From the 2016 Physics Alumni Newsletter
STATEMENTS FROM SOME FACULTY MEMBERS
Paul Anderson
This past year has had a good mix of teaching and research. I tried a new teaching technique (for me) last spring called the partially flipped classroom. The year before Fred Salsbury had done this for the undergraduate thermodynamics and statistical mechanics class. Since I was teaching the same class, I thought I would give it a try. Each Friday the class was divided into four groups and each group elected a spokesperson. Then I gave the groups questions and problems to work out and they reported their answers back to the rest of the class. It worked well and most students thought it was worthwhile. I am trying it again this semester for the undergraduate quantum mechanics course.
Last July my graduate student, Ritchie Dudley, and I attended the 21st International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation which was held at Columbia University. Ritchie gave a talk on his work on Bose-Einstein, BEC, analog black holes. The idea is that under certain conditions a BEC can mimic mathematically some of the properties that a black hole has. The advantage is that, unlike black holes, BEC’s can be studied in the laboratory. Also in July, Eric Carlson and I finished writing and submitted a paper for publication which investigates quantum effects in certain models of the universe in which gravity becomes very strong at late times resulting in a final singularity. This work involved three former undergraduates: Jay Einhorn, Bradley Hicks, and Andy Lundeen, who are coauthors on the paper.
Gregory Cook
During the last year, my graduate student, Max Zalutskiy, finished his PhD. His dissertation was titled “Investigations of Black Hole Spectra: Purely-Imaginary Modes and Kerr Ringdown Radiation.” We also submitted two papers incorporating some of his work on the purely-imaginary modes of the Kerr geometry. The most exciting event of the year was the first direct observation of gravitational waves, detected by the LIGO observatories in September of 2015 and announced in February of 2016. The gravitational waves were produced by a pair of black holes in an orbit where they spiraled closer together and eventually collided, producing a remnant black hole. This was extremely exciting to me since my own PhD, and much of my subsequent research, was on just such black-hole collisions. In fact, the observed waveform was nearly identical to recent numerical simulations based on my work. I was honored to be invited to talk about the detection of these waves on WUNC Radio’s “The State of Things”, and also gave a Departmental Colloquium titled “GW150914: The first direct detection of Gravitational Waves. What was seen – How did we see it – What does it mean?”
Martin Guthold
A lot has happened in the Guthold lab in the past year. After three PhD students (Xinyi Guo, Stephen Baker and Wei Li) and one undergraduate students (Mizuki Saito) celebrated their graduation in 2015, the Guthold lab population shrank a bit, and in May 2016 only one undergraduate student, Tommy Lucioni, graduated (with honors). All graduating students found great jobs or will continue their education. Xinyi Guo is getting a Master’s degree in Accountancy at Wake Forest University, Stephen Baker and Wei Li got wonderful post-doc positions at the University of Leeds and University of Virginia. Mizuki Saito is attending Dental School at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and Tommy Lucioni is planning to go to Medical School.
In February 2016, Jason Gagliano, who was a technician in the lab, accepted a lab manager position at Forsyth Tech. We are planning to continue working on our drug discovery project using next generation sequencing.
We welcomed new members to the lab. Graduate student Hyunsu Lee and undergraduate students Elizabeth Gianino, Josiah Low and Daniel Nelli joined the lab in 2015. Post-doc Amanda Smelser and undergraduate student Mary Kinney joined in the fall of 2016. We are also hosting a visiting scientist, Lukas Fiber, from Germany.
All the hard work by the students resulted in several publications. In addition to three dissertations and one honors thesis, the Guthold lab published papers in Biophysical Journal, Materials Science & Engineering, Applied Physics Letters, Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces, Materials, and Biomaterials. One of our previously published papers in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry was among the top ten most downloaded papers in 2015.
Dr. Macosko and Dr. Guthold won a $250,000 grant from the Discovery Institute to investigate motor-driven vibrations in cells during mitosis.
Dr. Guthold went to conferences in France and South Africa. He received the Outstanding Investigator Award from the International Fibrinogen Research Society at the International Fibrinogen Workshop in South Africa.
