Wasserman Group

Yea all the more reason to invest in what’s important: Mikhail Kats, Prof. QB

I think the quarterback for my university’s football team makes enough per year to fund my lab for ten years.
Have you considered becoming the starting QB at UWisc?
It has the added advantage that you’ll be doing something that the university actually cares about!

Yea this pretty much describes my mood perfectly. I lose so much time thinking about science because I’m thinking about $$

Miguel Centena taught a “western way of war” class that I TA’ed for in the early 2000’s. Enrollment was quite high, though it was sociology not history.
Dunno if that’s still offered.

Every time I read about some horrible policy being implemented in higher Ed I am outraged and then realize that we’ve been forced to do that at UT Austin like forever.

Might not have been fair to ask him to sing either

Workday is a nightmare
UT has had it for maybe 5+ years now
It’s awful

I dunno what you are talking about everything works great the first time and no equipment goes down and I don’t spend so much time writing reports that I don’t have time to do science. It’s easy.

It’s cultural, you wouldn’t.

This is actually impressive. You should be proud, as a father, that your kids place the plates in planes including the z axis!
My kids have been known to place dishes in the xy plane…literally resting in the tines.
In fairness, they may be trying to induce a stroke in me

And to be clear, despite our decrepit infrastructure and obscene lack of funding for TAs we still are lucky compared to other departments at UT. The depts. that don’t teach anything ‘useful’, just writing, reading, and critical thinking, are in worse shape…325K a year could go a long way there…

Amazing. My students do extensive repeated cleans on samples b/c the building’s HVAC system spits black dust all over the labs. Experiments are done under a tarp b/c the roof leaks. But @utaustin.bsky.social will spend >300K on a speechwriter b/c we have a pres. who knows nothing about higher ed

That’s weird. I was given to understand that university leaders are only able to cower in fear and preemptively overcomply with the very worst interpretation of a legislature’s anticipated actions. Hook ‘em 🤘🤘🤘

Or scientific discoveries. They also don’t understand those.

It’s the phones. A world of distraction at their (our) fingertips as addictive as a drug. I can’t do anything about my students but the fight with my more distract-able child is non-stop, and absolutely soul-sucking.
I wish I could smash that thing into a million pieces.

Wanted to go, looked at getting tickets, but it would have been $500 to take the family…to watch the USMNT C team?

Exactly this. In fact, universities subsidize this vital research by paying 9 months of faculty salary and supporting the research infrastructure (which typically costs more than what comes in from federal grants!)
Universities subsidize federal research, not vice versa!

Crap what did they do now?

Just checked and the paper with the clear duplications is still up. @springernature.com has done nothing despite this being a clear, open and shut, case of copying.
@retractionwatch.com

structures from this material with Q~100,000.
This work was a collaboration with the Demkov group at UT and includes co-authors: Divya Hungund, Dan Krueger, Zuoming Dong, Zarko Sakotic, Agham Posadas, and Alex Demkov. Funded by ONR and AFOSR.

...due to its extremely large nonlinear response, but thus far loss in this material system is much much larger than in other nonlinear optical materials such as lithium niobate.
Amogh shows losses in monolithic BTO waveguides of <0.15 dB/cm and fabricated ring and racetrack resonator...

High‐Q Monolithic Ring Resonators in Low‐Loss Barium Titanate on Silicon Barium Titanate (BTO) boasts one of the largest known Pockels coefficients and offers compatibility with the existing CMOS fabrication infrastructure. However, BTO photonic structures have, to date, ....

The latest from our group published in Laser and Photonics Reviews: doi.org/10.1002/lpor....
UT Mid-IR Photonics grad student Amogh Raju demonstrates record low loss in barium titanate (BTO) waveguides and resonators.
BTO is an intriguing material for integrated photonic applications...

#OPG_OMEx welcomes submissions to a Feature Issue on Epitaxial Materials for Photonics. Excited to be part of the guest editor team for this special issue!!
Submissions close 1 June:

It’s weird that a movement so fundamentally anti-intellectual, incurious, and intolerant is uncomfortable on college campuses. Must be the liberals fault.

Tricking Light with Metaplasmonic Films Texas Engineers have demonstrated a technique to trick light into behaving as if it was interacting with atomically thin metal films.

we show that this metaplasmonic approach enables us to confine light down to a fraction of a free-space wavelength (ostensibly down to wavelength/100 or smaller).
Write-up from @cockrellschool.bsky.social : cockrell.utexas.edu/news/archive...

Infrared Metaplasmonics Plasmonic response in metals, defined as the ability to support subwavelength confinement of surface plasmon modes, is typically limited to a narrow frequency range below the metals’ plasma frequency....

The latest from our group in ACS Photonics: doi.org/10.1021/acsp...
Led by Research Associate Zarko Sakotic, we show that we can fabricate metal films that mimic the behavior of atomically thin metals, but with a fraction of the loss! This enables plasmonic response out to the mid-IR,

Not a great sign when a basketball coach can offer a more spirited defense of academic freedom than @utaustin.bsky.social which has gone radio silent

…and yes I know Steve Kerr is not just any bball coach…he’s actually, on paper, more qualified to be President of UT than Jim Davis, current pres.

In fairness, our president is a lawyer from Ken Paxton’s office who has never taught a class, never written a grant, never advised a student, and is only here to serve Gov. Abbott.
It would be so amazing to have a president that believed in what we do. I’d even settle for a provost with a spine!

It’s great to see a school actually do the right thing, but there is a part of me that is so ashamed of the response of my institution @utaustin.bsky.social in comparison. Our administration can’t even muster an anodyne statement of support for the mission of higher ed.

LEFT: Near-field electric field enhancement maps of nanocystal layers in cross-section showing spatial concentration in different layers RIGHT: Reflection spectra in the mid-IR depending on the number of nanocrystal layers stacked on a Au-backed Ge substrate, demonstrating ultrastrong coupling and increasing splitting of spectral modes where reflection drops to zero.

Photonic integration of plasmonic metal oxide nanocrystal assemblies for ultrastrong coupling and infrared spectral tuning. Collaboration with @utmid-ir.bsky.social and @tmtruskett.bsky.social now out in @pubs.acs.org ACS Nano.
@texasche.bsky.social

#ChemSky 🧪
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...