People matter
Strong faculty establish Department of Physics and Astronomy as
a top department on campus - and in the nation.
Eli Rosenberg can talk for hours about the quality of the faculty in
Iowa State's Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Above all else, Rosenberg, professor and department chair, says the quality
of his department is dependent upon the quality of the faculty.
"In the end it's all about people,” Rosenberg says. "And in
the Department of Physics and Astronomy we have outstanding people"
”
Rosenberg cites the research efforts of the physics and astronomy faculty
as well as their educational backgrounds as proof of their quality.
But more than that, he likes to mention the number of faculty that are
currently receiving funding from off-campus organizations. Rosenberg says
every associate professor in the department is on a research grants. He
also estimates that over 85% of the faculty at both the assistant professor
and professor levels are conducting research funded by outside grants.
"We have extremely active faculty that get funding," he says.
Last fiscal year, physics and astronomy faculty received over $9 million
in grant support, with two-thirds of that funding routed through the U.S.
Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory.
"We concentrate on research in a number of areas," Rosenberg
said. "But we can characterize what the department does as studying
the nature of matter and energy from the smallest scales to the largest
scales.
"Our large funding levels are a reflection of the fact that we are
doing research that is important to the scientific community as a whole.
Our faculty are playing important roles, many times lead roles, in important
projects throughout the world."
The department has five active research areas including astronomy/astrophysics,
condensed matter physics, high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and physics
education research. Many of these research areas merge into priorities
of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Rosenberg says that research done by physics and astronomy faculty not
only coincides with activities within the Ames Laboratory (particularly
in condensed matter physics), but also coincides with activities at similar
DOE and other government facilities in the U.S. and the world. In recent
years, the department has had significant involvement with programs at
Fermilab, SLAC, CERN and Brookhaven.
"We go where the facilities that do first rate science are, regardless
of if it is at Oak Ridge, Tenn., Argonne, Ill., or Geneva, Switzerland,"
Rosenberg said. "What motivates us in the Department of Physics and
Astronomy is how do we do the best science.
"We're trying to stay on the leading edge of science and make a major
impact in the physics world. By doing that we're giving opportunities
to our students to be a part of the forefront of research wherever it
takes place."
Sometimes that science is based on campus, such as the Whole Earth Telescope
(WET), a worldwide network of 22 cooperating observatories that obtain
uninterrupted time-series measurements of variable stars. WET's international
headquarters since 1997 has been at Iowa State where it is directed by
Steve Kawaler with assistance from other departmental faculty and students.
WET is an example of multi-faculty collaborations that are now the norm
in the discipline's research activities.
"We need teams of people to be effective in our research efforts
these days," Rosenberg said. "That's the way physics is done
now. It usually takes more than one faculty member to have an impact on
projects of this magnitude.
"More and more of our faculty are utilizing national facilities as
more work takes place off-campus than on."
An example of the department’s shift to larger collaborations is a team
at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Five departmental members (John
Hill, John Lajoie, Craig Ogilvie, Marzia Rosati and Fred Wohn) were part
of a team at the laboratory that recently recreated conditions that existed
a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe in the "Big
Bang."
The experiments were conducted at Brookhaven's new accelerator, the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Lajoie, Wohn and Hill built the first-level
trigger for the $100 million PHENIX detector at the RHIC facility, a device
essential to the project.
And the five faculty members weren’t the only Iowa State physics community
members involved in the project as departmental students and engineers
also participated.
"By concentrating our efforts Iowa State receives institutional recognition
in addition to the individual recognition of our faculty," Rosenberg
said.
Still individual faculty members in the Department of Physics and Astronomy
do get recognized.
Recently two members, John Hill and Michael Tringides, were named Fellows
of the American Physical Society (APS), increasing the number of APS fellows
in the department to 13.
Other major faculty awards in recent years include:
*Alan Goldman – DOE "Outstanding Scientific Accomplishments in
Materials Chemistry."
*Bruce Harmon, Kai-Ming Ho and Costas Soukoulis – DOE Science 100 Award.
Soukoulis and Ho also have received the DOE Energy 100 Award.
*Frank Krennrich – DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award.
*Soukoulis – Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS).
The department has also been honored for its accomplishments on campus.
In the past two years, seven different faculty members have been recognized
either by Iowa State or the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for their
research, teaching and advising.
All of which has helped the Department of Physics and Astronomy to be
a highly ranked academic department both on and off campus.
In the most recent National Research Council (NRC) rankings, the department
was the third highest-ranked department at Iowa State.
Around LAS
February 9-22, 2004
|
