{"id":138975,"date":"2021-04-01T12:49:19","date_gmt":"2021-04-01T16:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=138975"},"modified":"2021-04-01T17:06:18","modified_gmt":"2021-04-01T21:06:18","slug":"ask-the-college-experts-the-value-and-opportunity-to-do-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2021\/04\/01\/ask-the-college-experts-the-value-and-opportunity-to-do-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask the College Experts: The value and opportunity to do research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The exponential growth of computing power has been a boon to the research that Assistant Professor of Physics Jeffrey Oishi and his students do every day at Bates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But supercomputers still can\u2019t top the power of the human mind to ask the right research questions, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oishi recalls what one of his college professors, the famed computational scientist David Keyes, once said in class. \u201cHe said he’d rather have today’s algorithms on yesterday’s computers than yesterday’s algorithms on today’s computers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/lite-youtube>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\n

In other words, even with the exponential growth of computing power, \u201chow we phrase our ideas and problems to the computer\u201d is what matters, Oishi says. \u201cHow we phrase our questions can radically change results by a much larger factor\u201d than any increase in computing power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, just yesterday, Oishi and a long-time collaborator, Keaton Burns<\/a>, found a way to solve a problem 2,000 times faster \u2014 on the same computer \u2014 simply by changing the mathematical formula slightly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Oishi and the students in his lab, past and present<\/a>, \u201cthat\u2019s where the real excitement comes \u2014in the ideas and ways of looking at problems.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oishi is a computational physicist. His lab, the Bates Fluid Dynamics Group<\/a>, seeks to understand highly complex systems \u201cthat are far from equilibrium,\u201d meaning that \u201cthere’s a lot of energy flowing through them. The classic examples for me are fluid turbulence in the atmosphere, the oceans, and the stars and their stellar atmospheres.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Ask and Receive<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Now in its second season<\/a>, Ask the College Experts<\/em> helps prospective students receive information about the college-search process. Subscribe to the Bates YouTube channel<\/a> to receive new Season 2 episodes as they debut.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s also looked at smaller-scale problems, like the growth of bacterial biofilms that thrive on surfaces \u2014 such as industrial pipelines and medical devices.  \u201cBiofilms grow and divide and exist in a fluid medium. It\u2019s one of the biggest problems for hospitals, for example, in intravenous lines.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research involves “extremely large supercomputer simulations on national-class facilities at NASA and some of the National Science Foundation centers,\u201d he says. In addition, his students have access to the college\u2019s high-performance computing cluster<\/a>. The HPCC is a “workhorse.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oishi earned bachelor\u2019s and doctoral degrees at two universities, Columbia and the University of Virginia. Now he\u2019s teaching and doing research at Bates, and he sees the benefits for his students when it comes to doing research at a small liberal arts college. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Jeffrey
In 2016, Jeffrey Oishi visits the college’s high-performance computing cluster, a workhorse of his and his students’ research, in a ground-floor hub room in Kalperis Hall. (Jay Burns\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd, importantly, the students bring value to the research work,\u201d he adds. Last January, a student in his lab, Morgan Baxter \u201920, co-authored a scholarly article published in the highly regarded P<\/em>roceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ample opportunities to do research is partly a numbers game. \u201cParticularly in STEM fields, there are fewer students, and no graduate students, to do the work,” Oishi says. “So a student can be in the thick of a project from an early stage.You can quickly see what it’s like to do scientific research and find out if it\u2019s interesting to you because it’s so vastly different than coursework.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s variety, too, in the work that undergrads do. \u201cUndergrads in my research group play a variety of roles in computational and theoretical physics,\u201d he says, \u201cfrom software development to what you might think of as traditional theoretical physics \u2014 using a pencil and paper and trying to make sense of equations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students also do data analysis, \u201cwhich can be done with a minimal physics background,\u201d Oishi adds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doing research builds \u201cpractical skill, even if you’re doing something extremely theoretical and extremely abstract.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students learn the valuable, lifelong skill of searching for an answer when \u201cyou don\u2019t know even if<\/em> there\u2019s an answer, let alone what that answer is. Learning to grapple with that, learning how to sit with that feeling, and move through it productively \u2014 that\u2019s the single greatest benefit of doing research.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doing research with a faculty member in a Bates lab teaches students the practical skill of searching for an answer when \u201cyou don\u2019t know even if there is an answer,” says Assistant Professor of Physics Jeffrey Oishi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":138985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,130,11009],"tags":[12238,11242],"class_list":["post-138975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-collaboration","category-the-college","tag-ask-the-college-experts","tag-jeffrey-oishi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138975"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139026,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138975\/revisions\/139026"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}