 Faculty News Dr. Witek Nazarewicz won a Research and Creative Achievement Award at the Provost’s Honors Awards ceremony on April 10. The University offers these awards “to honor and nurture scientific exploration and creative accomplishments of our senior faculty.” Dr. Nazarewicz is an internationally-recognized nuclear theorist who also serves as a deputy director for science at ORNL’s Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility. The January/February 2002 issue of Europhysics News features his article, “Quest for Superheavy Nuclei,” a general description of his work on filling out the nuclear landscape. The paper is available online at http://www-highspin.phys.utk.edu/~witek/papers/she.pdf.
Joint Faculty Member Dr. Ted Barnes is part of the ORNL research group awarded $100,000 from the ORNL Director’s R&D Fund. The money will finance their project “Heavy-Quark Reaction Cross Sections at RHIC: Studies of Quark-Gluon Plasma Signatures.”
Student NewsCongratulations to our most recent graduates:
Fall 2001 Stewart Hager, Ph.D. Hyunjeong Kim, M.S. Suzanne Parete-Koon, M.S. Bin Liu, Ph.D. Dowman Varn, Ph.D. Gerald Woods, Ph.D. Spring 2002 Michael Driskill, B.S. Paul Martin, B.S. Erin McMahon, B.S. Ted Nichols, B.S. Geri Ragghianti, B.S. Izabela Szlufarska, Ph.D. Stephen Wilson, B.S. Omar Zeidan, Ph.D.
Erin McMahon won three awards at UT’s Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement on April 5: the Natural Science Division Award of Excellence, the Phi Kappa Phi Natural Science Division Award of Excellence, and the College of Arts and Sciences Natural Science Division Award. She described her work as using a new, stochastic algorithm to model the time evolution of isotopic abundances with constant temperature and density conditions for the CNO and Hot CNO cycles. She successfully obtained acceptable results to a mass fraction of about 10-6 in comparison with the currently used element production code from the astrophysics group at ORNL. This “embarassingly parallel” code has also been implemented on the new 8-node Beowulf cluster, named GEAT (General Engine for Astrophysics at Tennessee. See http://geat.phys.utk.edu for details about the machine). Erin will begin graduate work at the University of Texas this fall.
Michael Driskill has been selected to join the New York City Teaching Fellows, a joint NYC/AmeriCorps program. The fellowship involves a two-year commitment to teach in an under-resourced school in New York. Michael will teach physics or math at the high school or middle school level in Brooklyn. (He explained that the program is in short supply of science and math teachers.) The NYC part of the program provides a full teaching salary and an accelerated masters in education plus certification over two summers (both for free). AmeriCorps will provide about $9,500 toward additional education when Michael finishes the program. The application process involved writing essays, providing transcripts, and going to New York for a long interview with other candidates and a mock teaching session. More information on the program is available at http://www.nycteachingfellows.org/.
Alumni NewsDr. Dennis J. Erickson (Ph.D., 1971) has been elected to the National Safety Council’s 51-person Board of Delegates. The board develops the NSC’s mission agenda, creates policy, and tracks safety, health and environmental trends. Dr. Erickson is division director for Environment, Safety and Health at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a physicist, a senior member of the laboratory, and an operations expert. Since 1993 he has been responsible for occupational safety and health, radiation protection, and operational assurance involving some 12,000 Los Alamos workers.
Cross Sections, Spring/Summer 2002 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on June 7, 2002. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu. |