The Postdoc Experience in the Duke Physics Department

In the field of physics, it’s considered de rigueur to complete a postdoctoral position, or postdoc, after earning a PhD and before beginning a faculty job. “It’s expected that you’re going to broaden beyond your PhD work,” says Duke Physics Interim Chair and Prof. Dan Gauthier. “Search committees want to see to what extent you were able to jump into another lab and another environment, and to what extent you’re able to come up to speed quickly and start to generate publications. If you do well at publishing and mentoring as a postdoc, then you’re probably going to do well as a junior faculty member.”

According to Administrative Manager Randy Best, there are 22 postdocs in the physics department this year.

The postdoc years are unlike any other phase of an academician’s life. “We have more time to do research than any other members of the group,” says first-year postdoc Erin O’Sullivan. “A graduate student has classes and TA responsibilities, and a professor has teaching and administrative responsibilities. A postdoc is hired to focus all their time on the research agenda.”

O’Sullivan, who came to Duke from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, works in the Neutrino Group led by Prof. Kate Scholberg and Prof. Chris Walter. She is working on improving a computer simulation that’s being used to design Hyper-Kamiokande, an underground facility that could, among other things, detect neutrinos and anti-neutrinos from distant supernovae and search for proton decay. If all goes according to plan, Hyper-K will be up and running in Japan in the mid-2020s.

O’Sullivan is coordinating a group of physicists at Duke and other institutions to work on different parts of the code. “The simulation looks at what kind of physics potential Hyper-K would have,” she says. “We want to optimize the detector during the design phase to be able to do the physics we want to do.”

Alex Himmel has been a postdoc with the Neutrino Group for three years. “Chris and Kate have provided outstanding mentorship,” he says. He’s seen his own mentorship abilities grow as well. “That’s the flow of things—as you gain skills, your role evolves to pass those along to the younger people in the group.” For example, on some of the earlier papers he published while at Duke, he did the analyses himself while on later papers, he advised graduate students who were doing the analyses.

Himmel worked mainly on the Super-Kamiokande and T2K neutrino experiments in Japan, traveling there about six times a year. He’s also been involved in Hyper-K and DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment), which is in the Homestake Mine in South Dakota.

Both O’Sullivan and Himmel enjoy the fact that the Neutrino Group is involved in so many different experiments. “Kate is a world expert in supernova neutrinos and Chris is getting involved in cosmology,” Himmel says. “It’s been great to be exposed to all those things.” He is currently applying for faculty and research lab positions, and expects to continue pursuing neutrino research.

While most postdocs go on to a career in academia, not all do. Rui Zhang was a postdoc in Dan Gauthier’s research group for almost four years. Today she works as a research and development engineer at Coherent, a laser-technology company in Silicon Valley. “I’m grateful for my training in Dan’s group,” she says. “In industry, we need very broad knowledge to find the best solution for a technical problem, and in Dan’s group I was exposed to many topics like electrical chaotic networks, slow light, optical coherence tomography, and ultra-cold rubidium atoms.” Zhang says she was open to a career in either academia or industry, but a good industry job presented itself first.

Damien Rontani was also a postdoc in Gauthier’s lab, and the experience helped solidify his desire to pursue an academic career. “By the end of my PhD, I wanted to aim for an academic job but I wasn’t really sure I was a good fit. The postdoc was a really good test.” Today he is an assistant professor at CentraleSupélec in his native France.

In Gauthier’s lab, Rontani and a graduate student worked together on experiments in the field of network science, using a device called a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), which is a processor made of reconfigurable logic circuits. “FPGAs are a versatile physical platform that allow us to design complex circuits quickly without having to do any soldering,” Rontani says. “Dan came up with the idea, but we were in charge of developing those concepts and pushing the idea into many different directions.”

While doing his research, Rontani was exposed to various aspects of being a faculty member, including writing and submitting grants, a skill he uses in his current position. In fact, he recently received an IBM Faculty Award to work on cognitive computing using physical systems rather than algorithms running on traditional computers. 

“Overall I really enjoyed my experience at Duke,” Rontani says. “And I’m really grateful to Dan because he inspired me in a lot of ways as to how I conduct myself as a scientist today.”

Mary-Russell Roberson is a freelance science writer who lives in Durham.