2.
Dead preferably.
If you could meet any academic, dead or alive, who would you meet and why?
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Waiting for my flight back home after
@APSMeetings
#apsmarch
with a notebook full of ideas for projects, papers and collaborations. It has been *so* good to see people and spend more quality time with my lovely colleagues. Bye bye Chicago! ✈️
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Mildly interesting: the engineering building at Stanford has a reconstruction of the HP Garage where Hewlett and Packard made their first electronics.
Working here today to see if I get inspiration for a money-making idea 🤞
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Next time I chair a hybrid session where the speakers neither upload talks nor appear in-person I will bring a karaoke machine to entertain the attendees while we wait to restart.
#apsmarch
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Cutting a sample in half to send one piece to a collaborator while I keep one piece for my records. Feels a bit like one of those necklaces...
Happy to have best friends all over the world!
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Yes people I know this is not universal: I know that sometimes theorists are not patient at all.
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Personal high speed train to Salerno for the last conference of the year at
La vita è bella 🍕
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Nah this isn't embarrassing. We don't need to remember how to do integration by parts, we just need to remember that it's possible and where to look to remind ourselves. Knowing the "vibes" of maths/physics is more important than knowing the details.
Do I have a Ph.D.? Yes.
Am I googling "integration by parts" because I don't remember how? Also yes.
What's the most embarrassing math/physics thing you've had to google?
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Good morning from the beautiful green campus of the University of Saskatchewan!
This is my first time in Canada and I'll be here all week!
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Explaining my samples to the guy at the Fedex counter when I'm trying to ship them:
Little rocks basically. Not interesting. No, no, not valuable in any way. Haha. *crying internally*
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Found in the wild: Moss Density Wave. Nobody scoop me pls, I'm writing this up for PRX 🙏
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(2/2) I don't know how well the group mechanics really worked but I would love to lead a group alongside some of my peers. It's the academic equivalent of "let's start a band".
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This is new, Nat. Commun. now encouraging joint peer reviews where both authors receive recognition (important for immigration before you all ask). I know there are PIs out there who make their students write the reviews anyway.. now there's no excuse, get them credit!
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If you're a synthesis person and the community can't reproduce your samples then you have a duty to help in any way you can. Otherwise what's the point.
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lol this reminds me of when I was about ten and my primary school teacher taught us the four fundamental forces of nature:
gravity, friction, air resistance and water resistance.
Physicist friends, how hard should my BS alarm be sounding at this headline?
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On one hand, I want to visit the Grand Canyon after the March Meeting. On the other hand, I don't want to see any other physicists at the Grand Canyon after the March Meeting.
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Just asked a collaborator if he knows anyone who does Mössbauer spectroscopy and his answer was "I knew many! Now they're all retired or dead".
smh why do all the fun techniques go out of fashion.
So... Anyone know someone who does Mössbauer? Specifically CEMS?
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When you're committed to a European time zone zoom meeting
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People who send mass emails asking for a job and writing that they went to the "most prestigious" university in their country, got to tell u, I don't care about prestige in my own country, why would I care about it in another
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Me: I should apply broadly to increase my chances of getting a job
Also me: I cannot possibly ask my reference writers for yet another letter
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A few years ago, when I was looking up stuff on LaTiO3 I would routinely get "did you mean Latios" along with google search results for a pokemon. I guess google's algorithm improved to realise "yeah, this person is probably more into Mott insulators than pokemon..."
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It's June, so here's your annual reminder that if you need something from your European collaborators you better ask them now 🏖️🍨🍷
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Author contribution: puts all the ~ into the right places in the tex file
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Shout out to my collaborators who follow me on Twitter and don't engage with me here at all but instead send me an email to tell me they think one of my tweets was funny 💯🫶
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A friend just sent me this photo (I didn't know was taken) of the first moments after I passed my PhD defence where instead of celebrating I'm discussing more science with one of my committee (
@ageorges44
who is, I realise, on Twitter)
Despite appearances it's a happy memory!
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So I did some LinkedIn stalking of my classmates from undergrad and PhD and... Data scientists the lot of them. I can't help but feel that they know something I don't 🤔
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