THIS YEAR'S PHYSICS GRADUATES

Crystal Bailey, Bachelor of Science; she has a Fellowship to attend graduate school at Indiana University.
Karen Bockel, Bachelor of Science; she will attend graduate school at Colorado State.
Matt Brown, Bachelor of Arts; he will attend graduate in mathematics at the University of Arkansas.
Ryan Coffee, Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts; he will attend graduate school in physics at the University of Conneticut.
Bryan Eliason, Bachelor of Science; he will working in computer programming in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Josh Hamblen, Bachelor of Science; he has a Fellowship to attend graduate school in physics at the University of Rochester.
Michael Maese, Bachelor of Science; he will be working as Chief Broadcast Engineer in Continuing Education at the University of Arkansas.
Noel Naperielski, Bachelor of Science; she will attend graduate school in either engineering or applied physics.
LoAnn Nguyen, Bachelor of Science; she will attend graduate school in applied physics at the University of Arkansas.
Brent Ragar, Bachelor of Arts; he will attend medical school at Washington University in St. Louis.
Jasmine Stotts, Bachelor of Arts; she will attend pilot training school in Fayetteville.
Ryan Wolfe, Bachelor of Science; he will attend graduate school in physics at the University of Arkansas.
Ditta Gallai, Master of Arts, directed by Assistant Professor Stewart; she has returned to Hungary where she just finished her masters degree in English; she has begun looking for a position teaching physics at an English-speaking institution in Hungary.
Horace Crogman, Master of Arts, directed by Professor Singh.
Jon Osborn, Master of Arts, directed by Assistant Professor Stewart; he is now employed as a physics instructor at DePauw University in Indiana.
Mike Schillaci, Doctor of Philosophy, directed by Professor Lieber; he is working as an Assistant Professor of Physics at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina.
Tim Burt, Doctor of Philosophy, directed by Associate Professor Gea-Banacloche.
Scott Hawkins, Doctor of Philosophy, directed by Professor Salamo.
Mathew Klotz, Doctor of Philosophy, directed by Professor Salamo.

STUDENT NEWS

Nadeem Akbar, Leann Brown, Nicholas Farrer, Mark Thompson, and Clint Wood won undergraduate Departmental Scholarships.
Matthew Schaeffer won the Bryson Scholarship.
Clint Ryan won the first annual Richardson Scholarship.
Steven Sandh won the Sharrah Scholarship.
Crystal Bailey and Joshua Hamblen shared the Lingelbach Award. Crystal Bailey also won a grant from the Materials Research Society
Luke Post, Josh Hamblen, Crystal Bailey, Michael Offenbacher and Christi Emery won APS Centennial Travel Awards.
Clint Wood, Jennifer Morrow, LeAnne Brown, and Loann Nguyen received NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates grants
Laura Fields won the Presidential Fellowship for the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences for this year.
Brent Ragar won an Arkansas Science Information Liason Office (SILO) Grant. He also gave a talk at the APS centennial meeting in Atlanta, and won the John Bower Buckley Scholarship to study at Cambridge.
Lin We resolved the atomic structure of the most important semiconductor surface [GaAs(001)-(2x4)], discovered a new STM imaging mechanism, and has submitted an article to Physical Review Letters.
Our congratulations to all on their achievements!

NEW GRADUATE STUDENTS

Husam Abu-Safe, BS Yarmouk University in Jordan, MS Wilkes University in Pennsylvania

Zhao Ding, BS Wuhan University in China, MS Wuhan University in China

Christi Emery, BS East Texas State University

David Goorsky, BS Kings College in Bristol, Tennessee

Aqiang Guo, BS and MS Xian Jiaotong University in Xian, China

Fernando Montes, BS University of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia

Lucas Post, BA University of Arkansas

Fuad Rawwagah, BS and MS Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan

Stephen Skinner, BS University of Arkansas

Michael Teplitsky, BS University of Dayton in Ohio

Ananth Venkatesan, BS Univ of Madras in India, MS Bharathidasan University in India

Ryan Wolf, BS University of Arkansas

ALUMNI NEWS

Calling all alumni! Please keep in touch with us and other alumni. Tell us about the interesting things you've been doing!

