It’s that time of year again. Young graduate students, having toiled for several years at the feet of Science, are kicked out of the nest to take their places among the ancient and honorable community of scholars. If you will forgive the mixed metaphors.
This week we had a double-decker celebration: both Heywood Tam and Moira Gresham successfully defended their Ph.D. theses. Congratulations to both!
Heywood was stuck with me as an advisor, but he seems to have turned out okay. We worked together on a number of papers that looked into models of Lorentz violation, including issues of extra dimensions and stability. More recently we’ve been finishing a couple of papers on fine-tuning in the early universe — coming soon to a preprint server near you! In the Fall Heywood will leave the dry heat of SoCal for the damp heat of Florida.
Moira’s advisor was Mark Wise, but we also interacted quite a bit. She and I collaborated with Heywood and Tim Dulaney on a couple of aether papers, and she and Tim recently wrote a really interesting paper on anisotropic inflation. But she promises that her next project will be completely Lorentz-invariant. And she’ll be doing it from Ann Arbor, where she’ll be joining the Michigan physics department as a member of the Society of Fellows.
Always bittersweet when students graduate; it will be a loss to Caltech when the leave, but it’s great to see people launch their independent research careers. Best of luck to both Moira and Heywood!
Heywood is a rather uncommon name; were the parents fans of 2001?
Congratulations to their advisors also, who must feel like proud parents.
Woot for more academic siblings!
Is it too early for a Carroll-fest yet?
Eugene!! That’s sort of indecorous, he’s not as old as all that. But I like the sentiment a lot, please post photos when it does (a long long time from now) occur.
Hey Moira, since you’re coming to Ann Arbor – if you have time, would you be interested in giving a fledgling Science/Skepticsm group a physics lecture at a local pub or coffeeshop?
Congrats to both Heywood and Moira! A great day for physics!