The Fall 2020 Virtual Physics Careers Seminar Series Starts Sept. 4 With Dr. Mohammed Sheikh

The Fall 2020 Virtual Physics Careers Seminar series starts on Friday, Sept. 4 with a talk by alumnus Dr. Mohammed Sheikh, who will talk about "An Honest Look at Startup Life in Silicon Valley" at 12:00 noon. Details of Dr. Sheikh's seminar are given below.

Time: 12:00 noon on Friday, September 4, 2020

Location: Virtual Event. The Zoom link was forwarded to the Illinois Physics Grad Student email list. For a copy of the link, please contact Lance Cooper (slcooper@illinois.edu).

Meeting ID: 932 0004 3075   Password: 691244

Title: An Honest Look at Startup Life in Silicon Valley

Speaker: Dr. Mohammed Sheikh, Deep Learning Researcher, Standard Cognition

Abstract: In many ways, working startups in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) is similar to researching in the physics labs at UIUC. You often have no idea what you’re doing, there’s a 99% chance you’re going to fail, but you still stay up until 3 in the morning trying to figure this one little thing out. In other ways, startup life is different, because the training wheels are off, and there are many tumultuous events in a startup’s natural life that can make or break careers in a matter of weeks. My talk will focus on the expected and unexpected experiences of working at a startup as someone with a physics research background. I will talk a bit about what I currently do, and I will also focus on what happens when startups go belly up, how to survive such events, and what kind trade-offs are made when joining startups as opposed to established companies.

Bio: I worked with Professor Karin Dahmen at UIUC for my PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics. My work blended together some amount of data analysis, theoretical work, and computer programming. I leveraged a lot of the skills I learned during my PhD at the first startup I joined, and also continue to use many of them at my current job as a Deep Learning Researcher at Standard Cognition.

You can see the rest of the Fall 2020 Virtual Physics Careers Seminar series here: http://physics.illinois.edu/calendar/careers/