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Nikita Klimovich

    • About Me:

      I’m a Ukranian physicist most recently coming to the UK from the United Sates. I love vegan cooking, chess, and Star Trek!

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      I was born in Ukraine, but moved to the United States around the age of 10. My mother and I moved around a lot, so I had lived in 12 different homes by the time I went to college. Outside of work and relaxation,I’ve spent a fair bit of time doing various forms of science outreach and political activism, although not nearly as much as I would like. I’ve also been vegan and happily married for over three years.

      I don’t watch much TV (pretty much only Star Trek and nature documentaries) because I prefer more involved/social forms of entertainment like video games, board games, and chess. I’m also quite fond of visiting museums, mostly because I can read/translate the middle Egyptian hieroglyphics they have on display.

    • My pronouns are:

      Any pronouns (he/she/they)

    • My Work:

      I use superconductors to invent new types of tools for astronomers to use to study our universe.

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      When astronomers gather the light from a distant object in a radio telescope, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done before that signal is turned into a form that can be stored in a computer. The first step is to amplify that very faint light until it’s bright enough to be read out by a detector. Unfortunately, this process of amplification isn’t perfect and always adds some amount of noise to the signal, making the resulting data worse.

      My work is mostly focused on solving that problem by making amplifiers that add as little noise to the signal as possible, down to the very limits set by quantum mechanics. I do this by using superconductors that are patterned into carefully-designed microscopic structures and cooled down to temperatures colder than outer space.

    • My Typical Day:

      I tend to sleep in, make my way over to the lab (running experiments) or my office (mostly coding) and work until I’m no longer being productive, whether that’s until 4pm, 10pm, or anywhere in between.

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      As an experimentalist, my work tends to come in three varieties:

      1. Coming up with new ideas for experiments: usually, this means lots of coding, reading papers, and talking to colleagues.

      2. Running those experiments: building the setup in lab, cooling everything down to just above absolute zero, using electronics to record data, and troubleshooting when something inevitably goes wrong.

      3. Analyzing the results: more coding, making graphs and writing up the results, then probably going back to run more experiments.

      Some days/weeks/months, I’ll only do one of the three, while at other times I might spend a little bit of time doing each of them in a given day.

      I’m a firm believer that it’s better to work smarter than harder, so I keep a very flexible schedule where I won’t force myself to sit in my office if I’m not getting anything done but I also don’t stop working while I’m making good progress.

    My CV

    • Education:

      I got my undergraduate degree at The University of Texas at Austin, where I did a double major in both physics and electrical engineering with the intent of pursuing a career in physics academia after graduating. Following that path, I then obtained a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

    • Work History:

      I spent the summer before applying to college working in a magnetism and superconductivity lab at the University of Texas at Austin, which solidified my intents to pursue the career in the future.

      Upon arriving there at university, I immediately joined another laboratory where I spent the next four years building, testing, and using a special type of optical spectrometry setup that used lasers to study the thermal atomic vibrations in materials.

      In the meantime, I did explore around a little bit: spending one semester working on modeling galaxy formation in the early universe, a summer at the University of Wurzburg developing algorithms to reconstruct data, and a year in an electrical engineering lab where I designed and tested network protocols for potential use in the upcoming 6G communication.

      At the start of my Ph.D., I spent a year and a half working in astronomy where I built optical instruments for directly capturing the light from exoplanets. Ultimately, I settled down in another research group where I build superconducting devices for a completely different type of astronomy.

       

    • Employer:

      The University of Oxford.

    • My Interview

      • What did you want to be after you left school?

        I've wanted to be a physicist since I was 16, and I'm lucky enough to still be pursuing that goal.

        Were you ever in trouble at school?

        Only once or twice.

        If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?

        Almost certainly pursuing a different career in academia, likely in theoretical population genetics.

        Who is your favourite singer or band?

        I don't listen to too much music, but when I do, it's usually some very generic pop artists like Selena Gomez.

        What's your favourite food?

        I will devour any potato crisps in my viscinity at an alarming rate.

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