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Faculty Highlights/Research

Benjamin Chandran

Amitava Bhattacharjee and Benjamin Chandran were awarded a three-year $2.1 million multi-institutional grant from the Department of Energy to establish an interdisciplinary center that will study the natural phenomenon known as "magnetic reconnection" in which magnetic fields reconfigure themselves liberating enormous amounts of energy. The Center for Magnetic Reconnection Studies, directed by Prof. Bhattacharjee, will include faculty and research scientists from the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin.
Amitava Bhattacharjee was elected president of the UI Faculty Senate for 2001-2002.

Thomas Boggess has been elected to a five-year term as the Department's new Departmental Executive Officer (DEO).
Thomas Boggess received a three-year $449,000 grant from Hughes Research Laboratories. The research, part of a multimillion dollar consortium funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is intended to lay the foundation for new high-performance electronic devices.

Benjamin Chandran was awarded grants from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The DOE award is a three-year $378,000 grant from the Plasma Physics Junior Faculty Development Program, which supports research programs of talented scientists and engineers in the early stages of their careers. The NSF award entitled, "Cooling Flows and Thermal Conduction in Galaxy-Cluster Plasmas" is a two-year $120,000 grant from NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences.

Louis Frank

Louis Frank presented one of this year's Niels Bohr Lectures, "A Cosmic Rain of Small Comets into our Atmosphere," at the Niels Bohr Institute for Astronomy, Physics and Geophysics in Copenhagen, Denmark. Niels Bohr Lectures are invited lectures given by internationally prominent scientists three to four times each year. The lectures are sponsored by the Danish Space Research Institute and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Michael Flatté was awarded two grants by the U.S. Department of Defense to conduct research that will develop the theory for faster electronic devices. His funding includes a three-year $804,045 grant from DARPA that will be done in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the University of Pittsburgh. His other grant is a $466,763 Army Research Office (ARO) award that is part of a $5 million multi-institutional project involving Cornell University, California Institute of Technology, UCSB, and the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.
Michael Flatté also received a three-year $240,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that will study the design of devices such as intense infrared lasers and sensitive infrared detectors for biomedical and communications applications. This project is in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago and Hughes Research Laboratories.

Kenneth Gayley

Kenneth Gayley was awarded a $192,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work on a three-year project entitled, "Are Optically Thick Winds Regulated by the Distribution Over Line Wavelength Rather Than Line Strength?" The research is aimed at understanding Wolf-Rayet stars, the hottest of stars, and why they lose mass so rapidly through a dense and optically thick stellar wind.

John Goree is a Co-Investigator for the Plasma Kristall Experiment (PKE) that took place on the International Space Station in March. The experiments, which were performed by the 1st and 2nd crews, were the first physical science experiments performed on the station. Details about the experiment can be found at Prof. Goree's web site at http://www.microgravity.net/.
John Goree, Amitava Bhattacharjee, and Robert Merlino were Workshop Coordinators for the 9th Workshop on the Physics of Dusty Plasmas, which was held May 21-23 at The University of Iowa. Eighty-two participants from five continents attended the workshop.

Donald Gurnett topped the list as the faculty member at The University of Iowa with the most external funding for fiscal year 2001. Prof. Gurnett had more than $5.3 million for the year.

Thomas Hasenberg has resigned from his faculty position to become the director of wafer fabrication at JDS Uniphase in California.

Richard Ignace is a Co-Investigator on a newly awarded grant entitled "Circumstellar Magnetic Field Diagnostics from the Polarization of Line Scattering," that has been funded by NSF. Also, Dr. Ignace has hired Helen Bryce (to receive her doctorate in astronomy from the University of Glasgow) to begin working this fall as a postdoctoral research assistant on theoretical studies of microlensing. Beyond the academic, a new addition was made to the Ignace family last January, a baby boy named Simeon David.

Craig Kletzing

Craig Kletzing is principal investigator on the sounding rocket mission, "Rocket Auroral Correlator Experiment," scheduled to be launched from Poker Flat, Alaska, in February 2002. The rocket, which stands about 65 feet high and will reach altitudes close to 600 miles above the Earth, is designed to make measurements of waves and particles associated with the aurora borealis. Although the auroral displays in Alaska are beautiful in winter, it's a bit chilly: typical highs are around -20º F. Prof. Kletzing's group will make sure they take heavy coats when they go into the field for auroral rocket launches!
Craig Kletzing was appointed to a five-year term as the Department's Associate Chair.

Usha Mallik

Usha Mallik organized the very successful outreach program, "Family Adventures in Science," held this past spring in Van Allen Hall.
Usha Mallik has been appointed to the University of Iowa Budget Committee and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Chemistry Review Committee.

Edward McCliment has retired after 37 years of teaching at The University of Iowa.

Robert Merlino

Robert Merlino was chosen by the American Physical Society's Division of Plasma Physics as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Plasma Physics (DLPP) Program for 2000-2001. The DLPP Program is intended to share with the scientific community exciting recent advances in plasma physics. Prof. Merlino will give a talk entitled, "Dusty Plasmas in the Laboratory and Space."

Vincent Rodgers

Vincent Rodgers was recently spotlighted in the "People in Physics" section at the American Physical Society's website, Physics Central (www.physicscentral.com). You can view the article at http://www.physicscentral.com/people/people-01-9.html.

James Van Allen continues to study cosmic ray data from his instrument on Pioneer 10, now in the outer heliosphere after over 29 years of flight. The most recent data for 28 April, 19 May and 9 July 2001 are of unique value in establishing the delayed influence of solar activity at heliocentric distances of over 78 AU in the antapex direction from the Sun. He and William Webber of the New Mexico State University are preparing a joint paper comparing data from Pioneer 10 with similar data from Voyager 1 and 2, both of which are also in the outer heliosphere but in approximately the apex direction from the Sun. All three spacecraft are still inside of the long-sought modulation boundary of the heliosphere.

John Prineas