MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY
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June 2004 Newsletter No. 010
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PHYSICS ALUMNI, PLEASE UPDATE YOUR INFORMATION
Unless you have communicated with us recently, we ask that each of you who are former MSU physics majors supply us with a few lines telling us where you are, what you are doing, your mailing address, your email address, the names of your spouse and children, your career path, and other interesting things that have happened to you. We will attempt to use a future issue of this newsletter to provide alumni of the department with information on their fellow graduates. Please also provide us with names and addresses of other physics alumni with whom you are in contact. You may send information to Joe Ferguson (jlf1@ra.msstate.edu) or Amy Massey (amym@ra.msstate.edu), Box 5167, Mississippi State, MS 39762. Phone (662) 325-2806 or fax (662) 325-8898.
2004 GRADUATES
Four students graduated in May with BS degrees in physics.
Davis Herring (Summa Cum Laude), from Starkville, received degrees in both Physics and Computer Science. He was the “featured undergraduate student” in our last newsletter and he was recently chosen as 2004 Outstanding Senior in Physics. He became the thirtieth student to have his name placed on a plaque in the conference room. (He is shown accepting a certificate from department head Dr. Mark Novotny.) Over the last few years Davis has been responsible for some of the most ingenious developments in Dr. John Foley’s WebTOP project (http://webtop.msstate.edu/).
Recently, Davis was chosen as one of nineteen students nationally to receive the prestigious Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship. He will be using this fellowship as he pursues graduate study at the University of California at Davis. (Where else for a guy named Davis?)
Lance Pittman (Magna Cum Laude), of Starkville, graduated with degrees in both Physics and Mathematics. Last summer in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, he combined his two academic interests while working with a mathematician on solutions to the Schrodinger equation. Lance plans to attend graduate school in mathematics at the University of Illinois.
Jason Rohner (Cum Laude), from Houma, Louisana, did several kinds of research during his undergraduate career. He spent one summer in an REU program at Vanderbilt doing particle physics and another at Auburn involved in solid state work. He has also done work with Dr. Chun Fu Su at MSU’s Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory (DIAL) and has served several semesters as an undergraduate teaching assistant. Jason will go to graduate school at Vanderbilt.
Omid Talaee, from Jackson, has been one of the leaders of our Society of Physics Students and has served several semesters as an undergraduate teaching assistant. Omid hopes to continue his physics studies later but, for the near future, he will take over a family real estate business in Jackson.
We expect two more B.S. students to graduate later this year: Craig Carrigee, from Kiln, in August and Jeff Durst, of Starkville, in December.
Several students are 2004 candidates for masters degrees in physics.
Poonam Verma, from India, recently completed her thesis defense. She did a computational materials physics project with Dr. Mark Novotny and is now working with him on her Ph. D.
Candidates for MS degrees later this year are Frances Carter, doing optics with Dr. John Foley, and Daniel Logue, doing astrophysics with Dr. Patrick Lestrade.
Last fall, Sudip Koirala and Hatim Yousif completed their masters degrees.
FOLEY IS RECIPIENT OF SESAPS PEGRAM AWARD
Dr. John T. Foley was recognized with the George B. Pegram Award for Teaching of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society at its 2003 meeting held last November in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. The citation read “For his outstanding undergraduate and graduate teaching and his creativity, leadership and dissemination of The Optics Project.”
Dr. Foley, who has been on the faculty since 1978, is frequently praised for his outstanding teaching and has received two major awards from MSU. In 1987 he was honored with the Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for excellence in teaching and in 1991 he received the Alumni Association’s award for graduate teaching.
In the Optics Project on the Web (WebTOP) Dr. Foley, Dr. Taha Mzoughi and a team of student programmers have created WebTOP, a collection of modules that run on the Web with spectacular interactive visualizations of many wave and optical phenomena. Sample some of their work at http://webtop.msstate.edu/ . Dr. Foley and Dr. Mzoughi have presented workshops on WebTop at several regional and national meetings.
In addition to WebTOP, Foley has maintained his work in classical theoretical optics. He has over fifty publications in major journals. He has a long collaboration in diffraction and coherence theory with Dr. Emil Wolf of the University of Rochester. Recently he has done work in near-field optics with fellow MSU faculty member Dr. Henk Arnoldus. Dr. Foley was made a Fellow of the Optical Society in 1993 in recognition of his work in coherence theory.
