Journal
This is a space to collect my weekly logs on things I’ve been thinking about, things that excite me, or things that I want to learn. Like many things in my life, this exercise is also inspired by Lucy.
Being an academic can sometimes feel like nothing fruitful has happened if something isn’t published every other month, but that obviously isn’t true. Good science takes time, so here’s a record of some non-linear thinking.
7th Oct 2026:
Caught the freshers flu (LOL). But I am fully locked in to get something solid to present in Vienna in the next couple of weeks. It is also Nobel Prize week! Every year I am humbled on how little I know about physics and/or chemistry.
On the 10th, it will be a year since I defended my PhD thesis, and I have been reflecting a lot. I am thinking of making a “Things I learnt from my PhD journey” video over the weekend…
1st Oct 2026:
Start of the new term at UCL, and I’ve already met some enthusiastic master’s students in the Chemistry department. The good news is that postdocs can now teach/demonstrate, which is great for some of us who are seriously thinking about an academic career ahead… I am also part of the first-ever (!!) postdoc committee that the department has ever had. Mostly I joined this because, believe it or not, postdoc life is even more isolating than PhD life, so I thought this was a nice way of community building.
Keith and I are also heavily discussing my post-processing results on the quin systems and planning out the next few weeks of work.
22nd Sept 2026:
After a few weeks of Young downtime, I was finally able to run some long MD on the quin structures. I’m getting quite close to interpreting the order-disorder transitions through angular projections… could this be the first exciting(!) result of my postdoc?
16th Sept 2026:
I’ve worked on computing Raman spectra for a good few years now but never for hybrid organic-inorganic systems. This week I’m trying to reproduce the experimental results of some hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite-like structures.
8th Sept 2026:
Brad and I are delivering an “Introduction to Git and Github/Gitlab” session in Liverpool next week, so I’m working on making the slides/exercises for that over the next couple of days (repo hosted here).
3rd Sept 2026:
This week I’ve been working on generating reasonable MLIP-MD and AIMD trajectories for the quin structures. It’s been quite a challenge thinking about fast H-dynamics, molecular solids, and entropy-driven phase transitions.