| 28 Years - 36 Years After graduating with my PhD I took a postdoctoral position at what was then called AT&T Bell Laboratories and now appears to be known as Bell Labs Innovations and is part of Lucent technologies. I worked under the supervision of Tony Tyson on projects involving the use of gravitational lensing for mapping the matter distribution of the Universe. An area of research that was to occupy me for the next seven years. During this period I lived in Highland Park NJ. I learned that the main thing NJ has going for it is proximity to New York City where I would escape to on weekends. Of course it also has ridiculously hot and humid summers as well as many lovely oil refineries. And one should not forget the endless strip malls. Bell Labs was an interesting place to work. Despite being an industrial lab it had an academic feel to it. It probably had the highest concentration of smart people of any place I have ever been. I completely changed research areas when I went to work there becoming an observational cosmologist. This was not an easy transition as my graduate student training was somewhat lacking in cosmology. I had taken some courses in extragalactic astronomy but I would say they were probably not as up-to-date as they should have been. I learned a lot as a postdoc and this continued until I left academia in January 2001. Angela and I were maintaining a long-distance relationship, she was in medical school at the University of Toronto. I would go to Toronto about once a month. Angela managed to find jobs in New Jersey for both the summers of 1993 and 1994. The first year she worked in a MRI clinic and we still have many MRI images of her. The second year she found a job to do with child psychology. I think they were measuring stress levels in children getting vaccines or something. We did a lot of cycling in that time and I think we managed to see most of New Jersey. We spent weekends in Wildwood and Washington DC. In January of 1994 I had an observing run at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii. Angela decided that she would play hooky from school and join me for a week. It was great vacation, we rented a car and drove around the whole island. We did some hiking and snorkeling and had a fantastic time. Volcanoes National Park was a definite highlight although we almost froze camping in the mountains with our inadequate sleeping bags. We had just purchased those sleeping bags from Canadian Tire. They were rated at some like 0 Celsius but that was clearly an exaggeration. We returned them to the store at the end of our vacation. One slightly scary incident occured when we were hiking down a trail at the north end of the island. We were looking for a place to set up our tents on what we thought was public land. We encountered a few young men with some dogs and a rifle. They informed us, in a somewhat menacing manner, that this was private land and that we could not camp there without a permit. This was depressing news as we were quite tired and did not relish the idea of having to hike back up the steep trail. We were just about to turn around when the "leader" said we could stay the night as long as we left by morning. We camped on the beach that night and did not encounter any other people. Needless to say, we left in the morning. For Christmas 1994, Angela and I visited Paris, France for ten days. We stayed in the Latin quarter and sampled the cities delights. I have a distinct memory of sitting across from Angela while she was eating a piece of apple cake. She looked up at me and said with heartbreaking sincerity "I love this cake". I realized then that her love for me would never equal her love for that cake. One night Angela opted for the cheese plate instead of desert. This seemed like a good idea until my creme caramel arrived. She then realized she had made the mistake of her life. Of course I shared my desert with her. She did not err in this manner again. Paris was a delight; there is probably no more pleasant a city anywhere to just wander around in. My job at AT&T ended in July 1995. I joined my fiance in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Angela was doing an elective in the emergency room at Halifax Children's Hospital. We hung out there for a month which was very pleasant. We rented a room in an apartment from a student at Dalhousie. We saw the sites and I won some money palying blackjack in the casino. After the elective we travelled around a bit. We drove the Cabot trail in Cape Breton and toured around New Brunswick. We scamped on Grand Manan island where we hiked and cycled and viewed the bunny rabits. We had a fabulous buffet brunch at the Algonquin Hotel in St. Andrews by the Sea., and witnessed the tremendous tide changes on the Bay of Fundy. I started a Hubble Fellowship in September at the Astronomy Dept at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor Michigan. The Hubble fellowship is supported by NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute and provides both salary and research budget. Therefore I was free to pursue whatever research projects I desired. I got married on Sept. 2 1995. The wedding took place in the backyard of my wife's father and stepmother. It was a beautiful day, sunny and not too hot. We were married by the Anglican minister of some church in Elora. Of course this was against my staunchly atheistic wishes but somehow it happened anyway. In fact, we were really married the day before at the church. Apparently some archaic Anglican rule requires that the wedding occur in a church so the wedding witnessed by all the guests was actually a sham. I think most enjoyed themselves anyway. I managed to stay sober almost until the very end, in the last half hour I finished up several bottles of wine and Angela had to drive to the hotel. She later claimed that if she had "waited" until her wedding night, she would have been dissapointed. My wife joined me in Ann Arbor the summer of 1996 to pursue her residency in Pediatrics at the University of Michigan. The Hubble Fellowship lasted three years (until Sept 1998) at which point I supported myself on research grants and teaching until Jan. 1 2000. I taught a Freshamn seminar course called Astronomy 125 "Observational Astronomy" of which I've managed to lose the online version. Also during this period I gave a series of three general interest lecture titled "Dark Matters - Unmasking the Invisible Universe" in both Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids MI. These were well received and were part of an ongoing series called "Saturday Morning Physics" Starting Jan. 1 1999 I started working with Timothy McKay on a project to measure the mass profiles of galaxies using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Next Return to Biography Index Return to Philippe's Home |