From the 2015 Physics Alumni Newsletter
STATEMENTS FROM SOME FACULTY MEMBERS
Paul Anderson
It’s been a good year. I was on sabbatical during the spring semester of 2015. I chose to stay here this time but made up for it with a fair amount of spring and summer travel. It was in 2015 that Einstein finalized his theory of general relativity and so there are various conferences in honor of that scheduled throughout the year. Most of the members of the gravity group attended one of these at Pennsylvania State University in early June. I also attended two others at which recognition of the centennial of Einstein’s theory took place: the American Physical Society April Meeting in Baltimore and an international conference called the Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity that meets every three years. This year it was in Rome, so my wife and I decided to do some vacationing there before and after the conference. After the sabbatical and summer travel it is good to be back and I am looking forward to resuming teaching during the fall semester.
Samuel S. Cho
We have had a pretty active 2014-2015 year in the Cho lab. Rongzhong Li successfully defended his PhD, and he is planning to complete his MS in Computer Science by December. In total, his time at Wake will be 5.5 years, which is the average time for most graduate students to complete one PhD, but he will leave with two graduate degrees and at least 5 publications and a patent. A new physics PhD graduate student, Lauren Nelson, also joined the lab, and she will be co-mentored by Prof. Dany Kim-Shapiro. Her research has already resulted in an NIH pre-doctoral fellowship, and we’re working on her first manuscript.
The undergraduate students in the group have been quite successful as well. Four undergraduate students, Jessica Leuchter, Adam Green, Cecilia Rambarat, and Julian Gilyard, wrote a peer-reviewed article summarizing recent developments in MD simulations. Their article was a special issue commemorating the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on the subject. Jessica presented her research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technologie (Germany) thanks to a travel award she received, where she met Prof. Yaakov Levy. She is now a researcher with Prof. Levy at the Weizmann Institute (Israel), and she plans to pursue to a Ph.D. Adam is now attending a Ph.D. program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he was the recipient of their Chancellor’s Fellowship, which is reserved for the top applicant and includes an $40k extra stipend over 5 years. Cecilia and another undergraduate, Billy Nicholson, presented their research at the internationally attended Biophysical Society Meeting in Baltimore, MD. Julian presented his research at the Society for Industrial Applied Mathematics Conference in Salt Lake City, UT, and he is interning at the Swiss global financial firm UBS in Manhattan.
I was able to travel to a few conferences, but the highlight for me was attending the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Beijing, China. Despite the geopolitical news I hear day to day, it was nice to see so many energetic students who share our mutual love of science. Also, the Chinese food is amazing (!) and very different from the Chinese food in America. I was also invited to give a talk at Nanjing University, ranked #1 in Physics in China and the undergraduate university of my graduate student, Rongzhong Li. I made a special talk highlighting Rongzhong’s work, and asked them to send students as talented as Rongzhong to Wake.
Gregory Cook
The last year began with Max Zalutskiy finishing his Master’s degree in Computer Science and starting his final push toward finishing his work toward a PhD. This included his first publication with me: “Gravitational perturbations of the Kerr geometry: High-accuracy study.” The fall semester also saw Anthony Craven join our group for a semester of undergraduate research. 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Most of the gravity group made the trip to Penn State University in early June to attend a week-long celebratory conference: “General Relativity & Gravitation: A Centennial Perspective.” Max and I were both invited to give talks during the afternoon parallel session.
Jack Dostal
During the 2014-15 year I taught several courses including The Physics of Music, taking students up to the carillon in Wait Chapel as well as to the hospital to see their own vocal cords! I also had the opportunity to give a couple of talks at professional meetings – one on musical acoustics in Indianapolis and the other on physics education in Minneapolis. I also kept busy by helping the Department host a meeting for about 50 North Carolina physics teachers in March. Perhaps the most memorable event for me was conducting an outreach session about sound and physics with approximately 100 second-grade students at Sherwood Forest Elementary. They thought it was pretty cool that plastic trombones make the same sounds as brass trombones!
