Physics Colloquium
Michigan Technological University
Thursday January 29, 2015
4:00 PM Fisher Hall 139
Photoreactions of the Chromophore-Binding Domain of Bacteriophytochrome
Heli Lehtivuori
Nanoscience Center, Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
Faculty Fellow Program Information Session Jan 27
The Vice President for Research Office will host an information session on the Faculty Fellow Program from noon to 1 p.m. on Tuesday, January 27. The session will be held in room 404 of the Administration Building.
This session will be presented by the 2014 Faculty Fellow recipients: Adrienne Minerick, Yoke Khin Yap and Larry Sutter. They will provide information on the program and share their experience.
The Faculty Fellow Program expands familiarity with Sponsored Program Administration and strategic planning among the faculty, develops leadership capacity among the faculty and improves Sponsored Programs Administration and strategic planning through faculty input. To learn more about the Faculty Fellow Program, please visit the Faculty Fellow Program website.
Registration begins today and ends on January 26. To register, please visit the event’s site.
There will be desserts and beverages provided; please bring your own lunch.
For additional information please contact Cathy Codere at 7-3043 or cmbanfie@mtu.edu.
Department Coordinator Andrea Lappi is a nominee of the 2014 Making a Difference Award in the category “Above and Beyond.” Nominations are posted by the Staff Council. Nominees were honored and award recipients were announced on Wednesday, January 7, 2015, at a reception.
Congratulations to Andrea for this well-deserved nomination!
Lake Superior in my driveway: lake effect snow in the Keweenaw
Raymond Shaw
Carnegie Museum Seminar
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
6:30 pm Refreshments and introductions
7-8 pm Seminar and discussion
Carnegie Museum Community Room, Downtown Houghton
Carnegie Community Natural History Discussion Jan. 13
Professor Raymond Shaw (Physics) will lead a discussion on lake effect snow titled “Lake Superior in My Driveway: Lake Effect Snow in the Keweenaw?” on Tuesday, Jan. 13, at the Carnegie Museum in Houghton.
This discussion is part of a monthly series on the geoheritage and natural history of the Keweenaw. The discussions are aimed at the general public, but discuss current research and science.
The museum will open at 6:30 p.m. for refreshments, with the lecture and discussion beginning at 7 p.m. This event is free and open to the public. For questions, contact the Carnegie Museum at 482-7140.
Lecture: Lake Superior in my driveway: lake effect snow in the Keweenaw?
Professor Shaw explains his discussion: “Whether you enjoy skiing, snow shoeing, or sledding, and in fact even if you simply endure the snow shoveling, lake effect snow is part of daily life in the Keweenaw for almost half of the year. Our peninsular home is surrounded by Lake Superior, which when conditions are right, becomes a giant snow-making machine.”
PI Will Cantrell and Co-PIs Claudio Mazzoleni and Raymond Shaw (Physics/EPSSI), “A Coupled Laboratory and Modeling Investigation of the Mechanisms of Primary Ice Production in Arctic Stratus Clouds,” US Department of Energy
PI Claudio Mazzoleni (Physics/EPSSI) and Co-PIs Lynn Mazzoleni (Chem/EPSSI), Will Cantrell (Physics/EPSSI), Judith Perlinegr (CEE/EPSSI), Sarah Green (Chem/EPSSI) and Bo Zhang (CEE/EPSSI), “Free Tropospheric and Marine Boundary Layer Aerosol Interactions in the North Atlantic,” US DOE
Read more at Tech Today.
Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics Dr. Ravi Pandey has been named a 2014 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). The Fellowship election was announced at the November 2014 meeting of the Council of APS. Pandey was nominated by the Division of Computational Physics. The citation reads:
For creative use of advanced computational techniques from materials physics and quantum chemistry to gain insights into nanostructure behaviors, especially for his prescient recognition of the looming importance of such calculations for predicting bio-nano hybrid material properties.
Election to APS Fellowship is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the membership. Pandey’s name and citation will be published in the March 2015 issue of APS News.
Pandey thanks his teachers and acknowledges contributions from his students, postdocs and colleagues for over 25+ years.
The PH3210 Optics Lab would like to invite you to a poster session, which will be happening on Tuesday, December 9th from 3:00pm-4:00pm in the Fisher Atrium.
The Optics Lab students will be presenting posters detailing experiments they have performed in class or projects that they have created themselves related to the coursework. We would love for you to come and ask questions and see what the Optics Lab has been up to this year.
Almetric, a website that tracks readership of scientific articles, reports that an article in arXIV—an archive of electronic science articles—about Professor Robert Nemiroff’s (Physics) search of the Internet for evidence of time travelers ranked second among the top 100 articles of 2014.
Since 1999, the A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum has recognized individuals for excellence in earth science education with the Charles A. Salotti Earth Science Education Award. Now the mineral museum has a new partner in selecting the awardee: the Michigan Earth Science Teachers Association (MESTA).
“I am delighted that MESTA has agreed to partner with the museum to advance informal earth science education,” said John Jaszczak, museum adjunct curator and professor of physics, who has played a key role in the Salotti Award since its inception. “My own path to becoming a scientist started with informal mentoring in the mineral collecting hobby.”
Naturally GraphiteTM is a local business that started as a project of Nanotech Innovations Enterprise, a former Enterprise program at Michigan Tech operated by undergraduate students. The business, advised by Professor of Physics Dr. John Jaszczak, supplies high quality natural graphite crystals and substrates for research, industry, and education. Jaszczak also serves as adjunct curator at the A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum.
Naturally Graphite was recently credited with supplying graphite crystals to a research group at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec in Canada. The research, published in Physical Review Letters, involved the use of high-speed electron diffraction techniques to study electron-phonon coupling in graphite.
High quality graphite crystals from Naturally Graphite are also routinely sought by laboratories around the world for the production and study of graphene. As a single layer of carbon atoms in graphite, graphene often generates much interest in carbon-based nanotechnologies. Graphene exhibits unique and amazing mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties. It is strong, highly conductive, transparent, elastic, and impermeable.
Naturally Graphite also donated graphite crystals to K-12 for an outreach event, Family Math Night based in Rocklin, California. The event involved simple experiments with graphite, including an activity for cleaving the graphite into layers using scotch tape. This was the original experiment by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester that led to the discovery of graphene and a Nobel Prize in 2010.
Learn more about the graphene sheet lesson plan in the 22-minute video Family Math Night Collaborative Project: Graphene Sheet by Elementary Mathematics Specialist Karyn Hodgens,. The description of the experiments begins at about 16:20.