Foley is the second MSU faculty member to receive the Pegram award. Dr. Joe Ferguson was the 1995 recipient.
MA WINS RESEARCH AWARD
At the 39th Annual Faculty Recognition Ceremony of the MSU Alumni Association Dr. Wenchao Ma received this year’s award for excellence in research. Ma, who has been on the MSU faculty for ten years, was recognized for his highly successful work in nuclear physics. Dr. Ma is also considered by his students and colleagues to be one of the best teachers in our department.
Dr. Ma received his undergraduate degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. His M.S. and Ph. D. degrees are from Vanderbilt University. Dr. Ma specializes in studies of nuclear structure at high spin states and in nuclei far from stability. He has nearly 100 refereed research publications. He has supported his work by bringing to MSU over $800,000 in research grants. In addition he has served as principal investigator on a $740,000 grant that supports MSU’s close association with Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Most impressive is Dr. Ma’s success in getting beam time at many of the worlds major nuclear physics facilities. In the highly competitive field of nuclear physics only the best proposals are successful. Dr. Ma has performed experiments at Argonne National Laboratory, Lawerence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in this country as well as at Legnauro National Laboratory in Italy and the French National Laboratory at Strasbourg. He maintains collaborations with University of Bonn, Vanderbilt University, Beijing Normal University, and Tsinghua University. His particularly successful collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, has made it possible for two of his postdoctoral fellows and two of his undergraduate students to spend time doing research at that prestigious institution.
Dr. Ma has directed the work of more than a dozen graduate students and has also involved several undergraduate and high school students in his research. He has been mentor to four postdoctoral fellows.
Previous winners of this research award from our department are Robert L. (Bob) Cook (1982) and Rodney B. (Buz) Piercey (1995).
FEATURED UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Phillip J. (Jeff) Durst is a senior physics major from Starkville who pursues his scientific goals while also maintaining his interest in the theater.
Jeff, who plans to graduate in December, has done a variety of things in physics outside the classroom while maintaining an excellent GPA. As an underclassman, he assisted in restoring the second floor solar system model to the newly-renovated Hilbun Hall. Jeff also helped to restore some of our old lecture demonstration apparatus. Since then, he has worked with Dr. Wenchao Ma in nuclear physics. His duties included analyzing spectra and computer programming. A highlight of this work came when Jeff accompanied Dr. Ma to the University of California at Berkeley for an experiment. Jeff has also worked at DIAL, where he was involved in efforts to develop a fiber optic moisture detection system. Jeff spent the summer of 2002 at the University of Toledo where he wrote the code for a ballistic deposition model. The model was designed to study the growth of surfaces (solar cells, microprocessors, etc.) during the deposition process. In addition to his research efforts, Jeff has spent a year and a half as an undergraduate teaching assistant.
Jeff’s interest in the theater was probably inspired by his two parents, who are both MSU Department of Communications faculty members specializing in theater. Jeff has taken a number of theater classes and has acted in at least one play each year at MSU. Recently, he played Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Gilderstern Are Dead. For this he was nominated for an Irene Ryan Acting Award.
On May 15, Jeff married Erica Lynn Covin in the MSU Chapel of Memories.
FEATURED GRADUATE STUDENT
Frances DeAnna Carter from Sardis returned to her home state for graduate school after a brief career in industry. This always cheerful former high school cheerleader is probably one of a very few who tried to understand the physics of cheerleading jumps and stunts while actually performing them.
Frances attended South Panola High School and then Mississippi School for Math and Science where her interest in physics was inspired. Frances then went on to Spelman College on a full NASA/Women in Science and Engineering scholarship. She earned a BS in physics from Spelman and a BS in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech. After graduation, Frances joined the Optical Fiber Division of Corning. Her work as an International Technology Transfer Engineer gave her opportunities to apply her physics knowledge and to travel internationally.
Frances says that she has returned to school to pursue her goal of earning a Ph. D. so that she can “teach physics to students like me, students who hadn’t been introduced to science early but upon discovering it were intrigued, interested and motivated.” We are very fortunate that our graduate coordinator, Dr. David Monts, was recruiting at the National Society of Black Physicists Conference in Huntsville in 2002 when Frances attended.
