Student Achievements 2009-10

Congratulations to Our Graduates for 2010

Our largest class ever!

  • Terry McAfee
  • Hamada Masaki
  • Preston Countryman
  • Jason Belveal
  • Rei Ohno
  • Kris Kilpatrick
  • Alan Hans
  • Don Ashby
  • Chad Gillis

Arloe Anania-Murray Scholarship Recipients 10-11

  • Alex Wallace

Michael McGie Service Award Recipient 10-11

  • Adam Archibald

Summer Internships 2010

  • Justin Baran, Nick Westrum, Carey Scott, Patrick McDougall, Isaac Aguilar, Dana Bayliss, and Rebecca Rolapp had summer internships at the University of California, Davis working with Dr. Mani Tripathi.
  • Alex Skeffington spent summer on a research project building an optical system using a semiconductor laser supervised by Dr. Petrova-Mayor.
  • Chris Hasek and Alex Skeffington are working on the NSF lidar project this summer with Dr. Shane Mayor.

Other Students Achievements of Note

  • Preston Countryman was the Student Reflections Speaker at graduation.
  • Carey Scott was awarded an NSF Noyce Scholarship.
  • Adam Archibald earned the Rawlins Merit Award and scholarship.


Faculty Achievements 2009-10

Dr. Anna Petrova-Mayor attended the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics; Quantum Electronics Laser Science (CLEO/QELS) as part of her efforts to improve the upper division labs in Optics and Lasers. The courses have been enriched with new experiments highlighting the use of the state-of-the-art methods and procedures. Emphasis has been given to using techniques that are standard in professional labs and industry. Dr. Petrova-Mayor traveled to her native country of Bulgaria this summer and gave an invited talk at Sofia University's Institute for Quantum Electronics on her Ph.D. research. She also visited the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and attended the 25th International Laser Radar Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Dr. Leslie Atkins is the co-PI on the NSF Grant, "Building a Life Science Curriculum for Elementary Teachers." In addition, she contributed to two conferences: "No Question Left Behind: Bringing Guided-Inquiry Curricula into Science and Mathematics Classrooms," at University of Maine in June 2009 and "Justifying scientific claims: Meta-rules of argument. Foundations and Frontiers in Physics Education Research.", a plenary talk at the The Foundations and Frontiers of Physics Education Research Conference in June 2009.

Dr. Xueli Zou has developed and begun testing CAMP - Cognitive Apprenticeship in Modern Physics. This is a resource-rich, inquiry-based, metacognition-driven learning system whose goal is to develop the expert "habits of mind" that are the hallmark of successful physics researchers. She continues to develop and publish inquiry-based physics videos for Introductory Electricity and Magnetism.

Dr. Eric Ayars and Greg W. Lowe published "Measuring the flight speed of fire bombers from photos: an in-class exercise in introductory kinematics" in The Physics Teacher. He presented an invited talk "Using XBee for wireless data collection" and a workshop "Falsification Labs" at the American Association of Physics Teachers national meeting in Ann Arbor. In addition, Ayars presented a poster, "Using Arduino microcontrollers as inexpensive dataloggers" at the AAPT winter meeting in Washington DC.

Dr. David Kagan continues to serve on the Editorial Board of The Physics Teacher in which he published four articles this year: "What is the best launch angle to hit a home run?", "Happy Balls, Unhappy Balls, and Newton's Cradle", "Radio-Active Learning: Visual Representation of Radioactive Decay Using Dice" with Lynda Klein, and "The Anatomy of a Pitch: Doing Physics with PITCHf/x Data." His web site "You Can Understand the Physics of Baseball" was cited in the Web Sights column of The Physics Teacher. He also presented "Using PITCHf/x to Teach Physics" at the 2nd Annual PITCHf/x Summit at the Westin Hotel and AT&T Park in San Francisco.

Dr. Shane Mayor has earned a $554,000 NSF grant to study "Horizontal Vector Wind Field Measurement with Eye-safe Elastic Lidar." In addition, he has presented invited talks at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics in San Jose, the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, Sandia National Laboratory, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. His paper, "Observations of atmospheric structure and dynamics in the Owens Valley of California with a ground-based, eye-safe, scanning aerosol lidar," appeared in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climate.

Dr. Chris Gaffney Delivered a series of four evening seminars on the exploration of space/time and dynamics near a Black Hole. They were very well attended. Mike Saalmi (student), Jamie Wenham (student), Chris Gaffney, Randy Miller and Rick Giberson presented their work "Decalcification of Cortical Bone in the Presence of Microwaves: An Example of a Diffusion Limited Chemical Reaction" at the College of Natural Science Poster Session.