It's about teamwork
When I started my Ph.D. in September 2013, I thought I was going to spend the next 5 years coding on my own in front of a computer. It turns out I was right about the coding part, but I was wrong to think I was going to do it alone (and I also understimated the number of years my Ph.D. was going to last 😅).
In 2016, three years into my Ph.D. (which is still considered as the "beginning" in our group), Ettore and I started working together on a small project aiming at writing our own inversion library in Python (to wrap our Fortran code), which eventually turned into a massive library (and a recently accepted publication). We quickly realized that we enjoyed working together and gradually began collaborating on pretty much every research projects/ideas we had. We were lucky enough to have similar research interests and a shared passion for seismic imaging, optimization problems, and numerical implementations.
More importantly, I think we got along (and still do) because we had a similar scientific approach to research and we wanted to tackle the hardest problems we could think of. Additionally, we both really enjoyed doing clean work without trying to cut corners. Eventually, we wanted to be able to look back at what we did, and be happy with it, regardless of the outcome. Moreover, I think we weren't afraid of being honest with each other and admitting when we had no clue of what was going on. At each step of the process, we tried to find ways to challenge our ideas and detect all the possible flaws of our reasoning. This may seem obvious, but sometimes as a graduate student, the mental fatigue takes over and you lack the power to admit when you don't fully understand a concept, and you just give up.
In the last 6 years, I feel I have been working in a two-person startup. Every day, we would spend time bouncing off ideas in front of the white board in our office, planning the next move to make our algorithm work. We had the freedom to work on anything we wanted for as long as we wanted (provided we got interesting results). We were able to go in depth on all the subjects we tackled until we found a solution. This was truly an amazing (but mentally exhausting)
adventure.
In May 2017, we found a cool idea together that turned out to be my Ph.D. dissertation (FWIME). After that, our common goal was to give everything we had to see whether this idea could perform. Eventually, in June 2019, our work paid off: we made FWIME outperform other algorithms on a industry benchmark test. That same year, we won the award for Best Student Paper Presented at SEG Annual Meeting for our results on FWIME. We also created a youtube channel called eg-optimization where we post more technical videos on our respective thesis topics.
Everything I did in the past 6 years at Stanford was the result of my collaboration with Ettore. Without our teamwork, none of this roller-coaster adventure would have been possible. We both went through many downs, but the few ups made everything worth it. Finally, as cliché as it may be, I truly believe our collaboration is a good illustration that teamwork is powerful, even as Ph.D. students.
What now?
On January 20th, 2021, Ettore successfully defended his thesis entitled "target-oriented elastic full-waveform inversion". Ettore is now a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech, working under Prof. Zhan on developing scalable and cloud-based wave-equation techniques to be applied to distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data.
In addition to our geophysical work, Ettore and I are actively collaborating on a AI/healthcare project along with Gregory Forbes and Elizabeth Tong (Principal Investigator) where we developed a deep learning method to automatically detect damaged brain tissues for stroke patients.