SDSU Physics - Documents
Physics Department Academic Planning 1999
Introduction
In the spring of 1998 the physics department planning document predicted that at least 7 faculty retirements would take place during the next 4 years. This wave of retirements started at the end of the spring 1998 semester when Don Cottrell FERPed. Bob Piserchio has stated that he will FERP (contract allowing) at the end of the spring 1999 semester and Jacques Templin has indicated that he will retire at the end of the spring 1999 semester. One of our faculty members turned 70 last year and has some health problems and another faculty member will be 70 in 2001. Both Roger Lilly and Herbert Shore have stated their intention of retiring three and half years from now. Thus roughly 50% of the faculty of the department will retire on or before the end of the 2001-2002 academic year.
To replace the retiring faculty members the spring 1998 planning document proposed that the department be authorized to hire 1 tenure-track faculty member/year for each of the next 5 years. We are currently conducting a search for the first of these new faculty members.
It is critical that these new hires place the department in a position to continue to expand its strengths in teaching and research. In order to do this we need to take into account the present strengths of the department and to make our best estimate of what areas of physics will succeed in the future at SDSU. We also need to take into account the teaching areas of those individuals retiring first. It is important that these new faculty members strengthen existing groups, provide continuity in programs when existing members in those disciplines retire, and create research groups of interacting faculty.
Academic Goals
The strength of the upper-division and graduate education programs in the physics department lies in the very close interconnection between faculty research and senior and master theses. The department's research and education programs have for many years had national and international reputations in 3 areas - electro-optics, condensed matter physics, and radiological health physics. These three areas are primarily experimental in nature and our strengths in these fields must be maintained.
It is also very important that the department maintain strength in theoretical physics in order to maintain the expertise to teach our graduate curriculum and provide a theoretical option for our students. Fortunately the emerging field of computational physics provides a means of having a faculty who have the needed expertise to teach the graduate curriculum while having research areas which are accessible to our students at both the undergraduate and graduate level. We also believe that this is an area where the SDSU physics department has a chance to be a build a very strong program. Accordingly, the department began adding to its expertise in computational physics, beginning with the appointment of an assistant professor in the fall of 1997. We are now in the process of a tenure-track search for another computational physicist. It is evident from the response to our search that we are well on our way to having a program that is recognized both nationally and internationally.
Program Areas in the Physics Department
I. Electro-Optics
Electro-optics is a rich area of physics combining numerous subfields. There are numerous examples of the importance of this discipline from optical fiber communications, compact discs, computer liquid crystal monitors and even a recent Nobel Prize in Physics. The Optical Society of America publishes 3 separate journals and the American Physical Society contains both the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics and the Division of Laser Science. There are additional international societies devoted to this field including SPIE and the International Commission for Optics as well as numerous other journals.
The Electro-Optics program at SDSU innovatively combines laboratory instruction, lectures, and thesis research and has attained an international reputation for SDSU for the past 20 years. Professors Davis and Morris have a combination of approximately 60 MS theses, 150 BS theses, and greater than 70 publications in refereed journals (with more than 55 of these with BS or MS student co-authors). There is also a great deal of international activity with important collaborations with researchers in other countries. Students have had excellent results obtaining employment in this field or access to graduate schools for Ph.D. work. The field serves to attract students from other universities in the country. The program has great support from government and industry allowing us to maintain high quality teaching and research.
II. Condensed Matter Physics.
Condensed matter is the area of most research in physics, with enormous implications in the economy, and technological developments. The experimental Condensed Matter Physics program has two members, Professors Oseroff and Torikachvili. NSF has funded Professor Oseroff's program continuously since 1985, one year after his arrival at SDSU. He has published well over 100 papers in refereed journals during this period. Many of those papers have students as co-authors. He is also a principal member of the Material Research Science and Engineering Center at UCSD. Professor Oseroff has collaborative efforts with a very large number of other laboratories, both national and international. These collaborative efforts include colleagues at, the Magnet Lab at Tallahassee, LANL, Lucent (formally Bell Labs), Campinas (Brazil), Bariloche (Argentina), Parma-Rome (Italy), and Compostela-Zaragoza (Spain). External funding is supporting all these collaborations. As a consequence of these collaboration agreements between SDSU with the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), the Xunta de Galicia (Spain) and the Universidad de Cuyo (Argentina) have been signed. In addition he had brought into the program over $500,000 in donated equipment from Institutions such as LANL, UCSD, Navy, and Industries.
