The news became public for the first time yesterday: Jodi has been selected to be the next Executive Director of SNOLAB and has accepted the offer for the position. You can read more about this here in the press release from SNOLAB:
As we have shared with our colleagues and students at SMU, when Jodi embarked on this journey through the challenging interview process for the position, I made it clear to her that should she be selected for this position I would do whatever it took to support her 100%. This included resigning my position as tenured Full Professor of Physics at SMU, the same position she held as well. I would be happy to give up my career to make sure that she could say “yes” to an offer to take on this position.
Obviously, we are moving to Canada! Jodi’s future is clear; I will have more to say about mine in a later post, but now is not an appropriate time. We have both submitted our resignations from our positions at SMU and will move up to Canada in the last week of July. Our house is on the market and we are hopeful it will sell before we leave for Canada. The housing market has softened and is less crazy than it was a few weeks ago. Buyers are more cautious now, and we are working in the new market forces to sell the house so we can make a clean move to Sudbury.
We are sad to have to leave behind all the friends, colleagues, and students at SMU. For many, this has been jarring news … but news that was SNOLAB’s to share and not ours, at the appropriate time in this process.
We have been working to make sure that our graduate students, especially, all have paths to a soft landing of their choosing after we leave. Many models and options are possible; we have tried to give our students the information they need to make a good, informed choice. It is not an easy situation.
I have also been working to inform the appropriate agencies and colleagues on my current experiments, but there is more work to do there. There are so many people that need to be informed of this big transition that, if I have not gotten to you yet, do not fret; I beg patience as we unpack this challenging situation.
Since we will not have a home for a while while our U.S. house sells and we hunt in the Sudbury region, that means I will have no static IP address for my home server and my domains (e.g. the domain where this blog is located). This blog and many other services hosted on this system will be offline, most likely until October or so.
A change is coming. We are excited about it, and eager to move forward. There is much to do before we get there … but there is closer every day.
