I am at a conference called Compound Nuclear Reactions ’26 in Fukuoka, Japan. I’m here to present work from the PhD of Khlood Alharthi and to support another PhD student Sam Sullivan who is here to present his own work. I’ve been moved to write a blog post, though, by seeing a slide from one of the other speakers.
The speaker is Mathis Wiedeking from Berkeley Lab in the USA. What made me take the photo is the picture and acknowledgement of the work of Michael Armstrong. I remember Michael well as a Surrey MPhys student. Like all our MPhys students, he had a year-long research placement, and he took his at Jefferson Lab in the USA. I was his visiting tutor, and I remember going out there to visit him to see how things were going during his year. I knew that he went into PhD study after his MPhys, but I was glad to see that the work he has gone on to do is such that it gets highlighted in talks in international conferences.
