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Scrumtui, A Local Scrum System
A few years ago, a colleague proposed to me that research, at its core, is an exercise in information organization. They believed that doing high quality research via the process of reading papers, performing experiments, and publishing results does not require talent or focus, but rather organization. Unable to evaluate the veracity of this claim at that point of my PhD, I took it to heart, and have spent a perhaps inordinate amount of my time on organization. I hope that my past post on the data I collected throughout my PhD lends some evidence to this.
July 12, 2026
Reflection on a Hiatus from Academia
At this point in my life, I feel incredibly happy and grateful. I have an amazing, loving girlfriend, I’ve secured my dream job, my ongoing health issues have been improving, and I’m spending the summer traveling the US to visit friends and family. I believe a huge contributor to this joy is that I’ve been fortunate enough to take the last six months off from work while I searched for my next career move. After about thirty applications, I received an offer from my top pick: a postdoctoral fellowship in Berlin, Germany. This is the type of work that I’ve dreamed of doing for years: intellectually challenging, consistent with my values of sustainability and open science, and enough compensation to pay the bills. As I’m incredibly grateful to be at this point, I’d like to reflect on what I did during my break from academia to get me here.
July 6, 2026
Cosmetic bike locks
Did you know that one in seven bikes parked at Purdue University can be walked away with in under a minute? In my few years living in West Lafayette, I’ve noticed a lot of bike locks which are cosmetic; that is, locks which appear sound at first glance but are topologically insecure on closer inspection. I spent a day meandering around Purdue University’s campus, recording a tally and photographing the different configurations. In total, I collected data on 270 bikes, and found roughly 6% of them to be entirely cosmetic or unlocked, with 15% removable with basic tools. See the chart below for a breakdown.
June 20, 2026
A PhD, in Data
In December, I was able to complete a dream I’ve had since I was a child: obtaining my PhD. I successfully defended my thesis, in which I used computational quantum mechanics and machine learning to discover new atomically-thin materials. It’s been quite an arduous journey to get across the finish line, and it’s taken a toll on me. Consequently, I’ve taken some time off to focus on my health, recenter my priorities, and look towards the next steps in my career. It therefore feels right at this moment to reflect on my time in grad school. While there are many possible avenues for this reflection, here I want to reflect on the data collected throughout my PhD. I expect to write later on more the qualitative aspects of graduate school. I start by asking the following question:
March 4, 2026
One Month with Linux in Academia, an Experiment
Throughout the four years of my PhD in computational materials science at Purdue University, I’ve spent absurd amounts of time with my computer. A back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest it’s been over 80,000 hours! Knowing that I’ll be spending this inordinate amount of time this way, and motivated by this XKCD comic, I’ve invested a lot of time reducing friction in my computer use. To name a few of these optimizations: adopting alternative keyboard layouts, learning competitive typing, using a package manager, and using tiling window managers have all saved massive amounts of time. However, like many computer geeks before me, I repeatedly find myself asking one question over and over:
September 8, 2025
Creating A Citation Web of my Publications
As a graduate student looking towards a career in academia, the pressure to publish highly-cited papers is omnipresent. Performing good science helps; but studying citation patterns seems to be an essential component to a highly-cited career. To be able to estimate the impact of a paper before having written a word seems an essential skill to build. I’m hardly the first to have this idea; the entire fields of bibliometrics and scientometrics explore this notion.
June 19, 2025
Using Apptainer (Docker) on HPCs
When rendering visualizations of large systems in our group, we often use Ovito, running on an Intel Mac in our office space. This seems a little strange, given that we have large amounts of high-performance computing resources at our disposal. Here’s a quick demo of how we can set up Ovito to run on a remote system. More generally, this is a demo of how to install any tricky-to-compile software, whether it be due to permission errors, missing dependencies, or out-of-date distributions.
January 27, 2025
Strachan Lab atomate2 Setup
This page serves as a guiding resource for atomate2 in the Strachan Lab. As of now, it is intended to be a companion to the installation guide at materials project. If there exists demand for a more comprehensive guide, that can be done later. What is atomate2? According to their README,
February 5, 2024
Atom IDE Installation Guide
Atom has been officially sunset and is no longer maintained. I do not recommend following this guide for new setups; prefer modern, actively maintained editors such as VS Code. This post is retained for archival purposes (it never migrated from my old site); I originally wrote it to help move my research group off MobaXterm and PuTTY. They now (mostly) use VS Code. What is Atom? Atom is a hackable text editor created by GitHub
April 29, 2022