Newsletter 2000

I am enjoying my work as chief academic officer at DePauw, helping many faculty colleagues to achieve success in their teaching and scholarly work. Ö My work in physics has slowed, but I am still publishing occasionally with my colleagues in Russia and Belarus and final papers have come out on my work with Cristina Masoller (Ph.D. '99). The latest version of my long essay on reasons for the success of Bryn Mawr's physics department on educating women was included in a new book entitled "Mentoring the Whole Life of Emerging Scientists", in Coming Into Her Own, edited by S. Davis, M. Crawford, and J. Sebrechts (Jossey-Bass Inc., 1999). And last, but not least, in the course of the year, the final report of the Committee on Undergraduate Science Education of the National Research Council on which I served for a number of years and for which Minna Mahlab '90 served as a staff member, appeared: Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology, Committee on Undergraduate Science Education, Center for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education, National Research Council (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1999).

Hania Al-Hallaq '94, is in her final year for her Ph.D. in medical physics at the University of Chicago. She has published one paper and is starting the ground work for her thesis. She came back to Bryn Mawr for her 5th year reunion in June, ë99

Greg Alman, Ph.D. '91 has left Rollins College in Florida and joined CVI, an optics firm, as a Research & Development Manager.

Carolina Artacho Guerra '99 is also working with CVI but at their Connecticut branch.

Chastity Bedonie '97 has finished her M.Ed. at Arizona State and now works at the National Indian Gaming Commission in D.C.

Kendra Burbank '00 is spending a year at the University of Pisa before starting graduate work in physics at Harvard in '01-'02.

Lowell Carson, M.A. '95 taught high school physics in Philadelphia for a year and is now working in a patent law office also in Philadelphia.

Joanna Lee Casson '87 at Los Alamos did some recruiting of undergrads and grads at BMC in winter í98.

Zhigang Chen, Ph.D. '95 reports continued progress and success at San Francisco State University and the birth of a second child.

Pam Chu '85 of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NISY) was awarded one of 25 physics-related researchers recognized among the 60 recipients of the fourth annual Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers. This award is the successor to the "Presidential Young Investigator Awards" of the mid-80's and early 90's.

Susan Cree Powers '68 has taken early retirement from AT&T where she was doing systems planning (EDP type and is thinking of doing something part time with more social impact).

Jeanne Di Grazio, M.A.'92 has just earned her Ll.M. (Intellectual Property) degree from Franklin Pierce Law Center.

Fabio DiTeodoro, Ph.D. í99 has finished his post-doc at Sandia National Labs and is beginning a permanent staff position at the Naval Research Laboratories in DC.

Christina Erwin '98 is working as a software engineer at Raytheon in Rhode Island. She entered Brown's Masters program in Computer Science in Spring 2000.

Lisa Everett '92, M.A.'92 was the department's first colloquium speaker in Fall, 99. She is currently a postdoc in the elementary particle physics theory group at Michigan. Neal Abraham writes that she stayed with them en route to giving a talk at the Field Theory Research Seminar at Indiana University.

Rashna Ginwalla '99, is enrolled in USC's medical school.

Melissa Green '97 works at an e-commerce consulting firm and has taken over organizing the monthly Philadelphia Alumni Happy Hours.

Naomi J. Halas, Ph.D. '97 was promoted to Full Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice effective July 1999. She also received a joint appointment in the Chemistry Department. At present she is supervising 11 graduate students who are matriculating in a total of six different departments (Physics, Chemistry, Applied Physics, Material Science, Chemical Engineering, and Bioengineering). She was recently awarded a $2.5 million dollar Army grant at the Center for the study of Metal Nanoshells, a type of nanoparticle that her group recently developed with tunable optical properties. This nanoparticle research was featured in a Business Week "Developments to Watch" Section in May 1999. Check out her group's research on her website http://www.ere.rice.edu/~halas. She and her husband (also a Full Professor in Physics at Rice) are actively pursuing a wildlife and brush management program on their 350 acre ranch in South Texas.

