Recent News
Greetings From Department Chair Bob Echols 2015
Dec 13, 2015
Hello friends of the Physics Department and welcome again to our annual newsletter. I started as department chair on September 1 when Matt Moelter passed me the baton.
We have a busy fall quarter with two tenure-track searches running. A new catalog cycle and program review are also underway, prompting us to take a close look at everything we do with an eye toward improvement.
The foundation of our program of course is our dedicated faculty and staff. We are grateful for two new staff members — Jenny Cruz and Kevin Thompson. Jenny, our new administrative assistant, is taking over for Kathy Simon who is now in the Biological Sciences Department. Jenny did a fabulous job managing all the department needs at the start of fall quarter when Shirley was on personal leave. Jenny and I are both grateful Shirley is back.
Kevin, a Cal Poly physics alumnus, is thrilled to return “home.” As an instructional support technician, Kevin is taking over many of Steve Soderberg’s tasks, and Steve is focusing on the upper division labs.
With the addition of a new tenure track hire, Stephanie Wissel, and three new lecturers, Adeel Ajaib, Robert Duffin and Fariha Nasir, we now have 43 full-time faculty.
A record number of 15 incoming transfer students and a large freshman class of 66 brings our total majors to nearly 220. The American Physical Society recently informed us that we are second in the country for number of graduates from a solely undergraduate program, granting an average of 30 degrees a year from 2012-14.
As chair, I have the opportunity to meet with prospective students and their parents. On a recent visit, a parent asked, what makes Cal Poly physics special? I responded that we have supportive faculty and staff who are dedicated to providing an excellent undergraduate education with faculty teaching all lectures and labs to a relatively small number of students.
I emphasized that outside the classroom, physics majors have the opportunity to engage personally with our faculty in world-class research. This past summer, we had 27 students working with 16 faculty members in our College Based Fee research program. Many other students conducted research with faculty mentors thanks to research grants. I hope you can take a moment to read about some of these exciting projects. We look forward to even more undergraduate research opportunities in the future.
We couldn’t provide as many high quality research experiences as we do without your help. Thank you. You can see the kind of impact your donations have in the article on Professor Emeritus Randy Knight’s gift.
If you haven’t been by to see our beautiful new building, do visit soon. We have another building, by the same architects, in the planning phase with a hopeful completion date of 2020. If you are interested in the new building, do let me know.
Please keep in touch,
Dr. Bob (Echols)
rechols@calpoly.edu
Newsletter 2015
Dec 10, 2015
Featured Articles
Cal Poly and UC Berkeley Receive $6 Million Grant to Enhance Collaboration in Data Science
Cal Poly and UC Berkeley received a $6 million grant from a three-foundation partnership to further develop an open-source software that makes data science more collaborative and interactive. The software package, called Project Jupyter, already influences the way work is done in industries ranging from genetics to finance. Think Google Drive with a brain.
Donation from Professor Emeritus Supports Undergraduate Research
Randy Knight, physics professor emeritus, has donated $25,000 to the Physics Department to support undergraduate research for five years. The first $5,000 will fund two projects.
Department Welcomes New Faculty Member
Stephanie Wissel joined the physics faculty this year following a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA. Her research centers on finding neutrinos, cosmic rays and other energetic particles coming from the most energetic objects in the universe.
More News
Greetings From Department Chair Bob Echols
Hello friends of the Physics Department and welcome again to our annual newsletter. I started as department chair on September 1 when Matt Moelter passed me the baton. We have a busy fall quarter underway.
Thank You to Our Generous Donors
We are grateful for the continued support of our generous donors. Financial contributions from alumni, parents and friends play a critical role in providing students with a Learn by Doing education. Thank you.
Cal Poly Students Take Top Honors at CSU Research Competition
Five Cal Poly students took top honors at the recent 2015 California State University (CSU) Research Competition held May 1-2 at CSU San Bernardino. Shaker Von Price Funkhouser, an undergraduate physics student from La Quinta, Calif., won a first-place award for his work in proving an energy principle for charged black holes.
