Class of 2000

Kevin Covey
Email: kevincovey@fastmail.fm
Well, there is certainly no confusion what the big news is in this year's update -- Sarah and I got engaged this spring, on a two and a half week vacation through Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. The trip was filled with relaxation and fun, and was the first big vacation we'd taken in way too long. We've just picked a date recently, so we'll be getting married next year over Memorial Day weekend. Life aside from wedding planning is going relatively well; work is going fairly steadily, though never as quickly as I would hope. I'm entering the second year of my postdoc, so while I do have another year before I need to apply for jobs, I'm testing the waters this fall by applying for a few particularly compelling positions. But I'm definitely feeling a little pressure to get various projects written up and out the door so I can be a strong candidate next fall when I'm on the market again for real. Not much other major news, really. Sarah and I are having fun exploring of the northeast, and are hoping to do some more next summer. The last warm weekend of the summer we took the commuter rail up to Walden Pond, which was interesting -- I'm hoping to go back up once each season to see how the landscape changes over the year. We also just got back from a visit to New Hampshire last weekend, where we stayed with Aaron Dotter and Kira Campbell; we took in some crisp fall air and foliage while walking the dogs, and then on Monday I went in to Dartmouth to give a talk, which was a lot of fun. All in all, a good year, though it went too quickly for my taste. And the welcome mat is out, as always; if people are passing through Boston, please do drop a line so we can get together!

Aaron Dotter
Email: Aaron.l.dotter@dartmout.edu
Phone: 603-863-8775
Address: P.O. Box 836
Hanover, NH 03755
The first two thirds of 2006 were busy and eventful. I defended my Ph.D. thesis at Dartmouth in April and then graduated in June. Almost immediately after graduating I took a rather long trip to Vancouver to work with a collaborator. I had the pleasure of serendipitously meeting another alum, Mike Siegel, back in January and we subsequently wrote a paper together. (Mike wrote most of it.) Good stuff. This autumn has been less eventful. I started a 1-year postdoc at Dartmouth (and didn't receive pay or benefits for the first two months). The possibility of better things to come is my strongest motivator at this point. Next year I'm hoping to find a job in Canada, ay?

That brings me up to the present. I invited Kevin Covey to give a seminar talk at Dartmouth on Nov. 12th and he obliged. It was tight. I think it is really nice that, without either of us attempting to do so, Kevin and I actually have some overlap in our research and can work together on occasion. That's all for the Physics & Astronomy news.

In other news, Kira and I celebrated our 6th anniversary in August and I'll be turning 30 in a few days. My aunt once told me that Carleton is a "Bastion of Liberalism" and, in hopes of justifying that stereotype, we bought a Prius. It is an excellent car but does not do well in the mud. Take care and have a great year!

Andrew Noble
Email: anoble@physics.cornell.edu
Hey everybody! I just got back from Carleton. Teach for America keeps flying me back- the best perk of being an alum. Carleton students are so interesting and easy to talk to. I struck up a conversation with a sophomore at Blue Monday. He's considering a double major in computer science and studio art, but a class in psychology seems to be what he's most excited about right now. The physics faculty continue to work incredibly hard to make great teaching and research happen. They really spoiled us silly. I never appreciated it at the time.

Emily and I are continuing to enjoy the good life of Ithaca. She's got about a year left in her program. I'm finishing up this year. We're starting to contemplate the two-body problem. I think Cindy derived that one for us in Classy, but this time round it's different somehow. We took a great kayak trip around Acadia National Park. It was the end of May, and we only saw two other kayaks over those eight days. It's a magical place. We saw lots of seals and seal pups, a few bald eagles, and a bunch of artic birds called black guillemots. Long story short, we got hooked on the tandem sea kayak thing, and a week after we came home, Emily found a used one online. We picked it from a used car dealership in northern New Jersey and now we can paddle the finger lakes.

Class of 2001

Mekayla Beaver
Email: Mekayla.beaver@gmail.com
Hello to all you poor souls suffering through another winter in the northern hemisphere. It's the year of perpetual summer for me, having left Boston in August for a year on the other side of the world. My boyfriend Greg and I ditched our apartment, our jobs, and most of our stuff, packed two backpacks, a tent, a campstove and a guitar, waved goodbye to our friends and family, and headed for the southern hemisphere. After two months traveling in Australia, we've settled down for a while in Christchurch New Zealand, and may even do a wee bit of work here. In the meantime though, the southern Alps are calling and we make frequent trips up into the hills. The real trick would be to find a job that allows me to enjoy the outdoors and get paid for it. Of course, the other day we visited a beautiful lake, and what do you know, on the hill far above the lake, with a wonderful view, were three observatories. If only I had listened to Cindy and followed the astronomy side of the department. If any of you have suggestions about ways to get to Antartica from here, pass them my way. (Ahem Carl, Phil...)

