From the Chair

F A L L 2 0 0 7 It’s hard to believe that private foundations for their visionary support a year has already gone by of young scientists.) More details on further fac- since I last wrote for this news- ulty and student awards can be found inside. letter. In what seems to have We welcome three new members of our become the usual pace, there Department, though none are new to UCSB. have been a number of happy Frank Brown and Joan-Emma Shea have been developments. faculty in the Department of Chemistry and We spent a great deal of time Biochemistry for several years. Their research and effort preparing for our interests spill over into physics, and so we were septennial External Review. grateful when they accepted our offer of par- You can find the details of this on page 6, but tial appointments in Physics. Chetan Nayak is the bottom line is that a committee of three dis- a Senior Researcher at Microsoft’s Station Q tinguished physics faculty from outside UCSB facility, dedicated to the study of quantum com- came away with a positive impression of what puting and housed at UCSB. Formerly on the we have been able to accomplish in the past faculty at UCLA, he has now joined our Depart- seven years, and where we are going in the ment as a faculty member. future (though, as always, challenges remain). We hope to welcome still more faculty in the Our faculty continued to set a blistering pace of near future. We are currently running searches awards and accomplishments, including induc- for new faculty in no less than five areas: experi- tion into the National Academy of Sciences for mental astrophysics, experimental biophysics, David Awschalom, bringing the number of cur- experimental condensed-matter physics, theo- From the Chair rent and emeritus faculty in our Department retical condensed-matter physics, and theoretical who are members of this august body to dou- elementary-particle physics. Success in these ble digits. Sergei Gukov (whom I wrote about searches would enable us to broaden and in this space last time as one of our new faculty strengthen our research and teaching program, in mathematical physicists) and Tommaso Treu which will be essential if we are to maintain our (a member of our small but very active group leadership in the new century. Our Department of observational astrophysics) each received the has always been one of the smallest among the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. top-ranked institutions, and so careful planning Tommaso also received the David and Lucile is needed as we go forward. Packard Fellowship, one of just 20 awarded nationwide throughout the sciences and engineering. This continues a strong tradition in our Department: Leon Balents, Jean Carlson, and Mark Srednicki Crystal Martin all received the Packard Fellow- Department Chair ship in recent years. (We are grateful to these UCSB Physics Faculty News Appointments He received his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Physics from Princeton in 1996. He was a post-doctoral Frank Brown holds a joint position fellow at UCSB’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics before with the Departments of Chemistry/ joining the faculty at UCLA, where he received an AP Sloan Biochemistry and Physics. He received Foundation fellowship and an National Science Foundation his BS in Chemistry and BA in Applied Early Career award. He joined Station Q in 2005 and the Mathematics from UC Berkeley and Physics Department in 2007. his PhD in Physical Chemistry from MIT His research interests are in the condensed matter physics of in 1998. He was a National Science strongly-correlated electronic materials, especially high-tem- Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego and a perature superconductors and the quantum Hall effect. His Yen Fellow at the University of Chicago before joining the current research focuses on the application of topological UCSB Chemistry faculty in 2001. Dr. Brown is an AP Sloan phases of electrons to quantum computation. Research Fellow and was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2005. Awards and Honors His research group’s interests lie at the interface between physical chemistry and biophysics and they use a variety of David Awschalom was elected tools spanning the traditional fields of statistical mechanics, as one of the 72 new members of hydrodynamics, elasticity theory and quantum mechanics the National Academy of Sciences, in their research efforts. in recognition of his distinguished Joan-Emma Shea also holds a joint and continuing achievements in position with the Departments of original research. Chemistry/Biochemistry and Physics. The National Academy of Sciences She received her BSc in Chemistry from is a private organization of scientists McGill University, Canada in 1992 and and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and 2 her PhD in Physical Chemistry from its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 MIT in 1997. She pursued her postdoc- by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abra- toral studies jointly in the Department ham Lincoln that calls on the Academy to act as an official of Computational Biophysics and Chemistry at the Scripps adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any Research Institute and in the Department of Physics at matter of science or technology. UCSD. After a year as an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago, Dr. Shea joined the Chemistry faculty at UCSB in 2001. Dr. Shea is the recipient of an National David Gross, director of UCSB’s Science Foundation CAREER award, an AP Sloan Fellowship Kavli Institute for Theoretical Phys- and a Packard Fellowship. ics and co-recipient of the 2004 Research in the Shea group focuses on developing and Nobel Prize in Physics, was elected applying the techniques of statistical and computational a fellow of the American Philo- physics to the study of biological problems. Current work sophical Society (APS), the oldest involves the investigation of cellular processes such as in- learned society in the country, in vivo protein folding and protein aggregation. the spring of 2007. Professor Gross was also elected as Honorary Fellow of the Chetan Nayak is a Professor in the Indian Academy of Science in Bangalore, India, and For- Physics Department as well as Senior eign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. Researcher in Microsoft Station Q, a UCSB research group working on Professor Gross also was bestowed the honor of Doctor topological quantum computing. The Philosophiae Honoris Causa at Sao Paulo University, Brazil, group combines researchers from in 2006, and at Ohio State University in 2007. math, physics and computer science. Faculty News Awards and Honors continued News Sergei Gukov and Tommaso Treu David Cannell, together with were awarded 2007 Sloan Research Professor Marzio Giglio from the Uni- Fellowships in Science and Technol- versity of Milan, were responsible for ogy. These awards are intended to The Gradflex experiment (GRAdient- enhance the careers of the very best Driven FLuctuations EXperiment), young faculty members in specified which was flown aboard the Euro- fields of science. pean Space Agency’s Foton-M3 Professor Treu was also selected as mission, after about 6 years of development. one of twenty recipients nationwide of Launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the Packard Fellowship for Science and the spacecraft carried a payload of 43 experiments in a Engineering for 2007. range of disciplines – including fluid physics, biology, crys- In the fall, an international team of sci- tal growth, radiation exposure and exobiology. The satellite entists led by Treu and UCSB Physics returned to Earth in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit. With postdoctoral fellow Phil Marshall identi- the equipment safely back on Earth, further experiments fied a tiny galaxy nearly halfway across and extensive data analysis will continue. the universe -- the smallest in size and mass known to exist at that distance. “Elementary particle physics is at a In June, Treu was awarded a UCSB Regents’ Junior Faculty crossroads,” says Joseph Incandela. Fellowship Award, for support of his project “The duty-cycle A new giant particle accelerator, the of supermassive black holes: X-raying Virgo.” Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will be In the spring, he was among the recipients of the National coming online in 2008 at the European Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) Development (CAREER) Program awards for his project in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC will “Dark Matter and Black Holes Over Cosmic Time”. open up the exploration of the properties of matter down -19 Alan Heeger, UCSB Physics profes- to distance scales of 10 meters. Many physicists believe sor and Nobel recipient for the 2000 that at this length scale new physics processes could Prize in Chemistry, was awarded the begin to manifest themselves, and that we may be on the Eni Italgas Prize on Energy and Envi- threshold of a revolution in our understanding of matter ronment for his innovative research and its interactions. on solar cells made with plastic mate- Two large international collaborations of thousands of rial: cheap, versatile and clean. The physicists each have almost completed construction of shared prize is awarded to scientists who have achieved two giant detectors to study particle collisions at the LHC. relevant results in research on energy sources and their relation with the environment. The UCSB experimental high energy physics group has been heavily involved in this program for many years. Jeff Richman, along with five other This year, Professor Incandela was elected Deputy Anal- UCSB faculty, was named a Fellow ysis Coordinator for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) of the American Association for the collaboration.

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