Rutgers Physics News

Five current graduate students in the Rutgers Physics Department have been awarded Lucent-Rutgers Fellowships: Ms. Kasturi Basu, Mr. Ilya Berdnikov, Mr. Craig Fennie, Mr. Shitao Lou and Mr. Soonyong Park. These students will soon be matched with mentors at Lucent, giving them opportunities to work in both academic and industrial research environments. Congratulations to Kasturi, Ilya, Craig, Shitao and Soonyong!

Natan Andrei and Bob Bartynski have been recently elected to APS Fellowship. Prof. Andrei's citation: For elucidating the many-body effects of several condensed matter systems, in particular the Kondo model.." and Prof. Bartynski's citation: For pioneering experiments to determine the electronic properties of surfaces, especially for leadership in developing Auger Photoelectron Coincidence Spectroscopy"
More info at http://www.aps.org/fellowship/2004/index.cfm

Namjung Hur, a student of Prof. Sang-Wook Cheong, was chosen to to receive a GMAG Outstanding Dissertation in Magnetism awards. This award has three components: an invited talk in an appropriate session at the March 2005 APS Meeting in Los Angeles, a monetary prize to the student, and finances towards travel or other costs of attending the Meeting.

Professor Joel Lebowitz has been awarded the 2004 Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service by the APS. The medal will be presented at the March 2005 Meeting of the APS. The citation reads: "For his tireless personal activism, throughout his superb career as a theoretical physicist, to help scientists and defend their human rights in countries around the globe."

Rutgers University Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. Philip Furmanski has announced the formation of the Institute for Advanced Materials and Devices at Rutgers University. This Institute is intended to provide a vital link between academic scientific research at Rutgers and the needs of emerging commercial technologies in the areas of advanced materials and devices, and will involve the participation of about 20 faculty from the Department of Physics and Astronomy working together with faculty from other FAS and Engineering departments.

Professor David Langreth receives an honorary Doctorate Honoris Causa from Chalmers University, Gothenberg, Sweden in Theoretical Physics in 2004.

Professor Ted Madey receives an honorary Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Wroclaw, Poland in Experimental Physics in 2004.

Professor Gabi Kotliar is among the four physicists selected this year to receive a prestigious and highly competitive Guggenheim Fellowship. Professor Kotliar received the 2003 award for his work in condensed matter theory.

Dr. George Downsbrough (B.S.'31, Ph.D.'36), the second Ph.D. recipient in our department, has contributed $200K towards an endowed fund in the department. The purpose of the fund is to help provide startup monies for new faculty members in Physics and Astronomy, who will be known as "Downsbrough Faculty Research Fellows" during the years that they receive such funds.

A bequest in the amount of $500K from the Van Dyck Trust, set up some years ago in honor of Francis Cuyler Van Dyck, the founder of the Physics Department, passed to the Department of Physics and Astronomy this year. Income from the funds will help supplement graduate fellowships for incoming graduate students who will be known as Francis Van Dyck Fellows.

The relocation in September 2001 of about a half-dozen faculty members into new offices in the NPL signals the completion of a major renovation project begun about 5 years ago. Adjacent to the Serin Physics building, the NPL -- formerly the "Nuclear Physics Laboratory" -- had been underutilized since a Tandem Accelerator was removed more than a decade ago. Now rededicated as the "NANOPHYSICS LABORATORY", the building provides offices and laboratory space for experimental faculty and postdocs associated with the Laboratory for Surface Modification (LSM), as well as other condensed matter laboratories. LSM has extensive state-of-the-art instrumentation in NPL, ranging from ion beam accelerators for determining surface structure and composition, to scanning probe microscopes for atomic-scale surface measurements.

The NSF has funded a major proposal submitted by Gabi Kotliar, David Vanderbilt, Karin Rabe, and Christian Uebing to acquire and install a supercomputer facility consisting of a cluster of roughly 150 tightly-linked high-performance PC's. In addition to its targeted reasearch mission for computational studies of complex materials, the cluster will also be available for broader research and educational purposes.

Dr. Basil Mchunu has arrived from South Africa as the the first Rutgers-SALT graduate fellow in astrophysics. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of Zululand in South Africa. This is a new fellowship program between Rutgers and the Government of South Africa.

Professor Valery Kiryukhin has been named a recipient of an NSF CAREER award. These awards fund junior faculty members who show exceptional promise of excellence in research and education.

Professor Walter Kohn (U.C. Santa Barbara) received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Rutgers University at the University Commencement on May 17, 2001. Kohn is widely acclaimed for his work on density-functional theory that led to the award of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in addition to a large number of other seminal contributions to condensed matter physics. In connection with his visit, he gave a joint Physics and Chemistry Colloquium and was toasted at a special reception that followed.

Joel Lebowitz has won the 2001 Volterra Award of the Academia Lincea in Rome, and will be giving the Vito Volterra Lecture there this spring.

Herbert Neuberger has been selected as a 2001 Guggenheim US/Canadian Fellow in Physics. The basis for this award is "unusually impressive achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment."

Baki Brahmia has won the FAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education. Baki will be presented with the award at the FAS Faculty Meeting next week.

Prof. Frank Zimmermann has been awarded the 2001 Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, given each year to a few Rutgers faculty members at the time of promotion for especially outstanding scholarship and research. The award carries a $2,000 research grant.

Congratulations to Michael Gershenson and Frank Zimmermann, who have been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure, and to Ron Ransome, who has been promoted to Full Professor, effective July 1, 2001.

Noemie Koller has been selected as the 2001 winner of the Rutgers University Daniel Gorenstein Memorial Award in recognition of her scholarly excellence in experimental nuclear physics research and 40 years of dedicated service, administration, and teaching at Rutgers.

David Merritt has been elected vice-chair of the Division of Dynamical Astronomy (DDA) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). He wil automatically become chair of the Division after one year.

Valery Kiryukhin as been chosen to receive an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship for 2001. Kirkyukhin's research interests are in the area of experimental studies of novel materials with unusual superconducting and magnetic properties.

An anonymous donor has made a major multi-million dollar gift to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University. These new funds will undoubtedly make a major impact on our programs. Among other things, it will be used for:

Emanuel Diaconescu, a recent Rutgers Ph.D. graduate who did his thesis work under the supervision of Michael Douglas, has been awarded the 2000 U.S. Council of Graduate Schools/University Microfilms International (CGS/UMI) Distinguished Dissertation Award for his thesis "D-branes and Nonperturbative Dynamics in String Theory." This is awarded annually for the best Ph.D. dissertation in the entire country in any field. He is now at the Institute for Advanced Study. Congratulations, Emanuel!

Professor Michael Douglas of the Rutgers Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the New High Energy Theory Center, is a co-winner of the 2000 Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, along with Professor Juan Maldacena of Harvard University (a former Rutgers postdoc). The prize is being awarded for their "outstanding contribution to Superstring Theory". This annual prize is awarded to a scientist(s) under the age of 40 in a selected area of the physical sciences. This year, the first year of the award, the topic was High Energy Physics. A distinguished international panel (including Stephen Weinberg) chose Douglas and Maldacena as the high energy theorists under the age of 40 who have made the most outstanding contributions in the world to the field. In future years, other areas of the physical sciences will be selected. The award was administered by Tel Aviv University in Israel, and was presented in Israel on May 22, 2000.