Martin Guthold
A lot has happened in the Guthold lab in the past year. We have celebrated the graduation of three graduate students and one undergraduate student. In May, Xinyi Guo successfully defended her PhD dissertation. She liked Wake Forest so much that she stayed around to get a Master’s degree in Accountancy. Her goal is to get a job in a consulting firm. In June, Stephen Baker successfully defended his PhD dissertation. He got a post-doc position with Gijsje Koenderink at the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam (Netherlands). In July, Wei Li successfully defended her PhD dissertation. She got a post-doc position with Tom Barker at Georgia Tech. Mizuki Saito, an undergraduate researcher in our lab, graduated in May and got accepted to Dental School at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
Together with Dr. Hall (Biomedical Engineering), we also got a state-of-the art combined Asylum MFP-3D-BIO atomic force microscope (AFM) and an Olympus IX73 inverted optical microscope. This instrument will enable many exciting experiments.
We welcomed several new members to the lab, graduate students Hyunsu Lee and Ali Daraei (fall 2015), and undergraduate students Tommy Lucioni, Josiah Low and Tracey Pu.
Our business collaboration with NanoMedica, LLC is going well. Former undergraduate student Victor Yu (Biophysics, ’13), who was working with NanoMedica, was accepted at the Business/Biomedical Engineering program at Duke University.
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, has finished his PA program in Germany and is now working as a PA in a Cardiology unit at a hospital in Stuttgart (Germany). Our daughter, Melissanthi, is starting 7th grade at Jefferson Middle School, and our two-year old son Alexander is making sure we have our priorities straight at home.
We hope to see you at homecoming, or just arrange a visit with us.
Natalie Holzwarth
This past year, undergraduate students Hannah (Xinran) Zhang and Zachary Pipkorn completed their BS degrees in Physics and participated in research by performing molecular dynamics simulations using the LAMMPS and GULP codes, respectively. Some movies resulting from that effort are posted in the web http://users.wfu.edu/natalie/MD/hannahsMD.html and
http://users.wfu.edu/natalie/MD/zacsMD.html. Hannah’s work resulted in an undergraduate thesis “Computational Modeling of Li Diffusion using Molecular Dynamics”. Hannah is now attending University of Melbourne in a Master’s degree program in Electrical Engineering. Zac will be joining the Marine Corp and becoming a pilot in a few months. Meanwhile he is returning to WFU and attending the Masters program in Management at the Business School. Jamie Drewery (BS 2014) spent part of the last year helping us to continue to update the http://pwpaw.wfu.edu webpages before joining some projects working with Richard Williams and David Carroll’s groups. This fall, he will attend the University of Pennsylvania in their Masters of Materials Science program. Cameron Kates (BS 2014) is starting the second year of graduate school at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. His senior thesis work on modeling Li4P2S6 is included in a manuscript submitted for publication in collaboration with Zachary Hood and several colleagues from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Graduate student Nicholas Lepley is currently writing his thesis, expecting to graduate in September 2015. Graduate students Ahmad Al-Qawasmeh, Larry Rush, and Jason Howard are all working hard to model various battery materials.
Oana D. Jurchescu
Our Organic electronics group had a good 2014-2015 year. Graduate student Katelyn Goetz was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) fellowship and she spent three months in the group of Dr. Tatsuo Hasegawa at the Flexible Electronics Research Center (FLEC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan, performing research on opto-electronic materials. Jeremy Ward successfully defended his PhD thesis and is now in Washington DC working as a Materials Research Society (MRS) and The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow, on the staff of a member of Congress or congressional committee. Three undergraduate students graduated with honors in Physics: Abdul Obaid, Andy Vuong and Derek Fogel. They are now enrolled in PhD programs at Stanford University, UCLA and Washington State Univ, respectively. Abdul also won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which he declined. We had two cover articles, one in advanced Functional Materials and one in ChemPhysChem. Our work was featured in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C: 2014 Emerging Investigators Themed Issue, which highlights the best work from material scientists in the early stages of their independent career. This article was also selected as one of the most accessed articles for 2014 and included in the Most Accessed Articles 2014 web collection.
