3 months in North Carolina: collaborations, climbing and a little southern culture!

During my PhD from September 2016 to December 2016 I got to visit Duke University in North Carolina, USA to collaborate with some of the developers of the FHI-aims software package used to simulate materials (the group of Volker Blum) and with scientists who make the materials in the group of David Mitzi. For me, this felt like the perfect ‘scientific sandwich’, resulting in this publication. Since I primarily use the software to simulate materials for PV, I don’t directly develop the main software (I just process the outputs) or synthesise PV devices… but I need to have an appreciation for both sides in order to do my job properly!
It was such a great scientific learning experience, attending the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (MEMS) seminars as well as seminars and meetings with the group of David Mitzi where often talks were given by visiting experimentalists such as Kasra Sardashti from IBM and Joe Berry from NREL. Both talks were so beneficial to me. The unexpected outcome from Kasra’s talk was that I felt really inspired to get back to a project (on cation disorder in CZTS) that I had been working on for a while, for which I must confess my motivation had begun to dwindle. I attended a special guest lecture given by Joe Berry as well as his research talk later in the day. From the lecture, I really got an appreciation for how experimentalists need to be mindful of the possibility of measurements perhaps being a little destructive to the material (especially for the very sensitive halide perovskites). It often strikes me that being an experimental scientist is a lot like being a detective, so knowing how far to trust the evidence is such an art! It was also great to be in group meetings with the FHI-aims developers in Volker Blum’s group to get more of an idea of the nuts and bolts of the stuff I’m using! I certainly came out knowing more about GPU programming and parallelization than I did going in!
In addition to the scientific learning experience… I also did a bit of cultural exploring. I attended some of the homecoming event at Duke, a basketball game and a football game. Sport seems to be such a central part of American culture, but what really came as a surprise to me was how much of the event was dedicated to general entertainment, a relatively small portion of the time was actually the sport. I remember at the basketball game all sorts of competitions with the crowd like throwing pizza boxes into the centre of the court to win flight tickets then at the football game there was some sort of race with people dressed up as dolmio pasta sauce jars. It also struck me that for the basketball team, it was not sufficient to just be very good at basketball – you had to be a decent dancer too since each player came out to their own theme song and danced to the crowd! Another thing that struck me at the games were the cheerleaders –wow! My stereotype of cheerleaders from TV shows I may have grown up watching was not necessarily the kindest, but wow they are gymnasts! How they could flip around on the hard wood floors was incredible. Then another enjoyable but of the culture was Blues at an open mic night in downtown Durham. As I’m utterly musically untalented I did not take to the stage myself, but it blows my mind how talented people are by night… then go back to their regular job by day!

Another cultural experience for me was a little southern food. I never got so far as trying a biscuit, which unlike a British biscuit (which would be something suitable to dip into a cup of tea), was more like a lighter scone that you could eat with gravy… I did however go so far as trying grits, which I thought were fine. My experience of grits was a mixture of something old and something new as it happens. I tried breakfast grits on a Saturday morning after doing the parkrun in Durham NC! The parkrun is something that is run all over the world every Saturday morning, but it’s much bigger in the UK than the US. It started in London in Bushy park (another part of my London adventures has been to do as many different parkruns there as possible – ‘parkrun tourism’), so it was actually quite a big coincidence for the city in the US I happened to be in to have a parkrun! Perhaps not so big of a coincidence when it turned out to have been set up by some Brits! This was a lovely experience though for meeting a variety of people and heading out for breakfast afterwards to sample some local cuisine! My other main cultural food experience was food trucks – something in the UK that would typically be undesirable, here it’s pretty darn gourmet! I ran the ‘Bull City Half Marathon and Food Truck Rodeo’ while I was at Duke and after the race, this was the first time I ate lobster, in the form of a taco, from a food truck!

Without a doubt for me one of the best experiences of my time at Duke was the friendships I made… in a pretty short space of time! Must be that Southern warmth? In particular, I made some great friends at the Duke climbing wall on campus and went on a couple of trips with the Duke Outdoors program. The best climbing experience however, was the Thanksgiving trip to Asheville I went on with some friends I made through climbing. I felt so welcomed into the group for such a short space of time. And the best part is, well best two parts, one of the friends I made at Duke is now doing a graduate program at a university in Colorado (where I’m now doing a placement!) and secondly, I’ve continued to work with the scientists at Duke since going back to the UK and will be visiting them again this November… and then spending another Thanksgiving with those great friends I made this time last year. It strikes me that when you’re moving around a lot, it’s always the people you meet that make the experiences. Of course, mountains help too.