Welcome From Our Department Head

Dear Physics Family,

Spring semester 2022 has been a busy one here in the Department of Physics—and one that has provided ample opportunities to celebrate the achievements of our faculty and students. We ended the semester with the investitures of Charles Gammie as the Donald Biggar Willett Chair in Engineering and Nadya Mason as the Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Professor in Physics. Among our guests, Ben Yalow represented his mother’s family and entrusted the department with the original doctoral theses of both his mother and father. The Yalow professorship is endowed through a generous gift from the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the foundation’s Director of Science Dr. Cyndi Atherton also spoke at the event. 

Unified undergraduate degree program

Our incoming class—the class of 2026—will be the first to graduate from our new unified physics undergraduate degree program. It combines the separate programs that had been split between the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and The Grainger College of Engineering. Over time the degree programs had grown to be nearly identical. By unifying the curricula into a single Bachelor of Science in Physics in Grainger Engineering, we better focus the available resources and further optimize the quality of our instruction. This change also improves cohesion among our students.

Increased research activity catalyzed by recent faculty hires

Our newest faculty members—we hired fourteen over the last 3.5 years—are highly active and successful in their scientific endeavors. Many are working in the new Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST) or in the new Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe (ICASU). During the past three years, faculty members have increased their external grant support from federal funding agencies, and the annual spending on research has risen from $23M to about $28M. While the number of tenure-track faculty members has remained steady at 60, the number of postdoctoral researchers has risen to over 50 and graduate students, to over 320. Research activities are very high, and we have successfully overcome the limitations imposed during the pandemic.

Our PhD programs rose in rank

The increased research activity may already have impacted our graduate program rankings—three research areas made the top ten in US News & World Report’s 2023 rankings. Condensed matter continues to rank number one, and four other specialties rose in rank: nuclear physics, fourth; atomic molecular optical, tenth; quantum, twelfth; and particle physics, fourteenth. As always, our top ranked program in condensed matter attracts the best graduate students from around the world, and our graduate program is now the largest in the country.

The war in Ukraine, our response in Illinois, and the helium supply crisis

Illinois Physics is collaborating with the Scholars at Risk Network to shelter displaced Ukranian physicists at UIUC. We will host up to five graduate students and two research scholars. Faculty, emeriti, students, alumni, and friends have already given more than $110,000 in support of our Ukrainian colleagues. I’m very thankful to all who have contributed.

At home the war has contributed to widespread inflation. Similarly, helium has become a scarce resource, and helium prices have risen by a factor of five. At UIUC, research programs supported by grants totalling over $120M rely on liquid helium. Our researchers are strongly impacted. We are working actively on further improving our helium recovery and on securing a helium contract from a crisis-independent source in Qatar.

Please get in touch 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