Spring Research Symposium - Update 4.9.9

Yesterday was the department's Spring Undergraduate Symposium. Thirteen Students that are engaged in research with our faculty presented their research. A good time was had by all.

Pictures are linked to a page on the department web site

It's been a busy recruiting year here in Physics and Astronomy!

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Anca Constantin has agreed to join our department in July this year.

Anca earned her B. S. degree from the University of Bucharest, Romania in 1995 and her Ph. D. from Ohio University in 2004. Since then she has held a postdoctoral position at Drexel University and a fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. Her research studies the accretion processes in the centers of galaxies. This includes the exploration of black holes at the center of galaxies and the so-called Active Galactic Nuclei. This is an exciting field of research and good complement to existing research in our department. She has been well funded by NASA and the NSF.

We are looking forward to Anca being part of our department and bringing her exciting research program to our students.

The addition of Anca brings us to a total 16 tenured/tenure-track faculty and a total of 21 full-time faculty. We're growing our department and our research opportunities for our students.

Welcome Anca!

New Faculty Member: Giovanna Scarel

We are excited to announce that in July, Giovanna Scarel will join our department. 

Giovanna earned her Laurea in 1994 from the University of Treste, Italy. She earned her Ph.D. in materials engineering from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee in 2001 using infrared spectroscopy to study TiO2 films. From 2001-2007 she was a postdoc and research associate at the CNR-INFM-MDM National Laboratory in Milano, Italy. She comes to us from a postdoc position at North Carolina State University.

Her research is focused on the study of the thin films produced using atomic layer deposition techniques using IR spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and ellipsometry. Of particular interest is the effect that sample geometry has on the optical properties at infrared wavelengths.

Giovanna has published 64 refereed papers and book chapters and been a Co-PI on 8 funded proposals (on 3 of these she took the lead). 

We are delighted to have such an accomplished and capable scientist join our department. We anticipate many exciting new opportunities for our students and new collaborations and directions for the materials science group.

Welcome Giovanna! 

Wells Planetarium featured in The Breeze.

Fooling Around With High Speed Video
One of the tools that is used for research in the Physics and Astronomy department is a high speed video camera. Just in the process of learning how to use this camera, I took the following videos of a seltzer tablet being dropped into a beaker of water. In the first one, the camera is focused on the water in the beaker. Since the index of refraction of water is 1.33, this means that objects in the water will be slightly out of focus, so when the tablet falls in it get a bit blurry. However, it is still interesting to watch the splash in the water itself and how an air bubble "bounces" from the bottom of the beaker about half way through the video.


In the second take, I focused on an object inside the water so that the tablet would be in focus after it fell in. You can see that it is clearer now. It is interesting to note that the fizzing of the gas being liberated from the tablet doesn't start instantaneously, but seems to be delayed slightly even to the point that the large wave motion of the top of the water has died away by the time it really fizzes strongly.

Student Presentations at National Meetings

This spring our students are once again traveling to national conferences and meetings to present research done with our faculty.

A popular venue for undergraduates is the annual meeting of the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research - NCUR. This year it is held in LaCrosse, WI, April 16-18. This year there are four students making presentations:

Ralph Herman "Shear stresses in a water/sand system partially fluidized by low-intensity vertical vibration."

Ryan Burke "Analyzing gas chromatography data using ROOT"

Patrick Hansen "Gas Chromatography"

Patrick McCauley and Daniel Simonson "Stellar Ages of the Debris Sample"
(Patrick is presenting)

In addition, Bruno Caputo is attending the APS March meeting March 16-20 in Pittsburgh, PA. He is presenting a paper titled "The Promotion of Au Adhesion on Polymer Surfaces Using Polyhedral Oligomeric Silsequioxane." His co-authors include Jonathan Wyrick and Ethan Rosenthal, two other JMU physics students.

Thus, altogether, there are eight physics students who are authors or co-authors on papers and posters at national meeting this spring.

If you are interested in visiting our department, here's where we are:

View Larger Map

The Spring Symposium, 2009

Each spring, we host a physics and astronomy

 symposium at which our students present their research. Here is Laurence Lewis presenting his research on big bang nucleosynthesis.

The symposium this year is March 28th (this is a Saturday). This is a couple weeks before the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research has its annual meeting in LaCrosse, Wisconsin (April 16-18). This year we have several students (Patrick Hansen and Ryan Burke among them) presenting their work at this national meeting. This timing for our department symposium gives our students a chance to practice in front of a friendly audience before going out to the 'real world.'

Everyone is invited to join us at the symposium this year. We will have a guest speaker (TBA) and refreshments. It promises to be a good time for all us physics and astronomy geeks.

Bring your thinking cap and come join the fun.

Welcome to the JMU Physics & Astronomy blog. We plan on using this site to let you know about some of the goings on around the JMU Department of Physics and Astronomy. This may include pictures from events, news from the research labs, or profiles of our alumni. Please let us know if you have any content that you think the world needs to see about us and if appropriate, we'll post it here.