Materials-related postdoctoral opportunity at Rice, 2026-2027 edition

See here.

The Rice Advanced Materials Research Institute has launched its 2026-2027 competition for prestigious postdoctoral fellowships - see here:  https://rami.rice.edu/rami-postdoctoral-fellowship-program for details.  The actual application link is here.

If you are interested and meet the criteria, I'd be happy to talk.  I have some ideas that lean into the materials for electronics direction, and other possibilities are welcome.  

Science policy/funding updates, early October edition

This post is a bit later than I'd wanted, due to a combination of work and wanting to be in the right frame of mind to write about what's new in science policy (directly and adjacent matters) and funding.

• The NSF did underspend their federal appropriation for FY26 by more than 20%, obligating only $6.37B out of more than $8B budgeted.   In terms of numbers of awards, they made 2410 fewer awards in FY26 than in FY25, and about 5000 fewer awards than typical in FY21-24.  
• This includes the almost complete evisceration of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate.  As that Science news article points out, SBE has until now funded about 2/3 of all US research in the social sciences (including linguistics and archeology).  The presidential budget request has been calling for SBE's elimination for the last two years.  Congress has rejected that in its budgeting, but seemingly OMB has gotten its way regardless.  
• There are more NSF X-Labs topics on the way, and a webinar next week to talk more about the "AI for Physical Systems" one.  
• NSF has also created a "metascience" office and released a statement about collaborating with the UK on this.  I've given my take on metascience before - the idea of seriously studying which types and mechanisms of research funding and programs give the "best" "results" is good in principle, but extraordinarily difficult in practice.  The idea that sound conclusions can be drawn in just a few years is absurd.  
• On the unambiguously positive side (gotta take the win when there is one), the NSF did announce the surprise support of the National Math Stars effort. 
• NSF also announced the first of their new Grand Challenge programs, rumored to be a possible destination of (some of?) the unspent funding from the top point above.  No real information about them yet, though the Quantum+X one has a webpage where you can sign up for updates.  Given the description ("Whether you're a researcher at a university, a startup, or an established company, this prize challenge is your chance to help define the next era of quantum technology."), it's hard not to wonder if this is another conscious effort to have NSF be a funding vehicle for industry/business rather than longer-term research.
• These announcements happened in part at the "Science: A New Golden Age Summit" (link to White House release about this.).  The National Medal of Science was presented to various tech leaders (not scientists).  If any of my readers attended this event, I'd be very curious about a first-hand account.
• DOE has announced the Genesis Mission Graduate Fellowship program.  The idea is a 4-year PhD with "cocompetencies" between a discipline and AI, with required extended internships at DOE labs/user facilities and industrial partners. The actual call is here, with a LOI due on 9 November and a preproposal deadline of 23 November. 
• For those of you who are PIs in condensed matter physics, the new DOE notice of funding opportunities (pdf) is out.  Pay close attention to the condensed matter physics program, as its focus has shifted.  
• Similarly, the new Air Force Office of Scientific Research BAA is out, and as with DOE, the focus of the condensed matter program has shifted.  Both DOE and AFOSR are now explicitly very interested in quantum geometry.  

On the more general research landscape:

• It's pretty clear that no matter what happens in the upcoming US elections, the next two years at least are likely to be comparatively bleak for federal support of science and engineering research.  Fundamentally, regardless of what OSTP says and despite glossy announcements of new programs, it sure seems like the executive branch (OMB) still wants to curtail federal support for research, and there is not much that even an opposed Congress alone can do in the near term.
• The number of STEM PhDs entering the job market in 5-ish years is going to be 25% down or more, because funding uncertainty has led to two consecutive years of double-digit decreases in admissions.  Remember, only 10% or less of STEM PhDs go into academia, so this demographic drop is going to be largely felt by industry.  I remain surprised by the apparent apathy about this.  If I thought my technical workforce applicant pool for some jobs might decline by double digits, I'd at least have some concern.
• Perhaps industry is collectively assuming that AI will somehow make up for this.  OpenAI released 722 preprints out there this week with results in math and mathematical physics.  This is simultaneously impressive and awful, and much has been written about it.  See here for an article and here for a weekly digest, from Quanta.  Peter Woit is hosting an interesting discussion, and points to a collection of comments about this.
• The US administration also announced a rule change that would impose a $70000 charge for "curricular practical training" (the mechanism that allows international students on F1 visas to have internships during their time as students) and a total of $100000 in fees for "occupational practical training" (the mechanism for international students to be allowed to work in the US for a period after completing their studies).  The actual proposed rule change is here, and people can submit public comments here until November 9.  Personally, I think that this rule change is yet another component of a seeming concerted effort to make the US unattractive as a destination for international scholars, a strategy that is incredibly self-defeating for the country.  (Sure looks like a lot of the "yes, kill OPT" comments are verbatim copy/paste of the same text.  Seems like someone has seen prior public commenting efforts on other controversial rule changes and decided to mobilize.)  Like the prior proposed duration of status changes for F1 and J visas (injunction discussed here), there are likely to be multiple big lawsuits filed over this.  

