Mark Harrison

Hey, I’m also on S1 of the sopranos!

They did great! I think I was more nervous than my students.

Excited to see my students present at Photonics West today! 💡

The quarter zip under the suit is quite the combo. They can’t help but bring parodies of themselves to life.

Are you interested in doing a postdoc in beautiful Southern California? Chapman's GCI program is hiring another round of postdoctoral scholars. If you are interested in applying and working with me, please reach out. More details are in the application itself apply.interfolio.com/176832 #photonics

View of the sunset over the Pacific Ocean. The sun is behind clouds, making streaks in the sky and the reflection in the water.

We decided to take a family photo while visiting my in-laws by the ocean. Caught some beautiful light at sunset, just before the sun dipped behind some clouds. But when it did, I pulled out my phone and managed to capture this.

Color photo of an oscilloscope running Higinbotham's "Tennis for Two" game. A horizontal line represents the ground, a short vertical line is the net, and a small green dot with a glowing trail is the ball. Image: Brookhaven National Lab

Physicist William Higinbotham was born #OTD in 1910. During the Manhattan Project he was the Electronics Group leader at Los Alamos.

In 1958, while working at Brookhaven Lab, he invented one of the first video games: “Tennis for Two.” It ran on an oscilloscope! 🧪 ⚛️

Image: Brookhaven National Lab

What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business? The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

I also prefer text, especially if I’m looking up something technical or reviewing something I’ve learned before. Students sometimes ask me to recommend YouTube videos I’ve found useful (for studying and learning topics) and I can’t recommend anything because I don’t find them useful.

Thank you! I will almost certainly use some to make grilled cheese, haha

I’ve been baking a lot of rustic sourdough bread recently. This afternoon I tried making just a simple sandwich bread loaf. Pretty happy with how it looks, we’ll see what it’s like when I slice it open and how it tastes.

Wow. Staggering the waste of time and effort that will take

It’s the enthusiasm that is so wild to me. I was not mentally prepared for institutions like NSF to be going above and beyond for trump

I’ve been baking lots of bread, but I recently used my homemade dough to make a pizza. The dough ball was a little big, but the pizza was tasty

Very proud of my student Max who gave a great talk at Chapman’s student scholar symposium this afternoon. He and the other student working on this project (also Max) have done great work and I hope to share more of their results soon.

Chapman is once again looking for postdocs for the Grand Challenges Initiative fellowship! If you are interested in pursuing a postdoc in the area of optics and photonics, particularly in designing and engineering waveguide devices, please reach out!

apply.interfolio.com/159294

Yesterday I made bread from scratch for the first time. I was quite pleased with how it turned out.

Very happy that, after a long wait for reviews, our work on three-wave mixing in an ENZ material without phase matching was accepted for publication. We coupled light into a thin film propagating mode and saw cascaded nonlinear interactions with CW lasers. Check it out! doi.org/10.1088/2515...

We have a preprint up on three-wave mixing in an ENZ material without phase matching! My undergraduate student Kyle Wynne led this effort and will be presenting this work tomorrow (Jan. 30) at Photonics West. Go see his talk at 3:10pm in room 210! 💡https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.02492

Glad that the "official" version of this paper has finally been published! doi.org/10.1364/JOSA...

Chapman is once again looking for postdoctoral research fellows for the Grand Challenges Initiative program!
 
The full job description can be found here:  apply.interfolio.com/136140

If you are interested in working with me, please send me a message or an email! Also happy to answer any questions

Depends on how you define impactful but I think so. My (biased) opinion is to look at R2 institutions or other places with less research pressure. I feel like I can do impactful research but with a narrower scope than at a larger institution. And I provide UG students with research opportunities.

We have a preprint out exploring strategies for getting good results quickly when using inverse design for grating couplers. This spun out of another project and represents a big effort from an undergraduate student. arxiv.org/abs/2308.01893 💡

We are once again hiring at Chapman! I have had a great experience at Chapman and would be happy to share my thoughts with you if you are curious about what it’s like.

Come join us and help us as we continue to build our engineering school!

apply.interfolio.com/133097

apply.interfolio.com/133080

Snuck in a photo with Kyle during the poster session at FIO. I’m super proud of the work he’s done.

For my first Bluesky post... I'm going to be at Frontiers in Optics in Tacoma starting tomorrow! My undergraduate student Kyle is presenting a poster tomorrow afternoon on some cool work with optical nonlinearities in ITO. Hoping to see some familiar faces and maybe meet some new photonics folks!