Testimonials
Professor Alex Schekochihin
The fellow I have been working with — Barry Ginat — arrived from a background as a cosmologist and gravitational dynamicist, but, besides pursuing these interests collaborating with Bence Kocsis, he has also become an active member of the plasma group, discussing and collaborating with me and some of my students. There has been quite a lot of flow of expertise/insight in both directions, and so as a result I think we are better educated in all things gravity while Barry is now an honorary plasma physicist. We are also writing some papers together, so besides personal enlightenment, there’s real research output. This kind of open-ended, curiosity-based broadening of people’s intellectual ranges is only possible because of the free nature of the Fellowship and the fact that it’s embedded in a Theoretical Physics centre where people working on usually siloed subjects rub shoulders. This really is exactly how these Fellowships are supposed to work — but it’s also the kind of thing that government-funded postdoc schemes, usually focused on specific projects or sub-fields perceived as important, do not support, despite all the official language about fostering inter-disciplinarity. In other words, they encourage pre-planned inter-disciplinarity with pre-agreed useful purpose, while a more serendipitous - and often deeper - form of inter-disciplinarity happens when curious people just explore what’s interesting to them in each other’s fields.
Professor Steven Balbus FRS FInstP
The Leverhulme-Peierls Fellowships Programme initiated by Professor Sondhi has been, in my view, an exceptional success. It set out to bring some of the best young physics minds of their generation, from all fields of theoretical physics, into a strongly interactive environment. Informal exchange is certainly enhanced by the layout of our building, and, as a sign of the programme’s success, very little active encouragement is actually needed! With the right people in the mix, discussion arises spontaneously all the time. Furthermore, because there is also an emphasis here on education, there are talks and seminars designed for those new to a field to pick up ongoing threads of thought and, if they wish, jump in. This is a very different mode than today’s intense project - and results - oriented mentality that postdoctoral researchers generally find imposed, in which their research activities are tightly prescribed. What this leaves out is creative, curiosity-driven “playing”, which historically is often the way the very best ideas emerge in physics. My personal experience with this came about in casual conversations with LP Fellows Andrew Mummery and Francesco Mori, an astrophysicist and statistical physicist respectively, when we realised that a natural way to think about the problem of turbulence in black hole accretions had much to learn from the theory of random walks with absorbing boundary conditions. An important paper emerged, as well as a new paradigm for understanding the complex flows that are seen in numerical simulations - and quite possibly observations - of turbulent flows around Kerr black holes. I look forward to many similar experiences in the years ahead!
Professor Julia Yeomans OBE FRS
The programme has been highly successful in recruiting the best junior scientists to the UK. As they move on to permanent academic positions worldwide, connections made in Oxford will lead to international networks and collaborations where the UK will play a leading role. During their time as post-docs in Oxford, the Fellows have not only been involved in exciting original research, but have contributed widely by organising and giving seminars, initiating multiple discussions and presenting their work at outreach programmes in Physics and in their Colleges.
Professor Siddharth Parameswaran
Quantum condensed matter physics is increasingly focused on two fascinating directions: the quest for new and exotic phases of matter in solid-state materials, and the investigation of new far-from-equilibrium regimes of quantum dynamics. Although these problems pose distinct challenges and represent very different experimental regimes, they are unified on a theoretical level: both are characterised by the exponential complexity intrinsic to the quantum many-body problem, and ideas from topology and quantum information have provided remarkably powerful tools with which to explore these problems. The theoretical physicists best poised to make significant advances in our understanding will need to be trained in a way that cuts across the traditional disciplinary boundaries that divides these fields - yet this is a fact poorly recognised by funding agencies and project-based approaches. By offering its fellows free rein to follow where their curiosity leads, the Leverhulme-Peierls program has helped make Oxford - already a leading theory centre in this broad area - highly attractive as a launching pad for independent work in one of today’s most exciting frontiers. The LP Fellow I have been working most closely with, Benedikt Placke, wonderfully exemplified this ethos: trained as a traditional solid-state physicist in the complex problem of frustrated magnetic materials, Benedikt has a strong interest in quantum information theory dating to his Masters’ project. At Oxford, he has leveraged this unusually broad preparation by launching into a series of projects at the interface of topological phases of matter, error-corrected quantum computation, and glassy optimisation problems. Benedikt is a wonderful example of how a talented postdoc can transform a research agenda: I find myself drawn to a range of problems I had barely thought about before I started working with him, and in turn, have introduced him to a new set of questions that we have enjoyed pursuing together.