Family, friends, and colleagues of the late Professor Charles P. Slichter have established a physics graduate student fellowship in his memory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Charles P. Slichter Fellowship will provide stipends without a teaching requirement, enabling promising graduate students to place more of their focus on original research earlier in their programs.
New Slichter Fellowship established for graduate students
Professor of Physics and Chemistry Charles P. Slichter was a pioneer in the development and application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to elucidate the structure and behavior of matter at the atomic scale and a renowned expert on superconductivity. Slichter’s seminal contributions to the fields of condensed matter physics and chemistry have been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2007 National Medal of Science. His impact is also evident in the successful careers and scientific contributions of those he taught. At Illinois, Slichter directed the research of 63 doctoral students and more than 15 postdoctoral researchers, including Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Mansfield.
Slichter exemplified and fostered the “Urbana style”—a way of tackling longstanding scientific problems through close interdisciplinary collaboration among theorists and experimentalists—which continues to define the culture of the department today. Known by everyone for his brilliant smiles, infectious enthusiasm, and trademark bow ties, Slichter represented science at its finest: creative, rigorous, curious, and scrupulously honest.
Family, friends, and colleagues of the late Professor Charles P. Slichter have established a physics graduate student fellowship in his memory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Charles P. Slichter Fellowship will provide stipends without a teaching requirement, enabling promising graduate students to place more of their focus on original research earlier in their programs.
Head of Department and Professor Matthias Grosse Perdekamp comments, “Charlie was a cherished member of our faculty for 57 years. Everyone loved Charlie. He was among his generation’s most talented and insightful condensed matter experimentalists. But for those of us who worked with Charlie, it was his kindness and love of life mixed with that great intellect, that great creativity, that impacted us so profoundly.
“Charlie’s commitment to the academic enterprise—to teaching and to research—left a tremendous legacy. We want this fellowship to extend Charlie’s legacy into future generations of stellar students. Our highly competitive graduate program at Illinois Physics is one of the largest in the nation and it attracts promising students from around the world. The fellowship support will help us to recruit and retain the best and brightest young minds, regardless of means.”
Slichter’s former student Po-Kang “Po” Wang remembers how Slichter was always in high demand, serving in numerous advisory roles in government, academia, and industry, but all the while never failing to demonstrate a deep and steadfast loyalty to his students and colleagues at Illinois.
“In the early 1980s, Charlie traveled often to D.C. and other places to attend meetings of the National Science Board and other boards, including IBM, Polaroid, and Harvard. It was always fun when he returned and showed up at the lab at lunch time, full of energy and eager to share with us his stories, his new ideas jotted down while on the plane, often with some back-of-the-envelope calculations. He was eager to hear about the latest in the lab.
“We would all sit on tall lab stools in a circle with him having one extra stool as his cutting board, where he would use his Swiss Army knife to cut off slices of cheese and ham to make his sandwiches. For him, it seemed, coming home to the small labs, chatting with his students, and puzzling together over the experimental results was the best the world had to offer. And for us, the students, with the passing of many lunches with Charlie, we slowly learned to look beyond the travail of our experiments and to be proud of belonging to the great family of physicists.”
The goal for the Charles P. Slichter Fellowship is to support several research fellowships annually. Each full-year fellowship valued at $25,000 requires a $600,000 principal investment. Donations to the endowed fund are tax deductible and will be invested and managed in accordance with donor intent by the University of Illinois Foundation, an independent not-for-profit corporation whose mission is to advance the interests and welfare of the university.