From the 2012 Physics Alumni Newsletter
I mentioned above that two physics conferences have been held at WFU in the past year. One of them, the WFU 2012 Zone 5 SPS Conference, was organized by the Society of Physics Students under the guidance of Professor Eric Carlson. It was held on the WFU campus on April 20-21. We were very impressed that they were able to bring in as a speaker Nobel Laureate William Phillips from the National Institute of Standards in Gaithersburg, MD and the University of Maryland, College Park. He gave an excellent public talk entitled “Time, Einstein, and the Coolest Stuff in the Universe”. Other participants at the conference came from North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.
The second conference was the 24th Annual Workshop on Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Theory held at Wake Forest on June 5-8, 2012. Physics professors Timo Thonhauser and Natalie Holzwarth, along with Chemistry professor Akbar Salam worked together to organize and make the local arrangements for it. They also worked with the international steering committee to choose a list of topics representing recent major developments in the field and invited speakers. The program consisted of 24 oral presentations, 70 posters, and 2 panel discussions, with a total of about 150 participants. Participants came from all over the world and included undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and senior scientists. During the closing remarks, Professor David Ceperley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), one of the founding fathers of this workshop series, said “This is without doubt the best organized workshop in the 24-year history of this workshop series and one of the strongest programs.”
Some members of the Department have also been involved in outreach programs to the local public schools. Professors Samuel Cho (Department of Physics and Department of Computer Science) and Paúl Pauca (Department of Computer Science) organized a computational thinking workshop for teachers at Hanes Magnet School. The workshop was generously supported by Google, Wake Forest University Departments of Physics and Computer Science, The Center of Excellence for Research, Teaching, and Learning at Wake Forest School of Medicine, and Cengage Learning. Their focus was to incorporate computational thinking problem solving skills into the teachers’ existing curriculum. Represented were Engineering, English/Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies teachers who decided to spend their summer learning about how computational thinking can help their students. They are an inspiration.
The Society of Physics Students, under the guidance of Professor Eric Carlson, visited Hanes Middle School weekly over a period of 3 months to teach sixth through eighth grade students about robotics, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The students designed and constructed underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), through their participation in SeaPerch, a national program sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
Some of the research efforts of our faculty have received extra recognition in the past year. An article written by Professor Fred Salsbury and post-doc Lacramioara Negureanu was selected for the cover of the February issue of the Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics. The paper titled “Insights into Protein – DNA Interactions, Stability and Allosteric Communications: A Computational Study of Mutsα-DNA Recognition Complexes” studies the conformational changes that occur in this recognition complex due to the binding of DNA damage from the chemotherapeutic cis-platin, in order to better understand the molecular origin of intra- and inter-protein communication mediated by this complex, to predict the effects of cancer-associated mutations on the molecular level, and to assist in further developing this complex as a target for therapeutic design.
Professor David Carroll’s group at the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials has developed an exciting nanoengineered thermoelectric/piezoelectric technology called PowerFelt. This fascinating material generates electricity from the heat and vibration of large extended objects, like the human body, but feels and acts like a fabric. Professor Carroll’s work in power generating fabrics has been featured in the national news recently (CNN, Discovery, Time, and more) and in June 2012 the NY Times featured PowerFelt at the top of a list of 32 Innovations “That Will Change Your Tomorrow”.
The research of Professor Sam Cho and his students was recently profiled in a number of international and local news media outlets. Professor Cho and his team tackle biomolecular molecular dynamics simulations by implementing their algorithms on a video gaming technology called graphics processing units (GPUs). These GPUs were originally designed for rendering images on a computer screen, but they hijacked this technology for high performance computing with impressive results.
Wake Forest University has been named a CUDA Teaching Center by NVIDIA Corporation. Professor Sam Cho will coordinate the Teaching Center activities, which include teaching, research, and training. CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU). CUDA Teaching Centers have integrated GPU computing techniques into their mainstream computer programming curriculum, and are dedicated to training the next wave of parallel programmers to address today’s most challenging computing issues and drive the next wave of scientific discovery. As part of the Teaching Center program, Dr. Sam Cho taught a new course: Special Topics: GPU Programming (CSC 391/691, cross-listed as PHY 391/691) based on the CUDA architecture in Fall 2011.
Two of our faculty members have also been interviewed by the press in the past year. Professor David Carroll was interviewed on the importance of nanotechnology by Denise Franklin on the Voices and Viewpoints Program on our local National Public Radio Station WFDD. Professor Eric Carlson was interviewed for several stories concerning numbers and the fascination of many with the date of 11/11/11. He was featured or quoted by WFMY 2 News, USA Today, CNN, Huffington Post, BBC Radio, and NBC Nightly News.