Robert B. (Bob) Owen
We are sorry to report the death of Robert B. (Bob) Owen (MS 1964) on March 6, 1996. His wife, Suzanne K. Owen, tells us that Bob never was able to read Dr. Sharrah's book "Physics At Arkansas" (see Reflections, Spring 1997, page 1), but he would have enjoyed it immensely. While Bob was never mentioned in the book by name, some of the pranks he knew about were, and he was one of the students for whom Dr. Zinke bought soft drinks. During Bob's career at Texas Instruments (TI), he received clearances above top secret with no problems. He worked on parts of Telstar, the Lunar Lander, Identify Friend or Foe concept, sonar, and antennae of various kinds including Airport Surveillance Radar. He was in the first Summer Development Program at TI and later administered that program and others to enhance the educational growth of employees and potential employees. He received awards for his work with the Cooperative Education Program and headed several projects for the regional and national co-op organizations. Bob is greatly missed by his family, friends and associates.

James Bennett (MS 1990), after six years with the Nippon Electronics Corporation (NEC) Research Institute in Princeton, has moved to California to join Symyx Technologies, a startup company doing combinatorial materials science. His job title is Research Engineer and he is working on the development of instrumentation for rapid sample screening. For more information on Symex, see www.symyx.com.

Collin Condray and his wife, Kathleen, lived last year in Vienna, Austria. She was the assistant to the director of the exchange program between the Economics University of Vienna and the University of Illinois, and he taught English and helped teach mechanical engineering, mathematics, and computer science at a technical high school. This year they are back in Champaign, Illinois where Kathleen is finishing her doctorate in Germanic literature, and he is working at Wolfram Research as one of their webmasters. He has with Wolfram for 9 months and has been "learning a lot from all the bright people they have here."

Lynn L. Hatfield (MS 1964, PhD 1967) has recently become Chair of Physics at Texas Tech University, where he has been for thirty years. He plans to change the way his department teaches physics, and to hire a new faculty member specializing in physics education. He expects that being chairman will cut down on his research. For 20 years he has been part of a faculty group from EE, Physics, ME, Chem E, Chemistry, doing pulsed power research at high energy densities. They work on dielectrics and have improved the understanding of discharges across the surface of insulators in vacuum when hundreds of kilovolts per centimeter are applied parallel to the dielectric surface. Presently, they are studying breakdown of dielectric windows subjected to high power density traveling waves at microwave frequencies.

Steven (Shao-zheng) Jin (PhD 1996) has been working with Northern Telecom (Nortel) as a software engineer for one and half years. Nortel is the world's 3rd largest telecommunication equipment manufacturer, with 78,000 employees. Nortel's research center in Ottawa employs 8,500 researchers and engineers.

Tacy Joffe-Minor (BS 1988, MA 1990) received her PhD in High Energy Physics from Northwestern University in June 1997. She is now a post-doc at Argonne National Labs, working on the "Soudan 2" and "MINOS" experiments. Tacy ran into Julia Smith (BS 1989). Julia is an Astrophysics postdoc at Oxford, England, has married, and is now Julia Kennefick.

Bill Kiehl (MS 1990, PhD 1995) got married a couple of years ago and is still at Ball Aerospace.

David Mooney (PhD 1990) is Director of Denver Operations for the Spire Corporation. He was formerly adminstrative vice president and corporate secretary for a wireless communications company, but recently left that position to get back to his first love, photovoltaics. In November 1997 he opened a Denver office for Spire, a Boston area company that is the leading supplier of photovoltaic module manufacturing equipment. See their website at www.spirecorp.com.

Jon Osborn (MS 1998) is a physics instructor at DePauw University in Indiana.

Forrest Payne (BS 1998) will begin graduate school at Colorado State University, where he has a graduate fellowship.

Luke Post (BA 1998) has entered the University of Arkansas MS program. He received APS funding to attend the APS Centennial meeting in March, where he presented a paper based on undergraduate research he had done with Assistant Professor Gay Stewart's Arkansas Precision Education Group.

