BRYN MAWR PROFESSOR WINS TOP PHYSICS HONOR

Bryn Mawr Professor Elizabeth McCormack has been named a fellow of the American Physics Society, an honor bestowed annually on just half of one percent of the society's 43,000 members around the world. According to the APS, the fellowship recognizes members who "have made advances in knowledge through original research and publication or made significant and innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology;" they may also have made "significant contributions to the teaching of physics or service and participation in the activities of the Society."

McCormack was recognized for both her research and her work on improving science teaching. The award citation credits her for "contributions to the development of novel four-wave mixing techniques for the study of molecular Rydberg states, and for efforts to advance the state of undergraduate physics education."

The research cited by the APS was in the field of laser spectroscopy, in which the interaction of laser radiation with various materials yields information about the materials under study. The complex techniques McCormack developed are useful for analyzing small molecules in highly excited states that couldn't be studied with traditional spectroscopic techniques.

"In four-wave mixing," McCormack explains, "we take two laser beams and cross them at a very small angle. Because they're electromagnetic waves, this creates constructive and destructive interference — where the waves add, there are bright fringes, and where they cancel, there are dark fringes. The molecules in the bright fringes become highly excited, while the ones in the dark fringes remain in the ground state.

"The population of molecules now varies over space in a pattern that essentially acts like a grating. Now we add the third wave, a laser beam directed at the grating. The grating will scatter the radiation at a certain angle. This scattered light still forms a coherent beam — the fourth wave. This fourth wave is the one we detect; it tells us about the properties of the molecule.

"We had to accomplish some difficult theoretical work before we could use this kind of technique quantitatively," McCormack explains. "The tricky part was establishing the connection between characteristics of the spectra of the scattered beams we measure and the properties of the molecular states."

McCormack published this theoretical research in the late 1990s with then-Ph.D. candidate Fabio DiTeodoro, Ph.D. '99. She also cites an undergraduate, Edina Sarajlic '00, for her role in the research; Sarajlic and McCormack co-authored an experimental study on the topic that was published in 2001.

McCormack, who joined the Bryn Mawr faculty in 1996 after several years as a staff physicist at the Argonne National laboratory, earned her bachelor's degree from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She established her research program at Bryn Mawr with the help of a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. While at Bryn Mawr, she has been a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar Fellow at the University of Paris XI (Orsay, France) and an ERCOFTAC Guest Scientist at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.

A member of the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics, McCormack has matched her research accomplishments with an unusual devotion to the improvement of science pedagogy and to enhancing access to science careers for underrepresented groups. She is a longtime member of Project Kaleidosocpe (PKAL), a national alliance that advocates building and sustaining strong undergraduate programs in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. She has served as a physics curriculum consultant to Effat College, a new college for women in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She is involved in establishing a regional network of faculty and K-12 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia to build K-16 connections in the area. As a principal investigator for an NSF-funded PKAL project, she is helping to to develop a nationwide infrastructure of leaders to support long-lasting improvements in science education.

McCormack is on leave from Bryn Mawr this academic year as an American Council on Education Fellow at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass.

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