I defended my thesis on Dec. 16th, and the final version has been submitted to the MIT library. An electronic copy is available here:
It is a huge relief to be done! Now I’m a postdoc in the Chemical Engineering department at MIT, working with Martin Bazant on computational modeling of LiFePO4 batteries: http://bazantgroup.mit.edu
Wow, a lot has happened since my last post from back in July when I got a speeding ticket on the way to Corning. About two weeks ago I finally finished my thesis proposal and gave my proposal presentation. It seemed like everything that could have possibly prevented me from finishing the thing during the last few weeks of summer happened – a large bedbug infestation in my apartment building, professors not responding to emails for weeks, fracturing a toe on a hiking trip, classes starting, organizing fall rowing, getting a new girlfriend, etc. I’m not sure if anyone actually reads the thesis proposal, and I’m still not really sure what the point of writing it was, but I spent a lot of time stressing about it.
On Wednesday I presented a poster on the work I did over the summer at Lawrence Livermore at a Materials Day poster presentation. Like usual, nobody was interested in my poster once they realized it was about math and involved Green’s function, and most people didn’t seem to understand the significance of reducing a O(N logN) algorithm to O(N). I also realized that it’s impossible for a modeling poster to every win any awards (except at modeling conferences, of course) because when everyone else is describing how they want to stop global warming by putting viruses on transparent conducting bio-nano-spheres or something, you’re talking about math. And not that my poster was really award-worthy to begin with.