How to make the transition to functional programming?

How can a physics postdoc transition to climate science?

• Asking for a friend: I am currently a postdoc who researches black holes, but I'm interested in changing fields. In particular, I'd like to do something in climate science. How can I go about this? I imagine performing weather simulations would be a natural transition as I have experience with high performance computing, using large clusters with various architectures and queueing systems. I am used to working with and contributing to large pieces of collaborative open source software. I have programming expertise in C and Mathematica, along with experience in many other languages. Certainly, learning a new language wouldn't be a problem. The major gaps in my experience are (as I see them): 1. I have never done computational fluid dynamics, which I assume is necessary for weather modeling. 2. I have never studied climate science. As a step toward rectifying my first shortcoming, I've installed OpenFOAM (openfoam.org) and have been working through the tutorials in my spare time. I will most likely be looking to make the transition in January 2017 or later, and would be perfectly happy being a code junkie who learns about the physics of the simulations I'm performing as I go along. So my questions are: 1. Has anyone here made a similar career change? 2. Do you have advice on the steps I can take make it possible? 3. Do you have any recommendations for learning enough climate science to get my foot in the door?

• Answer:

  I am an ecologist and knew several post-docs when I was in grad school whose PhDs were in another computational field who were post-doccing in ecological modeling. There was also a faculty member in biology whose PhD was in Physics but had translated his skills into an evolutionary ecology modeling postdoc and ultimately had been hired onto the tenure track and had gotten tenure in Biology. I would suggest applying to post-docs and doing it the same way you would if you were changing subfields within physics: read a lot of journal articles, figure out what specifically interests you, figure out the key labs within that subfield, and contact them. Obviously the most direct route would be atmospheric physics, but pretty much any aspect of climate change involves a ton of modeling and requires quantitative skills.