Congratulations to Dr. Valentin Danchev!

The D.Phil. thesis of my student Valentin Danchev (now a postdoc in the Knowledge Lab at University of Chicago) has now been officially approved. Valentin's other supervisor was Michael Keith of COMPAS (Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society) at University of Oxford.

Valentin is a sociologist and was a D.Phil. student in University of Oxford's International Migration Institute. His thesis is called Spatial Network Structures of World Migration: Heterogeneity of Global and Local Connectivity, and we have a joint paper on the topic in progress. We plan to submit that paper to a sociology journal.

Official Congratulations to Drs. Sofia Piltz and Marta Sarzynska!

My doctoral students Sofia Piltz (co-supervised with Philip Maini), who started a postdoc in ecology at DTU in June 2014, and Marta Sarzynska, who will be working at Bain & Company starting next month, both have gotten the revised versions of their doctoral theses approved in final form. Thus, they are now both officially done! Sofia's thesis is called "Models for Adaptive Feeding and Population Dynamics in Plankton", and some of her thesis work (with a couple more papers on the way) was published in SIADS. Marta's thesis is about "Spatial Community Structure and Epidemics", and you can read about some of it in this paper (whose sequel is on the way).

2014 'Dance Your Ph.D.' Contest Winners

The biology finalist was the overall winner of the 2014 Dance Your Ph.D. Contest. I didn't finish watching it because it wasn't amusing me (although it did look very sophisticated.)

I like the winner in chemistry. (It's pretty amusing.) I haven't tried watching the others.

One of these years, my group needs to submit an entry to this contest...

(Tip of the cap to the Improbable Research blog.)