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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.
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About me
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Thoughts and advice on finding your way through the ever-confusing postdoc job market.
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A few months ago, I had faced the task of extending my summer employment at Nokia Bell Labs into the Fall semester. Little did I know that the process of getting work authorization for the semester and ensuring compliance with other rules is a bit of a minefield, especially for an international Ph.D. student in the U.S. like myself. There were many factors to weigh, and I spent a frustrating few weeks with little guidance to ensure that I’m in compliance with rules concerning everything from immigration and full-time student status to health benefits and tuition fee. Part of this difficulty stemmed from certain specific aspects of the situation that I was in, but a bigger part of it was also that there aren’t very many practical guides out there for international Ph.D. students wanting to do internships during the semester (which as I learnt recently, many are interested in). And so I decided to put together this informal and practical guide that might be helpful for students that might be in similar situations.
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A reflection after taking part in the 2021 Emory Global Health Case Competition.
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Did you know that you don’t need to be in space to observe the effects of earth’s curvature?
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4 years ago, if I had known all that I’d have to give up to be able to do my PhD, if I had known the impact that it would have on my mental health, and if I had known the struggles that came with it, I probably would’ve hesitated to go to grad school. Today, all of those things have become my lived reality. In this article that I wrote for @thefacultypub on Medium, I draw on lessons from Logotherapy, developed and pioneered by Viktor Frankl, and I share my thoughts on how I was able to find meaning in my struggles and better cope with them.
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We live in an age where despite the unprecedented ease of access to information and facts, misinformation and pseudoscience have a tremendous impact on our lives. From anti-vaxxers in the US to miracle cures of the coronavirus in India, pseudoscience is seemingly everywhere. The battle against this trend is not one that can be won by scientists alone. It requires collective action. In this article, I wrote down my thoughts on pseudoscience and listed some popular tips on how one can spot it.
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Grad school (PhD) is hard. A particularly tricky yet important aspect is mentorship and academic supervision. A PhD advisor greatly influences the graduate school experience (and chances of success) of a student. Choosing an advisor can be a confusing process, yet it is one that the student must get right. Now that I have the benefit of hindsight – and while my grad school experiences are still fresh in memory – I have written down some thoughts on this subject.
Sai Kanth Dacha, Gabriele Vajente, Rana Adhikari, 'Ultra-precise Sensing and Control of Suspended Optics Breadboard in the Crackle Experiment', Caltech Undergraduate Research Journal (2016) pp. 21-33
S. K. Dacha, A. N. Iyer, A. Sobhanan and D. Venkitesh, "Regeneration of 10 Gbps BPSK signals through phase sensitive amplification coupled with injection locking," 2017 Twenty-third National Conference on Communications (NCC), Chennai, 2017, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/NCC.2017.8077068
S. K. Dacha and T. E. Murphy, "Time-Domain Interference of Nonlinearly Interacting Spatial Modes in a Multimode Fiber," 2018 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO), San Jose, CA, 2018, pp. 1-2.
S. K. Dacha and T. E. Murphy, "(2+1)D Spatiotemporal Characterization of Nonlinear Interactions between Selectively Excited Spatial Modes of a Few-Mode Fiber," in Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, OSA Technical Digest (Optical Society of America, 2020), paper FTh3A.6
Sai Kanth Dacha and Thomas E. Murphy, "Spatiotemporal characterization of nonlinear intermodal interference between selectively excited modes of a few-Mode fiber", Optica 7, 1796-1803 (2020)
S. K. Dacha, W. Zhu, A. Agrawal, and T. E. Murphy, "Kerr-induced Rotation of Mixed Orbital Angular Momentum States in Hollow Ring-Core Fibers," in Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2022, paper W2A.13
Sai Kanth Dacha, Wenqi Zhu, Amit Agrawal, Kenneth J. Ritter, and Thomas E. Murphy, "Nonlinear rotation of spin-orbit coupled states in hollow ring-core fibers," Opt. Express 30, 18481-18495 (2022)
At the LIGO facility in Livingston, LA, I presented my summer research on methods to improve the control system of a suspended optical breadboard setup that was part of the crackle noise measurement setup at the Caltech LIGO Laboratory.