The Westward Shift of Cosmic Variance

I've been so woefully remiss in my blogging duties the past several months that most of our dear readers probably aren't sure that I exist. But there has been a good reason. As some of you know, I was the only member of Cosmic Variance without a faculty job. No longer! I'm very happy to announce that sometime next fall I will be starting at faculty job at Stanford, affiliated with the couple-year-old Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. It's a joint position between the Stanford Physics department and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, so although I'll be losing Sean as a colleague, I'm looking forward to sharing a department with another co-blogger, JoAnne. As I described a few months ago, the past six months or so of job-finding have been quite a whirlwind, and I decided that I needed to really focus on getting a job and deciding on the right one. So I not only stopped writing here, but also took a major break from reading blogs in general and from obsessing about the news. (Instead, for the past month or so I've been obsessing about the bay area housing market...) I have to say that it paid off -- I really couldn't have hoped for things to go better this year, or to find a better job for me either professionally or personally. It's been a great stint in the midwest (I was at the University of Michigan for two years before coming to Chicago), but I miss the bay area, the ocean, the reasonably-nearby mountains, the burritos and the farmer's markets. And the job is very exciting -- there's lots of energy for cosmology at the new institute, several new hires planned, great postdocs and students, two brand new buildings, etc, etc... Plus of course, I'll be joining an amazing physics department and a great lab, and my impression is that the joint position will really give me the best of both worlds. It is rather too bad that Cosmic Variance will be losing its carefully-planned geographic diversity, and will soon be 80 percent Californian... but then again, Sean and I will both be trading wind and winter for ocean and sunshine, so it's not really too bad for us. ;)