On the path so far
What time in industry gave me
Open
Between my PhD and my current postdoc, I spent about a year and a half as a Tribology Application
Scientist at Bruker, working with academic and industry clients on tribological characterization across
a wide range of applications. It's a different kind of exposure than a single lab project gives you —
I got to see how similar surface and wear problems show up across very different industries, and to
build relationships with people tackling them from a lot of different angles.
That breadth stayed with me. It's part of why, coming back into a research role, I care as much about
whether a problem actually matters to people with real hardware as I do about whether it's interesting
on paper.
On curiosity
What keeps me interested in surfaces
Open
Almost every hardware failure I've ever looked at closely — in a lab, on a production line, or in the
field — started at a surface, not in the bulk. That's part of what drew me toward tribology and
characterization in the first place: the most interesting physics in a material often happens in the
first few microns, at an interface, under conditions that are genuinely hard to see directly.
I'm not ready to put the specifics of my current research direction here yet — some of it is still
making its way toward publication and I'd rather let the papers speak first. But the throughline across
my PhD, my time in industry, and my postdoc has been consistent: get as close as possible, instrumentally,
to the place where a material actually starts to change, and take that seriously as the main event rather
than a side effect.