Professor Leighton was an invited instructor on the Acoustical Society of America 2018 Summer School in Minnesota in May 2018. Around 100 PhD students spent the weekend talking to the ten instructors, in between specialist talks from those instructors, who covered a range of acoustics, from vocalisations in frogs to measurement of sea noise under icecaps. Tim changed the tone by discussing how acousticians can widen their field rather than specialise, explaining how acousticians have interacted with NAMRIP in tackling antimicrobial resistance and promoting infection prevention through collaboration with researchers and end-users from a wide range of other disciplines.
The students not only asked specific technical questions, but also a large number of more general career development publications such as the value of interdisciplinary work, decisions on where to publish the research, and how to generate impact outside of academia. The event was held at the Oak Ridge Hotel and Conference Center, Chaska, 4-6 May 2018.
After the Summer School, all the students and instructors were transported to the 2018 summer meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Minneapolis, where all the students from the School gave a presentation of their own.
One of the students, Rosalyn Putland (in the middle of the photo) introduced herself to Tim as someone who has chosen, several years ago, to sit in on his acoustics lecture course. Ros had been studying for a marine biology undergrad degree at Southampton and broke ranks to take an engineering course. That led to an animal acoustics PhD in New Zealand and now she is just starting an acoustics postdoc in USA.