Department News, Spring 2019

The renovation of historic Corcoran Hall was completed and the department moved back to its permanent home in January 2018. The renovated building features open floor design with abundant places for conversations and student study, seminar rooms, bright classrooms, well-lit hallways and a beautiful stairway. The building also features advanced lab space (be sure to read about the Innovations Lab!), SCALE-UP classrooms and a well-equipped eat-in kitchen! The latter is a favorite place to meet over lunch for both faculty and students. 

Those who are interested in history, will enjoy a brief travel to the past to learn about William Wilson Corcoran, the 1924 construction of Corcoran Hall, the new renovations and historic photos and documents related to the building.

William Wilson Corcoran joined the GW Board of Trustees the same year he founded the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1869. He became president of the GW Board of Trustees in 1872 and served until his death in 1888.

His partnership with Columbian University (GW) President James Clarke Welling, who was concurrently president of Columbian University and the Corcoran Gallery of Art between 1877 and 1894, laid the foundation for GW’s science and engineering programs. 

In 1874, Welling and Corcoran laid out “The Plan for Columbian University” at a lavish dinner attended by President Ulysses S. Grant. Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry, a member of the Columbian board of trustees beginning in 1862, spoke for “Science.” The dinner was held six months before the opening of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. 

Two new schools would be added: a scientific school funded by Corcoran and named after him, and a “Polytechnic School.” 

“To these would be added, as the crowning adornment of the university, a School of the Fine Arts, embracing architecture, sculpture, and painting. The resources of the Corcoran Gallery of Art would be available for use in the same way government establishments would be utilized in scientific instruction.”
—Columbian President James Clarke Welling

When Corcoran died, Welling gave the following statement:

“It is not too much to say that the Columbian University in its present reconstitution, in its new habitation, and in the enlarged scope of its operations is essentially his creation. He gave to us our Medical Building and the ground on which its extension has just been erected; he laid the foundation of the only permanent endowment which the university has ever had, for in 1873 the University not only had no endowment but was $30,000 in debt and had spent in current operation every dollar of the invested funds; he gave to us $30,000 for the erection of the beautiful building in which we are today assembled, and only two years ago at the annual meeting of that date, he added the munificent gift of $25,000 to our permanent endowment and presented a costly work of art for the adornment of the general hall of the Preparatory School.”

It was President Welling who led the planning for the Corcoran Flagg Building, which is now part of GW, and its School of Art. And it was Welling who spoke at the laying of the cornerstone of the Flagg Building six years after Corcoran’s death:

“Happy is it for the repute of our national capital, happy is it for the glory of art in the eyes of the nation, happy is it, let us hope, for the progress of art in the near and splendid future dawning upon our land, that the beneficence of William W. Corcoran has assured to us and to our fellow citizens that the tradition of the fine arts shall for all time to come be here kept alive in a marble palace, which will bear on its very front the proclamation of its mission. We have taken care that the new temple which we are here to erect shall bear over its very threshold the same inscription which was selected by our founder: “Dedicated to Art.”

GW subsequently had financial difficulties and moved to Foggy Bottom in 1912. Once finances allowed, GW built its first new building and named it Corcoran Hall. 

It is safe to say that Corcoran would be very pleased that GW has adopted the Corcoran and renovated Corcoran Hall to preserve his legacy 130 years after his death.

On May 19, the Department of Physics celebrated seven graduates in the class of 2018: Arthur Cronin, Sophia Donovan, Samantha Lumpkin, Tyler Samuels, Obinna Ome Irondi, George Sangiolo and Kara Zielinski.

The accomplishments of these excellent students were highlighted in a department party in which many family members, other students and faculty members participated. Everybody enjoyed some light snacks and drinks, and many very proud parents, grandparents, family and friends, heard Professors Briscoe and Van der Horst praise the graduates for their achievements.

They also presented departmental awards to several undergraduate and graduate students:

    •    Gus W. Weiss Prize for Outstanding Student in Physics: Kara Zielinski
    •    Berman Prize for Excellence in Experimental Physics: Jack Hirschman
    •    Parke Prize for Excellence in Theoretical Physics: Daniel Sadasivan
    •    Craig Futterman Prize for Best Graduate Student in Biophysics: Yan Kai
    •    Peverley Prize for the Best Poster Presentation by a Undergraduate Student: Sophia Donovan
    •    Chair's Prize for the Best Poster Presentation by a Graduate Student: Ben Kopchick
    •    Bennhold Family Award for Best Teaching on the Part of a Graduate Student: Michael Moss

At the end of the award presentation, all the graduating students received two gifts that will remind them of their time at GW for decades to come, one of which the traditional GW Department of Physics mug. After donning the robes, the faculty and students participating in the Columbian College celebration had a photo shoot on the steps of Corcoran Hall.

The department is very proud of this graduating class. Congratulations to the graduating students, and we wish them every success in the future!

Ten PhD students successfully defended their dissertations in 2018. The topics of their PhD theses encompass high-energy astrophysics and astronomy, experimental and theoretical nuclear physics, biophysics and condensed matter. Congratulations to students and their advisors!

