Welcome From Our Department Head

Dear Physics Family,

We are fully back to in-person teaching and have enrolled a record number of students. The 141 first-year students who joined us this year are the inaugural class in our new unified bachelor’s degree program in The Grainger College of Engineering. This degree program—titled simply Physics—consolidates multiple similar degree programs we had offered across Liberal Arts & Sciences and Engineering. Many thanks to Yann Chemla and Jonathan Makela for managing this transition successfully and to Brian DeMarco for his earlier work to establish a cohesive program that better serves all our students.

100 years of women PhDs at Illinois

This year we celebrate the centennial of our first woman PhD, Eleonore Frances Seiler. For her 1922 thesis, “The Color-Sensitivity of Photo-Electric Cells,” she measured the wavelength-dependent photoelectric sensitivities for alkali elements. Twenty-three years later, in 1945, Rosalyn Yalow became the second woman to earn a PhD in our department. She would later become the first American-born woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

Today, 100 years later, our graduate program has 91 women physicists—29 percent of our total doctoral students, well above the U.S. average of 21 percent recorded by the American Institute of Physics (AIP). When Lance Cooper took over as associate head for graduate studies in 2011, the representation of women graduate students was at 13 percent. I am grateful to Lance for his leadership in diversity, equity, and inclusion. 
Our department is enriched by the brilliant women who do leading-edge research, initiate and organize social and outreach opportunities, and exemplify the high-level training we offer tomorrow’s scientific leaders. To celebrate our women PhDs, we are kicking off a special series in this issue, giving voice to their experiences.

Faculty success in research

Our faculty, students, and postdocs demonstrated tremendous resiliency and determination throughout the global challenges of the past few years, and this is reflected in the continued successes of our research programs. For example, Fahad Mahmood won a $1.6 million Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems (EPiQS) investigator award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. And as I write this letter, Jeff Filippini’s balloon-borne cosmic microwave background experiment SPIDER has launched from McMurdo Station, Antarctica; Anne Sickles’ $3.5 million UIUC-built electromagnetic calorimeter has been installed in the sPHENIX collider experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory; and Nadya Mason has been appointed to President Biden’s National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee.

Several of our faculty have been recognized this term for outstanding achievements. Among them, Nancy Makri received the 2023 Award for Theoretical Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (ACS); Jen-Chieh Peng, the 2023 Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society (APS); and Nico Yunes, Emily Edwards, and Prashant Jain were elected APS Fellows. Additionally, two faculty members were appointed to leadership roles: Nadya Mason is director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Brian DeMarco, director of IQUIST (Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center).

Rethinking laboratory instruction

The use of the highly innovative iOLab in our introductory laboratory courses has advanced our ability to teach students creative and independent problem-solving in experimental physics. Now we are also modernizing our upper-division instructional laboratories. In Spring 2022 we completed the renovation of two new advanced laboratory classrooms on the fourth floor of the Engineering Sciences Building. This instructional space supports three additional quantum optics experiments in PHYS 403 and enables a new biological physics laboratory course, PHYS 498 EBP (the latter has already been taught twice). Next, we’ll be implementing an $800 thousand plan to enhance instruction across the upper-division laboratory courses. This plan was developed by the upper-division laboratory instructors under the leadership of Eugene Colla. While training our students in the use of state-of-the-art instrumentation, we aim to emulate real-world research conditions, fostering independence, scientific rigor, and creative problem-solving in our students.

New degree programs

We continue to develop several new degree programs. Future undergraduate degrees in Computer Science + Physics and Physics + Data Science are aimed at students seeking careers as industrial physicists. A future program offering a master’s in physics education will provide high-school science teachers a valuable continuing-education opportunity. And two separate concentrations in Grainger Engineering’s Professional Master’s in Engineering (M.Eng.) program will train industrial physicists in Instrumentation and Applied Physics and in Quantum Information Science. 

I am very thankful to the faculty colleagues who are developing these programs. Among the many strong contributors, I would especially like to thank George Gollin, who is directing the first of these programs to launch: The M.Eng. in Instrumentation and Applied Physics program is accepting students for Fall 2023. Special thanks also to Tim Stelzer for leading the overall development of our new degree programs. We are hoping for input and support from our numerous alumni working as industrial physicists. Please contact George, Tim, or me with your suggestions.

Please let us know if your travels bring you to Central Illinois. You will always be welcomed home at the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois!

Warmly,

Matthias Grosse Perdekamp