Welcome

• Stan Bentvelsen

Room: Turing zaal

From Physics to Building a Cloud Data Warehouse

• Fabian Springer

Room: Turing zaal After studying theoretical physics I felt like it was time for a change. I didn’t really want to do a PhD and felt like there should also be other fun things to do. Making this change was a bit harder than it seemed at first, eventually I ended up in the field of Business Intelligence / Data Analytics, which is still quite close to the physicists state of mind. After a few months of working as a data analyst I was introduced to the challenge of bringing an overall structure to the data with the goal to be able to combine historical data stored in different systems into one 'cloud' database for the purpose of analysis and machine learning. In this talk I will briefly explain my experiences looking around for job opportunities and the challenges that come with it. Then I will give a small introduction to the field of Data Analysis, Data Warehousing and Data Science.

(Physics) Life has only just begun

• Philine van Vliet

Room: Turing zaal When I started the bachelor in Physics and Astronomy at the UvA, I already knew I wanted to do theoretical high energy physics. It is a very exciting field of physics, not just to me but also to the general public. Think about all the newspaper articles written about CERN and the Higgs boson. Spending a summer at CERN was definitely one of the highlights of my short physics life so far. But how to explain to your mom that you are writing your thesis about CP violation, B mesons and Z’ bosons? As a physics student, I want to cross borders. Real ones, by going abroad and meeting other physicists, and invisible ones, by conveying my passion to non-physicists. In this talk I will tell more about why summer schools are great to do, about doing outreach as a student, and about what convinced me to continue in research.

So You Are Becoming an Administrator...

• Gerard van der Steenhoven

Room: Turing zaal After being educated as an experimental nuclear physicist, I had the opportunity to change my field of interest every 6 years - on average. On the one hand there was a bit of luck involved, but at the same time I also was attracted by the prospect of change. At a certain point in my career I realized I was talking more frequently to directors and deans than to my own students. At that moment a recruiter approached me to become a full time administrator. I never regretted that step, although I still like the ideas that I am surrounded by many physicists and other colleagues with a solid scientific background. At present I am director general of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), and I will show how it is possible to combine my administrative duties with frequent talks on important scientific subjects such as climate change. My background as a physicist turns out to be extremely valuable in my day to day work at KNMI, although it is quite differently from my work as a researcher in the past.

A Tale of Many Particles and Three Countries - A glance at the academic life through the eyes of a theoretical physicists.

• Sabrina Cotogno

Room: Turing zaal An outstanding problem in particle physics is the description of the structure of hadrons in terms of their elementary constituents, quarks and gluons. The most common hadrons are protons and neutrons, which build the atomic nuclei and make up almost all the visible mass of the universe. Since my Master’s time, I devoted a lot of effort in studying hadrons and their structures in the context of a very exciting but also extremely challenging theory: Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD). The peculiarity of QCD is that the strength of the interaction between quarks and gluons varies considerably with the distance, being weak when they are at short distances and progressively becoming stronger as they try to go far apart. The nature of the fundamental interaction between elementary constituents is responsible for many properties of hadrons such as their mass and spin, as well as the mechanism called color confinement. My adventure in the theory of subnuclear interactions started in Italy where I studied, continued in Amsterdam with the PhD program, and eventually brought me to France, where I currently work as a post-doctorate fellow. By reviewing my personal experience as a theoretical physicist in three different countries I will try to give a taste of what the academic life could be after the Master in Physics.

The Physics of (my) Life

• Manon Wigbers

Room: Turing zaal All life-forms consume energy (ATP) on a molecular scale to actively regulate physical, chemical and mechanical processes over a large range of length and time scales. For example, on the nanometer scale, individual molecules within a cell display random diffusive motion but can exhibit emergent collective behavior on a mesoscopic scale. The spatial order on the mesoscopic scale, in turn, affects processes on the cellular and tissue level. In the Physics of Life we use concepts from fields, such as Statistical Mechanics and Soft Condensed Matter, to understand how inherently noisy processes develop spatiotemporal order and function. However, where these traditional physical theories have been developed for systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, processes in living organisms are out of equilibrium, raising the question to what extend these traditional theories apply. In this talk I’ll tell how the Physics of Life became the physics of my life. I'll discuss how traditional physics can help to understand the living world around us and where these theories potentially break down. Furthermore, I’ll give a brief overview of my PhD project on self-organization in developing embryos and explain how this is a small building block to develop a unifying theory of life.

Status of women and Nobel Prize in Physics

• Cecilia Jarlskog

Room: Turing zaal I will discuss the status of women in the scientific society, by giving examples, and what we could expect in the "accelerated universe" of our time.