Pascal Mickelson
Email: mickelsp@gmail.com
Address: 1710 Albans Road
Houston, TX 77005
URL http://mac.andcheese.org
I was such a slacker the past two years that I'm trying to make up for it this year by sending in my response the very day that the postal service delivered Nelson's exhortation to my mailbox. By replying so early, I'm sure I'll miss some major bit of news in the next month that would make my response much more interesting. Alas.

I am still in graduate school at Rice University, working towards my doctorate by studying cold atoms. The life of an experimentalist is one of a repairman, so I'm sure I will exit graduate school well qualified to diagnose and fix problems. Unfortunately, it's not clear whether I'll ever have actual results to go along with that skill set.

Houston remains hot and humid most of the year. While today is a curious exception to that rule, I suppose poor weather is a useful tool for keeping me in the lab rather than out of it. On increasingly infrequent occasions, it is still possible to find me chasing pieces of plastic around a grassy field. This is a good thing.
Otherwise, I occasionally run into Carleton physics alums whether by design or not. The APS Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics meeting is always a likely spot, but apart from that, I make it to Colorado often enough to see Ben Luey and Mekayla Beaver once or twice each year. I wish you all well and best of luck in your endeavors.

Carl Tape
Email: carltape@gps.caltech.edu
Graduate School rolls along here at Caltech, and I plan to finish my PhD in seismology in June. The year's highlights included getting married to Elisabeth Nadin in "da UP" Michigan on Lake Superior in July. Second to that was a conference in Corsica (France, technically) on computational seismology. The Europeans have it just right, when it comes to hosting conferences, with plenty of scheduled fun time!

Class of 2002

Henry Brock
Email: hpbrock@gmail.com
Since May I've been living in San Diego, California with my girlfriend Beth. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a master's degree in Materials Science and am working full-time at the Pedal Pushing Bicycle Shop as a mechanic while I look for more career-related employment. Bike-work is great, though I would rather be designing and building components than just doing maintenance and sales. Most people here are shocked that we don't own a car. I've taken to wearing an N95 mask on commutes after the recent fires to ward off road-dust, but other than that, the potholed roads, and disrespectful drivers, biking in San Diego is a real pleasure. There are many incentives to get out of the city, though. The Stone Brewery is a prime example, and we have invested in a stainless steel 40 oz. growler to make the 80-mile round-trip all the more rewarding. The bike-route situation out here isn't ideal, so I'm working with some local officials to help improve it. There's a good chance we can get the rural Interstate 8 open to bike traffic all the way to El Centro, for example. There are pros and cons to all this, sure, but the more we can do under our own power the better off we'll be.

Katie Devine
Email: devine@astro.wisc.edu
Phone: 507-261-9310
Address: 1432 Morrison St #2
Madison, WI 53703
I've moved from Socorro, NM back to Madison, WI to complete my astronomy PhD and figure out what I will do next. How did two years in New Mexico go by so fast? I'm very busy with school these days. I've been TAing this semester for the first time in years, and I love it. It's a nice break from the paper writing and data crunching that takes up the rest of my time. I miss the mountains and sunshine of New Mexico, but Madison's social scene tops Socorro's, so it is good to be back. Chris, my boyfriend and New Mexican native, came with me to Madison and brought an entire freezer of chilies to prevent withdrawal. His presence and the ubiquitous chilies in our meals have eased my transition back to the Midwest. I'm having fun teaching him about canoeing and cheese curd appreciation. Hopefully by this time next year I'll have an update on where life will take us after Madison, but until then, stop by and say hi if you're in the area.

Sara Karbeling
Email: karbelis@yahoo.com
Phone: 515-205-3460
Address: 534 29th St. #11
Des Moines, IA 50312
Greetings! It was so nice to see so many physics people this summer when we were back on campus for the reunion! Olin still looks (and smells) the same! Life in Iowa is going well. I'm living in Des Moines and teaching AP Physics and honors math at the talented/gifted academy within the Des Moines public schools. I love my job - the kids ask great questions and keep me on my toes! Today we were covering momentum in AP Physics - and I was pleased to share with my students that my cat (Photon) was also studying momentum last night. She repeatedly crouched down and ran into her cat kennel and the combined mass slid across the floor. Physics is everywhere! The big news from this past year is that Adam and I are engaged! We're now working on planning the summer wedding while keeping ourselves busy at work besides. I hope this finds everyone well - take care and have a wonderful 2008!