Professor Torikachvili's research since coming to SDSU in 1987 has generated over 70 papers in refereed journals, most involving students from SDSU and elsewhere. He has collaborated actively with the neutron scattering facilities at Brookhaven and Los Alamos, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Los Alamos, and the Universities of Sao Paulo (USP) and Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil. His SDSU-USP project was awarded a 3-year grant from the NSF to start in July of 1998.
Students from the Condensed Matter Program have gone on to excellent Ph.D. programs and/or have obtained very well paying employment in industry.
III. Radiological Health Physics
Radiological health physics (RHP) is not only a program of education and research within the physics department, but it is unique since it is also a master's degree program that is separate from the master’s degree program in Physics. The department has only one permanent faculty member devoted to this graduate program. To maintain a viable program for the present and the future another tenure-track position is necessary.
Over the last 10 years the department has graduated 54 students with the MS degree in radiological health physics. Twenty of these students completing a master's thesis and the other 34 students all completed at least three units of research and the comprehensive exam (Plan B). There is a continuing demand for graduates of this program and this demand is projected to increase well into the future.
Students from the RHP program have been very successful in obtaining employment and reaching high levels of professional growth in their fields. Employment opportunities exist in both the private and governmental sectors. Also students who have chosen to continue their education leading to a doctorate have discovered the preparation from SDSU is unsurpassed.
We have gained a national reputation and are one of only fourteen programs nationwide recognized by the Department of Energy. Also our program at SDSU is the only one of its kind in the California State University system. The program has great support from government and industry allowing us to maintain high quality teaching and research.
Although our program has been very successful we can not sit still as other RHP programs in the Western United States are expanding and therefore in time will pass us by. If we wish to maintain ourselves as a major player, continue to attract high quality students and external funding we must hire another permanent faculty member in the near future.
IV. Computational Physics
Computational Physics is arguably one of the fastest growing and most exciting areas of pure and applied research in physics. Recently, the American Physical Society has created a separate division exclusively devoted to Computational Physics (DCOMP). In countless fields of science computers are being used to tackle many problems of basic and practical interest.
At the same time, this emerging field provides the opportunity for physics faculty to pursue cutting-edge research that can fruitfully involve undergraduate and graduate students, with minimal funding required. Students acquire valuable computing skills that enable them to seek successfully employment outside academia. With the appointment of an assistant professor in the fall of 1997 the department substantially increased our strength in this area. Concurrently, the physics department has acquired a cluster of six high-speed Alpha workstations to be devoted to research and training of students.
Shortly after joining the department, our new faculty member was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to perform basic research involving high-performance computing; at the present time, he has secured for the department a total of $115,000 in extramural research funding for the next three years. This is an indication of the funding potential of this area, which is in our view superior to other, more traditional areas of theoretical research. Ongoing collaborative research efforts have been established with various institutions, including University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Pennsylvania State University, University of Delaware, the International School for Advanced Studies (Trieste, Italy), and the Indian Institute of Technology
Comprehensive Hiring Plan
The physics department is strongly committed to the teacher-scholar model. We take great pride in the fact that great many of our students at both the undergraduate and graduate level participate in research that ultimately leads to them being co-authors of refereed scientific publications. Learning involves much more than sitting in classrooms. All faculty that we hire must not only be able to be excellent classroom instructors but also be able to serve as mentors to our students. Physics research is in general expensive and new faculty must be able to seek out grants, gifts and contracts that will support their research.
The department also is committed to maintaining a diverse faculty that will provide students with an international perspective of physics. Three of our present faculty are foreign born and all of our research active faculty have extensive contacts and collaborations with every region of the world. We expect this to continue with our new faculty hires.
The department presently is engaged in a number of community out reach programs, such as "Seeking Out Science", "Inner-Outer Space" and "Science Olympiad". New faculty will have to be able to continue these activities.
The department is a strong believer in the importance of interdisciplinary programs. As discussed below the department is actively engaged in creating a computational physics program. This program will be important part of the interdisciplinary computational science program.
I. At the present time there exists a unique opportunity to establish the SDSU physics department as an important player in the area of computational physics. Physics departments everywhere are beginning to recognize the importance of computational physics and are starting to consider having computational physics as a component of their program. At this time we have a head start on these departments which we should not squander. Two more faculty member in computational physics will solidify our standing in this area.
Computational Physics also has the potential to broadly interact with the recently approved interdisciplinary Computational Science Masters Degree. Although the impetus behind this degree program has come from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, the degree will be hollow without the participation of physical and/or biological scientists. A strong computational physics program will greatly strengthen this interdisciplinary degree.