Daria Halkides '98 is at the University of Colorado at Boulder doing Environmental Science, after working with Americorps in Chicago doing both elementary school and high school teaching projects.

Lawrence R. Holland, Ph.D. '62 is a visiting professor at the Universidade do Vale do Paraiba in Brazil. His career path has included Lehigh Unviersity, ITA (Brazil), NASA, Univ. of Alabama, Alabama A&M, retired, and now UNIVAP! He is thinking about retiring again to raise cows and build an airplane!

Christina Iwata-Schneider '93 is on maternity leave from Lower Merion High School while staying at home to care for her son, Benjamin Casey. She is teaching "Secondary Science Methods" at the University of Delaware this fall.

Mary Beth Janicki '93 has completed medical school and gotten married. She is interning in Obstetrics at the University of Connecticut Medical School.

Matty Lau '97 taught in Saddle River, NJ and now is at the Berkeley Carrol School in Brooklyn, teaching science to seventh and ninth graders.

Eunice Lee '97 has started graduate work at MIT (biology) after working at the NIH for two years.

Hong Lin, Ph.D. '91 continues to do well at Bates College.

Su-Nin Liu '83 has worked 13 years at Exxon and has recently moved on to Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore), in the Web Engineering and Services group.

Despo Louca '90, M.A.'92 has finished her postdoctoral stint at Los Alamos and has moved on to the University of Virginia.

Minna Mahlab '90 is continuing to have great success directing the science and mathematics teaching and learning center at Grinnell College.

Katharine Martin '96 is working at a small law firm using her physics background since the company's practice involves many high-tech companies. She plans to enter Law school at the University of Oregon to study Environmental Law.

Cristina Masoller, Ph.D. '99 reports that she has returned to her new house in Montevideo and enjoys teaching but she is also doing postdoctoral visits in Europe, particularly to the University of Nice (Institute Nonlineaire de Nice where Gian Luca Lippi, Ph.D. ë90 is working) and to the Universitat de les Illes Balears.

Dave McGee, Ph.D. '95 has moved from Moravian where he built a strong physics and chemistry research program on photorefractive polymers while enjoying teaching a full range of physics courses as the youngest of a department of three faculty members. He has now completed his second year at Drew University in a tenure-track position and the reports from both his former Moravian colleagues and from his Drew colleagues indicate that he is off to a good start there, as expected.

Patricia Mooney, Ph.D. '77 was appointed to the Editorial Board of Physical Review B for three years beginning January 1998. In October 1998 she was elected Fellow of the AAAS. In February 1999 she was elected Vice Chair of the Division of Materials Physics of the APS.

Elizabeth Niemeyer '94 will begin working as a patent attorney at the law firm of Finnegan Henderson in D.C. after she takes her bar exam.

Melinda Nickelson '98 taught for a year in Japan and has started graduate school in applied physics at Michigan. The BMC contingent at Michigan keeps growing.

Sally Oey '86 started her second postdoc in January, 2000 at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Kyoko Ohashi ë95 is still pursuing her Ph.D. in oceanography at SUNY-Stony Brook. She successfully defended her thesis proposal this summer. She also had the opportunity last summer to compete at Las Vegas in the all-U.S. championship tournament in kendo, which is Japanese fencing.

Ann O'Neill '83 who is on the Wellesley faculty says that their SPS chapter has put together a calendar of women in physics (http://www.wellesley.edu/Physics/sps/cal.html). Check it out!

Nina Pandey '00 has been accepted into the Physics for Entrepreneurship program at Case Western Reserve. She believes that she is the only woman and the youngest student in the program.

Cynthia Wyeth Peterson '54 was in Philadelphia as a judge for the International Science Fair in May and has just finished her sabbatical at Yale doing computational structural biology.

