Congratulations Khlood

Last Thursday, my PhD student Khlood Alharthi had her viva.  I'm pleased to say that she did well, and has passed, subject to corrections.  

I'm always pleased when my students get their PhDs, but I'm particularly proud (on her behalf) of Khlood's outcome.  Her journey has not been easy, coming to study as a mum with 4 kids, navigating through a foreign system that can seem byzantine enough to us natives.

The examiners were Prof Patrick Regan (internal examiner from Surrey) and Prof David Jenkins (external, from York).  Here's a picture taken by Patrick (Paddy) of L-R Dave Jenkins, Khlood, and me, in front of the whiteboard which they had her using throughout the viva

 

 

Bayesian calibration

Today sees the first preprint appearing on the arXiv from my student Sam Sullivan.  It represents the results of work he undertook as part of a BAND fellowship which took him to Michigan State University last year. He used Bayesian methods to fit a new optical potential appropriate to a particular region of the nuclear chart (around zirconium isotopes).  The method intrinsically includes uncertainty quantification, so that any predictions made with the optical potential come with well-formulated error bars.  

Sam has submitted it to Phys Rev C, and we're hoping that's where his first publication will appear.  Fingers crossed 

Here is a plot  from the paper showing predictions of neutron elastic scattering cross sections in Y-89