Whew.  This was a lot.  It's hard to maintain my customary equanimity when the pace of disruptive news is this rapid.  I will hopefully write more about some cool science soon.

The arXiv - where it's been and where it's going

Back in the ancient mists of time, scientists and mathematicians would circulate preprints of their articles among friends and colleagues via the postal service, as a courtesy, to get feedback and to try to make sure people in the community were aware of their forthcoming work.  As the wikipedia entry says, with the advent of widespread LaTeX and the development of the web, Paul Ginsparg (then at LANL) put together an html-based site for electronic sharing of preprints, initially at xxx.lanl.gov (back before "xxx" in URLs was the kind of thing filtered and blocked by employers).   In 2001 he moved to Cornell, and by then the lab was perhaps relieved to see the site, rebranded as the arXiv, shift to Cornell's library/repository infrastructure.   PIs my age remember (fondly? maybe?) the old days of the arXiv, when Prof. Ginsparg's rather dry sense of humor pervaded the site.  The skull-and-crossbones logo.  The "help"/FAQ pages that basically said, "if you can't figure out how to .tar.gz all of your necessary LaTeX files, and you can't figure out how to make your .eps figures small, maybe you should reconsider whether you're smart enough to be sharing your ideas here".  The arXiv was for preprints, without peer review (though interesting follow-on sites like Scirate now exist for organized commenting on the articles).

From these modest beginnings, the arXiv has grown enormously, including imitators/spin-offs such as chemrxiv and biorXiv and socarXiv.  The arXiv has recently become an independent nonprofit, hired a CEO, secured multiyear philanthropic support, and hosts over 3 million articles.  It's been interesting seeing some level of complaints online about some of these steps, but when the audience is so large, not everyone is going to be happy.  Rapid growth has been a major issue - see here for a graph of monthly submissions:

The exponential rise (except for a slight pandemic-correlated shoulder) has been problematic, especially recently.  One hallmark of the arXiv over the years has been its ability to function with comparatively minimal need for "moderation".  Early on, one consequence of the minimalistic help and moderate technical entry barrier was that it was unusual for fringe/pseudoscience to make its way onto the server.  (Hence the establishment of viXra.)  With the ease of cranking out properly formatted readable manuscripts using AI, clearly the arXiv has been struggling.  If 10-15% of submissions need some kind of human intervention or review, the support needs are rapidly outpacing the limited count of support staff.  There can be substantial backlogs.  To help deal with this, the arXiv recently updated its policies regarding AI-generated content (and AI cannot be a co-author, because the AI tools cannot take responsibility for content), and most recently has had to limit submission rates to two papers per month per submitting author.  These moves, too, have drawn some criticism (e.g. here).  Personally, I think the operators of the arXiv face an incredibly challenging environment and are doing the best they can - the idea that they are making moves because they are establishment sticks in the mud who don't understand the New Way of Doing Science is just wrong-headed.

It's completely unclear where all this is heading.  Exponential growth in nature signals instability and does not continue forever. If proponents of very heavily AI-driven research want to establish a repository specifically for that work, that's up to them.  [It is very on brand for the hard core AI advocates to argue that the arXiv is somehow morally obligated to host everything (regardless of hardware or personnel costs) so that future AI tools can read everything (a repository growing too quickly for human researchers to keep up) and summarize it.]

One overarching point that should come up in any arXiv discussion: The arXiv has become a global repository for an enormous amount of human knowledge, without charging anyone publication fees.  This should make interested parties think reallllllly hard about economic models of for-profit publishers. 

Annual Nobel speculation thread

 

It's that time of year yet again.  The physics Nobel will be announced next Tuesday, and the chemistry prize on Wednesday.  Who will it be this time?  Please speculate in the comments.  As is my annual futile tradition, I will put forward that the physics prize could be Aharonov and Berry for geometric phases in physics (even though Pancharatnam is intellectually in there and died in 1969).  This is a long shot, as always, especially since last year's prize for “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit” was condensed matter related.  Perhaps optical metamaterials, with Yablonovitch, Smith, and Pendry?  (Though that's another one where picking just three names is challenging.)  Astro-related is likely due, so perhaps something CMBR related?

Brief science items - September 2026 edition

Several science items of interest from recent weeks.  As always, apologies for missing some, which I'm sure to have done.

