2002 Newsletter - Faculty Highlights/Research

UI Physics & Astronomy
2002 Newsletter

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Faculty Highlights/Research

Michael Flatté

Michael Flatté received a UI Faculty Scholar Award for 2002-2005. Prof. Flatté's research on spintronics was featured in the June 2002 issue of Scientific American.

John Goree received a $700,000 NASA award in international competition for research in "Optically-Excited Waves in 3-D Dusty Plasmas." The research, to be conducted on the International Space Station, involves the study of wave motion through crystalline lattices. Other institutions working on the project include the University of Kiel (Germany), Los Alamos National Laboratories, the University of Tromso (Norway), and Dalian University of Technology (China).
Prof. Goree was recently nominated as an APS fellow.

Donald Gurnett

Donald Gurnett was inducted into the College of Engineering's Distinguished Alumni Academy. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1962.
Prof. Gurnett received more than $4.7 million in external research funding for the fiscal year 2002. He was third among all University faculty members who received funding.
In late January Prof. Gurnett's research group delivered the transmitter and antenna system for the Mars Express Radar Sounder, which will be launched to Mars in June 2003. This instrument is designed to search for subsurface water at Mars and to study the Martian ionosphere.
On October 26, 2002, the Kronos Quartet will present the premier performance of "Sun Rings" at Hancher auditorium. This production, composed by the well-known musical composer, Terry Riley, is based on radio sounds from space collected by Prof. Gurnett over a 40-year period.

Richard Ignace has taken a position as Research Scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Craig Kletzing will again be heading up to the frozen north this coming winter to launch the HIgh Bandwidth Auroral Rocket (HIBAR) with collaborator James LaBelle of Dartmouth College. This rocket will investigate high frequency wave phenomena associated with the northern lights. Prof. Kletzing's group is providing several particle detectors to help determine the relationship between the waves and auroral particles.

Usha Mallik is currently serving a three-year term as a member of the American Physical Society's Committee on Education. The committee deals with issues related to physics education such as meaningful testing and advanced physics programs at the high school level, and curricula programs at the undergraduate college level.
The Family Adventures in Science program which Prof. Mallik developed was a big success last spring, and will be held again this fall.
Prof. Mallik is leading a study of demographics in the area of particle physics, acknowledged by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) and the Division of Particle Physics (DPP), with a committee of eight physicists, to find the present trends among young physicists in the discipline.

Robert Mutel was appointed to a one-year term on the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) Instructional Technology Committee.

Charles Newsom

Charles Newsom has been awarded a NATO grant to bring Dr. Olga Piskounova of the Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia, to the US to work on an ongoing study of D meson production and decays at the E781 (SELEX) experiment and QCD. In October Dr. Piskounova will spend three weeks with Prof. Newsom at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, IL doing particle physics research.
Prof. Newsom was recently appointed "Physicist in Charge" for the BTeV Pixel Detector group for an upcoming testbeam run at Fermilab. He also holds two other positions at Fermilab as the BTeV testbeam liaison for all six BTeV detector groups, and Deputy Director of the Pixel Project. The BTeV project is a $150 million effort to build a new generation collider detector unlike anything built to date.
Prof. Newsom has played a major role in the design and construction of a new testbeam facility being built to test the individual BTeV detector subsystems and those of other groups over the next five years. Approximately ten groups from the USA to Japan have signed up to use the facility which is nearing completion. The first beam is expected in early October.
The SELEX experiment, in which Professors Newsom, Yasar Onel and Ed McCliment and their graduate students are involved, has recently reported the possible discovery of the first particle known to contain two charmed quarks. An article recently published in the CERN Courier details this new finding and is available on the web at http://www.cerncourier.com/main/article/42/6/4. It has also been reported in Science News and accepted for rapid publication in Physical Review Letters.

Edwin Norbeck has retired from teaching after 42 years of service at The University of Iowa. This will allow him to do research full time.

Yasar Onel

Yasar Onel was one of the few individuals at the University who was awarded more than one million dollars in funding this past fiscal year. Prof. Onel's research brought in $1,492,345. This is the second year that Prof. Onel's annual funding has topped the one million dollar mark.

Mary Hall Reno was promoted to the position of Professor.

Vincent Rodgers was recently named as a Fellow of the National Society of Black Physicists.

Fred Skiff was an Obermann Fellow at The University of Iowa.

James Van Allen was recognized for 50 years of service to the University.
In a recently published paper (Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 29, No. 7, April 2002), Van Allen and William Webber (U of I, PhD, 1957), report that the cosmic ray intensity observed by Pioneer 10 at 78 AU from the Sun in the antapex direction and by Voyager 1 at 81 AU in the apex direction is still being modulated by solar activity. Hence, both spacecraft are still inside the modulation boundary of the heliosphere.

Markus Wohlgenannt was the first recipient of a new award recognizing a young scientist in the field of organic semiconductor/synthetic metals physics at a recent international meeting in China.

New Faculty

Cornelia Lang

This fall the Department welcomes new faculty members Cornelia Lang and Markus Wohlgenannt as Assistant Professors to The University of Iowa.

Joining the Department as an astronomy faculty member, Cornelia Lang comes to Iowa from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she was a postdoctoral fellow working in X-ray and radio astronomy at the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. Her prior experience also includes a fellowship at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. She received her MS and PhD degrees in astronomy at UCLA.

Markus Wohlgenannt

Markus Wohlgenannt will be teaching in the areas of condensed matter physics and optics. He received his MS degree in physics from the Technical University of Graz in Graz, Austria, and his PhD degree in condensed matter physics from the University of Utah at Salt Lake City. He previously worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Utah, conducting research in the spectroscopy of organic electronic materials and opal photonic crystals, and also fabricating organic sandwich devices. His main research interests include spectroscopy and transport in pi-conjugated polymer films and devices, and also extends into molecular physics and physics of low-dimensional semiconductors.

In Memoriam

Richard Carlson, Professor Emeritus, passed away October 24, 2001. He was 78 years old.

Prof. Carlson was born Sept. 15, 1923 in Chicago, IL. He received his BS, MS and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. In 1951 he married Evelyn, and moved to Iowa City and the University of Iowa (then called the State University of Iowa) where he taught physics until his retirement in 1994. His major research interest was in nuclear physics. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the American Physical Society, served on the Board of Directors for the Fermi National Laboratory, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Prof. Carlson was preceded in death by his wife, Evelyn, in August 2001. Survivors include three children and six grandchildren.

A more detailed obituary will be published in an upcoming issue of Physics Today.