Bruce Carney elected Chair of AURA Board

Astronomy professor Bruce Carney has been elected Chair of the Board of Directors of AURA (Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy), which manages the Hubble Space Telescope and three national ground-based observatories (NOAO, NSO, and Gemini). He was also elected Chair of the Member Representatives group that elects the Board of Directors and recommends to the board members of the management councils that oversee the observatories. At UNC, Prof. Carney also serves as Senior Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences and Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences.

Two grad students win dissertation fellowships

Graduate student Leslie Prochaska has been awarded the Linda Dykstra Science Dissertation Fellowship by the Graduate School and made a member of the Royster Society of Fellows, an award recognizing her "exceptional scholarship, leadership abilities, and capability for contributing to the Society." The Fellows meet regularly with senior faculty for interdisciplinary academic enrichment, and professional and leadership development. They also act as ambassadors for graduate education within and beyond the University. Leslie is a student of Jim Rose.

Brian Collins has been awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship by the Graduate School, based upon the quality of the research he is conducting and the progress he has made toward completion of his degree. Brian is a student of Frank Tsui.

The Department of Physics & Astronomy is very proud of these outstanding students, and congratulates them on their achievements.

Hugon Karwowski wins Johnston Teaching Excellence Award

Prof. Hugon Karwowski has received a 2008 Johnston Award for Teaching Excellence. Nominations for this award come from Johnston Scholars, recipients of UNC-Chapel Hill's premier need-based scholarships. Every year approximately 70 entering freshmen are chosen to be Johnston Scholars, based on outstanding high school records and leadership potential. The citation for Prof. Karwowski's award reads as follows:

Professor Karwowski's devotion to teaching undergraduates can best be described as "fanatical." Despite a distinguished career as a nuclear physicist, he is best known by students as an exemplary professor, consistently described as "considerate," "extremely approachable," "always available," "humorous," "bright," and even "crazy."

Questions are "expected, not encouraged" in Dr. Karwowski's courses. He teaches by helping students think through ideas, rather than simply lecturing. He eschews examples from the textbook. Instead, he develops his own clever means of illustrating physics concepts which are "memorable as well as pedagogically sound," using examples which include beavers, toys, sleds, and other scenarios rarely found in an introductory physics course.

One specific example quoted by a former student: "He challenged us regularly in class to tackle design problems that integrated all our undergraduate knowledge and applied it to creating a feasible solution. One such problem that I particularly remember was posed to us on Valentine's Day. He challenged us to design a system that could monitor the heart rate and the amount of blood drips per minute of an individual whose heart was pierced by Cupid's arrow. The problem initially seemed to have no relevance with electronics, but once our class began to think and come up with new ideas, we were able to apply our electronics knowledge to come up with an innovative solution. Several problems like these not only made the materials learnt in class digestible, but also helped me retain the information and observe how the classroom knowledge can be applied in practice."

Dr. Karwowski is extremely dedicated to helping students succeed outside of class as well, spending "hours upon hours with students in office hours and with review sessions," sending multiple e-mails per day, and offering advice on everything from grad schools to building a distortion-free speaker system. Even in his larger classes, he knows everyone's name and regularly greets students from previous semesters. According to one student, "all 50 people [in his class] would vouch for his being approachable."

He is widely known for working nights and weekends; one student sent him an e-mail Friday night, and in his prompt response, he offered an impromptu help session that Saturday evening. According to the chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department, "he never says he has something more important to do than help a student understand a physics concept...This is contagious!"

Professor Karwowski's tremendous efforts to impart his passion for physics and to ensure students learn clearly set him apart among faculty. As one interviewed student said: "He is far and away the best professor I have ever had at Carolina...Make sure he wins an award!"

Three graduate students from the nuclear group to give talks at APS Spring Meeting

Three graduate students from the nuclear physics group will give talks at the APS Spring meeting in St. Louis in April. Padraic Finnerty will talk on "Systematic study of cosmogenic activation with low background Ge spectroscopy at the Kimballton Underground Research Facility", Samantah Hammond will present her work on "Search for dipole states in 235,238U" and Chris Angell will talk on "Gamma strength function for p-process nucleosynthesis calculations".

UNC graduate Rachel Rosen wins Graduate Dean's Distinguished Dissertation Award

Rachel Rosen, who recently completed her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Chris Clemens, has received the 2008 Graduate Dean's Distinguished Dissertation Award for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Engineering. Recipients of this award, which was recently established by the UNC Graduate School, are selected for their originality, scholarly excellence, methodological sophistication and significant contribution to the discipline. In order to recognize timely completion of doctoral training, preference is given to candidates who complete their doctoral training in a timely manner (i.e., 6 years or less in most disciplines). The title of Dr. Rosen's dissertation is "A Non-radial Oscillation Model for Radio Pulsars." We congratulate her on her significant achievement.