Our new state-of-the art combined Asylum MFP-3D-BIO atomic force microscope (AFM) and an Olympus IX73 inverted optical microscope is getting great use by researchers investigating cancer and normal cells, and other biological materials.
Our business collaboration with NanoMedica, LLC is going well; though, finding funding remains a challenge. We were granted on patent and a second patent is pending. We are also having a conversation with Illumina, a large sequencing company, which is interested in our technology.
The Guthold family is doing well. My wife, who is a lawyer for the city of Winston-Salem, is making sure the city is staying out of legal trouble. My son, Felix is working as a PA in a Cardiology unit at a hospital in Stuttgart (Germany). Our daughter, Melissanthi, is starting 8th grade at Jefferson Middle School, and our three-year old son Alexander started Kindergarten at Forsyth Country Day School.
We hope to see you at homecoming, or just arrange a visit with us.
Natalie Holzwarth
This year we decided to call ourselves “The Materials Modelers”. The biggest milestone of the group was Nicholas Lepley’s completion of this Ph. D. Thesis — “First Principles Investigations of Solid-solid Interfaces in Lithium Battery Materials” before Dec. 2015 and the publication of his work in Physical Review B “Modeling interfaces between solids: Application to Li battery materials”, N. D. Lepley and N. A. W. Holzwarth, Phys. Rev. B 92 214201 (2015). Nicholas is now pursuing a career in “Big Data” and keeps in touch from time to time. Graduate students Jason Howard, Ahmad Al-Qawasmeh, and Larry Rush have all been busy with various projects modeling battery materials, attending some of the Electrochemical Society and American Physical Society meetings and completing the publications: “First principles simulations of the porous layered calcogenides Li2+xSnO3 and Li2+xSnS3″, Jason Howard and N.A.W. Holzwarth, Phys. Rev. B 94, 064198 (2016); ” Computational Study of Li Ion Electrolytes Composed of Li3AsS4 Alloyed with Li4GeS4″, Ahmad Al-Qawasmeh and N.A.W. Holzwarth, Journal of the Electrochemical Society 163, A2079-A2088 (2016); and “First principles investigation of the Structural and electrolyte properties of Na4P2S6 and Li4P2S6, Larry E. Rush Jr. and N.A.W. Holzwarth, Solid State Ionics 286, 45-50 (2016). In addition, undergraduate student Yaqi Yang worked with us during the Fall 2015 semester, starting to explore the possibilities of our modeling of X-ray photoemission spectra.
Oana D. Jurchescu
Our group had a successful year. Three students defended their PhD theses and started new jobs: Katelyn Goetz is doing a postdoc at Heidelberg University, in Germany, Yaochuam Mei works in industry and Peter Diemer is now a postdoctoral researcher at Wake Forest University. Several students won awards: undergraduate Angela Harper won a Goldwater scholarship, Hannah Smith won a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation and she started her graduate studies in the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University. Graduate student Peter Diemer won a gold award from the Materials Research Society (MRS) for his graduate work on organic devices. This is the first MRS gold at Wake Forest. We welcomed a new graduate student to the group, Andrew Zeidell.
Our research made national newspaper headline when we developed the first hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite transistor. The solar cells based on these materials have recently emerged as one of the most promising contenders for large scale, low-cost photovoltaic energy generation. Our first generation transistors allowed us to directly measure, for the first time, the intrinsic electrical properties of such materials. In addition, the results expanded the use of these hybrid perovskites towards other low-cost thin film electronic circuits, thus widening the spectrum of possible applications of these materials.
Daniel Kim-Shapiro
As in most previous years, stuff happened this year. Several undergraduate students moved on. Andrew Barelli graduated (early) with honors in physics and got job with Bloomberg in NYC in Financial Analytics. Amy Xie graduated and is now a medical student at the Ohio State University. Between 2015 and 2016, the group has about 20 papers accepted or published. For me the stand-out is the Redox Biology paper that Nadeem Wajih (Research Professor in the lab) is first author on.
On the homefront, my oldest son Soleil is now a senior. We have been looking at engineering schools that he will apply to. Wake is not on the list as he doesn’t want me as a professor. The other two boys are still in middle school. My wife is still working a ton as a pathologist.
Hope to see some of you at homecoming – or just come for a visit and arrange to see us.
