Early Career Scientist Supported by RMetS Legacies Fund
Since 1961, the Legacies Fund has supported RMetS members through financing grants for scientific activities. Recent recipient, Charles Powell, a PhD student in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, shares how the Legacies Fund aided his professional development and enabled him to reach a milestone in his career.
Thanks to the generous support of the Royal Meteorological Society through a grant from the Legacies Fund, I was able to travel to the US to attend the 76th annual meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society. The financial assistance covered my travel and accommodation expenses which I would otherwise not have been able to fund.
The conference was held in Washington, D.C. from the 19th to 21st of November, 2023. The DFD annual meeting is one of the biggest conferences for fluid dynamics in the world. This year, there were almost 3,300 attendees across two and a half days of sessions. It is a fantastic opportunity to network owing to the large number of attendees. I was able to speak to many fluid dynamicists whose work has been foundational to my research so far, which was very beneficial for me as an opportunity to critique my own results, and hopefully a pleasing moment for other academics to see research building upon their work.
Attending the conference was a crucial step in my PhD, allowing me to present a short talk on a recently submitted paper which covers much of my work so far. At such a large conference, this exposed me to feedback from the perspective of a number of different sub-disciplines which has been very useful for focusing my plans for future work. I was also delighted to present a technical poster, which helped to publicise my work to the wider fluid dynamics community. The depth and breadth of talks available gave me many ideas which will hopefully prove to be fruitful in the next stages of my research.
Once again, thank you to the Royal Meteorological Society for enabling me to attend this conference which has been a great milestone in my academic journey and also personally, as my first trip to the United States!
Charles Powell
DAMTP, University of Cambridge