About Paul Woods
I am the Nature Astronomy editor who usually deals with papers on stars, the interstellar medium, the Milky Way & the Magellanic Clouds and anything molecular. My background is in astrochemistry, looking particularly at star & planet formation, the Early Solar System, evolved stars and the dust content of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Recent Comments
UPDATE: The new Springer Nature LaTeX template is available from this page: https://www.springernature.com/gp/authors/campaigns/latex-author-support
This is great work... thank you for your efforts.
That one is great... but I think I prefer the phoenix one. Hard to believe it's real.
I've been attending astronomy conferences now for 17 years or so, and it amazes me that we still have some really poorly organised ones, as if conference organisers are unable or unwilling to learn from previous experiences. Somebody should really write a conference organisation 'bible' to propagate our shared wisdom. This could cover a range of advice from such complex topics as gender parity and inclusion on invited speaker lists to things as simple as printing names in LARGE FONTS on both sides of conference badges.
Thanks for trying to re-think the way things are done in order to improve the conference experience for everyone, Kevin!
Great work and a fascinating story (I particularly like "Having an apparent discrepancy with Einstein's theory was not a comfortable place to be"!). Thanks for posting it.
Awesome! Such a good story behind this paper!
What a great 'Behind the paper' post! My favourite yet. So nice to see that collaborating together in a different way can give you a new insight into the work you have been doing for years.
I wanted to develop your point (2)... it is very good to learn new skills, for sure, and it is useful that when you're looking to transition to a new position, you look for ways to develop yourself, not just do the same thing you've already been doing... in terms of skills and knowledge base. But I would advise against jumping to a completely different field, as I did. This can certainly develop you, as a person and a scientist, but it is not necessarily good for an academic career, where you really need to establish your expertise in a certain topic. So yes, look for opportunities to learn new things when you move jobs, but don't make a huge leap into a completely different topic (unless you're unhappy with your current topic, of course!).