Jed Macosko
Life in our combined Macosko-Holzwarth lab in Olin 213 has been full of comings and goings in 2015-16. Graduate student Amanda Smelser earned her Ph.D. Undergraduates Adam O’Dell and Scott Smyre graduated after working a combined 9 years in the lab. Both Scott and Amanda will continue to work in the lab for another six months on a research project that examines the affect of cell cycle on any motor-driven whole-cell vibrations, as measured by an AFM cantilever. Adam is pursuing a master’s degree at Tokyo University. Undergraduate Manuel Gomez will spend the fall 2016 semester in Copenhagen (not far from where Dr. Macosko lived in the fall of 2013 while he worked on educational research projects at the University of Copenhagen). Manuel will return to his research projects in the spring. Melissa Pashayan, who came to WFU after a successful master’s program at the University of Chicago, has been working in the lab since fall 2015 and will continue to investigate the stiffness of breast cancer cells (and non-cancerous breast cells) as a function of cell cycle and cell-cell proximity. She has been aided in her efforts by John Paul Spaventa, a rising freshman at Stanford University who hails from Winston-Salem. As the PI’s of the Macosko-Holzwwarth lab, we continue our work in the lab. Most recently, one of us (George) worked with Scott and Amanda to build an environmental chamber for long-term live cell imaging on Dr. Guthold’s Zeiss microscope. The other of us (Jed) was appointed the Director of Educational Initiatives at an education startup in Bellevue, WA, which specializes in 3D and virtual reality learning environments. As always, we are both thankful when alumni send news of their latest exploits, and are even more grateful when old friends stop by for a visit. Former graduate student, Todd Fallesen, returned from Europe to attend a conference and made a special trip to visit the lab. It was a happy reunion!
Fred Salsbury
The 2015-16 academic year was a busy one in the Salsbury group. We had three publications come out: our latest review article on molecular dynamics simulations and drug discovery finally came out, and Ryan Godwin and Ryan Melvin both first-authored methods papers. Godwin’s paper was on the long-time simulations and rare event sampling, and Melvin’s on visualizing ensembles in structural biology. We also had an active year of conferences and workshops. Jiajie and I attended the 2016 Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in Baltimore, whereas Ryan Melvin attended the two workshops in Europe: the Barcelona High-Throughput MD workshop, where he won the Best Talk award and the PyEmma Winter School, the results of which he shared with the rest of the group. Godwin attended the NBCR/TCBG Simulation-Based Drug Discovery Workshop in San Diego and shared the latest results and methods with our group. This was also a good year for awards. Godwin finished up his T32 fellowship, though will be here for one more year. At the end of summer 2016, Ryan Melvin received a T32 NIH fellowship from the Structural and Computational Biophysics training grant. He plans to stay longer to add an MS in statistics; a good fit for our interests in applying statistical methods to simulations. Ryan Godwin also pursued his interest in entrepreneurship by competing in the Triad Startup Weekend in Innovation Quarter, where his team finished in third place. We had some personnel changes: Cenji Yu, a BS Biophysics major, joined our research group and stayed the summer with a WFU Summer Research Fellowship to work on aptamer mutant simulations. TJ Colvin, a part-time graduate student, joined our group at the end of the summer. Meanwhile, Dr. Yan Lu returned to China to take up a new position.
Timo Thonhauser
During this last year, my group continued its research on hydrogen storage materials and metal organic frameworks for the purpose of gas sequestration and storage. For the latter, our research has also moved into the direction of catalysis, which is interesting for many industrial purposes. Our latest research shows that we can use metal organic frameworks much like a storage vessel at the molecular level, being able to add/remove a cap at will. My graduate students David Harrison and Evan Welchman are coming into their last year and are likely to graduate next summer. My post doc Sebastian Zuluaga moved on to another post doc position at Vanderbilt University. On the other hand, we are also welcoming new group members: Stephanie Jensen (post doc), Matt Roveto (graduate student), and Jack Treadwell (undergraduate student) have just recently joined my group. I, myself, have temporarily relocated to Cambridge, MA, to start my sabbatical at MIT. So far it has been very rewarding and I hope to be able to work through the long list of projects I have set up for myself.