News

Professor George Holzwarth passed away on March 13, 2024. George joined the physics faculty of Wake Forest University in August 1983. While he officially retired in 2004, he remained active in his biophysics research to the very end.  Before joining WFU, George earned a BS  degree in physics from Wesleyan University in 1959 and a Ph. D. in biophysics from Harvard University in 1964. He served as a faculty member at the University of Chicago 1967-1974 and on the Research staff at Exxon Corporate Research 1974-1983. Throughout his long career, George enjoyed finding ways in which physics concepts and methods can be used to address interesting and challenging biological questions. George would have been very happy to learn that his last paper, “Directional change during active diffusion of viral ribonucleoprotein particles through cytoplasm ” in collaboration with his students, Doug Lyles from the medical school, and others has now been published. The family is arranging for an annual biophysics colloquium as part of the physics colloquium program in George’s honor.

More information about George and his life is available here.

The Critical Zone Network is an NSF-funded program geared at gaining an interdisciplinary understanding of the Earth’s surface. Nick and the team at the Lowman Environmental Dynamics Lab are part of the Dynamic Water Thematic Cluster through the ORE-CZ NSF grant. Nick presented his poster titled “Unraveling plant responses to flash drought” at the  2024 Critical Zone Network All-Hands Meeting.

Corak’s research project studies the effects of fire on vegetation regrowth dynamics across a gradient of North Carolina ecosystems and climates through a combination of ground observations and NASA satellite remote sensing data. This work will add to scientific literature on how fire impacts vegetation health, being the first of its kind to use ground observations to validate remotely-sensed leaf area index (LAI) after fire.

On June 26 th 2024 Dominique S. Itanze defended his Ph. D. thesis “First-Principles Simulations for Catalysis for Sustainable Production of Fuels and Chemicals” and is scheduled to officially receive his Ph. D. from the Wake Forest University Department of Chemistry in August, 2024. Dominique’s work is interdisciplinary; mentored by Professors Scott Geyer and Patricia Dos Santos in Chemistry and Natalie Holzwarth in Physics. His committee also included Professors Akbar Salam and Elham Gadhiri in Chemistry and Stephen Winters in Physics. From the beginning of his graduate career, Dominique contributed to various projects in the Geyer laboratory through computer analysis and simulation, gradually increasing the sophistication of the computations. His most recent modeling work, some of which was presented to the Electrochemical Society shown in the picture, used newly available computational formalisms and codes which incorporate the effects of solvation and voltage at each step of the catalytic process. The manuscript “On the Mechanism of Butanol Formation from the Electrochemical Reduction of CO 2 on Phosphorus-Rich CuP 2 without *CO Dimerization: A Computational Study” was submitted to the Journal of Physical Chemistry C for consideration for publication. Based on an experimental report in the recent published literature, Dominique’s simulations provide insight into the detailed mechanisms of this complex multi-step process. Dominique is looking forward to continuing his research and to teaching and mentoring students in chemistry at Winthrop University.

Katie Koch was awarded a poster prize at the Gordon Research Conference for Unconventional Semiconductors and their Applications earlier this month at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts.