The Spectrometer « Physics at Oregon State University

Elaine and Ben Whiteley were honored with the College of Science Distinguished Service Award on Friday, November 18th, 2016 at a dinner and award ceremony in the Memorial Union. Mr. and Mrs. Whiteley are pictured at the awards dinner with Prof. Janet Tate. The Whiteleys are OSU alumni who graduated in 1951 and 1953 respectively, and are long-time friends of the Physics Department and the College of Science. They contribute generously to the endowment for the Yunker Lecture series, in honor of Elaine Yunker Whiteley’s father, Prof. Edwin A. Yunker, who was on the physics faculty for 43 years and was department chair from 1949 to 1966. They have also created a scholarship for students in Materials Science that bears their name. Many of our students have received the Whiteley Materials Science Fellowship and we all continue to enjoy the intellectual vibrance that the annual Yunker Lecture brings. Congratulations and thank you both for your support and friendship!

Congratulations to Dr. Scott Clark who is the 2016 recipient of the College of Science’s Young Alumni Award. Scott is co-founder and CEO of SigOpt in San Francisco, a startup company for tuning complex systems and machine learning models. He’s a 4th-generation Beaver and earned 3 B.S. degrees (in Physics, Computational Physics and Mathematics,) from Oregon State University in 2008! He did research with Prof. Rubin Landau (Physics) and Prof. Malgo Peszynska (Math) while at OSU. He earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and his M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University and then spent 2 years at Yelp developing black-box Bayesian global optimization techniques. He subsequently founded SigOpt with his business partners and has raised millions of dollars in start-up funds. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sc932)

We were delighted to host Scott in the department and the college, where he talked with current students and visited his old stomping grounds! On Friday evening, November 18th, Scott accepted his award at a banquet in the Memorial Union. He was accompanied by family members, including his wife, Dr. June Andrews, who also has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell and is a data scientist at Pinterest.

Scott said that what he liked best about OSU was the encouragement to pursue whatever he wanted and the excellent problem-solving and analytical skills he developed in our physics program! Thanks Scott, and congratulations!

Oksana Ostraverkhova has won the Milton Harris Award in Basic Research!!!

She was honored (and surprised!) at a ceremony on October 17 at the Horizon Room.

In her ten years at OSU, Oksana has built a successful program demonstrating creative and productive basic research in the study of photophysics in organic semiconductors. She has also collaborated with Prof. Sujaya Rao (entomology) to study bee color vision. This interdisciplinary collaboration has led to while new insights in the basic science field of bee color vision.

Oksana also won the Harris Graduate Teaching award this year and has supervised dozens of undergraduates and graduate students in her lab.

About the award:

This award was endowed by G. Milton Harris, a Portland native who received his bachelor’s degree in 1926 from OSU and his PhD from Yale. He was a pioneer in polymer, fiber and textile science and was founder and for many years president of Harris Research laboratories which later became part of Gillette. His distinguished career in chemistry included service with the National Bureau of Standards and five years as the chair of the American Chemical Society.

The purpose of the Harris award is to recognize exceptional achievement in basic research by honoring an outstanding faculty member in the College of Science. Special consideration is given to recent research that was carried out at OSU and that will have a significant impact on its field. The recipient of the Harris award not only receives a monetary award, but also is given the opportunity to present a public lecture that highlights his or her research.

Oksana Ostraverkhova's review article: Organic Optoelectronic Materials: Mechanisms and Applications is now published in Chemical Reviews 

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chemrev.6b00127

Congratulations to Oksana!

Andrew Stickel wearing a Swedish Doctoral hat.

On University day, our own Andrew Stickel will receive the University wide Herbert F. Frolander Award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant!

University Day is Monday, September 19th and there will be an awards ceremony at the LaSells Center.

Andrew recently defended his dissertation “Terahertz Induced Non-linear Electron Dynamics in Nanoantenna Coated Semiconductors at the Sub-picosecond Timescale”. Please congratulate him on both of these accomplishments!

Prof. Bo Sun’s work on intercellular communication has appeared in PNAS and is featured in the College of Science’s Impact magazine. Click on the title below to see the full article.

