Abstract: Many physics graduate students wonder if they will be able to become faculty, and the path often seems murky. Securing a faculty position in physics requires far more than a strong thesis and a long publication list. In this talk I combine personal experience—spanning industry, national lab research, and various academic appointments—with data from the American Institute of Physics to give a picture of a possible path through the academic job market. While this will highlight one physicists journey, I will outline the pillars of a successful transition from graduate student to professor: strategic networking, resilience and risk taking, leadership and mentorship. I will conclude with some personal advice on negotiating offers, cultivating multiple mentors, and balancing teaching experience with research productivity. This talk will give people some resources to convert their scientific passions into sustainable academic careers.
Bio: Dr. Rosi J. Reed is an associate professor of physics at Lehigh University whose research explores the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. She earned a B.S. in Physics from San José State University in 2002, then spent three years at L3 Communications designing klystron RF amplifiers before a brief appointment as a research scientist at NASA Ames. Reed began graduate studies at the University of California, Davis in 2006 and completed her Ph.D. in 2011 with a STAR experiment dissertation on Υ production in Au+Au and p+p collisions at √s NN = 200 GeV. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University working on the ALICE experiment at the LHC, and a research faculty post at Wayne State University, she joined Lehigh as a tenure track professor in 2015. There she joined the STAR experiment and the sPHENIX and built a large heavy-ion program. She has an NSF CAREER award and an NSF MRI, which have allowed her group to build two different detectors that are currently in use at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. She was a member of the Nuclear Science Advisor Committee and is currently the run coordinator for the sPHENIX experiment.