Jeff Paine
Email: Jeff.h.paine@gmail.com
Being my first letter to the department since graduation, where do I begin? Do I mention my time in Ann Arbor, Michigan doing geophysics research after graduation? Or my time in the Earth & Planetary Sciences department at Berkeley? My search for a career where I could apply science to my evolving values regarding the environment? Do I detail my backpacking adventures around the country after graduating with an MS, a wonderful summer spent living under a tarp with numerous books to keep me company between visiting various cities? I should at least mention that after that traveling I successfully and enjoyably lived in an office on the Berkeley campus for 5 months, during which time I wasn't even a student. Though I was not gainfully employed at the time, I got lots of work done, and decided to pursue a degree in Chemical Engineering (the flexibility of a physics degree!). Later that winter I met my girlfriend, Melanie, at an In & Out in Auburn, CA, both of us coming back from skiing in Tahoe. She's my best friend, and make sure to look for us in the upcoming TV commercial as In&Out expands from its West Coast base to take over the fast food world.

So here I am, living in Austin, Texas with Melanie, starting graduate school for a second time and beginning to formulate a project at the nexus of Air Quality and Energy Policy. I'm excited to get going with research, and equally excited to get more involved with policy problems over the long term. One advantage of Austin to Berkeley is that I can afford to have a small yard, and I developed a quick addiction to gardening. Austin is growing fast, like much of the country, but it's not so big that I can't bike to campus each day. And with the copious festivals, music venues, rock climbing, and school to boot I am staying busy and happy. If anyone is passing through Austin and needs a place to stay, make sure to look me up and we can trade stories of Carleton lore. I'll only charge you a full tour of my yard of vegetables and native Texas plants.

John Parejko
Email: John.Parejko@alumni.carleton.edu
Phone: 215-895-2786
Greetings, from rainy Philadelphia! I miss Northfield! Still haven't gotten used to the big city, though we have been taking in more than our share of Philly Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. Alina (Badus '04) and I are still together, and we've added a new one to the family: a 30kg standard poodle. We let his fur grow out, so he looks like a big, fluffy muppet (and behaves like one too! Springs for legs!).

I was saddened to hear about Warren's death. I still remember him trying to help ham-handed me build a C-clamp in the machine shop. It was successful, in spite of myself. I still use it occasionally, to hold models together while glue dries. He will not be forgotten.

Graduate school at Drexel is still dragging me along. My first (first author) paper should appear in the January issue of the Astronomical Journal, so I guess that means I'm getting somewhere. I'm switching my research focus from low-luminosity active galaxies, to those bright beacons, the quasars. I am using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for most of my work. It is a great publicly available database containing 5-band photometry for 15% of the sky and spectra of more than a million objects. And they have a wonderful web-based system for exploring it: www.sdss.org. Also, it is included in the Sky View in Google Earth, so everyone can enjoy a "road map to the sky." Nifty!

I saw Cindy, several undergraduates and a number of alumni at the January 2006 AAS meeting, and I'll be at the coming one in Austin. Maybe I'll see some of you there or somewhere else? If you come to Philly, we'll take you to the art museum, and you can see the new statue of Rocky.

Kenji Spielman
Email: skenjis@gmail.com
Phone: 503-313-1208
Address: 2917 SW Hume Ct.
Portland, OR 97219
I'm in Portland, OR, taking undergrad level electrical engineering classes at Portland State to set myself up for a masters program next year, probably somewhere on the west coast. The academic level here certainly makes me miss Carleton, but I suppose that is to be expected. The strangest part is discussing a device or a physical property and spending the bare minimum of time on understanding what it does, but not much on why. A friend of mine, a mechanical engineer, once told me engineers love physicists; the physicists come up with the theories, the engineers make all the money of them. We'll see, but I'm still a physicist at heart.

I'm roasting coffee for a coffee shop in Tigard, one of the Portland suburbs and playing some frisbee in my spare time. Frisbee tournaments are certainly a good way to run into Carls.

