A Message From The Chair

From the Stanford Physics Department Annual Newsletter 2024/25

Dear Friend of the Physics Department,

A new academic year is beginning, and I hope that this newsletter will provide some connection with our department. Following our “one year tradition” you will find two writeups briefly describing the science that gets our two new colleagues Alfred Zong and Jeongwan Haah out of bed in the morning. Alfred is a condensed matter experimentalist who uses ultra-fast lasers to study non-equilibrium phenomena in solid materials. He was an undergraduate in our department so some of you may remember him! His lab will be in the Varian basement (as usual, the building is really full). Jeongwan is a theorist working at the interface between quantum information and condensed matter physics. We managed to snatch him from Microsoft Quantum in Seattle. You will also find an article describing the research of Ben Feldman, who is not exactly new and, in fact, last year wrote about the summer undergraduate research program.

This year, we are running two new searches in astrophysics and theoretical physics. We are also continuing to re-staff and expand our education staff team with Paul Bergeron (Lecturer), and Lauren Dana (Physics Education Lab Manager). They are joining Chas Blakemore, Julien Devin, and Felicia Tam, teaching introductory physics and better organizing teaching labs. This opens up more opportunities to cover more advanced courses at undergraduate and graduate levels.

A few colleagues have gone emeriti in the last year: Blas Cabrera, whose labs are being taken over by Alfred, Sarah Church, who has guided education at Stanford in the last several years, including during the complex period of the pandemic, and Andrei Linde, who is eager to have more time for his research. Still on the academic side, also retiring is Chaya Nanavati who has been central to the restructuring of undergraduate education in physics and has trained generations of TAs. On the administrative staff side, Violet Catindig and Ping Feng retired. Scott Barton will also be retiring this year.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Stanford student observatory which, in fact, has been recently upgraded with a new telescope. You will find below a piece describing the history of the observatory. Still on the historical and commemorative end of things, you will find articles about Prof. Peter Sturrock, who passed away at age 100 this past August and Dr. Tom Neff, who passed away in the spring. Peter had an illustrious career as a plasma physicist and astrophysicist and, most remarkably, kept working and publishing past his 100th birthday. Tom was a SLAC graduate student in the 70’s and had a very effective career in nuclear nonproliferation.

I invite you to visit us, meet many colleagues leading the respective fields of physics and explore the many new exciting initiatives in the areas of research and instruction.

-- Giorgio Gratta, Department Chair