Technician Hilsinger Retires, Remembered for Excellence and Enthusiasm
Technician Jim Hilsinger retired from the Physics Department in 2015 after nearly 30 years of dedicated service and is dearly missed by all. Hilsinger always ensured that advanced labs ran smoothly.
NSF Grant Will Send Students to CERN
Physics Professor Themis Mastoridis has received a three-year, $225,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that will send student researchers to the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Read more about Mastoridis's grant ›
Student-Faculty Research Flourishes in Department
Undergraduate research is thriving in the Physics Department. Current students Learn by Doing research with faculty mentors on projects as massive as black holes and as tiny as nanometer-thick liquid crystal films.
Read more about student-faculty research ›
Cal Poly Physics Department No. 2 in Nation for Graduates
Cal Poly’s Physics Department was ranked No. 2 in the nation for granting physics degrees in solely undergraduate programs, according to a recent report.
Cal Poly and UC Berkeley Receive $6 Million Grant to Enhance Collaboration in Data Science
Jul 7, 2015
July 7, 2015
Fernando Perez and Brian Granger discuss the architecture of Project Jupyter, a collaborative computing
software, as its scope expands to work with data science applications in over 40 programming languages.
SAN LUIS OBISPO — Cal Poly and UC Berkeley received a $6 million grant from a three-foundation partnership to further develop an open-source software that already influences the way work is done in industries ranging from genetics to finance. The software package, called Project Jupyter, makes data science more collaborative and interactive. Think Google Drive with a brain.
The new funding comes from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Fernando Perez of University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Brian Granger of Cal Poly will lead the effort. Project Jupyter is the evolution of Perez and Granger’s work developing the IPython Notebook, a popular user interface for interactive computing across multiple programming languages.
“More than a million people are currently using Jupyter for everything from analyzing massive gene sequencing datasets, to processing images from the Hubble Space Telescope and developing models of financial markets,” Granger said.
The central tool the project provides is the Jupyter Notebook, a web-based platform that allows users to integrate code, plots, text, data, even video in one document and then share that document interactively with others.
“Project Jupyter serves not only the academic and scientific communities, but also a much broader constituency of data scientists in research, education, industry and journalism,” said Perez. “Given the importance of computing across modern society, we see uses of our tools that range from high school education in programming to the nation’s supercomputing facilities and the leaders of the tech industry.”
For example, teachers, can prepare a lecture using the Notebook and then turn it into a web-based slide show presentation in which they can write code and see the results of that code in real time. Students can then use Jupyter for homework and reports.
With funding over the next three years, the capabilities of the Jupyter Notebook will be enhanced to allow technical and non-technical users easier access to collaborative computing. New developments will include the ability to reuse content, especially visualizations such as charts and graphs, in a wide range of settings from websites and blogs to mobile apps and interactive dashboards.
“We are excited by the potential of Project Jupyter to reach even wider audiences and to contribute to increased cross-disciplinary collaboration in the sciences,” said Betsy Fader, director of the Helmsley Charitable Trust’s Biomedical Research Infrastructure Program.
“Jupyter Notebook is a tool that embodies the current shift in science towards more reproducible research, which in turn enables more effective science,” said Chris Mentzel, program director at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “It will enable data exploration, visualization, and analysis in a way that encourages sounds science and speeds progress.”
Link
For more information on Project Jupyter, visit the project's website.
Cal Poly Students Take Top Honors at CSU Research Competition
May 27, 2015
Physics student Shaker Von Price Funkhouser (left) won first place in the undergraduate physical and mathematical sciences division at the CSU Student Research Competition. Funkhouser is pictured here with Jeffrey Thompson, dean of graduate studies at CSU San Bernardino, and Sheela Lewis, a student at CSU Bakersfield.
SAN LUIS OBISPO — Five Cal Poly students took top honors at the recent 2015 California State University (CSU) Research Competition held May 1-2 at CSU San Bernardino.
Shaker Von Price Funkhouser, an undergraduate physics student from La Quinta, Calif., won a first-place award for his work in proving an energy principle for charged black holes.
