Faculty

Cindy Blaha
cblaha@carleton.edu
The year sped by as usual and I keep trying to catch up with it. My family is doing well. Katie is enjoying her second year of history graduate school and Jenny is a sophomore at Carleton. It looks like she will be a physics major – excellent! Olin is busy as usual and my students and I continue our work on emission-line regions in the Local Group. So far we have one galaxy in the Carleton Catalog and only eight left to go. This year I’ve enjoyed working with alum Barbara Whitten on an NSF ADVANCE mentoring project with a cohort of female physics professors at liberal arts colleges. It has been a pleasure brainstorming ways to encourage more women to choose a career in physics and took make our field more welcoming for all. As always, I hope all is well with you and yours. Take care, keep in touch and have a wonderful new year!

Nelson Christensen
nchriste@carleton.edu
It has been another long and productive year. Fortunately this is my last year as chair, and it will be with pleasure that I pass the torch on to Joel at the start of July. As always, teaching is keeping me very busy too. The students continue to be motivated and enthusiastic. The gravitational radiations research with LIGO has been very successful again this year at Carleton; the students are making substantial contributions to the effort. I am so happy to be working with such capable and interested students.

Melissa Eblen-Zayas
meblenza@carleton.edu
After teaching materials science last winter, teaching E&M in the spring, and successfully making it through my third year review, this fall has had a very different feel because I’m on sabbatical for the year. Nevertheless, I’ve been spending a lot of time on campus in my lab as I received my first NSF grant last spring to support my studies of Eu-rich EuO. I’m enjoying the chance to focus fully on research, and although I’m absent from the classroom, I do have students working with me in the lab. Personally, one highlight of the year was the trip Roberto and I took to France in September. Best wishes for the new year!

Rich Noer
rnoer@carleton.edu
Travels this past year took Raymonde and me to San Diego for a week in March, to New England and Montreal for two weeks in May, and to Seattle and Vancouver for two weeks in September. Otherwise we’ve been working in our garden, taking in plays and concerts in the Cities, and continuing various involvements in Northfield—and I try to get to most of the physics talks by comps students and visiting luminaries. Though all of my old physics students have graduated by now, the current ones look as good as ever. And it was great to see so many of you old grads at reunion this past June.

Arjendu Pattanayak
apattana@carleton.edu
Hello everyone, has it already been a year? Let’s see: Teaching the usual courses of Revolutions, Quantum (which I suspect Bill is going to wrestle away from me after a 4-year run, so I am definitely going to enjoy it while I can) and various flavors of Intro (can I just say I love Visual Python?! 21 lines of code to be able to see planets do Keplerian orbits, and not many more to see binary star dynamics). Research paid off nicely this year, with two papers in Phys. Rev. Lett. and a couple of others in submission/in the works.

I’ve been doing some administrating recently, as co-director of the Carleton Interdisciplinary Science and Mathematics Initiative, and it’s a very different way of being. It’s not all under control yet, but some of it is rewarding, including helping land $1.6M from HHMI for research and teaching at Carleton.

Meera’s an extremely tall almost-6-year-old in kindergarten and has been reading up a storm. I’m proud to report sneaking in some atomic physics perspective into her kindergarten curriculum (long story).

Feel free to keep in more continuous touch through Facebook (a few of you already do) and my blog “Confused at a Higher Level” (http://arjendu.wordpress.com)

Happy Solstice Celebration of choice!

Bruce Thomas
bthomas@carleton.edu
The world traveling slowed down a bit this year – just one trip. My wife agreed to give a workshop on modern teaching methods at a university in Taiwan, then discovered that half of the audience would be engineers. So she enlisted me as an assistant. We were there for a week and a half. She worked hard and I filled in a little around the edges. On the weekends we traveled in Taiwan. Very interesting but, by the end, we agreed that we have had enough traveling for awhile. Domestically, we flew to Connecticut a couple of times to see our third and newest grandchild. Professionally, I got far enough into an interesting quantum mechanics problem to prepare a short presentation for the Minnesota physics teachers group. But it was a lot harder than it used to be.

