Bittersweet Transitions (From Georgia Tech to Johns Hopkins!)

As I have been mulling over my move to Johns Hopkins, the word that keeps cropping up again and again is "bittersweet." I look back at the 20 years that I spent with my family, my colleagues, my friends, and my group in Atlanta, and I feel the moroseness of the loss. We built our home here, our son was born here, my research group thrived here, and I was part of the team that raised the visibility and profile of Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry.

The funny thing about that rise is that it included faculty like me who started our careers at Tech, but it has also included a significant number of colleagues who moved to Tech after having established their research groups elsewhere. The latter came to Tech with an opportunity to reinvent themselves and their research groups. They also had a mandate to add to the growth of their new department. This is the sweet side of a move. Likewise, I am looking forward to reimagining a more agile research group solving problems across our core areas of research. I am also excited by possible new collaborations, and what I will learn from them. The practice of chemical research has increasingly become multi-disciplinary and collaborative. It's exciting to be on a new team, but it is still a bittersweet feeling as I will undoubtedly lose some of my ties to Georgia Tech.

At the stroke of midnight on June 30th, the transition will be complete. I will start my adventure with my new colleagues at Hopkins! The size of our undergraduate student population makes it feel like a primarily undergraduate institution that happens to be collocated with a world-class graduate research program. I look forward to being able to engage with students in smaller classroom settings just as I experienced during my Phi Beta Kappa lectures. I look forward to meeting with my new colleagues and collaborating on problems that I have not yet thought about. My research group is also moving quickly, and we will have the resources to advance the theory of chemical reaction rates and dynamical consistency in multiscale nonequilibrium approaches, while tackling challenges related to proteins, nanoparticles, colloidal suspensions and high-speed flows. Hopkins Chemistry has been moving up because of: many outstanding recent junior hires, many successes by mid-career and senior faculty, and emerging ties to other disciplines. It's an amazing opportunity to be a part of this growth!

So farewell to Georgia Tech and hello to Hopkins. This is an ending that has a beginning, and I am looking forward to what awaits.