Biomedical engineering graduate student Kevin Campbell from South Lake Tahoe, Calif., and senior Kristina Bishard of Arvada, Colo., won first for their research in the category of health, nutrition and clinical sciences. Their project focused on the use of a dairy protein to protect against UV-induced damage in human skin cells.
Mikaela Vournas, an undergraduate anthropology and geography student in from Westlake Village, Calif., won first for her research on the association between urbanization and dietary changes among indigenous Fijians.
Mathew Thomson, a graduate economics student from Hatfield, England, earned a second-place award for his work on the impact of asset selloffs by the Federal Reserve Bank on short-term interest rates.
Participants in the statewide competition submitted a five-page research report and gave an oral presentation before a panel of judges. They were judged on clarity of purpose, appropriateness of methodology, interpretation of results, clear articulation of the research, and their ability to field questions from the jury and audience.
More than 245 students from 22 CSU campuses participated this year. Cal Poly’s 13 student-scholars presented their work on 10 different projects. Overall, Cal Poly tied for the most first-place awards and was second in most awards overall.
“It is a testament to the quality of research opportunities and mentorship available to our students that we compete so well in this competition each year,” said Dean Wendt, Cal Poly dean of research. “Our faculty impact student learning through their research programs, and it is a prime example of Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing approach and our academic excellence.”
NSF Grant Will Send Cal Poly Students to International Research Collaboration
Nov 26, 2014
November 26, 2014
Professor Tom Gutierrez has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support undergraduate research. The $186,000 grant allows several students to participate in the international research collaboration called the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy.
The CUORE experiment is designed to search for a certain type of nuclear decay — particles breaking off from an atom's nucleus — that would shed light on many of the basic laws of physics, including why the universe is made mostly of matter instead of antimatter.
Gutierrez's students have been helping to build and maintain the experiment for seven years. Last summer, two students had the opportunity to be in Italy when the COURE collaboration set a record for the known universe: scientists cooled a block of copper to minus 273.144 °C, the coldest temperature of a large object literally anywhere.
The students will join an international team of more than 100 physicists from institutions in China, Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland and the U.S. that designs and maintains the experiment.
"The students get to interact with an international group of scientists and work with some of the top people in the field," said Gutierrez. "They're involved with cutting-edge science, and they also get to see the nitty-gritty details."
This is the third NSF grant Gutierrez has received for this work. A total of 13 students have traveled to Italy, usually for five to six weeks, and two have helped support the experiment by doing work at UC Berkeley. The current grant will fund two students' travel and living expenses each summer for the next three years.
Undergraduate research is part of Cal Poly's Learn by Doing approach, which prepares students for this kind of work. "People were asking for our students by name because they were able to bring the skills they developed at Cal Poly to a real research environment," said Gutierrez.
Contact: Tom Gutierrez
805-756-2455; tdgutier@calpoly.edu
Liquid Crystal Lab Research
Feb 11, 2013
Crosby Sperling, Lani Fuller, Zach Sailer and
Josh Fankhauser assembled in the Liquid Crystal Lab.
During the summers of 2011 and 2012, nine physics and chemistry students researched the properties of liquid crystals, famous for their use in liquid crystal displays (LCDs) found in nearly all portable electronic devices with screens. A liquid crystal is a phase of matter that is fluid but has a more complex structure.
Students seek to understand the formation and structure of these phases by modeling their behavior using both analytic theory and a statistical algorithm. They also measure electrical and optical properties as the temperature and applied electric fields change. The sensitivity of liquid crystals to light and electricity are the basis for applications like LCDs.
Students created liquid crystal cells for investigation, carried out experimental measurements, analyzed data and wrote computer code for simulations. Work from their efforts was published in the peer-reviewed research journal Liquid Crystals and presented in multiple venues including a Physics Department colloquium in 2011, the College of Science and Mathematics Student Research Conference in 2012, and the 2012 meeting of the California-Nevada section of the American Physical Society hosted at Cal Poly in fall 2012.
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