119th AAS Meeting, Austin Texas

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. Between job applications, the holidays, and conference travel I've been pretty busy, and not as productive research-wise.

I'm currently at the AAS meeting in Austin. It's been a lot of fun. I've especially enjoyed some of the career development talks they've had here. There was a great discussion about alternative paths for astronomers / physicists -- things like journalism, science policy, education, outreach, and science communication. I had some productive/helpful conversations with people who work at primarily teaching organizations, as well as people who are do science outreach.

I attended a wonderful talk by Jean-luc Doumont on effective scientific communication. He apparently is speaking at Berkeley in April. I will encourage all my friends to go to this.

I'm currently on a "talking tour." Basically visiting a bunch of universities talking about my research and trying to convince them to hire me. It's actually a lot of fun (much more fun than I thought it would be).

Here is my AAS poster on my recent research on Luminosity Dependent Quasar Clustering (click here for larger image):

Cloudcroft Talk

Likelihood Target Selection Talk

I'm at the BOSS Collaboration Meeting in Utah this week. I've been assigned the task to give a detailed talk about the likelihood technique. I thought it would be useful to post it here so there is somewhere on the blog where it is discussed in detail (click on any of the below slides to enlarge):

(Award Winning) AAS Poster

Below is my poster from the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Washington DC last week. It is on the likelihood method and initial results.

(Click on image for larger resolution)

I'm currently at the Cosmology on the Beach conference. Sorry for lack of posting. Will post more soon.

Update: This poster won the Best Poster Award at the Cosmology on the Beach conference. Woo hoo!