Lisa Pollack '92 got her Ph.D. from Tulane in May, 1999 and is now an Assistant Professor at Xavier University in New Orleans.

Linette Prawirodirdjo '93 received her Ph.D. in earth sciences at the University of San Diego and started a postdoc immediately at the same place.

Dolores Pretorius '74 is a full professor in radiology at UC/San Diego. She writes that she uses "those physics skills from Bryn Mawr developing 3-D ultrasound imaging." Check her out at http://3Dultrasound.ucsd.edu.

Jessica Ree '99 is on Wall Street working for the Riskmetrics Group.

Joli Rightmyer '95 is starting graduate work in Mechanical Engineering at Maryland in Fall 2000 after working as an electrician for a year, working for a semiconductor company in San Diego that designs specialty adhesives for silicon chips for three years, and working as a carpenter prior to the start of the ë00-í01 school year. She is interested in designing hybrid automobile engines.

Edina Sarajlic '00 won the Slaughter Fellowship this year and is off to Stanford to do graduate work in Physics. She was also one of six finalists for the APS's Apker National Award for Undergraduate Research this past summer. The research she did with Liz will be published in Phys. Rev. A. this fall.

Cynthia Schwartz '87 has been working at Hewlett Packard but has been thinking of earning a graduate degree in astro-geophysics. She has been taking graduate classes at the University of Arizona in Planetary Sciences. In summer 2000 she is participating in SAGE (Summer of Applied Geophysical Experience) for field experience at Los Alamos. She is applying to enroll full-time in the graduate program in planetary sciences at U. Arizona next fall.

Vada Seccareccia ë96 reported from Brighton, MA in January that she had been accepted in four of the five architecture programs to which she applied and that she has decided to enroll at Rhode Island School of Design beginning this fall.

Laura Sivitz '86 is an intern at Science News as part of her graduate program in journalism at Northwestern. Her first byline at SN appeared in its Sept. 22, 2000 issue.

Laura Smilowitz '87 started to work back at Los Alamos last year after spending a couple of years away on a post-doc job in Boston.

Lidija Sekaric ë97 has been in the applied physics Ph.D. program at Cornell since Fall í98.

Erin Slonaker ë99 wrote that things are going well at Book Soup Publishing. She is proud of their new bestseller: "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" (co-written by her boss Dave) which has been featured on the Today Show and 20/20. She is living "at the edge of Society Hill with a deck all to herself that's larger than her living room." She reports her excitement that her senior research with Peter will become part of "a giant paper for the Journal of Chemical Physics".

David Schwamb, Ph.D. '79 is a Senior Staff Scientist at Boeing. He says hello to everyone via Nancy Vickers who met him in California this past spring.

Alice Towey '98 is an intern in an environmental engineering firm in Texas. She expects to enter graduate school for Environmental Engineering.

Aurora Vicens '85 continues to teach high school in Palma de Mallorca and still works occassionally with Maxi San Miguel's group at the Universitat de les Iles Balears when she is not tending her daughter Maritxell.

Michele Walters Costa '84, who was the first BMC student to go on to the now defunct BM Caltech 3-2 engineering program is greatly involved with her church while she raises her three sons and pursues writing and poetry as a hobby.

Eleanor Warfield '96 finished two years with Teach for America. After slowly making her way to Seattle via South America, Spain (where she learned to play the medieval harp and visited with Aurora Vicens '85 in Mallorca), and France (where she was firming up her French language skills), she has entered graduate school in Physics at the University of Washington.

Tracy Weber '97 is living in Brooklyn and working full time at the Columbia School of Public Health and going to grad school part-time for her masterís in public health.

Ann Wehrle '78 is still at JPL doing astrophysics when she is not raising her two children (girl age 7, boy age 3).

Heather White '97 passed her examinations at the University of Siegen (Germany). She visited Aurora Vicens í85 in Mallorca to escape the German winter and says she is considering a "semester abroad" to a more sunny country.