A Successful Year; Against All Odds
It’s been a long and gloomy year. The first major event, our midcycle program review, was held in late February, which now seems eons ago. The site visit was completed in the nick of time, a few weeks before the Knox County Health department issued the ”safer at home” order due to the worrisome rise in COVID-19 cases. Students and instructors had to move abruptly and en masse to a virtual learning environment with thousands of parallel Zoom meetings and tens of thousands of participants system-wide each day. This has been a most challenging experience for students, faculty, and staff, and of course we all miss the personal interactions with students and colleagues. While some in our physics family were infected by COVID, we are immensely grateful that none of them suffered life-threatening health conditions. The department reviewed well and 2020 became a very busy and remarkably successful year. These are some of the people who made it happen:
Kudos to Drs. Marianne Breinig, Christine Cheney, Kate Jones, and the physics staff for creating a safe work environment in Nielsen. This entailed, among other things, implementing new seating plans for offices and labs and stocking PPE supplies, disinfectants, wipes, hand sanitizer, etc. Thanks to their efforts, we were able to offer hands-on face-to-face laboratories every week. Marianne and Christine and Dr. Sean Lindsay did a formidable job in creating online content for many of our laboratory sessions. Students were able to split their lab assignments between a face-to-face and an online setting every week. Many students expressed their appreciation for having the opportunity to interact face-to-face with their lab instructor, as nearly all other course instruction was done online. Paul Lewis and Ricky Huffstetler even designed disposable eyepiece covers for our telescopes so that our rooftop astronomy sessions could continue, albeit with reduced capacity. Finally, Christine Cheney and Showni Medlin did a marvelous job putting COVID-adapted teaching schedules together for fall 2020 and spring 2021. This was an enormously challenging task, but the rollout of the fall schedule was mostly flawless.
Kudos to our Graduate Teaching Assistants for rising to the challenge. You went the extra mile, serving the needs of different groups of students, including those who were sick or quarantined. Thank you for your presence in the labs, and for organizing and coordinating all the extra review sessions on Zoom and daily discussions on Discord. Thanks to all faculty for being so flexible and adaptable in presenting your online course materials and accommodating the diverse needs of our students. Finally, thank you to our students, for doing your part in wearing your masks, cleaning your stations, and physically distancing from each other. It is remarkable to see how everyone rose to the challenge. I do not recall any major complaint, which is a testament to the collegial “can do” attitude in our department. Traditionally, we have about 15 graduating seniors each year. The number of majors has been steadily growing and for the first time ever, we shattered the magic “20 barrier.” This year we graduated 31 bachelors! In addition, we graduated 18 PhDs and 9 master’s students.
In other news, this year we welcomed three new faculty members. You can read their profiles in this newsletter. Briefly, Assistant Professor Joon Sue Lee joined our department in January. Joon Sue is an experimental condensed matter physicist, received his PhD degree from Penn State University in 2014, and completed his postdoctoral work at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He is interested in the electronic, magnetic, and superconducting properties of semiconductors and novel quantum materials with potential applications for quantum computing and spintronics. Professor Adrian Del Maestro is a theoretical and computational physicist with interests in the study of phase transitions, quantum fluids, ultra-cold bosonic gases, superconductors, and topological states of matter. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2008, and held postdoctoral positions at the University of British Columbia and Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty at the University of Vermont in 2011. He won numerous research grants including the prestigious NSF Career Award, and served as lead PI and Director of the Vermont Advanced Computing Core. Adrian will lead the theory effort of the recently established interdisciplinary research cluster on Quantum Materials for Future Technologies. In this role, he will develop new interdisciplinary courses in machine learning and quantum technologies. Last but not least, Assistant Professor Tova Holmes is an experimental high-energy particle physicist who received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2016. Tova held a postdoctoral appointment at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and was stationed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Her primary research interest is the search for physics beyond the venerable Standard Model of particle physics. Tova’s expertise includes the identification of long-lived subatomic particles, hardware-based pattern recognition, and electronic trigger systems. Three additional faculty searches are underway, which bodes well for the future of the department.
We were thrilled to hear that Professor Geoff Greene won the prestigious Tom W. Bonner Prize of the American Physical Society. The APS Bonner Prize is the nation’s most prestigious award in all of nuclear physics, and this is the second time that one of our faculty members has won the honor. (Witek Nazarewicz, now at MSU/FRIB, won the prize in 2012.) This clearly attests to the high stature of our nuclear physics program. Geoff will accept the award at a ceremony in April.
Congratulations to Lucas Platter and Andrew Steiner for their promotion to associate professor with tenure. They run prolific research programs in nuclear and nuclear astrophysics, respectively, and you should expect to hear more about their accomplishments in years to come. Thank you, Professor Soren Sorensen, for leading the diversity taskforce in creating an ambitious plan to improve the departmental climate and enhance the diversity of our faculty and student body. It was adopted with unanimous faculty approval, which is quite a feat. The implementation of the plan is now moving at warp speed thanks to the new departmental community committee led by Professor Adriana Moreo.
Associate Professors Christine Nattrass and Steve Johnston were appointed as undergraduate and graduate program director, respectively. Their enthusiasm and drive are making a significant impact on the department’s teaching mission, particularly as it relates to the advising experience of our undergrads. Christine is transforming our traditional advising to more of a mentoring experience, while the technical aspects of advising are now handled by our professional advisor Max Steele. Max is a member of the College advising staff and came to us with an MA in Educational Studies, Higher Education and Student Affairs from the Ohio State University. Steve also leads the graduate recruitment committee and our cohorts are getting better and more diverse. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, many of the international students could not come this year.
I am closing on a sadder note. This summer, our former colleague Professor Ward Plummer passed away unexpectedly but peacefully at his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was 79. Ward was a UT/ORNL Distinguished Scientist and Professor in our department from 1992 until 2009. He was the founding Director of the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Ward was instrumental in recruiting several of our condensed matter faculty and made a big impact on the lives and careers of his former mentees. I will always remember him as a kind-hearted person whose teachings still guide me in my professional career. His passion and drive for science laid the groundwork for our current successes, and we thus owe him much gratitude.
I wish you a joyous holiday season and please stay safe.