Department News

Summer 2006 - Spring 2007

 

Physics and Astronomy 410 Symposium: Tuesday May 8, 5:30 PM. Program (pdf, booklet style)

Joe Amato named the William Keenan Chair of Physics and Astronomy. Congratulations Joe!

Physics and Astronomy awards:
-- Alumni Award: Devin Edwards '07; Bryce Gadway '07
-- Founders Award: Adam Dioguardi '07; Brendan Mullan '07
-- Kingsbury Prize: Jared Borden '09; Claire Watts '09

2007 graduating class: 18 students!

15 Physics and Astronomy majors marks a 23 year high!
-- Physics: Alison Andrews, Charles Bwayla, Ben Cerio, Joshua Dempster, Adam Dioguardi, Devin Edwards, Lauren MacMillan, Kartik Misra, Andrew Olson, Jessica Poetzsch, Andrew Potter, Ben Reschovsky, Andrew Wasicek
--Astronomy-Physics: Bryce Gadway, Brendan Mullan

--Astrogeophysics:  Alyssa Brubaker Kaercher

--Pre-Engineering:  Emily Hall

--Physical Science:  Corbin Director

--Physics Minor:  Kellen Myers

 

 

Sigma Pi Sigma Honor Society 3rd Annual Induction Dinner and Ceremony was held on April 11, 2007. Ten students were inducted and guest speaker was Prof. Eric McKenzie.  Students inducted:  Jane Cornett, Katy Fallows, Nikhil Fernandes, Erik Johnson, Mike Nitzberg, Brit Pearsall, Jeff Seely, Peter Shively, Konstantinos Vilaetis, Nikolay Zhelev.  Congratulations to all! 

 

 

Faculty retirement celebration: The weekend of April 14 hosted a celebration of Shimon Malin's retirement. This was a two-day event where alumni, invited guests and Shimon himself gave talks to an audience of students, faculty, alumni and friends. Among the highlights was a lively debate between Abner Shimony and Shimon on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics.

   
New Faculty:  University hires Patrick Crotty to join the faculty in replacement of Vic Mansfield.  Patrick is a theoretical physicist with background in high energy physics and neuroscience. His current research interests include computational models of describing action potentials. Patrick comes to Colgate from the Department of Neurological Surgery, University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville, VA.  He attended the College of William and Mary and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago.
 
Kurt Andresen will be joining us for a one-year post-doctoral fellow for the 2007-08 academic year.  Kurt comes from the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University.

 

 

 

Community loses beloved faculty member, teacher and friend, Charlie McClennen. For the last four years Charlie endured a hard battle with cancer. He passed away on January 13. He was instrumental in the planning and building of the Ho Interdisciplinary Science Building, to open in September.

 

 

Shimon Malin announces his retirement at the end of the 2006-2007 academic year. Shimon has been a studious of foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity. For many years he has taught a yearly course for non-majors on physics and philosophy.

Vic Mansfield announces his retirement at the end of the 2006-2007 academic year. Over his tenure at Colgate Vic has been an inspirational teacher, and a researcher of unconventional problems, such as connections between Buddhism and quantum mechanics, and physical reality and psychology. Vic has been our in-house astrophysicist and creator of a very successful course in Computational Mechanics. One of his favorite courses is Tibet.    

The First Americans: Where They Came From and Who They Became, by Tony Aveni (Scholastic, 2005) was awarded the 2006 Spur Award for Juvenile Nonfiction by the Western Writers of America, an award given annually for distinguished writing about the American West.  For this writing, Tony was also named to the International Readers Association Teacher's Choice List for 2006.

For thousands of years nomadic people from east Asia followed caribou walking east. Sometime around 20,000 BCE, they crossed the land bridge into North America. These waves of people are the ancestors to every culture on the continent. Tony Aveni, whose expertise is the scientific, mathematical, and cultural accomplishments of the first Americans, celebrates the disparate cultures by highlighting one or two from each region of the country: the Taino, the Iroquois, the Adena, the Anasazi, the Kwakiutl, and the Timucua.

Uncommon Sense: Understanding Nature's Truth Across Time and Culture by Tony Aveni,  published in 2006 by the University Press of Colorado, explores the patterns created by humans of many cultures and time periods—the maps we make, the star charts we follow, the ordering of the universe and our place in it. Along the way, he opens the reader’s mind a little bit to the renderings of the possible universes beyond our Western philosophies.

 

 

Physics and Astronomy Home  |  Colgate Home | email: Department Chair

Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Home