For these reason we currently actively searching for another faculty member in computational physics. With the already existing departmental facilitates as well as our access to the supercomputer center and our inclusion in the new high speed network, a minimal amount of startup funds will be required (~$40K).
II. When Professor Morris retires the department will lose a faculty member who is an outstanding optics experimentalist and who mentors a significant number of undergraduates and graduate students. In addition, he teaches a critically important junior laboratory course. His retirement will leave a significant hole in the optics program and in laboratory instruction. The optics program and our emphasis on laboratory instruction are key strengths of our department and we must not lose any continuity in theses areas.
Thus we propose that the second tenure-track hire be an optics experimentalist. We anticipate that startup funds for this position will need to be about $150K.
III. To solidify our position in computational physics we will need one more computational physicist. Thus we propose that the third tenure-track hire be a computational physicist. Again only a minimal amount of startup funds will be required (~$40K).
IV. At present the Radiological Health Physics program has only one permanent faculty member who is responsible for directing the program as well as supervising almost all the master degree theses done in this area. We see the potential of this program becoming broader by interacting with the upcoming environmental sciences interdisciplinary degree program. To broaden the program in this manner will require an additional faculty member.
Thus we propose that the fourth tenure-track appointment be in the area of radiological health physics/environmental science. We anticipate that startup funds for this position will need to be about $75K.
V. We anticipate that the interconnection between optics and materials science will continue to grow. The San Diego region already has many high-tech companies working in this area. Since we have strengths in both of these experimental areas, we believe that hiring an experimentalist in this area will not only maintain our excellence in condensed matter and optics but will allow us to have excellent ties to local industry.
Thus we propose that the fifth tenure-track appointment be in the area of optics/materials science. This is an important area for combining these two department strengths because so many of the recent developments in electro-optics combine condensed matter physics to obtain devices with key applications in optics. We anticipate that startup funds for this position will need to be about $150K.
Lecturer Support
Besides permanent faculty appointments the department needs lecturer support. We have two permanent lecturers (Gordon Shackelford and John Ferguson). John is a very important contributor to our undergraduate laboratory teaching programs. Gordon is not only a very important contributor to our undergraduate laboratory teaching programs but also contributes to the Radiological Health Physics program. In addition we anticipate lecturer support will continue to be required NS 100 and Physics 170.
If we area gong to maintain the RHP program with just one permanent faculty member for the next few years we will need continuing support for outside lectures. In addition, for some RHP courses the needed expertise is only available off campus.
Graduate Teaching Assistants
The department will continue to need graduate teaching assistants to support the large number of lower division laboratory course that we offer. These assistantships are the primary financial support for most of our graduate students.
Space and Facilities Issues
Computational Physics Space
:We continue to envision converting the space currently occupied by Environmental Health and Safety into a "Center for Computational Physics". This would be a large space with a central public area where people could interact, surrounded by partitioned off desks with workstations or terminals for faculty and students. A main function of the center would be to conduct research and education in applications of distributed parallel processing to problems in condensed matter physics, and AMO (atomic molecular and optical) physics.
At the present time the Computational Physics Laboratory and the Environmental Modeling Laboratory are sharing a small research room. The Environmental Modeling Laboratory had outgrown its space in a faculty office. The Environmental Modeling Laboratory carries out research and teaching in the area of physical environmental sciences. Specifically, this laboratory carries out computer modeling of physical process in the environment and the utilization of geographic information system analysis.
As both the Computational Physics and Environmental Modeling programs grow, sharing space will not be feasible. The department plans to move the Computational Physics Laboratory into the space presently occupied by Environmental Health and Safety. The previous continually supported the return space to physics when Environmental Health and Safety moved to the new science building.
Office Space
There is a critical lack of office space for visiting faculty, lecturers and graduate students. Graduate teaching assistants are housed in two small interior rooms originally intended for lecture demonstration equipment. These rooms should be returned to their original purpose and adequate office space be provided for the GTA's. The department regularly employs lecturers both for large and small classes. These part time faculty need to have office space to carry the teaching mission of the department. Finally the department has a continuing stream of visitors, both long and short term, that should be provided with decent office space. There is adequate office space in the physics building. It is simply occupied by non-physics faculty and staff. When the new science building is completed, this office space should be returned to physics.
Obligatory disclaimer
Last updated: 6th September 1999