UNLOCKING THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE WITH RYAN LEVY
CURRENT POSITION: PhD Candidate in Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
LOCATION: Urbana, Illinois
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DEGREE: B.S. in Physics
GRADUATION YEAR: 2016
ACTIVITIES AT MICHIGAN: Michigan Pops Orchestra, Society of Physics Students, Society of Women in Physics, Campus Band, Javanese Gamelan (briefly)
MICHIGAN POPS ORCHESTRA INSTRUMENT: Percussion
KELLY COMPTON, our Pops Life correspondent, finds Ryan Levy in the cornfields of Illinois, where he is pondering the Universe’s smallest mysteries!
KC: Ryan, tell us a little bit about your experience in Pops over the years!
RL: I was in Pops all four years that I was at Michigan. I was in the very back playing percussion, which included some drum sets and other fun instruments!
KC: How many other percussionists were there in Pops?
Saul!
RL: It varied quite a bit…my first year there were six or seven and then it dropped to three or four, but we slowly built up in number again. I was lucky enough to play with Saul Hankin, and then he came back after I left.
KC: If you had to describe the percussion section in one sentence…
RL: I’d say… life of the party!
KC: Were you a pretty close-knit group then?
RL: We were close more in my later years when I was more running the section – that’s when the Spirit of Pops Awards started happening, House Cup stuff, etc. The percussionists did a bunch of things for those initiatives which really brought us together. I enjoyed that especially because I was leaving, and it was a great way for me to close out my Pops career.
KC: What are some of your favorite memories?
RL: One of my favorite memories was my first day in Pops. I was a very shy freshman and remember being surprised by the whole Pops process. I showed up and everyone knew so many other people - it was a huge orchestra, which was a little intimidating. We opened with Jupiter, and I was totally blown away. I knew I was going to really love it there just by how well that went.
The other fun memory that I like to think about is that we had a percussion section dinner outside of rehearsal. For most of my time there, the section was really friendly and cordial, but we didn’t do a lot of things outside of Pops events. We actually went and had dinner together one time; that was the nice part about only having six of us.
KC: How has the Pops influenced your life since graduation?
RL: I think Pops helped a lot with allowing me to have a great undergrad experience. I’m in grad school now, and I think without Pops I would have struggled a lot more with relaxing and doing things other than physics. One of the biggest things that I’ve taken from Pops is that I still listen to a lot of the music that we played. I have all of the pieces in a playlist on Spotify – it’s my “I’ve played this” playlist that I like to jam out to sometimes when I need to get focused and get to work.
KC: What was your background in music before you even got to Michigan?
RL: My dad is a drummer. There’s actually a picture from the day that I came home from the hospital where my dad sat me on his knee and had me play the drums. I’ve been playing ever since. To be fair, my sister was given this same opportunity and she picked viola. Sooo… that tactic doesn’t work for everyone. But I’ve been playing percussion every chance I get since then.
KC: What are you up to now?
RL: I’m in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign working towards getting a PhD in Physics. I do theoretical and computational physics. Urbana is a very small, flat corn town that’s quite different from Michigan.
KC: Now that you’re a few years into the program, do you have a specific topic that you’re working toward a thesis on?
RL: Yeah, I’ve already specialized. My subfield is called “condensed matter physics.” Essentially, I like to study everyday materials that have interesting properties. I think about tough theoretical problems and how to make algorithms that solve those problems in a reasonable amount of time, because for most problems you need several “age of the universe”s to complete. That’s what I like to do and spend my time doing.
Ryan also likes to spend his time auditioning to take over for Howie Mandel!
KC: What made you decide to pursue a PhD?
Click above to read more of Ryan’s senior physics thesis!
RL: I had a lot of questions that I wanted to answer, and I really like science. I like figuring out these really tough problems. This was a very natural continuation of what I was doing in undergrad, mostly because during my final years of undergrad I started an undergrad thesis, and that made me learn more and have more questions – like fundamental universe questions.
KC: What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of your program and being a PhD candidate?
RL: I think my favorite is that I’m in a very large program, so I have a lot of colleagues and a lot of people I can talk to in order to get different views. I really appreciate that. We also have a lot of visitors come, so we get to hear different people talk from around the world. I think my least favorite aspect is that I really miss trees. I grew up in Michigan with forests everywhere, and I lived in Markley at Michigan so I was less than a 5-minute walk to the Arb. My town here is flat with lots of corn fields, and there’s no real city. On one hand, it’s very nice to do physics with no distractions; but on the other hand, fall is not as beautiful here as it is in downtown Ann Arbor.
KC: Where exactly is your school located?
RL: Urbana-Champaign is about a 2-3 hour drive to Chicago and a 2-3 hour drive to St. Louis. Professionally, it’s very much worth it to be in this environment. I was recommended to this program by someone who graduated from here and is now a professor at Michigan. He was telling me that it’s nice to have that quiet compared to some of the other options like living in New York City, where everything is much crazier. I will also mention that the houses are SO cheap here. I was floored when I found out that you can pay $350 a month for a room in a 2-person apartment. It’s ridiculous! I actually have friends who bought their house here because their mortgage is less than what their monthly rent would cost.
KC: What are the potential “real-world” applications of your research?
RL: One of the things I study is high-temperature superconductors. What’s neat about these materials is that they have zero resistance. There are a ton of materials that are limited by the amount of heat that is given off when electricity is passed through a wire, and these materials don’t have that. In addition, you can make really strong magnets, for something like an MRI, using these superconductors. No one knows why certain materials have these special properties at high temperature, so I’m trying to understand this on a very small scale and answer some questions about why the world works the way it does. To do this, I and others write down models of how electrons interact and attempt to solve/understand the physics within those models.
KC: If any students are interested in pursuing a PhD program, what advice would you give them?
RL: WELL, I happen to have a great Pops Professional article on that…
KC: What advice would you share with students transitioning into the real world?
RL: Make sure you have the ability to keep track of everything you need to do. That’s really important. Also, finding systems that work for you, even if they’re unconventional, is key to becoming a real-life person.
KC: Anything else that you wanted to share?
RL: YES, I want to share a story! When I showed up to Michigan, I stumbled upon Pops at Festifall, and I just happened to find the Pops table and sign up for the info session and audition and all of that. But I had no idea that it existed otherwise – it was purely by circumstance. The year that I graduated, I went back to my old high school where my sister was graduating, and I went to her orchestra concert. Their orchestra was really well known because they were a good group; they’d been invited to play at Carnegie Hall. The seniors got to stand up and share with the audience what their plans were after graduation. 9 out of 10 of them who were going to Michigan said, “I’m going to go try to join the Michigan Pops Orchestra.” I was just floored that they had all heard about it and that that was their new goal. That made me really happy!
RYAN’S FAVORITES
Click on an image to find out!
interested in learning more about high temperature superconductors or physics as a career? or DO YOU HAVE SOME APOLLO-SOYUZ MEMORABILIA YOU’D LIKE RYAN TO TAKE OFF YOUR HANDS? CONTACT HIM NOW AT RYLE@UMICH.EDU!
4/1/19