John (Jujiang) Qu (PhD 1995) is a member of the British Telecommunications (BT) technical staff, at BT's US Systems Engineering Center, where he helps develop telecommunication system software. He is working on a venture for Concert Management Sercices, to provide global telecommunication services to major corportations. John is working on a product that manages all Concert Voice products and services. Since Microwave Communications Inc. is merging with World Communications, Concert is removing its Voice products from their dependency on MCI. John's project is building Concert voice products while making it independent of MCI.

FACULTY NEWS

Laurent Bellaiche published three Physical Review Letters, two Applied Physics Letters, and one Physical Review B article, on semiconductors, ferroelectrics and high-pressure effects. He also gave an invited talk about his work on perovskite alloys, at the 1999 Centennial Meeting of the American Physical Society in Atlanta. (See article in this issue).

Raj Gupta spent the Fall of 1998 Semester at Princeton University in the research group of Professor William Happer. He participated in the ongoing research on the polarization of xenon by spin-exchange with optically-pumped rubidium. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (see news article in this issue).

William Harter has developed several new computer simulations that help to combine research and teaching. One simulates molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) deposition based on random walks. Other simulations show the relations between linear and non-linear resonance phenomena. Another allows a more realistic way of teaching quantum mechanics, corresponding to current experimental methods. These programs take advantage of Feynman's approach as well as classical optical polarization theory.

Art Hobson's textbook Physics: Concepts and Connections was published in its second edition, by Prentice Hall, Inc. It has been adopted by the Library of Science as its Main Selection for the month of May, 1999 (see www.booksonline.com/los), and is being translated into Chinese and will soon be published in China by Shanghai Scientific and Technical Publishers. The first edition was published in 1995 and was adopted on over 85 campuses. Hobson retired from teaching this year (see article in this issue).

Claude Lacy's most interesting discovery of the last decade was published in January. Twice this century, the eclipsing binary V907 Sco has stopped eclipsing for several decades. It is the only eclipsing binary known to have done this. It is currently not eclipsing, but Lacy predicts it will start eclipsing in 2030. The driver of this behavior is a third star that causes the eclipsing pair to "wobble" and turns the eclipses on and off. The third star is probably a white dwarf or low-mass star since it does not show up in spectrograms.

William Oliver was one of 35 selected to attend an NSF-funded two-week Harvard University workshop on "Teaching Physics Conservation Laws First," out of 200 faculty applicants. Oliver also developed and implemented our new University Physics I course and lab. He was invited to the National Science Foundation for a CAREER Awardee Symposium, where he presented a talk. He presented three research talks at the Centennial meeting of the American Physical Society in Atlanta.

Gay Stewart has been elected to the Executive Committee of the APS Forum on Education, where she will serve as liaison to the AAPT. She continues to serve on the College Board Advanced Placement Physics Curriculum Development Committee. In a program under her direction, the U of A has been chosen as a pilot site for "Preparing Future Physics Faculty," a program sponsored jointly by the NSF, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the AAPT.

Paul Thibado has resolved the atomic structure of the most important semiconductor surface, known as GaAs(001)-(2x4). He has also discovered a new scanning-tunneling microscope imaging mechanism, and submitted a Physical Review Letter about this technique.

Ken Vickers joined our department as Research Professor and Director of the Arkansas Center for Electronic-photonic Materials Innovation. He created an interdisciplinary MS program in microelectronics-photonics, a new MS Degree in Applied Physics, and a new course called "Intra/entrepreneurship of Technology." He co-authored a successful $2.1 million NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training proposal. (See the article in this issue).

Min Xiao was promoted to Full Professor, and received the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award on Research. He published 8 papers, including a Physical Review Letter. He and Dr. Michael Henry won an NSF grant for "University-Industry Partnership for Enabling Advances in Telecommunications" (see the article in this issue). He received a 3-year NSF grant for research in "Quantum-Statistical Properties and Applications of Atomic Coherence in Multi-Level Atomic Systems."