From the 2016 Physics Alumni Newsletter
The Physics Department continues to do well and our students and faculty continue to win prestigious awards.
Last March Timo Thonhauser, was named a 2016 Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics. Timo is one of 14 university professors named by the Simons Foundation Division for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences for the fellows program that provides funds to faculty for up to a semester long research leave from classroom teaching and administrative obligations. The Simons Foundation was established by billionaire James H. Simons, a mathematician and philanthropist, to support distinguished scientists. Combined with a sabbatical from the University, Timo is spending the 2016/2017 academic year on research leave at MIT. One of his research goals is to obtain a better understanding of fundamental interactions in materials from a theoretical perspective. He says that “With this newly gained understanding and insight, we hope to improve all kinds of materials for challenges and demands of novel devices in the 21st century — ranging from cell-phones and computers to energy production and storage.”
Also in March, Rick Matthews won the WFU Teaching and Learning Center’s Teaching Innovation Award. This award recognizes the effort put forth by faculty who have redesigned their courses or introduced new courses with innovative, research-based approaches to the practice of teaching, using new methods and/or technologies, with an intentional emphasis on how these innovations improved or facilitated student learning. Rick has redesigned sections of General Physics I and II in which most lectures are delivered by video while class time is dominated by interactive activities and small group problem solving. Rick discussed this briefly in his contribution to the newsletter last year.
Last November, graduate student Crystal Bolden received a Young Investigator Award at the 22nd Annual Meeting for the Society for Free Radical Biology and Medicine. The Young Investigator Award is presented to students and postdoctoral fellow members based on a submitted research abstract and the presentation of the work at the Society’s Annual Meeting as judged by members of SFRBM’s Awards–Junior Committee. Crystal is a PhD Candidate in Molecular Medicine and Translational Science at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and works with Dany Kim–Shapiro.
This spring undergraduate Angela Harper was selected as a Goldwater Scholar for the 2016-2017 academic year. This is a high honor as only 252 Goldwater Scholars were named this year. To quote from the WFU article (http://news.wfu.edu/2016/04/07/physics-students-win-prestigious-awards/) “Harper was selected as a Goldwater Scholar on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,150 mathematics, science, and engineering students who were nominated by the institutional representatives of 415 colleges and universities nationwide.” Angela has worked with Jacque Fetrow and Oana Jurchescu (separately), and spent last summer at Cornell University working with Prof. Paulette Clancy, performing computer simulations on solar cells.
Former graduate student Pete Diemer won the Spring 2016 Materials Research Society Gold Graduate Student Award for the work he did in developing novel deposition techniques for organic semiconductor device layers. His first project of Vibration Assisted Crystallization resulted in a first author publication, including journal cover, highlights in Nature and Nature Materials, as well as US and European patents. Later, he developed the first laser printed organic field-effect transistor using an office laser printer. This invention disclosure was also submitted and a patent is pending. This is the first time that a Wake Forest student received the MRS Gold Award. Pete received his Ph.D. last summer and is currently working as a postdoctoral research associate for Oana Jurchescu.
This year graduate student Ryan Melvin was awarded an 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 is a member of Fred Salsbury’s research group. Last year Ryan was awarded Best Talk at the 2nd Workshop on High-Throughput Molecular Dynamics in Barcelona, Spain, at the Barcelona biomedical research park. The award included a prize of an Nvidia Tesla K40 — a specialized GPU for computer simulations. His talk was titled “Combining Molecular Dynamics and Biopolymer Docking”.
Former undergraduate Hannah Smith, who worked in the group of Oana Jurchescu, was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for graduate studies in Electrical Engineering. Hannah graduated last spring and is beginning her graduate career in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University this fall.
At the Physics Department’s annual awards ceremony last April Rick Matthews received the Physics Department Excellence in Teaching Award. Graduate students Melissa Pashayan and Maxim Zalutskiy won the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award, postdoc Sabastien Zuluaga won the Outstanding Peer Mentor award, and seniors Harsh Patolia and Hannah Smith received the Speas award.
From left to right: Keith Bonin, Hannah Smith, Rick Matthews, Melissa Pashayan, and Maxim Zalutskiy.