Materials Hipster #7: Laura Ratcliff
tags: [materials_hipster dft Laura develops computational methods for simulating large systems of atoms with high accuracy. She is an EPSRC early career fellow, based in the Department of Materials at Imperial College London. Before working at ICL, Laura worked at the Leadership Computing Facility in Argonne National Lab, IL. She is a developer in not just one, but three state-of-the-art DFT codes, and still finds time for a tonne of impressive extra-curricular activities. To find out more about the work in Laura's group, checkout https://ratcliffgroup.wordpress.com/.
Faavourite all time material
Well I’d have to say that with my background and the kind of work I do I am actually much more interested in method development as opposed to specific materials. However, from a development and theory point of view I’d have to say graphene, I’ve been working with that a lot recently. It’s really easy to set up for calculations and it’s certainly easier to visualise things in 2D rather than 3D.
Any tips for the next big thing in electronic structure methods
Well obviously (since I work in the area) I would say that linear scaling DFT is pretty exciting right now, and it’s going to get bigger. I would also say the applying machine learning with DFT seems to be something that’s getting very popular. I haven’t really done anything myself, but I am starting to see more and more papers on this popping up. Stuff like basis set learning seems to be catching on.
If you could only read one journal which one would it be
I’m actually pretty journal agnostic. I pay very little attention to what journal I am reading something in, so I don’t really have a journal that I go to all the time. I tend to go with Google alerts and just following reference trails. Probably the journal I have published most in and a journal that has a lot of good method papers is The Journal of Chemical Physics, it’s got a lot of relevant stuff for me.
PRL or JACS
I am a physicist, so it has to be PRL.
Best crafted paper you’ve read recently
I did do a bit of work recently on constrained DFT, which I really enjoyed. And there is a great review paper on constrained DFT by a group from MIT.
Favourite conference
The only conference I’ve been to several times is the APS March meeting, so that wins by default. Now that I know more people from different places it’s really nice to bump into old colleagues and you get lots of variety. The general physics sessions are also often quite entertaining for talks. The first time I went there was a guy who had a new theory of gravity, which was … interesting!
Best conference catering you’ve experienced
There was a Onetep master class at the University of Warwick. I was helping to organise it and I don’t know if we just lucked out or if the catering is always that good at the University of Warwick, but it was great. [Aside, I can also vouch for excellent catering at the University of Warwick from the 2018 NMSUM conference, two reports == fact!]
Worst conference catering
Not necessarily the quality, but the Psi-K meeting at San Sebastian a few years ago. The quantities were so small. Several times they ran out of food so I had to go elsewhere. And the conference dinner was crazy, if you were an invited speaker there was a fancy dinner, but for the rest there was a reception in the aquarium. It was a really nice venue, but there was hardly any food, just lots of wine. At least San Sebastian is a good place to go out to eat.
What do you do outside materials?
I have too many hobbies really, I don’t have time to fit them all in. I bake, I sew, I play the harp. Also, although playing the harp is a bit expensive, it can pay off. You have to pay up front, but a lot of people want harps at their weddings and you don’t have to be the top top standard to do it, so you can make some money back.
Also, for the last five years I have been writing a book with my brother. It’s a fantasy novel, that has taken much more time and effort than we had originally anticipated, but we’re still going, hopefully we’ll finish some day! I was living in the US when we started, so it was mostly an online collaboration, we sort of split up chapters and take a few characters each. Now that we are living in the same area we get to sit down and write some chapters together.
Whiskey or gin?
I actually don’t drink, so neither! [I guess that’s how one finds time to be productive and keep up multiple diverse hobbies!]