Johannes Hauschild - Technical University of Munich
1. Briefly describe your current position/project, research focus, and your role within MCQST.
I am a postdoc in condensed matter theory at the physics department of TUM, working on numerical simulations of quantum many body systems with tensor networks. Moreover, I'm involved into the Munich Quantum Valley as scientific manager to coordinate theory efforts towards quantum computing in the THEQUCO consortium.
2. You are active in Research Data Management (RDM). Why is RDM important for you? And what is your biggest learning from this area, so far?
Science is open - if a lonely genius derives the world formula, but doesn't share how she or he obtained it, they only advance personal knowledge but not science as a whole. And we all make mistakes, so the scientific community has to be able to reproduce and validate each other's results. Research data management means to document the reproduction process, providing more details than the high-level explanations we put into our papers - for example in the context of numerical simulations, we can just include the full source code used to produce the results.
A key insight for me was that I also need to do this for myself: when I look back at a certain project or code that I did just half a decade ago, I forgot what those cryptic parameters r, beta and omega stand for and whether they included that minus sign and factor of 2 pi or not. Writing good code means to write code that is readable by other humans - this is more important than optimizing it to run a few seconds faster. And in fact, it already helps tremendously during the running project to keep your data organized in a good way.
Science is open - if a lonely genius derives the world formula, but doesn't share how she or he obtained it, they only advance personal knowledge but not science as a whole.
3. Are you cooking or baking anything for the holidays?
I love baking all sorts of Christmas cookies and can spend hours decorating them. When I was a child, my whole family used to gather in the kitchen every year in the beginning of the holiday season. With music in the background, we were often baking so many cookies that we had left overs until many weeks after the holidays.