The extremely giant Quantum Information Theory Group at the LMU Munich has now a new homepage, cited at the LMU theoretical physics website. Here the long list of its group members.
Since my postdoc ends end of march and there are no more open postdoc positions currently available and given the not so easy website handling, I am not so sure it was worth the effort to mention me.
posted by nad
on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 5:29 pm // math, physics.
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January 18th, 2009 at 1:05 am
Do you think that teaching did impair your research?
May I ask, what you are going to do if your job ends in march?
January 18th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
@ingeborg >Do you think that teaching did impair your research?
oh no, it may have made it a bit slowlier (although even this is debatable) but it definitely didn’t impair my research. Impairing to my research were non existing or almost empty libraries, moving every other month from one place to the other, uncertain perspectives. In particular due to a german law (hochschulrahmengesetz) i gave up research completely in between. In this law it suddenly was not allowed to get a non-permanent academic job after six academic working years after your Ph.D.
Means: if you didnt manage to get a permanent position within 6 six years after your Ph.D. then this was the end of your academic career in Germany.
Since there is the socalled Sekt or Selters (Champagne or Water) principle in Germany, i.e. there are almost no “intermediate” permanent positions, like lecturers, readers but only the position of at least associate professors, this meant furthermore that you had to be super-duper in the six years after your Ph.D. The law was intended to stop the situation that scientists lived for years on non permanent jobs (often until they where much too old for industry), however it was omitting the fact that the academic job market is international, which lead to a socalled brain drain. They changed the law again in 2007. At the moment it is possible to have non-permanent academic positions beyond the six-years if they are not funded by a university. And you can have socalled “Lehrauftraege” (teaching which is paid by the lecture hour). So I taught a class about photovoltaics at the university of applied sciences in Bielefeld. It was paid 23.50 Euro the lecture hour (i.e. no payment for preparation of the lecture, preparation of the exam, social security etc.)
But back to the topic, in general I think a little teaching now and then is good for everybody. I am quite skeptical about research-only jobs. I do think however that a too heavy teaching load does impair research and teaching. It is clear that the higher the teaching load, the less you will find advanced classes, innovative approaches etc. Especially in academia the preparation time of an advanced class exceeds the actual lecture hour multiple times. For an advanced class, you have to do usually research (which doesnt account as your own), fill in gaps etc. (i am speaking here about math and physics, but this probably holds also for other disciplines) In the past years the teaching load of a german university professor was subsequently increased. It is now about 9 hours a week (at a university of applied science even more). This sounds not much but I think it is too much already.
There is another fact, which is often forgotten here, which is that a human can on average work highly concentrated and creatively only for about 4 hrs a day, the rest hours you can still do routine work but usually not much more. Some people can extend this temporarily, but in general efficiency is only there for this rather short time. If this time is more or less occupied with teaching (-only) then there is not so much left of this very important time for research. A sabbatical, i.e. a longer period reserved for research only is also important.
>May I ask, what you are going to do if your job ends in march?
i dont’t know yet. May be open up a hedge fund and investigate wether gauge theory (which is actually experienced some renaissance in topological quantum computing) can be used for example for treating the CDO bubble? —JUST JOKING.
no i dont know yet. At the moment we are looking for a smaller appartment here in munich.
January 21st, 2009 at 1:41 pm
>>@ingeborg >Do you think that teaching did impair your research?
>oh no, it may have made it a bit slowlier (although even this is debatable) but it >definitely didn’t impair my research.
but if you are slowlier then your faster collegues may react faster to new important scientific breakthroughs and they will be faster to publish new results, so it does impair your research.