2024 in review

It was a busy year for me, hence the substantially lower posting frequency.

I became a dad in February. It really puts the insignificance of the academic rat race in perspective. I had a lot less sleep and less uninterrupted time for deep work, but thankfully as of mid-December we are finally able to sleep more than 4 hours uninterrupted.

After a tough 9 years as a postdoc I started at tenure track position at SUTD in July. I have had a bit of a breather before research students join next year. I'm looking forward towards starting some research with a more longer term horizon than "get something publishable out within a year" as is typical for postdoc positions. And teaching undergraduates for the first time has also been highly rewarding even if it does take up a lot of time.

Before joining SUTD I was encouraged to apply for a start-up grant. Proposal writing really was a struggle with a newborn. My proposal was extremely rushed and unpolished - my aim was to just get out something that met the requirements. And thankfully it was funded. Take-home message: your grant proposal doesn't need to be perfect, sometimes the topic and the timing are more important than getting everything just right. The only certainty we have is that a proposal that is not submitted will never be funded.

On the research side, I was a collaborator on 8 papers submitted or published, with a few more promising ideas in the pipeline. I also managed to give 8 conference/seminar presentations, including at a graduate school in Indonesia. While I didn't participate in any big international conferences or workshops, I did enjoy attending a few meetings in Singapore.

On the editorial side, I've already finished 3 years of work with Physical Review A and will continue for another term. Since June I have also been serving temporarily as an editor for Physical Review Letters, handling more than 100 submissions. While there is a lot wrong with academic publishing today, one shouldn't lump journals of academic societies such as the American Physical Society with profit-driven publishers.

Happy 2025 to all readers! And if there's anything you'd like to see more of next year, let me know in the comments or drop me an email.

Teaching at SUTD

This term (just finished last week) was my first time teaching undergraduate students. I taught the first year maths course, covering calculus and numerical modelling. Overall it was a good experience and not as hard as I was expecting, thanks in part to all of the course materials being ready-made by some of the other instructors.

SUTD has quite a special system for its undergraduate coursework. For the first term all students take the same introductory courses, including maths. Rather than teaching this as a single big lecture class, the students are split into 11 cohorts of about 45 students each, with two faculty members assigned to teach each cohort, plus additional teaching assistants. 

During a class, one faculty member would focus on delivering the content while the other would go around the room to answer any questions one-on-one. To further promote discussion and interactions amongst the students and teachers, the "lectures" are regularly broken up by example problems for the students to work through in groups. This means the classes are also longer than usual - 2.5 hours each, twice a week.

One thing we tried differently this year was to make the weekly problem sets optional. Students were encouraged to work through the assignments themselves, but they were not graded. The motivation for this was that with the advent of tools like ChatGPT it is very easy for students to copy and paste the questions and immediately get full worked solutions, so we didn't think this would be a reliable way to grade the students' progress.

The flip side to this, of course, is that if the assignments are not graded it is extremely difficult to motivate the students to complete them. Indeed, the only time I had students come for office hours was just before their mid-term exam when they were trying to cram all the content from the first half of the course. Many students were unprepared for the mid-term, but grades improved somewhat in the final.

From the point of view of a fresh lecturer, I found being paired up with more experienced lecturers very helpful. Each week I would teach one class per cohort, and spend the other class answering any student questions. This allows one to see what methods work better and what concepts students are struggling with in real time, helping to improve one's own style of teaching. 

Looking forward to teaching this course again and hopefully doing a bit better next year!

 

Topological Photonics 2025 workshop in San Sebastian: call for abstracts

The Topological Photonics 2025 workshop, to be held at Palacio Miramar in San Sebastian, on 30th June-2nd July 2025. This meeting follows similar workshops held in 2021, 2022 and 2023 and is aimed at gathering a critical mass of people working in the vibrant area of Topological Photonics as well as topology in other wave and quantum phenomena. Abstract submission is now open for contributed talks and posters. 

 The following confirmed keynote and invited speakers are confirmed:

Keynote speakers:

• Andrea Alù (The City College of New York – USA)
• Olga Smirnova (Technical University Berlin, Germany)
• Päivi Törmä (Aalto University, Finland)
  
• Shanhui Fan (Stanford University, CA, USA)
  

Invited speakers

• Alexander Cerjan (Sandia National Laboratory, US)
• Baile Zhang (NTU, Singapore)
• Chiara Devescovi (ETH, Switzerland)
• Clivia Sotomayor-Torres (ICN2, Spain)
• Dario Bercioux (DIPC, Spain)
• Ewold Verhagen (AMOLF, Netherlands)
• Frank Scheffold (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
• Oded Zilberberg (University of Konstanz, Germany)
• Sylvain Ravets (C2N, France)
• Thomas Christensen (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark)

Please submit your abstracts here before 14th of March 2025. Registration deadline is 30th May 2025. Participants are advised to book rooms as early as possible, hotels fill up quickly at that time of the year. You can find more information at the meeting website.

The 17th Annual Meeting Photonic Devices, Zuse Institute Berlin, Germany

Call for abstracts for the 17th Annual Meeting Photonic Devices (AMPD2025), taking place at Zuse Institute Berlin, Germany.

Topics include nanophotonic devices and related simulation methods. The organisers aim for open discussions between experiment, theory, and numerical methods.

Invited talks will be given by:

Anna Tasolamprou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Bumki Min, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon
Costantino De Angelis, University of Brescia
Costanza Toninelli, European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy in Florence
Haejun Chung, Hanyang University, Seoul
Humeyra Caglayan, Tampere University
Jesper Mork, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby
Kurt Busch, Humboldt University of Berlin
Mohsen Rahmadi, Nottingham Trent University
Nahid Talebi, Kiel University
Olivier Martin, EPFL, Lausanne
Thomas Pertsch, Friedrich Schiller University Jena
Tim Schröder, Humboldt University of Berlin
Further invited speakers to be confirmed.

Please consider joining this workshop as either a speaker (poster or talk) or as an audience member. The workshop is free of registration fees.

Important dates:

Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2025
Decision about acceptance: February 15, 2025
Registration deadline: March 25, 2025
Workshop: April 02-04, 2025 

Further information is available at https://www.zib.de/workshop-photonic-devices/ampd2025.html

What to do when a reviewer asks for irrelevant citations

This paper has been circulating on social media thanks to the unscrupulous request of one of the referees and the authors' blunt response:

A lot of the comments I've seen about this example demonstrate a lack of understanding about how peer review works. 

It is never the reviewers who accept or reject papers - it is the editor who does so, based on advice provided by the referees. 

The editor knows the identity of the referees. 

The editor knows if a referee is asking for a bunch of irrelevant self-citations.

The editor knows not to base their decision to accept or reject the paper based on such self-serving comments.

While the authors' response in this case is amusing and made their paper go viral, it puts both the journal and the authors in a bad light. As one of my collaborators said once, "shitty referee reports will produce a stinky smell extending to our work."  Anyone can see here that the referees were more interested in boosting their citations than evaluating the scientific merits of the work, so the paper might as well be preprint that has not undergone peer review.

The correct response is to explain to the editor why the requested citations are irrelevant and leave them out of the revised manuscript. Don't cave in to blackmail.