Todos:
- Ph.D. dissertation submitted
- Secure a postdoc position
Yes… I finally submitted the final version of my Ph.D. dissertation today: Seismic-Wave Propagation and Ground Motion Prediction During Strong Earthquakes - The Dead Sea Transform
I still need to defend and graduate but it seems like the end of an era is inevitable. I enjoyed my time as a doctoral student very much. I was very fortunate to gain some serious skills in addition to the usual scientific research skill one might expect to gain during their Ph.D. I got to build a computational high performance cluster on which I computed my earthquake ground motion simulations. I got to deploy temporary seismic arrays in order to collect data in populated sedimentary basins. Although this data was not directly used in my Ph.D., I anticipate that I will use it down the road as it is a really nice dataset of continuous recordings. I got to TA several courses in geology, geophysics, geomechanics, and more at the undergraduate level, teach a full course on the Dynamical Earth to first year geology students while my advisor Prof. Michael Tsesarsky was on sabbatical, and I was actively advising M.Sc. students in our group on a professional level. Perhaps I will have separate blog posts on those later on.
I have not secured a real postdoc position yet… This is no easy task when you come from a fairly unknown university and were raised by academic advisors who are not very well known in the field of interest. Don’t get me wrong, I think my advisors (Prof. Michael Tsesarsky and Prof. Zohar Gvirtzman) were absolutely fantastic, really, but neither of them comes from a seismology background. They made up for this in many other ways. I attended as many conferences and workshops as I wanted. This helped me make some connections myself. I met with a lot of good scientists and gave a ton of seminars all over. For a while had a good feeling but there were funding issues.
For now, I am heading for a short, in-between, postdoc at the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI) to work on underground tunnel detection. I have confident this will be meaningful work but probably not publishable (for obvious reasons…) and that is less than ideal at this point.
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