Frances’ M. S. research with Dr. John Foley involves design of planar waveguide and optical fiber modules for WebTOP, a 3-D interactive Web-based, computer-graphics instructional tool that simulates/visualizes optical phenomena (http://webtop.msstate.edu/). At the Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory Frances has done experiments to verify her theoretical investigations.
Recently, Frances won a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that she will use at the University of Maryland. For more information go to
http://www.ur.msstate.edu/news/stories/2004/nsfgraduatefellowship.asp
MSU PHYSICS GRADUATES IN MEDICINE
A few alumni of this department have chosen to go into medicine after leaving MSU. Meet these distinguished alumni.
Stanley K. Burt, graduated from MSU in 1965 and stayed on campus long enough to help Glenn Bryant of Aerospace Engineering build the last turbine race car to run at Indianapolis. He then went on to the University of Mississippi Medical Center and earned a Ph. D. In pharmacology from the University of Mississippi. Although he isn’t a “real doctor” his work can have great influence on the way thousands of physicians treat cancer. He uses high speed computing in such areas as quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics to address questions related to molecular systems ranging from small molecules to proteins.
Dr. Burt did postdoctoral research at Stanford University and was later Deputy Director of the Molecular Theory Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute. He was a National Research Council Senior Fellow at NASA-Ames where he conducted research related to early origins of life. He has held positions at Abbott Labs and at Sandoz where he was Head of Computational Chemistry.
Dr. Burt joined the Structural Biology Program at the National Cancer Institute in 1992 and since 1997 has been Director of NCI’s Advanced Biomedical Computing Center. He is a Principal Investigator in the NCI’s Center for Cancer Research and a Smithsonian Science Laureate.
Richard Clatterbuck graduated from MSU Summa Cum Laude in 1987. He then attended the Johns Hopkins University Medical School where he received his Ph. D. (in neuroscience) and his M.D. in 1995. He remained at Johns Hopkins for his residencies in general surgery and neurosurgery. He has also been a Cerebrovascular and Skull Base Surgery Fellow at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.
Dr. Clatterbuck is currently Director of Cerebrovascular Research and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. He has an active clinical practice and a vigorous research program. He has won numerous awards for excellence, most recently the Gailbraith Award of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons/Congress of Neurological Surgeons Section on Cerebrovascular Surgery. Two web sites that will give you some additional information on this physicist turned physician are:
http://www.neuro.jhmi.edu/profiles/clatterbuck.html
http://www.neuro.jhmi.edu/BrainWaves/Winter2004/vasospasm.htm
Patrick Johnston was another 1987 Summa Cum Laude graduate of MSU. He entered the University of Alabama at Birmingham where he was awarded one of five national fellowships from the Life and Health Insurance Medical Research Fund. He was awarded both M. D. And Ph.D. in 1995. He went on to the Internal Medicine residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He next entered the Mayo Clinic’s combined fellowship in Hematology and Oncology. He was then offered a Mayo Foundation Scholar position in which he did basic research with Dr. W. French Anderson at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Johnston has now returned to Mayo Clinic as Senior Associate Consultant in Hematology. He has numerous clinical trials upcoming in the area of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas.
His wife, also a physician, is Assistant Director of the Mayo’s Blood and Marrow Transplant program. They are expecting their first child in July.
Edward Victor (Vic) Ross graduated Summa Cum Laude from MSU in 1982. He attended Tulane University School of Medicine. Following his internship, Dr. Ross was sent by the U. S. Navy to Sasebo, Japan as a General Medical Officer. In 1992 he completed a dermatology residency at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1994 he was the first Navy-sponsored fellow in Photomedicine and Lasers at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Captain Ross is presently Staff Physician in the Dermatology Department at the Naval Hospital in San Diego where he directs the laser section and the residency program. He was honored as the 2001 Navy Recipient of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Award for Excellence in Military Medicine.
Dr. Ross makes use of both his physics and medical knowledge as one of the leaders in the
burgeoning field of biophotonics. His special interests are laser skin resurfacing, photodynamic therapy, non-ablative skin remodeling, and a number of other laser treatments. He is author of more than 50 scientific articles and five book chapters and conducts multiple laser research protocols. As a leader in the American Society for Lasers in Surgery and Medicine he is on the board of that society and recently served as chairperson for its annual meeting.