Six physics majors inducted into Phi Beta Kappa

Six physics majors were inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa national academic honor society in March 2008. Only juniors and seniors who have at least a 3.85 grade point average are eligible for membership. Nationally less than 1% of college seniors are invited to join. The picture shows (left to right) Sheel Shah, Joshua Schwartz, Alan Liu, Jonathan Toledo, and Alex Mellnik. Not shown is Nicholas Cook, who is studying abroad at Oxford University this year. We are very proud of these outstanding young physicists!

Sean Washburn named Outstanding Referee

Professor Sean Washburn has been named an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society (APS), one of only 534 of the 42,000 active referees for the physics journals published by the APS. This is the first year of this very selective award, and the physicists chosen are truly exceptional in their contributions to the physics community by their hard work and careful attention to the peer review process. The efforts of the honorees in peer review not only keep the standards of the journals at a high level, but in many cases also help authors to improve the quality and readability of their articles-even those that are not published by APS. The basis for choosing the honorees was the quality, number and timeliness of their reports. The names of this year's honorees are listed at http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees, and will be printed in each APS journal. Prof. Washburn is to be congratulated and thanked for his outstanding service to the physics community.

Paul Frampton's research on black holes discussed in New Scientist

Graduate student Brian Collins wins award at conference

Graduate student Guang Yang wins Radiological Society prize

Guang Yang, a physics graduate student working under the supervision of Prof. Otto Zhou, has won the RSNA Trainee Research Prize from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) at its 2007 meeting. This meeting is the world's largest professional meeting on medical science and technology. It hosts more than 60,000 attendees from around the world every year. The RSNA Trainee Research Prizes are given for the best paper or poster in each subspecialty presented by a resident/physics trainee, fellow or medical student at the RSNA meeting. The Research Trainee Prize consists of $1000 and a certificate.

Guang Yang' paper, "Novel Gantry-free Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) System Using a Stationary Multibeam Field Emission X-ray Source Array Based on Carbon Nanotubes," describes an interdisciplinary study in which the authors developed a novel multibeam field emission x-ray source array based on carbon nanotubes, and built a digital breast tomosynthesis system (Argus) for breast imaging. Argus is the first stationary tomosynthesis system for clinical diagnostic imaging. Compared to its clinical counterparts, the Argus system can provide diagnostic images with similar quality, but the total imaging time is reduced by factor of 10 to 100. This research result shows great potential for clinical applications.

The research was supported by the National Cancer Institute and UNC's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The co-authors of this paper are: Guang Yang, Ramya Rajama, Guohua Cao, Shabana Sultana, David Lalush, Jianping Lu, and Otto Zhou.

Physics department alum serves as technical expert to North Korea disarmament negotiations

Kevin Veal, who received his PhD from our department in 1998 (Profs. Ludwig and Karwowski were his advisors), has worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1999. He currently serves as the leading US DOE technical expert to the Six-Party talks seeking an end to North Korea's nuclear weapons program. The six parties, which also include North Korea, China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan, have held sporadic talks over the past four years aimed at disabling the North's nuclear facilities. Last week the US-led delegation of nuclear experts conducted a site survey of North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility and engaged in technical discussions on the scope and feasibility for disablement actions there. Kevin can be seen at the left in the picture accompanying Sung Kim, the chief Korea expert for the U.S. State Department. The photo is courtesy of China's Xinhua news agency.

Three physics students receive research and funding from the Office of Undergraduate Research

Three physics majors received funding from the Office of Undergraduate Research to support their research. Two of these received travel awards to present their research results at conferences. Lauren Hartle, who is working with Prof. Richard Superfine on "Electrospun Substrates for Cell Growth," will present her work at the 2007 ACC Meeting of the Minds at UVA. Nora Tramm, a student of Prof. Paul Tiesinga working on "Interneuron Diversity" attended the Neuroscience Conference 2006 in Atlanta GA and reported on her research. Shibani Dogra, who is working with Prof. Darin Knapp in the Dept. of Psychiatry, received research support for his study of "Ethanol and Cytokines effect on brain function and behavior."

Physics department alum becomes Division Director at NASA

Jon A. Morse, who received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from our department in 1992, has been selected as director of the Astrophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, effective April 2.

Morse's career to date spans more than 15 years in the academic, private and federal arenas, including a recent 1-year assignment to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President. He was senior astrophysicist in the Laboratory for Observational Cosmology at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., arriving in 2005 from the Arizona State University where he had been an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He has extensive science, technical and program management experience, and has authored or co-authored over 60 publications and dozens of scientific and technical white papers and conference proceedings.

NASA's Astrophysics Division coordinates the space missions and related research to study the origin and evolution of planets, stars and galaxies, including such exotic phenomena as exploding supernovae, neutron stars and black holes. With its $1.5B annual budget, the Division's work increases our understanding of the nature of the universe and the fundamental laws of space, time, and energy.