• A month ago, Premi Chandra, Piers Coleman, and Clare Yu published a really nice memorial biography of Phil Anderson, one of the great scientists and characters of 20th century physics.
• A few days ago Dam Son, an outstanding condensed matter theorist at U Chicago, posted a paper on his site that resolves a math issue that had been lingering related to a well-known paper from back in the heyday of anyon superconductivity.  The authors had always been afraid that their approach accidentally violated a sum rule.  It turns out, the authors had just misplaced a factor of 1/2, and their approach was actually exactly right.  The really novel bit here is that the paper is written as if it is single-authored by Claude, and acknowledges Dr. Son for prompts that led to the result.  See here for an interesting twitter thread on this via Sankar Das Sarma.  
• Tangentially related, Anthropic and Matt von Hippel achieved a new result, a 9-loop perturbation theory calculation based on N=4 super Yang-Mills theory.  These kinds of mathematically virtuosic calculations are exactly the sort of task that AI tools to which are extremely well suited now.  
• Three weeks ago, a neat paper appeared in Science Advances.  These folks used quantum interference of a Bose-Einstein condensate to test the equivalence principle in a quantum system.  The basic idea is, you take an ultracold atomic gas in a well-defined quantum state.  You split it and toss one component of it upward, while you hold the other component of it fixed in the lab frame. (This work is a descendent of this approach, which was happening in the lab above mine in back when I was in grad school.) The upward-thrown component accumulates quantum phase as it rises in the lab gravitational field, slows to a stop, and comes back down.  There is a specific amount of phase difference between the two components predicted by the equivalence principle (which says that inertial mass and gravitational mass should be exactly the same), and that's what the authors find.
• A couple of weeks ago, this paper appeared (shoutout to the first author, who is a Rice undergrad alum).   The authors fabricated a nanomechanical resonator made out of LiNbO3 and coupled it to a qubit to act as a measurement device.  Remarkably, through the qubit they are able to see transitions between individual vibrational quantum numbers in this many-atom mechanical resonator.  This is quite impressive, and it opens up many possibilities for transduction between different quantum degrees of freedom.  

More soon.

The NSF memo - why is it so concerning to many?

Last week the NSF issued a new memorandum describing the changes that they plan to make in agency programs and operations to implement the Golden Age of Science ideas advocated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  It has been reported (Science, Nature) that many scientists are concerned about what is in the memo.  The first words of the Science article: “For many U.S. scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the agency they know and loved died on 10 September.”  I will try to lay out why some people feel that way.

The memo outlines changes to operations that will fundamentally alter the character of the agency.  Generally most of the ideas are not a priori bad if the agency were in an environment with greater resources, when experimentation with alternative funding schemes and evaluations was not a less-than-zero-sum proposition.  Instead, these ideas are being put forward at a time when the NSF is underspending (for no obvious reason by the non-technical people in leadership roles) its appropriation for FY26 by around 18%.  This self-imposed budget austerity takes a bad situation (great uncertainty for everyone, drastically reduced staffing, delayed/eliminated/consolidated programs) and makes it considerably worse.    Now this memo outlines plans to take resources away from historically core programs and redirect them to new, untested initiatives, and to do so in ways that don’t always seem internally consistent.   

The memo talks about trying to fund certain investigators for longer periods (e.g. five-year awards) with minimal goal direction (so that PIs are free to explore where ever the spirit moves them – across all of NSF’s portfolio, or only in chosen administration priority areas?), but there is no adequate discussion of how those people will be chosen.  At the same time, there is talk of “golden tickets”, where individual reviewers in an already stripped-down review process can earmark some proposals for elevation, again with little explanation of how this will work.  Without careful safeguards, this combination seems problematic, and the assertion that this will lead to higher risk/higher reward research unsupported.   The memo also talks about short-duration, small budget awards for really risky proof-of-concept ideas.  This isn’t crazy and the EAGER program has been good, but the idea that the key to enabling success in high-risk research is to reduce the budget and the timeline doesn’t make much sense to me.    

There is a through-line that the agency is trying to treat workforce development as separate and distinct from funding research projects.  As the Science article says, “Traditionally, most graduate students and postdocs are funded through a research grant to their adviser or lab chief. But that will no longer be the case. Instead, the memo says, ‘Talent development funding opportunities may be coordinated with [research]-focused activities, as appropriate, but will be distinct and goal-oriented efforts.’”  The memo mentions nurturing talent through the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program and proudly talks about how this was just renewed.  What it doesn’t tell you is that it was renewed at a considerably lower level than in previous years, which seems completely at odds with the claim of bolstering the program.  Similarly, the memo talks about expanding access to shared infrastructure like cleanrooms, etc., but stated targeted funding levels of programs like the NQNI are no higher now than they were 12 years ago, not even accounting for inflation. (I assume they will actually make NQNI awards.)  If NSF leadership keeps slashing their own budget, in defiance of congressional appropriations, it won’t matter what their priorities are. 

