A 75 min presentation on Organizing Creativity

From the author of  Organizing Creativity, Daniel Wessel, here come an overview of the book in 75 minutes!

As I have said before, this is a must for all graduate students. I cannot recommend enough that you take the time, listen to the presentation and afterward download (free!) and read the book for more in-depth information.

Quite frankly, this book is so good that I bought the printed (color) version. Yes, a paper version, call me a romantic…

An interesting resource for PhDs, postdocs and early career researchers

I recently came across the following document by Professor Alan M Johnson, which appears to be distributed freely by Elsevier and entitled “Charting a Course for a Successful Research Career: A Guide for Early Career Researchers – 2nd edition“.

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O Captain! my Captain!

To Jean Pouliot (1958-2015)

Berkeley 1985 (left) and more recently (right)

The title of this post is from a wonderful and powerful poem by Walt Whitman, delivered to a large public by a passionate performance in the movie Dead Poet Society.

It is here dedicated to my PhD thesis co-supervisor whom, through the years, became of a colleague, a co-conspirator in many fruitful scientific projects for which we successfully “tricked” numerous students to undertake them (as we acted as co-supervisors), and more importantly a dear friend.

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How many citations are actually a lot of citations?

In a previous blog post, I suggested to my younger colleagues that while they should not care so much about the impact factor of the journals they published in (as long as these journals are well-read in their respective fields of research), they should care quite a lot about these papers being cited, and cited by others not self-cited!

A few months ago, I was listening to the introductory talk of for a prestigious award from our national organization when one statement hit me: a physicist with 2000 or more citations is part of the 1% most cited physicists worldwide. There might have been a bit more to that statement but let’s work with it.

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Business management meet student mentoring

There is Nothing so Unequal as the Equal Treatment of Unequals

– Leadership and the One Minute Manager

If someone would have told me 15 years ago that I would write about a blog post on the link between some business management principals and student supervision, I would probably have reply “are you crazy, science is pure, untainted (yeah!). Business is all about money and nothing about peoples”.

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Memory of my first major peer-reviewed paper 

My very first manuscript published in Physical Review Letters (major physics journal!) came about by drawing figures on piece of papers (basically mocked-up figures) with a colleague of mine!

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