Class of 2003

Daniel Miller
Email: danmillerlighting@yahoo.com
Phone: 503-282-1849
Address: 3931 NE 78th Ave
Portland, OR 97213
It's been a busy and exciting year for Jess Felt '02 and me. We found out Jess's residency match results last March; she (and I) would spend her first year of residency in Portland, OR doing a general internship and then move up to Seattle, WA for the following 3 years of Anesthesiology residency. That meant that while I had hoped to begin school again for an MS in EE at University of Washington in the fall, I would have to put that off for another year. So I'm taking undergrad EE classes here at Portland State University in the evenings, while working a day job.

The discovery of where we would move came in the midst of the last few months of serious wedding planning for our June wedding. The timeline went something like this: Jess graduates from medical school May 18th, leave Rochester for the cross-country drive to Seattle for the wedding May 22nd, arrive in Seattle about 5 days later, get married on June 2nd, take a honeymoon for a week, drive to Portland and find a place to live in time for Jess to start residency on June 21st. It was a very busy month, but everything went great (except for the car breaking down during the cross-country drive!). Our wedding was beautiful and all that we wanted it to be. We had an awesome honeymoon up in the Canadian Rockies in Jasper National Park. And we found a nice 2-bedroom house to rent in NE Portland.

With Jess (now Dr. Jessica Miller) busy at the hospital, I settled in to look for work. I hoped to find a job with one of the many tech companies located in Portland doing electronics work. With nothing forthcoming I did a few odd theatre jobs through connections from Rochester. But fortune was with me, and as I write this at the end of October I will be starting a job at a company called Vernier in Beaverton tomorrow. I will be doing electro-mechanical assembly and testing of their line of lab sensors and probes designed for middle and high school science classes. I'm very excited about it. I'm also taking a class as I mentioned earlier, and playing French horn in a community wind band. Life is busy and good. I'm also excited about and eagerly awaiting our 5 year reunion this June. I hope to see a lot of you there! Until then, if you're ever in Portland look us up; we've got the spare room made up and waiting.

Tim O’Connell
Email: Oconnelt2003@yahoo.com
Phone: 217-377-7271
Address: 765 Prestwick PT.
Champaign, IL 61822
My big news of the year is that I got married on September 1st. I bucked tradition and married a non-Carl, a great girl named Megan from here in Illinois. Fellow '03 physics alums Eli Morris and Nate Pogue were in attendance, and a good time was had by all. Megan and I traveled to Hawaii for our honeymoon, but we let Nelson down and didn't learn to surf.
When I wasn't planning, participating in, or recovering from the wedding, I found some time for some research and schoolwork. In the spring I was a TA for the electric machines lab course here at the U of I and had a lot of fun teaching students how to avoid measuring line-to-line current in a three-phase power source. In May I went to Antalya, Turkey for a machines and electric drives conference. When I wasn't attending the conference, I found some time to check out the ancient Roman ruins and swim in the Mediterranean. I'm currently preparing to take my preliminary exam and TA'ing a power electronics course. I had hoped to be Dr. O'Connell by the time our 5th reunion rolls around, but it looks like it might take a few more months than that. Looking forward to seeing all my '03 classmates in June!

Nathaniel Pogue
Email: npogue@physics.tamu.edu
Phone: 979-574-5672
I am still at Texas A&M University working on my PhD. We are working on some pretty exciting research here in the lab. We are working on a cavity for ILC and pushing it past the BCS limit. We are working with NASA to create a magnetic shield for a mission to Mars and the AMS project. We are also working on our high field magnets along with commissioning a RF Plasma deposition source. I had breakfast with billionaire George Mitchell to fund a project, he said no, but three months later donated enough money to build two new physics buildings here at A&M. They will be up and running in a year. As for traveling I have been to Los Alamos, SLAC, Germany, Las Vegas, and Mexico and probably other places I have forgotten. Since last November I have seen a few Carls along the way: Nick Auger and Eli Morris at New Years up in Bemidji, Kelen Tuttle at SLAC, and Eli Morris, Ashley Ross, and Tim O’Connell at Tim’s wedding. I commute to Corpus Christi about twice a month to see my girlfriend of 3 years who is in the nursing program. We have three dogs: English Bulldog, Great Pyrenees, and Dalmatian/Bassett. I still toss around the Frisbee and have played in a few tournaments but nothing major. Overall, things are going well, but I’m ready to graduate.

Mathew Strait
Address: 1631 Selby Ave #1
St. Paul, MN 55102

Class of 2004

Adam Libson
Email: alibson@gmail.com
I am still in grad school in Austin, TX, where I am in the third year of my doctoral studies. Research is going well (by which I mean I get little sleep but am making good progress on my experiment). We have had some good results, so I'm pretty happy school wise. In other news, I am still rock climbing whenever I can, (Austin has a surprisingly good rock) and there's a small group I've been going with from my lab. The summer wasn't too bad this year, but that might have been because I was in the air conditioning of the lab all the time. Feel free to look me up if you're ever passing through. Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well.

