June 2009

 

Dear A&EP Alumni and Friends,

 

Greetings! Here is a brief update on activities in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics.

 

News from Clark Hall

 

Professors John Silcox and Vaclav Kostroun have retired and have been appointed emeritus faculty.

 

Interest in the A&EP undergraduate major continues its recent growth. We have 96 juniors and seniors affiliated with the program, which is an all-time high.

 

As you may know, Cornell is one of many universities dealing with serious budget deficits that have arisen from the economic downturn. All units at Cornell have gone through a first round of budget cuts. A&EP survived that without terrible pain, although many small cuts in our programs and services had to be made. We did lose authority to hire a new faculty member, which is disappointing. With the retirements of Professors Silcox and Kostroun, it will be a challenge to deliver our programs at the highest level in the near term. A second round of budget cuts will be made this year. In addition, we are engaged in longer-term planning aimed at creating a leaner College of Engineering in the future. 

 

Good news! Construction on the new Physical Sciences Building is proceeding and is almost on schedule. In addition to the crane that has been in place for the past year, a second large crane has been set up in the Clark Hall loading dock area to transfer steel to the building site. That will be in place for the summer. We plan to begin occupying the building in the summer of 2010. Many construction and renovation projects on campus have been put on hold, so we are fortunate to have construction on the PSB continue. As I have told many of you, the new building will have wonderful teaching and research facilities for A&EP.

 

Be sure to read the enclosed overview of A&EP for more information about what’s happening at the school.

 

Commencement

 

At this year’s graduation ceremony, 41 students received the BS degree in Engineering Physics. 57% of the class graduated cum laude or above. 7 students completed the MEng degree in Engineering Physics, and 10 earned PhDs in Applied Physics. 

 

Cuykendall Awards

Friends and former students of Trevor R. Cuykendall, one of the founders of the EP program, endowed two prizes in his honor: one for the senior who has compiled the most outstanding academic record at Cornell, and one for the most outstanding A&EP teaching assistant of the year. This year the Cuykendall Award for the outstanding senior was presented to Joel Thompson. Avtar Singh received the Cuykendall Award for outstanding teaching assistant. 

 

Clark Award

This year’s winner of the David Delano Clark Award for the best MEng project was Stephen Parshley for his work to design a spectrometer to detect infrared radiation from galaxies billions of light years away. Stephen was advised by Professor Gordon Stacey of the Department of Astronomy.

Chau Award

Fred Chau MS ’74 and Dorothy Chau are great supporters of our school, and they have endowed an award to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. This year the Chau Award went to Alex Contryman, who worked with Professor Silcox on high-resolution electron microscopy studies of graphene. Alex is a co-author on a paper titled “Atomic and electronic structure of graphene-oxide,” which was published in Nano Letters, one of the top journals for nanoscience.

 

Hartman Prize

Paul Hartman was one of the patriarchs of the A&EP school, and one of the architects of the advanced experimental physics labs that occupy two floors of Clark Hall. Physics and A&EP students are eligible to receive the Hartman Prize, which recognizes the best work in experimental physics by an undergraduate. This year the Hartman Prize was awarded to Jeremiah Wala of A&EP. Jeremiah worked in Professor Harold Craighead’s lab on the production of polymer fibers and on microfluidic cell-sorting devices. Jeremiah was also a teaching assistant in our freshman-level Nanoscience lab.

 

Findley Prize

A few years ago, the school was very fortunate to receive a gift from the estate of William Findley MS ‘39. In addition to providing support for our computer instrumentation laboratory, this gift created a prize for the best published paper each year authored by an Applied Physics graduate student. The Findley Prize was given to Buz Barstow, for “Alteration of citrine structure by hydrostatic pressure explains the accompanying spectral shift,” published in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Sack, Smith, and Cuykendall E.P. Founders Fund

 

In June 2008, a new PhD fellowship endowment was created by merging the E.P. Founders Fund and a portion of the Henri Sack Memorial Fund. We would like to grow this fund with contributions from alumni, so please read the enclosed details about the fund and consider giving to support a critical need of the school.

 

Alumni Activities

 

We always enjoy hearing news from A&EP alumni. Please feel free to send us a note to update us on your activities. Several alumni responded after receiving last year’s newsletter. I have had the opportunity of meeting some of our alumni in the past year on my travels, and approximately 20 alumni attended the A&EP Reunion Breakfast on June 6. It was a pleasure to learn what they are doing today and how their A&EP education has impacted their lives. As one alumnus put it, “It looks to me as if we old EP grads have done pretty well in the big course called life.”

 

Let us know if you plan to visit campus in the future. Stop by our offices to say hello; we would enjoy catching up with you.

 

Best wishes,

 

Frank W. Wise MS ’86, PhD ’88

Professor and Director