Lastly, let’s talk about “metascience”, the comparative study of different research funding models and practices, with the goal of a “self-improving NSF”.   Again, the essential idea of doing careful studies of alternate funding mechanisms and research team structures and practices to improve research outcomes (not a trivial matter to define) is not bad.  Doing this well is hard, because of several obvious reasons:  How do you define successful research – by scholarly impact, by patents/economic impact, by production of educated scientists, some weighted average of these?  On what timescale do you do this evaluation?  The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper was hardly cited for decades, and it is now arguably one of the most influential papers of the last hundred years, with enormous impact on quantum science and technology.  How do you have sufficiently large samples and sufficiently long constant overall conditions to get reasonable statistics?   There are strong practitioners of metascience out there, but when the memo says “These efforts ultimately serve a concrete ambition for NSF to double the scientific productivity and impact generated by each federal research dollar by 2036”, how can one take that seriously?   No definitions of productivity or impact, and an implication that there will be optimization and major programmatic changes within less than two cycles of the much-vaunted five-year grants?   The word “ambition” is doing all the work in that sentence.  

Oh, and while all this is going on, the agency (among others) has now eliminated language from its integrity policy that used to say that political interference in grants and operations is bad.  I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about.

There is tremendous uncertainty in funding from multiple agencies these days, and this has resulted in many universities cutting back on doctoral admissions in the sciences and engineering.  This guarantees that there will be fewer PhD recipients in a few years across these disciplines.  The large majority of PhDs in these areas do not go into academia and instead have formed the base of technical knowhow across diverse sectors of the US and global economy for decades.  Cutting the supply like this will definitely have long-term consequences beyond just the halls of academia, affecting US competitiveness in ways that will take years to unravel.  Adding to this uncertainty is not helpful to anyone.

These are among the reasons why many find it hard to read that memo in the context of everything going on and feel optimistic that the proposed changes in NSF operations and direction will lead to a golden era for research.

 

Science communication - importance, insights

This past week we launched SCOPE, a new center for science communication and public engagement.  We marked the occasion with a fun symposium, as well as a Science Café event the preceding evening and a public science openhouse yesterday.  The symposium was very enjoyable, with a panel that comprised Kelly Weinersmith (known for many things, including an outstanding podcast and popular science books such as this Hugo-award-winner), Peter Hotez (tireless champion of vaccine development and pushing back on disinformation), Eric Berger (space editor for Ars Technica, founder of spacecityweather and theeyewall, two excellent sites for no-hype weather information), and Briana Rapini (one of The Amoeba Sisters, creators of a youtube channel with 2.9M+ followers).

You might have picked up from my 21 years of blogging that I think science communication is of great importance.  We've learned amazing things about how the world works, and I think we'd all be better off if more people knew about them and about the process of learning and discovery.  If there is public investment in research, then it's incumbent upon researchers to make sure that the public has the opportunity to learn about the fruits of those labors.  When the government, NGOs, and corporations make policies and strategic decisions that involve or depend on technical knowledge, we need to do our best to help those be informed decisions.   Once upon a time, Congress had a research office to help their staff and office holders understand technological issues.  It was killed in 1995 as "wasteful" and allegedly partisan. <sarcasm> thank goodness no technology-oriented issues have come up before the US government since then.</sarcasm>  (I am very tired of victim-blaming that presents mistrust of science or partisan razing of the research ecosystem as somehow the direct fault of scientists who failed in the communication mission.  Communication could have been better about many things, but complex societal forces are, in fact, complex, and there are many deep-seated reasons behind where we are right now.)

There were a few key points that came out of the panel above and from related discussions at the symposium.

• Know your audience and put yourself in their place.  What would you want to hear?
• Respect your audience.  You can avoid jargon without condescension.
• Ascribed to my colleague Neal Lane:  "The general public expects that you're smart.  They want to see if you're human."
• Listen to your audience.  Ascribed to Will Rogers:  "Never pass up a chance to shut up."
• If you're hesitant to do your public-facing project (writing, podcast, videos, etc.) because it's not flawless, just push through and do it.  The way to get good at this is through practice, not perfectionism.

There is a real dilemma out there about the degree to which practicing scientists can and should put effort into science communication.  Very few people in the US can name a single active scientist.  Among scientists and engineers, there is still sometimes an attitude of "Why are you spending your time on this?  If you are, you must not be a serious researcher."  It is true that, if you're a faculty member teaching and running a research program, you have to carve out time to do this, and those efforts are historically not well rewarded by many evaluation schemes.  Yet, I still think it's important, and programs like those run by SCOPE are hopefully going to help those who have an interest in science communication develop their skills and get valuable experiences.