Bill Titus
btitus@carleton.edu
Ah, another year as quickly passed. I’m still enjoying teaching and include among my students, children of those I have taught in the past. I have yet to teach any grandchildren, but that may be coming soon. In case you haven’t heard, the college is moving to a five-course teaching load (from six) and the faculty will vote on a new set of graduation requirements early next year. If you ever are in Northfield, please do stop by -- if not to see us, then at least to look at your old comps paper. May you have a joyous holiday season.

Joel Weisberg
jweisber@carleton.edu
Hello alums!
The story can finally be told: The names of the three scofflaws who painted my Goodsell door with stars, planets, the Starship Enterprise, and Pac-Man. I figure they are beyond the long arm of the law some 20 or so years later, so I have published their names next to the picture of the door and me on my website at http://people.carleton.edu/~jweisber/joelhome.html. (Well, only their first names and last initials to throw off the feds a little.)

Life continues to be good. Ben started Northfield Middle School this year and likes it very much. I enjoyed seeing some of you at reunion. In July I got drafted at the last minute to be the faculty person on an alumni wagon train and camping trip near the Grand Tetons. It was great! Every day I would ride out to some nice place in a horse-drawn wagon, have lunch there, and then ride a horse back to camp. I brought a Meade 8-inch telescope and the skies were spectacular - reminiscent of the NM mountains where I got my start. It is always fun to be with alums, even if not physicists! Some of my early Astro students came along with partners and children, and we all had a great time. You probably got a pack of postcards from the Alumni Office a few weeks ago with my mug on one. Next summer I am the faculty person on an alumni rafting trip at Arches National Monument, Utah, and Janet and Ben will be there too. Come along! Shortly thereafter I will be taking some Carls to Australia for a month of pulsar observing and analysis.

Staff

Tom Baraniak
tbarania@carleton.edu
This year, like last, and for years to come is about raising the boys. Alex started kindergarten this year, and he has daily homework and a backpack. His brother Adam is now in first grade. He is in the Compañeros program and comes home singing in Spanish. At bedtime he does addition in his head in Spanish. Soon enough he will be talking back to mom and dad in Spanish, and we won’t have a clue to what he is saying. Or maybe we will...

Things have been running pretty smoothly from my perspective in the department. I helped with a new computer science/sculpture class where the students used little computer boards and sensors to animate interactive sculptures. I had the odious task of wiring the sensors and cables. But the outcome was really cool. For fun I am still moving along on the new advanced weather and atmospheric science station which hopefully will include a user controllable webcam on the roof of Olin.

Mary Drew

mdrew@carleton.edu

Once again it was wonderful to hear from so many of you and catch up with your careers and families. It has been another busy year for me here at Carleton in Physics and Astronomy and CISMI. On the home front it was a year of highs and lows. My father past away last spring. Though it was not unexpected, it is still difficult. I miss him, but feel blessed in that I was able to live close to him these last 17 years. My younger two girls continue to keep me busy chauffeuring them to and from music lessons, swim practices and swim meets. My oldest daughter is now receiving letters of acceptance from her college applications. It now seems real and possible that she will be going away to college next year. What a mixed blessing that will be!

Bruce Duffy
bduffy@carleton.edu
Hi folks. The last time I wrote a blurb for this newsletter I didn’t actually know any PHAS alums. Now, thanks to the graduating class of 2008, that is no longer true. I really, truly enjoyed getting to know most of you, and not infrequently wonder what kind of trouble you’re making out in the world.

Life is good. Working at Carleton agrees with me -- new friends, no commute, access to the college environment, Melissa’s chocolate brownies -- it’s all good. Don’t forget to stop by and say “Hi” if you visit Northfield. Bye for now.

Mark Zach
mzach@carleton.edu
I joined the department in July of this year as the Instrument Project Manager. For most people who know Carleton the easiest way to describe my position is to say “I am the new Warren Ringlien”. I never had the pleasure of meeting Warren, but through the eyes of his colleagues and friends I am getting to know him and have developed a respect for who he was and what he did.

I come to Carleton with a background in mechanical engineering, designing and building factory equipment for companies in the Twin Cities area. I have a strong interest in the sciences and engineering, but also in the arts, woodworking, bicycling, and a dozen other areas. I love designing things and building things in the shop and sharing these interests with others. If you are on campus, please stop by the shop in the basement of Mudd and see what’s going on.