Hello Alums!

Here is our annual holiday newsletter.  We greatly appreciate all of your responses. It is a joy to read of your many paths.

I would like to give you a brief update on the department..  Nelson Christensen has retired as chair after his three-year stint. This year Cindy Blaha is on sabbatical.  Visiting Assistant Professor Hector Calderon, who spent last year with us , has now moved on to other pursuits.  We have three new assistant professors this year, two of whom some of you know very well.  Dwight Luhman is our new tenure track experimentalist, coming to us from UMass and Princeton.  Liz McDowell ’02, a biophysicist, was kind enough to spend this year and next with us after graduate and postdoctoral research and teaching at Michigan.  We were also fortunate to lure planetary Astrophysicist John Weiss ’99 here for this year, after his graduate studies at Colorado and research work  at the Space Sciences Institute.

We especially thank you for staying in touch and for being available for our majors. Many of our students have benefited in all kinds of ways from their contacts with you.

We hope to see many of you in person before too long!  If you’re going to be in the area and have time to stop by, please let us know!

Joel Weisberg

Chair