I’m on my way to the UK where I was invited to an astro conference doubling with a birthday celebration of a famous US astrophysicist. I tend to travel abroad minimalistically these days, but I didn’t have the heart to decline this one by respect for my colleague and for all the close colleagues (some of them almost family) attending, plus I actually have some neat stuff to present. I also view this as a respect of my ongoing professional obligations as a CNRS researcher still active in astro, since I am still expected to attend conferences and present my research results on a regular basis.
This is likely to be my last astro event in a while though, so a good occasion to chat and say goodbye to a lot of long-time international colleagues and friends from the astro world. Some page turning, nostalgia and sadness involved…I can’t say I’m in particularly good spirits for this particular trip, especially since I know a lot of my colleagues there do not share my own perspective on the future of the field and I expect to have quite a few arguments with some of them, but we’ll see.
More broadly, and since I haven’t posted news of the transition in a while, as expected I am still not on the other side of the river regarding this move from astro to eco. I’m still finishing astro projects and have one more year of tenure as head of group in Toulouse to fulfill, and on the ecology side, things are taking time too, especially because I can’t commit to it at 100%. One of my projects there is now being setup with the recent hire of a PhD student who will start in October, and we just bought a small GPU server for the SETE in Moulis for modelling work (nothing big but a pretty handy little local machine). Another funding proposal for 4 years, standing at the interface between astrophysics and ecology, which I was hoping to get funded after successfully going through stage 1 of the process, well I didn’t get in the end, so I’m back to square one on this one. Everything is a bit viscous at the moment and I feel a bit like Sisyphus on some days, but as I gave myself 2-3 years to become fully operational in ecology and it’s only been a year and a few months, I try to keep a positive outlook on the whole process — since that is what it is, a process. I met some really interesting new people in Moulis so far, have a lot of ideas, and there’s now a core team of theoreticians there including two new postdocs with whom I really feel connected scientifically, which bodes well for the near future.
I am still also in the process of reading a lot, I am just about to finish Carl Bergstrom’s 800 pages textbook on Evolution which I started in January, I read a whole classical community ecology research textbook “The balance of nature” by Stuart Pimm in springtime, and I have recently been lent a book on quantitative conservation biology by Morris & Doak for the summer, which I still have to dip my toes into. Reading and learning is key when you get into a new subject (not just a new field), and for me has always taken priority over rushing to start calculations / modelling . So I’m taking ample time to learn the craft on the biology and ecology side, and to get some perspective into the field. Lots of interesting papers out too in spatial community ecology these days.
Finally, I spent a lot of time in the mountains observing the Pyrenees flora and fauna over the past few weeks to reset after a very busy first half of year. The mysteries of how nature organises itself remain as thick and beautiful as ever to me. If motivation to push through this difficult period of hard transition work was ever in demand, I know where to find it.
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