Vic is married to the former Beth Francis who graduated from MSU in 1983. They have two daughters, Ruby (6) and Violet (3).
James E. Stone graduated Magna Cum Laude from MSU in 1988. He then attended medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) where he received several awards including the James H. Akers Memorial Award (May 1992) presented by the Senior Class of UAB School of Medicine. Dr. Stone continued at UAB through his residency in Internal Medicine. He then went on to Wake Forest University Medical Center / North Carolina Baptist Hospital where he did Fellowships in Cardiology and Electrophysiology.Dr. Stone is currently a Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiologist for Cardiology Associates of North Mississippi. He is active in clinical research and is principal investigator on a number of national trials. He and his wife Beth live in Tupelo with their three children: Jimmy (8), Ann Douglas (6), and Katherine (4).
Two recent graduates of our department are currently in medical school.
Allen Bryan (Summa Cum Laude 2000) was all of eighteen years old when he left MSU for Massachusetts with a prestigious fellowship and a goal of earning an M. D. from Harvard University and a Ph. D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is well on his way to both degrees and has found time to become an avid Red Sox fan.
Cecelia Powless (Magna Cum Laude 2001 in Physics and Microbiology) returned to her home state for medical school at the Southern Illinois University. In her third year, she is very busy with clinical rotations but she has managed to find time to give health education talks to local schools and has served as American Medical Association president for her school.
GENERAL PHYSICS
In connection with the investigation of the space shuttle crash of Feb. 1, 2003, it is likely that you have seen several newspaper articles and television news stories about Columbia Accident Investigation Board member Brigadier General Duane Deal, who took NASA to task for some of its mistakes. Unless you attended MSU during the mid seventies, you may not have recognized him as a graduate of our department. (Photo at right courtesy of USAF)
Duane Deal graduated with a B.S. in 1975 and stayed on at MSU to earn an M.S. in counseling and psychology. In 1979 he earned a second M.S., in systems management, from the University of Southern California. He has been an Air Force Research Fellow at the RAND Corp. and a National Defense Fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
Gen. Deal, an ROTC graduate of MSU, did his Undergraduate Pilot Training at Columbus Air Force Base. As a pilot, he has more than 2200 flying hours in seven aircraft types including the high-flying, ultra-fast SR-71 “Blackbird.” During a very distinguished career, he has had a number of commands. Currently, Brig. Gen. Deal is Commander, Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center in Colorado. He has numerous awards including Legion of Merit with two oak leaf clusters, Meritorious Service Medal with three oak leaf clusters, Southwest Asia Service Medal with Bronze Star, and several awards for Safety. For more details visit
http://www.af.mil/bios/bio.asp?bioID=7777
His outstanding record led to Gen. Deal’s appointment to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. His basic knowledge of physics allowed him to understand, more quickly than others, the large kinetic energy, and potential for damage, that could be carried by even a piece of foam traveling at very high speed. In significant ways, he was to the Columbia investigation what Richard Feynmann was to the earlier Challenger accident investigation. Gen. Deal says “The grounding I benefitted from through physics and its scientific method laid the foundation for nearly everything I’ve done–from flying the world’s fastest jet to presenting technical papers at university conferences to space operations to the Columbia and other accident investigations.”
Gen. Deal has a daughter graduating from Baylor and a son who will enter the Air Force Academy this summer.
BOB COOK RETIRES
Earlier this year, Dr. Robert L. Cook, retired from Mississippi State where he has been on the physics faculty since 1974. Cook began his MSU career by teaching and heading our microwave spectroscopy laboratory. Later, Cook was instrumental in the development of the MHD Energy Center which became the Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory (DIAL) in 1985. He served as Deputy Director from 1982 until 2001 when he became Head of the new Center for Advanced Energy Conversion. Dr. Cook served for several years as Graduate Coordinator for the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He has directed the work of seven Ph.D. students.
