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The "Real" World: Adventures of an AMO physics professor in industry

Most of us who do a Ph.D. choose either an academic career path or one in industry, but not both. In this talk I will describe my attempts to straddle both of these disparate worlds as a physics professor seeking practical know-how at a small company. I will focus on how my academic skills helped my industry career and vice-versa, how working at a company has helped in my academic life. This talk will combine a personal narrative with a scientific and technical overview of cold atom experiments performed at Georgia Tech, and will freely float between the two topics. For Ph.D. students considering the next phase of their work life I hope to provide some insights into life outside of graduate school.