Paternity Leave

Today I walked to DTU for the first time. It's a nice walk, just over a mile and through a quaint part of Lyngby (pronounced Loong-booh) with parks and such. I met my contact, Jan Rossmeisl at 11:30, and we went to lunch with some of his colleagues. Lunch was a sort of buffet where you prepared your own Smørrebrød, a danish type of open face sandwich on a heavy Danish Rugbrod (translates as Rye Bread, but not really much like rye) that you eat with a fork and knife, for the most part. Jan commented that "I find that typically when things remain a regional specialty, there is a good reason."

During lunch, I spent some time getting to know Jan and a few of his colleagues. Jan has four children, ages 1, 3, 6, and 13. Jan explained to me that the financial and time burden of having children, even with a busy career, was ameliorated by the Danish government's requirement of at least a year's worth of maternity/paternity leave (which apparently is divvied up between the couple as they see fit). Furthermore, he explained that the government also heavily subsidized child care, providing 66% of the cost. I was impressed by this, to say the least.

We also talked a little about work and about what I was doing with respect to CO2 electroreduction, but mostly he told me about the university. Apparently the layout corresponds to a 2-D cartesian coordinate system (i. e. x-y) with the first digit of each building number corresponding to its respective quadrant. We also stopped by a large hall filled with prospective high school students and exhibits about the university. There were several interesting-looking exhibits (including a huge model of the DNA double helix) but I was kind of in the dark as to what was going on, not speaking Danish.

Upon returning, I met some more folks from CaMD (the center for atomic-scale materials design) and talked with Jan a little more about electrochemical scaling relations in the CO2 reduction pathway. After getting set up on the network, I started working a little on implementing the new transition-state search algorithm that Andy had suggested I look at during my trip. By the end of the day, I'd written a script that replicated the results of the NEB calculation on the ASE web page, but it still needs quite a bit of work before it will run efficiently.