From the 2014 Physics Alumni Newsletter
As in previous years some of our faculty and students have received awards and other important forms of recognition. In February 2014 Professor Timo Thonhauser received the WFU Award for Excellence in Research. In December, 2013 Professor Oana Jurchescu and graduate student Peter Diemer received the 2013 WFU Innovation Award. In March 2014 graduate student Nicholas Lepley was awarded first place in the inaugural 3-minute thesis oral competition at the Fourteenth Annual Wake Forest University Graduate Student & Postdoc Research Day. We learned in January that Professor David Carroll was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society and in April he was awarded the Scott Family Faculty Fellowship for his excellence in scholarship and teaching. Also in April, Professor Samuel Cho has been awarded the Shively Family Faculty Fellowship for his research, teaching, and service. Some additional details on these and other activities and awards are given below.
The number of students in our Department remains high. This fall we will have 18 juniors, 40 seniors, and 39 graduate students. Our tradition of undergraduate research also continues. Last year at least 30 undergraduate students engaged in research with our faculty. If you look around Olin, you will see posters and publications in our halls bearing the names of both our undergraduate and graduate students. You can also read about some of the students and their research projects at http://www.wfu.edu/physics/profiles/profiles.html
It is a significant honor to be named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and it signifies the recognition of one’s professional peers. Professor David Carroll is the second WFU faculty member to achieve this distinction. Emeritus Professor Howard Shields was the first. Professor Carroll was nominated by the APS Division of Materials Physics for pioneering studies in determining the electronic structure of nanoscale materials and their defects and interfaces through the use of scanning probes leading to applications in electroactive polymer nanocomposites.
The University’s Excellence in Research Award which Professor Timo Thonhauser won this year is given annually to one or two faculty members who are assistant or associate professors and who have been at Wake Forest for no more than 10 years. He has inspired and mentored countless students since coming to Wake Forest in 2008, and is currently guiding a group consisting of five undergraduate students, four graduate students, and a postdoctoral research associate. They are working to solve problems related to carbon capture and hydrogen storage, which are of tremendous importance for a sustainable energy future. Timo has also won over $1,000,000 in external support since coming to Wake Forest.
Graduate student Peter Diemer and Prof. Oana Jurchescu received the Wake Forest Innovation award in December 2013 for their work on organic thin-film transistors. These electronic devices are the fundamental building blocks for new applications such as flexible and rollable displays, wearable electronics, electronic paper, smart bandages, disposable sensors, etc. The Wake Forest team developed a method to enhance the performance of these transistors, and obtained record-high numbers for the figures of merit characteristic to such devices. Their method relies on vibrating the substrate during film crystallization: the mechanical energy provided to the system in this manner encourages the organic semiconductor molecules to reach the structural configuration corresponding to the global energy minimum, thus greatly reducing the density of defects. The technique exploits a key competitive technological advantage – solution processability. It is inexpensive and is compatible with substrates of any size and type. The work was published in Advanced Materials (25, 6956, 2013), highlighted in Nature (502, 9, 2013), Nature Materials (12, 946, 2013), on the cover of Advanced Materials, and resulted in a filed US patent application (PCT/US2013/61463).
One of the ways WFU gives recognition to faculty members is through named faculty fellowship awards. The awards are for outstanding teaching and research. They last for a period of three years. As mentioned above, Professor David Carroll has received the Scott Family Faculty Fellowship and Professor Sam Cho has received the Shively Family Faculty Fellowship.
This summer (June 2014) graduate student Ryan Godwin was awarded a National Institute of Health (NIH) NRSA predoctoral fellowship in the Structural and Computational Biophysics Program. The NIH training grant is a National Research Service Award for predoctoral research training in specific shortage areas and will provide up to two years of support. The goal of the training program is to bridge the gap between the biomedical sciences and the more quantitative basic sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Ryan works with Professor Fred Salsbury.
At the Physics Department’s annual awards ceremony last April Professor Daniel Kim-Shapiro received the Physics Department Excellence in Teaching Award. Graduate student Gregory Smith won the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award, graduate student Katelyn Goetz won the Outstanding Peer Mentor award, and seniors Margaret (Maggie) Payne and Madison Marvel both received the Speas award. Maggie is attending UC Berkeley this fall to begin her PhD studies in Electrical Engineering and Madison began her studies in medical school at Southern Illinois University in July.
Graduate student Andrea Belanger won a poster presentation award for excellent research presented at the Nitric Oxide – Nitrite/Nitrate Conference in Cleveland, OH in June, 2014. Andrea’s poster was titled “Effects of SNP on deoxygenated-induced RBC dehydration in sRBC”. The conference was a joint meeting of the 8th International Conference on the Biology, Chemistry and Therapeutic Application of Nitric Oxide and the 6th International Meeting on the Role of Nitrite and Nitrate in Physiology, Pathophysiology, and Therapeutics. Andrea works with Professor Daniel Kim-Shapiro.
A new 3-minute oral thesis competition was added to the Fourteenth Annual Wake Forest University Graduate Student & Postdoc Research Day program. The Reynolda Campus winner was physics graduate student Nicholas Lepley. He is performing computer simulations of advanced Li-ion battery materials under the direction of Professor Natalie Holzwarth. You can view the video of his talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXxzBAtUL9o .