 Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce a very interesting, unmanaged gentleman, by far away to be with us tonight. Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to beautiful Pasadena, California. Alright, I made it. Not too bad. And... I got coffee. So I'm here today and tomorrow visiting the Caltech Astronomy Department. I'm here to talk to people with the PTF slash ZTF team. So these are people who work on the Zwicky Transient Factory, which is the new survey that's being conducted here out of Caltech. Survey the Night Sky to look for transient or variable objects. So I'm really excited about this survey. I actually originally applied to work here out of grad school right in the frenzy of job application season. I actually ended up taking the job that I have now with the NSF Fellowship. The ZTF has just come online in the last few months and is now in survey operations, which is super exciting. And in a lot of ways it's a precursor to LSST, which I've talked about a lot on this channel. So I'm really excited to come and be here for a couple of days, learn more about what people here are doing. So I'm going to talk tomorrow about flares and star spots and things like that that I have been studying in Kepler. And I'm going to drink a lot of coffee. When you visit a department like this, there's a couple of cool things. Usually I end up doing a lap, just sort of walking around. You look at the names on the doors and you realize that there's a ton of people that you either met once or you'd know their name. So for example, there was a woman down the hall who I had never met in person, but she's another NSF Fellow. And we spent the first part of this week on the same video conference conference for like two days and then I was walking to the bathroom and realized she was right there so I finally got to meet her in person which was really cool oftentimes in especially in a big department like Caltech or like Harvard or places like this they're very famous people to get to see them just in their office working and then to get to talk to some of them they usually set you up with a schedule too so I have a schedule with like lunch and coffee and people that I'm meeting with so you just kind of get to hang out and talk to people and come up with new ideas so it's it can be really an enlightening thing to come in these kinds of visits all right time for my first meeting California but I was in the office by about 8 30 9 o'clock so not too bad so I had a really great day I got to meet with a bunch of people who I haven't met before but whose work I admire and it's really uplifting when you're going somewhere and people who you admire are saying oh I've read your papers or what do you think about this thing or what are you working on next or what you know what are you excited about and it's exciting for me to ask them what they're excited about and what are the things they're thinking because people often will be really honest with you about the things that they're working on the things that excite them it's not just trying to find new collaborations and and learn new facts and read new papers it's also about just trying to get people's sense about what they're not saying so the last meeting I had today was with who I whose work I have admired for a long time who published a model about almost 10 years ago published a model that I've used a ton in a bunch of my papers but there's also like five other competing variants in this model and I was able to ask her what version of this do you believe most and she said oh I this paper I think is actually the best prescription so far and that's really helpful like you're not going to find that written down in a paper but it's an expert opinion that is nice to have and that's some of these sort of insider pieces of information that you're looking for when you're trying to meet people and get to know them and drink coffee with them so my plan tonight is to kind of walk around Pasadena a little bit I also have to write a short talk something kind of informal to sort of talk about my work maybe show some slides for my upcoming paper probably go to bed a little bit early and then I've got meetings starting in the morning I have a five o'clock flight home nice short trip