Looking back forty years on the significance of my Hunt fellowship Free

A postdoctoral fellowship comes at a very important point at the start of a young scientist’s career. Since the Hunt Fellowship provides salary and covers incidental expenses, it allows the applicant to select where (s)he will work and with whom. Although it was impossible to know at the time, my year as a Hunt Fellow at the University of Sussex, doing ultra-low temperature acoustics in superfluids, determined the direction of a career in acoustics that has been challenging and fulfilling over four decades. In Sussex, I shared an office with Prof. Richard Packard, on sabbatical from UC-Berkeley. He invited me to spend the following two years in his laboratory where I also had the pleasure of working with Greg Swift. When Greg left to take the Oppenheimer Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory to work on novel heat engines with John Wheatley, the field of thermoacoustics was born. After doing a Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Izzy Rudnick and Seth Putterman, the Hunt allowed me to continue working with amazingly talented and innovative physicists. Seth and Izzy are a hard act to follow. Having the access that the Hunt provided set me on a path of lifelong learning.