Dr. Cook earned his B.S. and M.S. at the University of Miami and his Ph. D. at Notre Dame. With the late Walter Gordy of Duke, Cook is author of Microwave Molecular Spectra, the definitive reference work in that field. He is also author of several book chapters, over 140 articles in journals and conference proceedings and numerous technical reports. He was responsible for bringing many millions of dollars of research contracts to MSU and played a key role in planning and obtaining funding for the $8M DIAL building. Dr. Cook is a member of numerous professional organizations. He has served as member and Chairman Elect of the AIAA Plasmadynamics and Lasers Technical Committee and as President of the Symposium on the Engineering Aspects of Magnetohydrodynamics (SEAM) Board of Directors
With his wife, Rosemary, Bob lives on a lovely small farm on the northern outskirts of Starkville.
CROFT AS BUSY AS EVER
Dr. Walter Lawrence Croft, who was on the MSU Faculty from 1962 to 1997 and who served as Department Head 1993 to 1996, has not used his retirement as an excuse to slow down. He remains active managing his tree farm and serving as an officer in several organizations. He recently finished a term as Chairman of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society and remains very active in the affairs of that organization. Before being Chairman, he was Program Chairman making him the person primarily responsible for organizing the annual meeting. Dr. Croft is very active in conservation organizations. He serves as past president of the local Audubon Society and president of Friends of Noxubee Refuge. He does everything from organizing meetings to bush-hogging trails. He is a frequent participant in activities at the Strawberry Plains Audubon Center at Holly Springs. He is also active in the Oktibbeha County Forest Farmers Association.
At MSU he has served as president of the Association of Retired Faculty. He still teaches an occasional physics course when he can fit it into his schedule.
Dr. Croft, his wife Elsie, two horses, several cats and a dog live on their farm at Longview six miles west of Starkville. The Crofts make frequent visits to their daughters Laura in Villa Rica, GA and Cathy in Ocean Springs. In recent years they have also traveled by auto in Alaska, southeastern Canada, and in Belgium and France where Dr. Terry Crow accompanied them as navigator.
DR. LARRY GRILLOT IS
A&S ALUMNI FELLOW
Last fall Dr. Larry Grillot (B.S. 1968) was honored as Alumni Fellow for the College of Arts and Sciences. In November Dr. Grillot was honored with a reception in Hilbun Hall and he and Alumni Fellows for other colleges were recognized at a ceremony in the Hunter Henry Center. In the photo, Grillot (right) is presented the award by Dr. Gary Myers, Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences.
Dr. Grillot, former Phillips Petroleum geophysicist and executive, was featured in our last newsletter because of his generosity in creating a scholarship for physics majors. For more information go to:
http://www.msstate.edu/dept/physics/newsletters/webletter03.htm
http://www.msubulldogs.msstate.edu/fellows/fellows.htm
http://www.ur.msstate.edu/news/stories/2003/grillot.asp
MEET THE PHYSICS STAFF
The following four very helpful people make the work of our professors and students go smoothly.
Ben Ardahl is in his 29th year as our electronics technician. He not only repairs problems but invents ways to make our equipment better. Ben, who holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Techonology from MSU, is probably the most organized person in the department. His efficiency makes it possible for him to provide electronic service to about fifteen other departments in addition to physics. No doubt, he has saved various research laboratories on campus millions of dollars in equipment costs. In 1996 he was recognized by MSU with an outstanding staff award.
Amy Massey has been one of the departmental secretaries since 1999. For her first year, physics shared her with Phi Kappa Phi honor society. Since our return to Hilbun Hall, she has had a full time position in physics. This cheerful redhead takes care of almost everything from book orders to travel arrangements to recruiting letters to course scheduling to........ In addition to taking care of her physics family, Amy finds time to work toward a degree in Information Technology Services and also to take care of her husband Steve and two children.
Rob Riehle is the newest member of the department. In January Rob took over scheduling and supervision of our teaching laboratories. Rob also issues keys and takes care of departmental inventory. In addition he serves as jack-of-all-trades around the department. He has a B.S. in physics from the University of Central Oklahoma and came to MSU after several years of graduate study at the University of Utah. Rob and his wife Katie and four children live in a campus house not far from Eckies Pond and the President’s Home.
Connie Vaughn (who showed off her granddaughter Kendall at last year’s Christmas party) is in her 21st year in the department. In her early years with us, Connie was called on to do a great deal of typing. More recently, she has become our expert on the increasingly complicated regulations and paper work of the University. Connie helps us jump through the many hoops necessary for getting positions approved and filled, for making purchases of equipment, for managing research contracts, and for paying bills.