It is more than happy for us to have two brilliant post-doc researchers in our group.
I am afraid that it is late to announce that Dr Amamoto has joined our group as research associate from April 2016. He graduated from Kyushu university under guidance of Prof. Atsushi Takahara who is very famous for polymer physics, in particular for experiments on surface properties. Dr Amamoto is one of the super-post-doc scholars of JSPS in chemistry. Amazingly, only a few persons are allowed for this position. Dr Amamoto’s research topic along his career has been synthesis to produce functional polymeric materials, with around 20 publications. In our group he is learning simulations to merge his knowledge in experiments and molecular information obtained from simulations. I hope it works!
The other researcher, Dr Ankita Pandey has joined us as post-doc researcher on August 1st 2016. Dr Pandey is from India, and she has just graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras under guidance of Prof. Sunil Kumar who is famous for the researches on soft-matter physics by means of modeling and simulations. Dr Pandey’s thesis is on hydrodynamics of active systems and she has a strong background in computational soft-matter physics that is actually what I need for her position. The budget for her position is from the national project so-called SIP on the development of polymeric materials for motor-car industry, and we are attempting to develop a code for thermoset polymers.
Having young and brilliant researchers in laboratory is a great help in many aspects. In particular, for students, they are quite helpful. Now we only have 5 active students (2 undergrads and 3 in graduate school) and we have 4 staff members (including Prof. Yamamoto and myself). This situation means that for the students it is not difficult to catch one of the staff members (if they wish).
The other important thing for us from this August is that we have to make chatting in English basically, because now we have foreigner. This situation is very nice for us to make up our English tongue. Otherwise we have to pay for English lessons.
Now our research group has a great mixture of staff members. Prof. Yamamoto for theories, Dr. Amamoto for experiments, and Dr. Pandey for simulations. We can do our research in any directions for a topic of interest… More than great… Greater than I expected when I started my group. What I have to do now is to get sufficient budget for them.