Here are examples of job placements for students who graduated from GW with a PhD in physics in 2018-2019:

• Dr. Jeremy Hare is now a postdoc in the Space Science Laboratory at UC Berkeley continuing his research in high-energy astrophysics of compact objects studying accreting binaries using the NuSTAR space telescope.
• Dr. Noel Klingler is now a postdoc in the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory team at the Pennsylvania State University and working in the exciting new area of following up LIGO gravitational wave detection events and looking for their electromagnetic counterparts.
• Dr. Oleksandr Koshchii is now a postdoc doing research in theoretical nuclear physics in the Institute of Theoretical High Energy Physics at Mainz University, Germany. 
• Dr. Oksana Chubenko is now a postdoc in Center of Bright Beams (NSF’s Science and Technology Center) at the Arizona State University and is working on near-threshold photoemission electron spectroscopy.
• Dr. Chuxuan Yang is now a machine learning research scientist at the Mokobio Life Science Group in Rockville, Md.
• Dr. Yan Kai is now a postdoc in in computational biology in the Department of Biostatistics and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University.
• Dr. Zhouhao Zeng is now a research scientist at Facebook.
• Dr. Berhan Taddesse Demissie is now a software engineer at IBM.
• Dr. Dehua Guo is now a research analyst at Bayview Asset Management in Miami, Fla.
• Dr. Jianlei Chen is now a senior data scientist at CarMax.

GW was the host site for the 2018 APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP). The conference took place from January 12-14th, 2018, in the Science and Engineering Hall on the Foggy Bottom campus. The conference included lots of fun and exciting activities including opportunities to learn about new, cutting-edge physics from senior women leaders in their fields; workshops and panels on professional skills, life as a physicist and career opportunities in physics; opportunities to tour NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and other local labs and programs; a career fair; and a vibrant social program and outreach fair organized by the local Society of Physics Students (SPS) chapter.

The whole Physics Department actively participated in organizing the conference. The organizing committee included Physics Department Chair Professor William Briscoe, CCAS Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Physics Evangeline Downie, Professor Chryssa Kouveliotou, Professor Alexander van der Horst and several graduate and undergraduate students (Kelly French, Isabella and Lucia Illari, Samantha Lumpkin, Maria Solyanik and Kara Zielinski). There were 100 undergraduate participants and 40 speakers and panelists. We were particularly proud that 20 men from the Physics Department took a very active role in the conference organization, and logistical support. They helped encourage the women attendees, and staffed the registration desk so all the women could participate fully in conference events.

The conference was so successful that our GW conference chair was elected to be the incoming chair of the National Organizing Committee of the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics. Thank you to all who participated to make CUWiP such a success!

The entire Physics Department is excited about the new Innovation Lab and Innovation Lab clubs. Professor Sylvain Guiriec shared his thoughts on this landmark new addition to the GW community:

The interests of physicists and engineers are intricately connected. The goal of physicists is to model the behavior of natural phenomena. This is based on observations and measurements using equipment, modeling using mathematics and computer simulations and tests for reproducibility using experimental equipment. The goal of engineers is to design systems and devices for facilitating human activities and to entertain us. To do so, engineers use physics for controlling nature at a certain level and shape it to respond to our needs. Thanks to physicists and engineers we know how to make a pile of sand perform billions of operations per seconds: the microprocessor.

The innovation lab of the physics department is set to be the crossroad of these two communities and more. We envision that the innovation lab will host the development of real-scale research experiments for physics with our partners and collaborators, including the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Jefferson Lab and the Naval Research Laboratory. We want students to participate in these projects so that they will be the best equipped for their future careers.

However, we have even bigger ambitions for the innovation lab. We want it to be the place for creativity and for sharing knowledge without any boundaries. If you have an idea, which can benefit society, improve our everyday life or revolutionize physics (or at least contribute to it). Then build a team composed of scientists, artists, managers, economists, lawyers, health providers, educators ... and propose your idea to the innovation lab.

This is open to all members of the university: students, faculty and staff. If you have ideas but not the scientific and technical background to complete your project, then you will have the opportunity to join our evening clubs where people can work together on electronics (Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, FPGA, ...) and programming projects, share and show their ideas and brainstorm. These clubs will be open to everybody from the university because knowledge and skills do not only transfer from faculty members to students but also from students to faculty members and from person-to-person across fields, especially so in the case of modern technologies.

We want students and citizens to be aware of the importance of physics in their everyday life. We want them to be informed about how the technologies they use all the time work and to apprehend the benefits and the risks. With this goal in mind, Professor Gerald Feldman and I developed a course offered in the innovation lab to students of the University Honors Program: the Physics of Everyday Life. In this course, we explain how physics in our everyday life operates and how devices work. In addition, the students of this class—who are not necessarily physicists and even not scientists—must develop a semester-long research project involving physics and electronics. Via a series of labs, we provide the building blocks for creating basic electronic circuits, for interfacing them with a micro-controller, for programming a microcontroller, for operating sensors and for analyzing data. These projects must be related to student passions because physics is everywhere. For example, a group of students doing boxing wants to measure the strength of a punch, another group playing squash wants to measure the impact of the temperature on the bouncing ball and others want to measure the impact of temperature on the sound emitted by a music instrument. These are only a few ideas in a world where imagination is the sole limit. We hope that this class will become regularly offered as part of the physics curriculum.

I am also currently leading several projects for developing equipment for education and outreach in the innovation lab, which will serve in our physics curriculum at GW and will also help to disseminate physics in community colleges and high schools both in the United States and abroad, particularly in developing countries.

An announcement for the grand opening of the innovation lab and of the innovation lab clubs will circulate soon across the university. If you have any questions, please contact me.