Daniel Kim-Shapiro
The 2014-2015 year has been pretty eventful in and out of the Kim-Shapiro lab. Andrea Belanger completed her PhD and is now working as a Licensing Associate at UT Dallas. Craig Clodfelter completed his PhD in Chemistry. Jack Janes completed a Bachelors degree and is now working at Lockheed while Pragna Shetty took her Physics bachelors degree to medical school. The group welcomed a new graduate student, Lauren Nelson, who is also working with Professor Sam Cho and who just won a NIF pre-doctoral fellowship. As usual, the whole group went to the meeting of the Society for Free Radical Biology and Medicine (including Jack) in Seattle.
On the homefront, my oldest son Soleil will be a junior in high school next year. He worked in Professor Jurchescu’s lab this summer. The other two boys are in middle school. My wife (a pathologist) is working a lot both at Wake Forest’s Lexington and Winston-Salem’s hospitals. We had a great vacation in Maui visiting my wife’s sister and her daughter. The highlight is when we caught a little octopus while tide pooling.
Hope to see some of you at homecoming – or just come for a visit and arrange to see us.
Rick Matthews
I’m back! After seven years in administration, first as Associate Provost and then as Chief Information Officer, I returned to Physics last summer. While I enjoyed being in a position where I could shape campus technology, I deeply missed teaching and time with students.
When you are away that long, you think a lot about what you would do differently when you get back in the classroom. My guiding principle was this: do not waste a moment of the time you and the students are together doing things you could do just as well when you are not together. That led me to blow up my old approach and “flip” my classes. I had students watch short lecture videos before coming to class and then we spent class time in immersive interactive activity, mostly small group problem solving. It worked wonderfully, in spite of my inexperience with this approach. I am grateful to the department for completely renovating one of the labs to accommodate such an intensely collaborative use of class time. I look forward to round two this academic year!
On the way back to Physics, I picked up another responsibility: Director of Academic and Instructional Technology for the College. In this role, I oversee the Instructional Technology Group and get to indulge my passion as a “tech evangelist.” Faculty in our department and across campus, enabled by technology, are finding more effective ways for students to learn. I love spreading the news of their successes.
So, I get to spend half my time ferreting out the best of teaching practices and the other half applying what I learn to my own classes. It has been a dream year.
Fred Salsbury
The 2014-15 academic years was a busy one in the Salsbury group. Ryan Godwin received a second year of fellowship funding from our NIH SCB training grant. He also went to the Protein Society first International Annual Meeting in Barcelona with me; ample great science in a beautiful city. Ryan Melvin gave an invited talk at Stanford on Sustainability and Simulation, and joined Ryan Godwin and me at the Biophysical Society Conference in Baltimore this year. The three of us also co-wrote a review article on Molecular Dynamics Simulations and Computer-aided Drug Discovery for Methods in Toxicology. Jiajie didn’t join us in Baltimore this year, instead he covered the APS March meeting for our group.
In personal notes, Dr. Yan Lu had her baby, and my wife, Rebecca, is now the newest Assistant Principal at Reagan High School.
Timo Thonhauser
In the spring semester of 2015 I took 15 students to the WFU Flow House in Vienna/Austria. This is the first time that the introductory physics classes (General Physics I and General Physics II) were taught abroad. This option was very popular amongst students, in particular for the pre-med students who typically are not able to spend an entire semester abroad, as they were able to fulfill their entire physics requirement in one semester. In addition to physics, during this semester in Vienna the students also had to take a German class and either a Music or History class. We also took the students on several trips, visiting the Technical Museum, the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Prague, and Budapest. It was a wonderful experience for everyone involved and an exciting way to extend the reach of our department to the WFU international programs!