Oregon State Physicist discovers a new process of intercellular communication

We just heard that Corinne Manogue is the APS Woman of the Month

August 2016 Woman of the Month: Corinne Manogue, Oregon State University

Corinne Manogue obtained her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. She studied black holes with Denis Sciama and field theory in curved spacetime with Bryce DeWitt, and joined the physics faculty at Oregon State University (OSU) in 1988 after postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the University of Durham in England, and as an Indo-American Fellow of the Comparative and International Education Society. Professor Manogue played a key role in the early work relating division algebras and supersymmetry. In her infinite free time, she continues explore how to use the octonions to describe the symmetries of high-energy particle physics.

Since its inception in 1996, Professor Manogue has been the driving force behind the Paradigms in Physics project at OSU, a complete redesign of the physics major. This redesign involved both a rearrangement of the content to better reflect the way professional physicists think about the field and also the use of a number of interactive pedagogies that place responsibility for learning more firmly in the hands of students.

Her curriculum development/research interests are in helping students make the difficult transition from lower-division to upper-division physics. Professor Manogue is the recipient of a number of teaching awards, among them the 2008 David Halliday and Robert Resnick Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the American Association of Physics Teachers. She was voted a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2005 and named a Fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2014. After more than three decades in her career, she continues to be amazed to find herself a physicist.

Mateus Carneiro in the neutrino lab worrying about meson exchange currents.

Please welcome Mateus Fernandes Carneiro who has joined the Schellman neutrino group as a postdoctoral scholar. Mateus just completed his dissertation “Measurement of Muon Neutrino Quasi-Elastic Scattering on a Hydrocarbon Target at Enu of 6 GeV” at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas using the MINERvA neutrino detector at Fermilab. He will be working with Heidi Schellman and Amit Bashyal on studies of neutrino cross sections. Mateus will be working from Fermilab most of the time but will visit us frequently.

Janet Tate setting up her superconducting demonstration.

The Spectrometer has been operating from the Oort cloud for the past few months, hence some delays in the signal reaching you.

A big event Spring quarter was Janet Tate’s masterful Gilfillan Lecture, “It’s a Materials World” on May 9th.

If you ever wanted to know what goes on in her lab, this is the lecture to watch.

You can find photos at:

Scenes from 2016 Gilfillan Memorial Lecture

and a video, featuring some great superconducting material at:

Graduate student Atul Chhotray sets up telescopes for visitors on the roof of Weniger Hall.

On the moderately cold, crisp night of June 28th the Department of Physics hosted OSU’s First Astronomy Open House. The event, set up by graduate students Tyler Parsotan and Atul Chhotray, gave over a hundred children and adults alike an opportunity to experience physics and astronomy.

Attendees were able to experience what happens to a star when it spins up, how astronomers identify what a star is made of, how telescopes work, and how the solar system is scaled. Additionally, people were able to see, through the Department’s telescopes, into the dark night sky, planets and their companions such as Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its rings, and Mars. Tom Carrico, a renowned astrophotographer, showed attendees deep sky objects such as the great American Nebula using long exposures with his tracking telescope camera. Along with the wonder and awe that one gets from seeing these beautiful celestial objects, attendees also got a free NASA Tourism Poster for them to remember the event.

There were beautiful 3D posters of the surface of Mars that encompassed a near real experience of being on the surface of mars, and the other “2D” posters decorated the walls of Weniger Hall in a mosaic of celestial beauty.

With the success of this first event of its kind at OSU, harboring at least 120 attendees, Tyler and Atul will be having another event, so stay tuned to when the next Astronomy Open House is!

The Spectrometer

Physics at Oregon State University

Elaine and Ben Whiteley honored with CoS Distinguished Service Award

Scott Clark (B.S. 2008) wins CoS Young Alumni Award

Oksana Ostraverkhova wins the Milton Harris Award in Basic Research

Oksana Ostraverkhova publishes in Chemical Reviews

Andrew Stickel (PhD) will receive the 2016 Frolander Award

Bo Sun’s work on intercellular communication is making news!

Corinne Manogue names APS Woman of the Month

New Postdoc – Mateus Carneiro

Photos and Video from Prof. Janet Tate’s Gilfillan Lecture

Astronomy Open House draws hundreds to Weniger

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