The Irish Taxpayer paid for me to go to Barcelona

OK, it does seem unlikely, but this actually happened. A colleague of mine (a former PhD student) works in Ireland now as a research associate at the University of Limerick in Ireland. He applied for a a grant from a programme there that promotes the development of an international research collaboration. He approached me and a colleague of ours in Barcelona to participate. We have mathematical skills with some common ground but also some differences, and had worked together productively before. The topic was the development of nano-scale models of some of the electrochemistry in Lithium-ion batteries, which I am interested in. We started looking through the literature and discussing ideas by e-mail, but part of the mandate of the grant was to organize a face to face meeting. He chose Barcelona as the venue. A friend of his was working as a post-doctoral fellow there that was included in the project; the senior colleague there was the only one with young children so harder for him to travel; there is an institute there that provided us with office space; and, well, Barcelona is quite nice.

We met at the Universitat Autonoma Barcelona, which is in a suburb. I had spent some time there in the past, one two month visit during my last sabbatical year and another month in a Fall term that was free of teaching. The first one was one of the first long trips I took away from the family, when I thought the kids were old enough and I also thought that time away might reset my failing marriage. The latter thought was a bit of a Hail Mary and, as you probably know, was not successful. Below are pictures of the campus, including the residence I stayed in on my longer trips. This time, I was in the campus hotel, with a very nice buffet breakfast every day.

We actually worked pretty hard. I think the Irish taxpayer got their money's worth. We had a detour from the original focus we had in mind and made progress on the scaling of the macroscopic processes of these batteries that will give insight into when some simplified (reduced dimensional) models are appropriate, and also interesting: when they are not. I think this will make a nice publication that will help other researchers in the field and understanding the model better will lead to insight into how to implement computational simulations based on these models efficiently, which is a project I was interested in before I went. Here we are all puzzling over something together at the board:

    

It was not all work. My colleague (and friend) in Barcelona has us over to his place for a BBQ dinner in San Cugat, a small city near Barcelona where he lives with a great view. 

We ate and drank quite well. My former student and I had one of the best meals I can remember at a restaurant, La Taverna del Pla, near the old cathedral. We had another dinner as a group at the end of the week. That is my gin and tonic (or "gintonic" as they say there) you can see in the foreground on the left.