Category: PhD
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There’ll always be an England: Madrid week four
I didn’t write a blog post last week as I was rather ill (fortunately not with coronavirus…) and consequently did not get up to anything of note. As of tomorrow, I’ll have been in Madrid for a month, which seems rather unbelievable. I’ve been feeling a bit homesick this week. It’s funny the strange things […]
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Standard sirens, Cobaya and Beethoven’s 9th: Madrid week two
As of tomorrow, I’ll have been in Madrid for two weeks! Time really does fly. The weather is still freezing and there’s fresh snow on the hills behind campus (as you can hopefully see in the header image, which I took on my commute this morning). This week I made a proper start on the […]
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Studying abroad in Madrid: the first week
Hello! If you’re reading my website for the first time, I’m a third year PhD student from the University of Portsmouth, working on testing and constraining models of interacting dark energy. If you want to know more about my research, you can click here for an overview and here for some more in-depth information. However, […]
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Year Three
With the arrival of the new first year PhD students on Monday, I can officially class myself as a third year. It’s a rather terrifying thought! The past two years have raced by in a blur of reading papers, attending conferences and wrestling with code. I’m now starting to seriously think about my post-PhD career. […]
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COSMO19 in Aachen
This week I travelled to Aachen on the western border of Germany for the COSMO19 conference hosted by TTK, the theoretical physics department of RWTH. The conference, which occurs yearly in different locations around the world, has a very broad scope ranging from particle astrophysics to theoretical cosmology. Conferences are an important and fun part […]
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Constraints on the interacting vacuum — geodesic CDM scenario
At the very end of February, I published my first paper. In this post, I want to provide a brief, non-technical overview of what we* were doing in this work and the results we found. The manuscript is currently under review at MNRAS but you can view the preprint here: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/1902.10694. The aim of this […]
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Surviving burn out and the post-paper blues
I published my first paper at the end of February. I won’t beat about the bush: writing this paper was exhausting. I’d had unrealistic expectations for how quickly I’d get publishable results, and consequently every delay to our draft felt like a disaster. At first we were going to be ready by July (2018). Then […]
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Congres des Doctorants — a week in Paris
Last week I attended the 26th annual Congres des Doctorants organised by students of the STEP’UP Doctoral School in Paris and hosted at the Institut de Physique du Globe, near the Pierre and Marie Curie campus of the Sorbonne. The doctoral school comprises physics and geosciences students from almost every university in Paris and I […]
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A collaborative week in Leiden
I spent the past week at the Lorentz Institute, the theoretical cosmology part of the physics community at Leiden University. My collaborators there are fellow members of CANTATA, an EU COST-Action that is mainly focused on creating and testing alternative theories of gravity, and I was awarded my second STSM (short-term scientific mission) by CANTATA […]
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Slow progress — but progress nonetheless
This week I’m in the Netherlands, visiting colleagues at the Lorentz Institute at Leiden University. Leiden is a beautiful place– a scaled-down, tourist-free version of Amsterdam– and the institute is nice too. It’s the oldest theoretical physics institute in the Netherlands and has played host to many greats of the field, including Ehrenfest, Fermi and […]
Natalie B. Hogg 