It has been two years since our last newsletter. What changes we have had in these two years!
First of all, we have expanded the faculty significantly. Max Chertok (a high energy experimentalist) and Lloyd Knox (a cosmologist) joined us in 2000 and Kai Liu (a condensed matter experimentalist) joined us in 2001. They are being profiled in this issue. Chris Fassnacht, Nemanja Kaloper, and Lori Lubin (all cosmologists) have accepted our offers, and so has John Rundle, the new Director of the campus-wide Center for Computational Science and Engineering. They all will be profiled in a later issue. With the retirements of Paul Brady and Doug McColm, we have a net gain of 4.5 faculty. With the three new cosmologists arriving, we have concluded our initial phase of building the Cosmology program — it was a cosmic inflation! Kai Liu’s appointment is associated with the Nanomaterial in Environment, Agriculture, and Technology initiative. His appointment and John Rundle’s make the Physics Department a full participant in the campus’s interdisciplinary initiative process. Our current non-emeriti faculty (36) is the largest in the College of Letters and Science, including Biological Science ahead of English and History at 35 each and Chemistry, Mathematics and Psychology at 33 each.
We are delighted that the campus has come through with the $1.6 million needed to expand the fifth floor of our building by 4,400 square feet. Otherwise, we certainly would not be able to accommodate the new faculty and continue to grow. The expansion is expected to be completed by next spring. By then, all of our cosmologists will be onboard. The timing also coincides with the Davis Meeting on Cosmic Inflation 2003 (see ad on page 8) and Stephen Hawking’s public lecture at the new Mondavi Center. It is a really fitting time to publicly launch our cosmology program. We plan to invite our alumni back to celebrate this happy occasion and the Golden Jubilee of the UCDAVIS Physics Department. Our next Newsletter is also planned to coincide with these events. Our growth is of course connected to the growth in student enrollment. In these two years we have seen our Physics 9 enrollment grow by a third. It is not only the quantity of our teaching that is noteworthy, but the quality as well. Members of our department have received the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Awards in both of these two years — Shirley Chiang in 2001 and Doug McColm in 2002. Our hats off to both of them! In the research arena, we have had a few high profile events. Bob Becker’s observation of the most distant quasar, probing pre-ionization era of the early Universe made the front page of the New York Times. Daniel Cox and Rajiv Singh’s statistical mechanics work on prions also received extensive media coverage. Lloyd Knox determined the age of the Universe to be 14 billion years old, give or take half a billion years, a result much more precise than previous estimates, which had margins of error of more that 10 percent. He also garnered the NASA Long Term Space Astrophysics Award. James Wells received DOE’s Outstanding Junior Investigator Award in high energy theory. The high energy group has now enjoyed 30 years of uninterrupted Department of Energy funding. Steve Carlip organized this year’s Pacific Gravity Conference (see the neat poster on page 8). Ramona Vogt received the 2001 Academic Federation Excellence in Research Award. Luke Donev, who worked in Rena Zieve’s lab, was the sole recipient of the 2001 Chancellor’s Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award. If you have a feeling that the Physics Department is on the roll, it is probably correct. Come on the Alumni Day this spring to see for yourself and to celebrate with us. /P>Sincerely,
Winston Ko
ko@physics.ucdavis.edu
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