By David Ingram
Professor and Chair of Physics & Astronomy
We are in our third year on semesters since 1967, and we remain an active and vital environment as we help students realize their potential and advance the frontiers of science. Our alumni are testimony to the past success of our program and an inspiration as we look to the future. We are happy to share some updates from our program with this newsletter.
Dr. David Ingram
In following up on our commitment to provide a research experience for our undergraduates, this year 19 undergraduates worked with 12 different faculty members from across the department. In addition two undergraduates were able to work elsewhere this summer. Samantha Thrush went on an REU to the University of Minnesota. Helen Cothrel is an Ernest R. Hollings Scholar and spent her summer at NOAA in Colorado. Many students get their first taste of what it is like to perform research with us during their summer internships. One student who took advantage of these opportunities to great effect is Austin Way. He graduated this year and has secured a prestigious NSF Graduate Fellowship. He is now a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he will study Materials Science.
Graduate students also had many achievements. Andrew DiLullo won the second NQPI dissertation award. Sushil Dhakal won the prize for an outstanding poster in low-energy nuclear science at the Steward Science Academic Programs meeting in Washington, D.C. This is the second year in a row one of our students has won that prize. Zhiyuan Fan was one of 10 students who graduated with a Ph.D. and while at Ohio University, under Sasha Govorov’s direction, Fan co-authored 16 papers and two book chapters, including one paper in Nature which has already collected more than 100 citations.
Several developments have affected the composition of our faculty in the past year. Among our current faculty, Tom Statler completed a sabbatical at the University of Maryland and is now taking a temporary Program Officer position at NASA in Washington, D.C. Saw-Wai Hla remains a Group Leader for Electronic & Magnetic Materials & Devices in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Lab and will return to our department full-time during Spring semester. Julie Roche is on sabbatical at Jefferson National Laboratory, where she is leading an experiment to measure Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS) in order to learn more about the structure of the proton. Her experiment will be the first to run at JLab since the $300M upgrade to 12 GeV. Doug Clowe has returned to us this Fall from a sabbatical at the University of Pennsylvania where he has been working on plans to use the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). This is an 8-meter class telescope currently under construction in Chile, expected to become fully operational in 2020.
We have been successful at recruiting three new faculty. Heather Crawford is an experimental nuclear physicist who joined us in January. Hee-Jong Seo is an astrophysicist who joined us in Fall 2014 from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Another new astrophysicist who joined us this Fall is Ryan Chornock. Ryan’s most recent position was as a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In other faculty news: Justin Frantz was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure; Daniel Phillips was voted an Outstanding Referee by Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. In staff news, Candy Dishong has completed 35 years with us. She did retire a few years ago, but we managed to get her to come back to be the assistant department administrator. We thank her for her truly great service to the department. Without Candy, and our other highly dedicated staff, we could not maintain such an active and excellent department.
We greatly value the support we receive from our friends and alumni in helping our department in the pursuit of its mission. We always appreciate visits by our alumni, as a means to educate our students about possible career paths and to help our department remain connected to a larger community. We also express our sincere thanks to those who have contributed financially to our program, as listed elsewhere in this newsletter. In particular I should like to call out the generosity of those who have helped us achieve the endowment of the graduate-student scholarship fund begun by Emeriti Professors Ernst Breitenberger and Louis Wright. This fund is to be used for many different purposes including, but not limited to, supporting graduate-student travel, providing graduate students with equipment (or software) needed to pursue their research, special awards to outstanding students, and assistance in cases of particular need. Now that it is endowed, we should be able to begin to make awards for the next academic year. I hope those of you who have benefitted from work with these dedicated faculty will help us continue to grow this fund and thus benefit future graduate students
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