Bryn Mawr College

Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics

I was an undergraduate at Caltech (BS in physics, 1987) and went to graduate school at Princeton (MA and PhD in physics, 1989 and 1992). I spent three years as Jansky Fellow of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia. While in Charlottesville, I also briefly taught at the University of Virginia. I returned to Princeton, first as a postdoc and then as a faculty member, before moving to Bryn Mawr College.

My research focuses on observations of pulsars—rapidly rotating neutron stars—using large radio telescopes such as those in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and Green Bank, West Virginia. Lately I have been concentrating on pulsars in binary systems, using the detection of relativistic phenomena to constrain neutron star masses, test theories of gravity, and to study the evolution of eclipsing pulsar binaries. Recent observations at Arecibo have included the first stringent tests of gravitational radiation emission from a system dominated by a dipolar mass distribution, and the first measurement of a pulsar substantially heavier than a Chandrasekhar mass. See astro-ph/0508050 for details. I am part of a small collaboration which has developed the Arecibo Signal Processor (ASP), an x86/linux cluster for real-time processing of wideband radio telescope signals. A search for new pulsars using the ALFA receiver cluster at Arecibo has already found three dozen pulsars, including the youngest relativistic pulsar binary ever detected, and promises to unveil hundreds of new pulsars.

Breaking news: the Fermi (née GLAST) Gamma-ray Space telescope is in orbit and taking data. It will detect dozens of pulsars at gamma-ray energies and provide new clues about the physics of pulsar magnetosphere and the means by which they emit pulses.

E-mail:  dnice@brynmawr.edu
Office:  Park Science Center, Room 351
Telephone:  +1-610-526-5361
Fax:  +1-610-526-7469

My office hours are listed on my course webpages (see below).