Greetings from Department Chair Bob Echols 2016-17

Hello friends of the Physics Department and welcome again to our annual newsletter. I hope everyone is doing well.

Our educational mission would not be possible without our dedicated staff and faculty. We are grateful to have three new tenure-track faculty members joining us this year: Matt Beekman, Louise Edwards and Stamatis Vokos. In addition, we are pleased to have seven new full-time lecturers: Marwa Abdalmoneam, Andrew Clough, Christopher Culbreath, Nikolaus Glazar, Lei Lu, Alfredo Sanchez and Daniel White. You may recognize two of these names — Christopher and Nik are Cal Poly physics graduates — welcome back! These new additions bring our total full-time faculty count to 47.

As I have said before, many aspects of the Cal Poly Physics Department make us special, but undergraduate research certainly stands out. I hope you will enjoy reading about some of our student research experiences in this newsletter. During the past summer we had 32 students working with 13 faculty members funded by the Frost/CBF undergraduate research program. Many other students conducted research with faculty thanks to funding from research grants.

If you haven’t been by to see our beautiful new building, please visit soon. I had the pleasure of giving Scot Shields (Physics and Mathematics, ‘03) and his family a tour recently. Scot was blown away by h-bar’s private balcony on the sixth floor.

Another building by the same architects is in the planning phase, thanks to a generous donation from Bill Frost (Biochemistry, ’72) and his wife Linda. It will fill the need for dedicated undergraduate research space and is scheduled to open in 2020.

A big thank you to all of our department donors as well. Your contributions help us continue to provide a truly Learn by Doing education to today’s physics students.

Please keep in touch,

Dr. Bob (Echols)
rechols@calpoly.edu