It is already Friday morning and I have not been posting because it has been so busy (and I'm also desperately trying to keep up with my referee reports...and trying to read some science and keeping up with my group ... all with dubious or no success at all). I'll try to add some words here and then post pictures ... now I can include some awesome sight-seeing and precious experiences with some locals.
First, the most important greeting:
After the panel on Wednesday afternoon, we got into breakout groups to see how we could establish collaborations. Most of this workshop was composed of chemists, so finding the right group for superconductors or strong electron correlations was a challenge. Mary Wirth suggested we determine a research goal and work to see how we cold collaborate on it, but in my case, it was more important to see what the capabilities of my group members were and then design the research around that. You see, it is true I have "holy grails" in my research, but I would be happy working on almost any problem -- maybe that is one of my problems: that I can scatter shot so easily -- but any unanswered question in science can be absolutely fascinating to me. I just wanted to work with some of the other women -- particularly the N. African ones.
My breakout group consisted of Janet Tate, an old friend who is at Oregon State but born and raised in South Africa, Leila Adane from Algeria who was also an organizer of this workshop and a University Professor at USTHB, Nadia Saoula, who is in a National Laboratory in Algeria (DCTA), and Sonia Haddad, the theorist from Tunisia. We shared our ideas and found what could and could not be done -- won't bore you here but between alloy growth (Algeria), a variety of thin fil capabilities (Algeria, IL, and OR), computational materials modeling (Tunisia) and a whole lot of materials characterization (US), we had a plan to hammer out.
Each group reported -- one was on phosphates, one on water, and ours -- all with positive plans. We all worked on developing our research plans over dinner -- but also shared a lot about our lives.
After dinner we went out -- first time in a day and a half for me. We were a group of about 10 women. It was about 9:30 pm and we really stuck together and found no problems -- sticking to busy streets. Crossing the streets was quite a challenge. I finally noticed that there were indeed streetlights -- just not obviously positioned and rarely obeyed.
I'm going to post this and then try to post related pictures.
First, the most important greeting:
- Sallam (peace on you)
- Alaykoum assallam (peace on you, too).
After the panel on Wednesday afternoon, we got into breakout groups to see how we could establish collaborations. Most of this workshop was composed of chemists, so finding the right group for superconductors or strong electron correlations was a challenge. Mary Wirth suggested we determine a research goal and work to see how we cold collaborate on it, but in my case, it was more important to see what the capabilities of my group members were and then design the research around that. You see, it is true I have "holy grails" in my research, but I would be happy working on almost any problem -- maybe that is one of my problems: that I can scatter shot so easily -- but any unanswered question in science can be absolutely fascinating to me. I just wanted to work with some of the other women -- particularly the N. African ones.
My breakout group consisted of Janet Tate, an old friend who is at Oregon State but born and raised in South Africa, Leila Adane from Algeria who was also an organizer of this workshop and a University Professor at USTHB, Nadia Saoula, who is in a National Laboratory in Algeria (DCTA), and Sonia Haddad, the theorist from Tunisia. We shared our ideas and found what could and could not be done -- won't bore you here but between alloy growth (Algeria), a variety of thin fil capabilities (Algeria, IL, and OR), computational materials modeling (Tunisia) and a whole lot of materials characterization (US), we had a plan to hammer out.
Each group reported -- one was on phosphates, one on water, and ours -- all with positive plans. We all worked on developing our research plans over dinner -- but also shared a lot about our lives.
After dinner we went out -- first time in a day and a half for me. We were a group of about 10 women. It was about 9:30 pm and we really stuck together and found no problems -- sticking to busy streets. Crossing the streets was quite a challenge. I finally noticed that there were indeed streetlights -- just not obviously positioned and rarely obeyed.
I'm going to post this and then try to post related pictures.
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