A Return (Again)

About two years ago I wrote a post entitled “A Return”, upon moving to Princeton for a year (I was a Presidential Visiting Scholar at the Physics department). I reflected upon the fact that it was a return to a significant place from my past, where I’d been transformed in so many ways. Princeton was the first place I visited (not counting airports) in the USA, the location of my first postdoctoral appointment (at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)), and its was there that I did a deep enriching dive into the hubbub of Theoretical Physics, at one of the very top places in the world to do so.

After that, I moved West, to Santa Barbara, where my next postdoc position was at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), now called the KITP. I was very lucky to be able to go from one top place to another, and (as I’ve recently talked about in a BBC interview here) additionally, my field was in a delicious turmoil of activity and discovery. I was able to be a part of the maelstrom (the “Second Superstring Revolution”, and all the gifts it gave us, including better understanding of the role in quantum gravity of extended objects beyond strings (such as D-branes), the physics of quantum black holes, the tools to unlock the holographic nature of quantum gravity more generally (through AdS/CFT), and so on. (I’ve blogged about many of these topics here, so use the search tool for more.)

I’ve been known to say that Princeton was the place where I found my physics voice (Edward Witten was a key guide at that time). Well, to continue the theme, Santa Barbara (with its wonderful research group made up of people from both the KITP and the wider Physics Department) was the place where I started to learn how to use that voice to sing (with the guidance of Joe Polchinski (who sadly passed away a few years ago)).

Well, as you may be guessing after that long introduction, I’m doing “A Return” again, but this time not with some boxes and suitcases of things for a year’s stay: I can now announce that I’ll be leaving the University of Southern California (USC) and (as of 1st July 2023) joining the Physics department at UCSB. I’ll be in a wonderfully vibrant department, with all kinds of exciting physics activity, and as a bonus I’ll be able to take part in the very many things the KITP has to offer every day of the week. The members of the combined high energy theory and gravity groups seem to be very excited about my work and what I’ll bring to the groups and the department beyond, and I couldn’t be more excited to join! (You can probably tell this from the fact that a paper I put out earlier this week already had the UCSB physics address on it!). The people I’ve met so far from the larger UCSB faculty community have been welcoming and enthusiastic, which has been delightful. (As you may know, I tend to connect with a wide range of faculty in departments well beyond my home department, and UCSB is a great place for this.)

A good portion of the blame for my silence here on the blog the last several months can be laid at the feet of the process of making this move possible, and then all the logistical ins and outs (both professional and person) connected to it. Updating a blog (especially when I could not talk about what was afoot) was a hard thing to find time for. There were also a lot of deeply negative things on my mind (some of which I am walking away from) that certainly took away any enthusiasm for sharing thoughts freely with the world. I’m no doubt going to have a lot of fun (and maybe even interesting) things to share, moving forward, and so (family and many other duties permitting) I’ll try to do better here. (Don’t forget that you can regularly get shorter updates and musings on my social media sites on facebook and twitter. See the feeds in the sidebar.)

In addition to the excellent faculty, I’ll be in a place with a strong cohort of several postdocs, and also graduate students. It has been a very long time since I’ve had the privilege to be in a group enriched by regular postdoctoral activity, so I’m really excited about what comes next – I’ve any number of project ideas and techniques I’d like to pass on to interested young researchers to explore, and I know there are so many opportunities for me to learn things from them too. Moreover it will be a delight to be able to give something back to the field by helping train new generations of postdocs in the place where I myself benefitted from the care and attention of the many faculty of the group, almost 28 (yikes, really?!) years ago.

So, I’m looking forward to – as part of this Return – regularly walking down to the lagoon to have lunch with members of the group, discussing the latest papers, sharing ideas, unpicking confusions, and talking about everything under the sun from black holes and string theory to movies, novels, TV shows, and more. Sure, new buildings have sprung up on the path we used to take there, and maybe (as I’ve heard) there are different traditions in the group for sharing ideas in this relaxed way now… I’ll be happy to jump into whatever now carries on that wonderful practice.

It has to be said, it feels weird, and a little daunting, to move after being 20 years in one place. 20 years! That’s how long I’ve been at USC and in Los Angeles. I’ve made some wonderful friends and collaborators there over the time (both in and out of academia) and I truly love the city. The good news is that our family is not abandoning Los Angeles in favour of Santa Barbara. It’s more interesting than that. In fact, my wife’s primary work is in Los Angeles and so she will be regularly there, and I (as you know) regularly do work in the broader LA context in connection with public engagement events, museums, science consulting for the entertainment industry, The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and so forth. Moreover there are major theoretical physics groups in Los Angeles with which I have strong common research interests. So I’ll be a regular in LA too. More broadly, there are so many things for our children to engage with in the city as well, so they’ll be regular visitors too.

So while it is hello Santa Barbara, it’s not at all goodbye Los Angeles.

-cvj