Munich with Markus and Mitch

I met Markus and Mitch while I was visiting collaborators at Duke University for a couple of weeks in March of 2016 after attending a conference in Baltimore (above is a photo taken from a lovely trip we went on to the Outer Banks in North Carolina with the research group of Volker Blum – I describe this trip more in a blog post written for my CDT). In June 2016 Mitch invited me to the workshop (Frontiers of Multiscale Modelling) in Monte Isola in Italy that he was organising for his MASSIVE research group in Munich. It seemed like a great opportunity to see some friends again and learn some new science (especially as one of the projects I work on during my PhD is related to the topic of multi-scale modelling) and not to mention… spending a couple of days on an island in the middle of a lake in Northern Italy sounded very tempting! I also got to visit the research group in Munich after too. On the coach ride over to Monte Isola from Munich, the views of the Bavarian Alps were incredible. It still blows my mind (as a Brit!) being able to drive from one country to another like that. I hadn’t even realised we’d crossed to border, I only noticed when the things sold in the service stations seemed to be distinctly more Italian! The workshop was really interesting…even if I didn’t understand it all at the time! I was introduced to a lot of new topics like genetic algorithms, different charge transport models, kinetic Monte Carlo. I’m not currently using these techniques in my research, but may in the future and I feel that getting exposed to this kind of stuff repeatedly at conferences and workshops is great to start sewing together a kind of ‘foundation of understanding’ of the general area of materials science… so that I may one day be able to pluck out a different technique I may need to solve a problem or answer a scientific question! Well, hopefully, I still feel like a bit of a tadpole in the pool of materials science research to be completely honest. The island was really cool too, and only little. You could run around the whole thing within a 10 or 11Km route if I remember rightly (I did this a couple of times), or run up the mountain if you were fancying a challenge (I got about ¾ of the way up before bailing out, I was presenting that day and thought I should keep some energy in reserve at least!). It was a pretty idyllic island, with beautiful weather for the most part but when I gave my talk at the workshop there was a pretty substantial storm going on, it made for an interesting atmosphere! One of my old lecturers was a guest at the workshop too (he collaborates a lot with this research group it turned out). So that was quite an interesting experience for me, discussing research (and getting tips!) from someone who originally taught me! It often strikes me when doing a PhD that you’re continually re-visiting science you learnt as an undergraduate, but trying to understand it more, link old understanding with new knowledge to improve on the original understanding you already had. It’s kind of a continual cyclic process. Oh, but back to the island, there was also this weird bridge there at the time made from some odd white material. I think it was some sort of artistic thing. I often find myself not cultured enough to appreciate art. Shame really.



After a lovely time in Italy, I had a weekend to kill in Munich before my week visiting the group in Munich. I made the climbing wall in Thalkirchen my ‘Sunday office’. It had a nice cafe for reading papers in between climbing sessions. There were a couple of outdoor climbing walls in Munich which I thought were pretty snazzy!



I also went to a beer festival in the centre of Munich with Mitch and some nice Austrian friends of his who were also visiting (from whom I learnt that the word for ‘bin’ in Austrian is a word you would be more likely to use in a farming context in German?!). And lastly, I managed to squeeze in half a day that weekend to take the train to Garmisch. This place is firmly on my ‘to-come-back-to-with-more-time’ list. It must be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen: the buildings in the town, the backdrop of the Bavarian Alps, the awesome Partnachklamm gorge, which felt like being on the set of Lord of the Rings. Amazing. Shame to only spend half a day here! Bike hire here was surprisingly cheap too and good for getting to the gorge quickly. Although this was before I became a London cyclist and I remember finding the motorists surprisingly unforgiving here! Or perhaps I formed that opinion because the man who served me in the bike shop had gotten run over on his bike that morning?



I then spent some time working with the research group in the Technical University of Munich (TUM). This was a nice opportunity to continue some discussions from the workshop on Monte Isola and attend some seminars there. It was also interesting to see how the group dynamics work for such a huge research group! The group had subgroup leaders and what was nice was that it felt like there was always someone to discuss work with. Or even just discuss stuff in general with. The group had a nice habit of having morning coffee together in their common room. Sometimes you’d discuss a probem you may have been having with your research, sometimes just politics, news, whatever really. It was while I was in Munich that the awful event of a politician getting murdered during the Brexit campaign and I felt pretty shuck up by this for some reason, may have been because I was away from the UK and I found talking about this a little before work with colleagues there, kind of helped me to clear my head of it. Hard to explain, but I came round the thinking this was a nice feature of the group (after initially being a bit of a grump and thinking it was a little bit like wasting time when there was science to be done!) TUM was a little industrial looking but, to my surprise, there is also a giant slide in the Maths department and just so happened that there was a beer festival right outside the office the whole week I was there. I also thought the supercomputer at TUM (SuperMuc) was rather handsome, as far as super computers go. Looking back on it, this was a really cool trip and I think another sign of one of the nicest parts of working in science – the people that you meet and getting to see them again, all over the world. I often think of working in science as having an extended family, all over the world.