On Oct 14th 2016, I was invited to the meeting of computational polymer science in Tokyo and gave a talk on “Analysis of polymer rheology by molecular simulations”. This topic is my favorite, and actually the presentation is filled with my own research results. (Here, “my own result” means the output made by myself, not by students or postdocs).
On average, I have invited talk once a month. This specific fiscal year (2016), up to the end of October (from April) there were 7 invited talks. Nowadays for some cases the topic is something like “Basic rheology” which is fun, but most of the contents are not from our own research, just like my lecture course on linear algebra. The talk for polymer composite is also fun, but for this case more than half of the contents are made by Prof. Yamamoto and Mr Hirayama. Thus, my talk is a sort of advertisement of our group (or maybe NCC). Nevertheless, the talk for my own results is always great fun.
At this time, the presentation time was 1 hour, which is somewhat longer than the standard. Such a long presentation time has dual nature. In one side, I can present many things. But for the other side, presentation with many topics is not good for audience unless the talk is well-organized. For my presentation, I made an introduction for the multi-chain simulations for entangled polymers, including the primitive chain network model and the multi-chain slip-spring simulations. Then I showed some results for the analysis of polymer processing and strain-hardening. These two topics are somewhat useful for polymer industry. Following these topics, finally I added the inter-chain cross-correlation which might be useless for industry, but it is interesting for the description of polymer dynamics. Nevertheless, (as usual) I saw that almost nobody in the lecture room went sleep ;->. This observation is satisfactory for me.
Apart from the presentation, I made chatting with the other speakers at the lunch table. One of the speakers was from prvate sector, and this person was sent to Prof. Frederickson’s laboratory in UCSB to collaborate on the mean-field calculation of block-copolymers. According to him, his company pushes the young researchers to go abroad, and for such a purpose the company makes amount of donations to foreign universities. Hearing this story, the other speakers (from universities including myself) wondered why the company does not pay that money to Japanese universities. In the chatting, we had no conlusion, but just guessed that something abroad is appreciated. We might have a virtual institute outside (maybe in the Cayman Islands ;-X) to collect donations…