Ashley Ross
Email: Aross2@astro.uiuc.edu
Address: 211 West Green Street, # 10
Urbana, IL 61801
A lot has happened in the last while. I am now in my 4th year of grad school in the astronomy department at UIUC. I got married in June to fellow Carl alum Mikel Williams. She got her masters in social work last spring, and is now working at a couple of schools in the area. I've been playing a lot of softball, which is pretty serious around here. My team had a winning record in the Fall after a disappointing summer season. Fellow Carl physics alum Tim O'Connell was our center fielder and lead-off man.

School-wise, I'm going to attempt to graduate with my Phizzle Dizzle (or PhD for those who don't talk Snoop) in May or August. This assumes that I'll get a job offer that I want. I'm aiming high and hoping to get a postdoc fellowship somewhere that will allow me to continue my research into the measurements of higher-order correlations of galaxies. If you'd like to learn how they can be used to probe the evolution of star-forming galaxies, the general relationship between the clustering of baryons and clustering of dark matter, and how to do all of this while self-consistently constraining cosmological parameters, look up my latest couple of papers (and ignore most of the first one). Its hard to say where I'll end up, but The University of Chicago's involvement in the Dark Energy Survey makes it the most attractive option to me.

Class of 2005

Seth Cooper
Email: cooper@physics.umn.edu
I finally traveled to CERN this year as a part of my work on CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), one of two large general-purpose detectors at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). I was there for about 6 weeks over the summer, and I just got back from another several-week trip in October. I will be leaving again shortly and staying until the lab shuts down at the end of the year. CERN is a great place to be with a lot of scientists around—this summer I bumped into Kira Grogg '05 in the cafeteria, also a CMS collaborator! I'm still based at the University of Minnesota, and my service work involves developing data monitoring tools for the CMS EM calorimeter (Ecal). I recently joined an analysis group to search for supersymmetric particles, and I was excited to learn that some of my work in that area will be published soon in an internal note. Now I just have to hope that the collider turns on in the not-too-distant future!

Kyle Willett
Email: willettk@gmail.com
I defended my Comps 2 in astrophysics at the University of Colorado this October and have now advanced to Ph.D. candidacy. I’m looking forward to spending more time exploring the Rocky Mountains now that my next-to-last hurdle is cleared!

Class of 2006

Dave Williams
Email: Dave.williams36@gmail.com
Phone: 713-44601485
Address: 219 Second Street
Denton, TX 76201
I’m currently working towards a masters degree in Environmental Science at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and loving applying physics to subjects like geomorphology and hydrology. My thesis will involve developing a native plant palate for green roofs in Texas, and I hope to join UT Austin as a PhD student helping to further promote green roofs and water conservation.

Class of 2007

Glen Perry
Email: perryg@mail.utexas.edu
Phone: 518-588-1468
Address: 2804 Rio Grande Street
Apt 206
Austin, TX 78705
I am currently getting started as a Graduate Student at the University of Texas, Austin in the Mechanical Engineering Department (Nuclear Engineering Subfield). I've been appointed as a GRE (Graduate Research Assistant) and am working up at UT's research reactor on neutron shielding/activation experiments. Getting used to the weather (hot, humid, no snow). Still active in Chess, and am now an officer for UT's chess club, which is going very well.

Katrina Pitas
Email: Katrina.pitas@gmail.com
Address: c/o Mr. Ren
Waishibu
Fenyang Zhongxue
Fenyang, Shanxi 032200
People's Republic of China
Well, I've been teaching English in Fenyang, China with two other alums (Joanna Lee '07 and Julie Young '06) for two months now, and it's pretty great. I'm learning Chinese, the school provides tai chi lessons five days a week, and Chinese food is delicious. Teaching classes of 60+ students at a time is challenging (oh so challenging), but rewarding (oh so rewarding).

Kassandra Wells
Email: Kassandra.wells@gmail.com
I'm trudging through my first year as an Astronomy and Planetary Science grad student at Cornell University. I've been taking classes on everything from E&M to Radar Remote Sensing, and continuing my research on Lunar cratering. The eventual hope is to use radar to study planetary surfaces and maybe delve into studies of astronomically forced climate change on Earth and elsewhere. I love Ithaca and have met plenty of very nice people here, but I still miss the Physics Department at Carleton :)