From the start of November 2013 I’ve moved down from Imperial College London to Bath University, joining as a PostDoc on an EPSRC Programme Grant (Energy Materials: Computational Solutions). Here, I am in the Walsh Materials Design Group - still PhotoVoltaic based, but more concerned with Perovskites and Kesterites than Fullerenes. Crystal structures have the most fantastic names - after the Georgian mineralogists who scurried the Earth’s crust looking for new ones and named them either after each other, or crazy portmanteaus of Greek & Latin.
Bath university is up a great big hill (well, not that big - only a 150 m climb!), which makes the cycle up in the morning a bit arduous, but the return home jet propelled. Much more staggering has been the culture shock of moving from The Big Smoke to a rather small (and seemingly smaller) British town. All the coffee shops close at 6PM, the city centre empties to leave a ghost town. But Bristol is just a short hop away by train, and seems to get nearly as many gigs as London, and being surrounded by hills and countryside is great for the cycling possibilities (and there’s an active cycling club in VC Walcot).
