Class of 1990

David Allaway

I am still enjoying my (relatively) new job at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, and hoping it will survive the state's budget woes. A highlight of the summer was seeing Mike and Nancy Casper during their vacation in Oregon, and taking them to some of Portland's beautiful gardens. They also stayed at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, where Doug Foxgrover once worked. Hope all is well.

Amy K Bylsma Engebretson

Email: akbedseprodigy.net

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If this note is a little incoherent, blame it on sleep deprivation. Last night Sam (born June 27th!) woke up twice and Ben (4 and learning to sleep without a gate on his bed) fell out of bed twice! Luckily, this year I am taking a break from teaching so I won't be rambling in front of students. I'm happy to report that Samuel John is a laid back, happy, healthy baby. We all think he is pretty neat. Ariel is 7 and in first grade! (I'm not quite sure how she got to be so old.) She seems to be mastering the intricacies of lunch ladies and homework assignments pretty well. Ben is enjoying going to preschool. Fargo, despite its amazing flatness, is turning out to be a good place for us.

Michael Lach

I'm now in charge of science education for the Chicago Public Schools. It's an enormous task--600 schools, 25,000 teachers, and 450,000 students--but there's a lot of community and business support to really make some thoughtful changes. My time is spent mostly in planning and in administration instead of problem sets and academics, but I still find time to coach new physics teachers in the district and visit classes as much as I can.

Mary Anne McLeod

Email: mamcleodmindspring.com

Address: 215 N. Comanche St., Flagstaff, AZ 86001

I'm still in AZ, still doing environmental consulting, but I've moved up (literally) in the world and am now living in Flagstaff. We're hoping El Nino brings us lots of snow this winter to ameliorate the drought and so we can play, of course. I'm still happily hanging out with Scott, my partner of five years. Our three "kids" are all of the canine variety, and keep us hip-deep in hilarity and fur rhinos.

David Oglesby

E-mail: david.oglesbyucr.edu

Address: 3004 Belvedere Dr., Riverside, CA 92507

Phone: (909) 682-6175

Hi everyone, I'm in the first quarter of my third year at UC Riverside as an assistant professor of seismology, and life is very good. Papers and grant proposals keep taking more time, but teaching classes is much easier the second and third times around. Married life is wonderful, and just keeps getting better. Laura and I bought a house at the beginning of the summer. It is 1.5 miles from campus, right at the edge of the Box Spring Mountains. Hiking trails in the hills begin a block from our house, and we have had a road runner and a bobcat in our yard! I've also seen my good friends and fellow physics alums Jennifer Johnson and Jenny Wurster over the past year. I hope that everyone out there in Minnesota (and scattered across the world) is doing well, and if you're in Southern California, please come visit!

Brian Risch

It has been a tough 12 months in the Telecom industry. Things went from going great in 2000- early 2001 to outright disaster in 2002. So far about 80-85% of the people at my site have been laid off!!! Luckily I am still here ... for now. I could have got out with 6 month's pay in pocket, but opted not to. ...crazy?? maybe, but the job market isn't great. I personally had to lay off many great friends and coworkers. This was about the toughest thing I have had to do. Especially since all of the people in my group were strong contributors and we had real camaraderie. Luckily about 1/2 of the layoffs were "voluntary" with the company offering a generous severance package. These folks are finding jobs now or going back to school, but new jobs seem to be taking 3-6 months to find for the people who were hit by layoffs. The funding for the joint research I had been doing with universities has been essentially eliminated except for what we were contractually obligated for. I really regret this since it was the favorite part of my job. Since I now just have one other person in my "group". I am obviously doing a lot more in the laboratory, which I enjoy. I haven't broken any equipment yet, which is pretty good for a Ph.D. I've been doing a lot of SEM and optical microscopy work which is kind of Physics type stuff.

I have continued an active travel schedule even though much less is work sponsored. I had a nice trip out to Washington State in April with my wife Holly to see my 96 year old grandmother and other relatives, then the Virgin Islands in May for a second honeymoon. On July 4th week I took Holly and the kids to Washington, DC and Lake Seneca, NY. Later in July I took Holly for a short trip to Minnesota to see my family. Last month we rented a cabin in Virginia for horseback riding, getting rained on, and a VT football game. I also took Nathan (my stepson) on a whitewater rafting trip on the Natahalia river after a week of torrential rains. We went with a group of about 20 boy scouts, and due to a shortage of guides, I was allowed to be a raft captain even though the river was about as high as it gets. I am proud to say we made it to the end of the river without capsizing and all passengers on-board. I will be presenting two papers in Orlando at the IWCS conference in November, and maybe I can convince my boss to let me go and have a wrap-up meeting for our research at Arizona State University. I always do some hiking in the mountains with Doug Adamavich (St. Olaf - '91) when I go out there. He is a good guide even though he is an Ole. We met another Carl and another Ole on the trail last time; however, we didn't stop long enough to exchange a lot of info.

Mick Veum

Email: Mick.Veumuwsp.edu

URL: http://www.uwsp.edu/physastr/veum/veum.htm

Hello again, my friends. Life in Wisconsin is as blissful as this Midwestern boy could realistically hope for. Nina and I are swell, dandy, peachy, all those happy words. We will soon celebrate the 1st birthday of our daughter Edie. Parenthood keeps us on our toes, but I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. My days at UW-Stevens Point are hectic and fulfilling. All in all, I guess a guy could do worse.

Class 1991

Juan Cabanela

URL: http://www.haverford.edu/physics-astro/Cabanela/

Another year and my how things have changed. While I am still teaching at Haverford College, this is my last year, and Catherine and I will soon be moving onward to some new job (hopefully tenure track for me).

The major change in our lives is that this time, instead of just dragging our possessions and our cats across the nation in our next move, we will also be taking our new twins! Zakari William (our son) and Carolina Rosa (our daughter) were born on October 23, about 9 weeks premature. They are in excellent health (as of this writing in early November), but will need to be in the hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for three to five more weeks. It's hard not taking your newborns home, but they are in excellent hands and it has given Catherine a chance to recover.

Hopefully when I write again, I will be at a tenure track position somewhere in the Midwest (near our families).

Neeraj Chepuri

Email: nchepuriyahoo.com

Hello! I've made my way back to Minnesota after 2 years in North Carolina and 4 years in Michigan. I'm working with a radiology group in Minneapolis at Abbott-Northwestern Hospital. I'm practicing in neuro-radiology, which means I look at a lot of MRI, CT and angiography pictures of the brain and spine. I've been at it for 3 months now, and so far it's been going well! I love being back in MN in the vicinity of so many Carleton people! My wife Carolyn and my 3-year old son Ravi are also happy to be back.

John Evans

E-mail: jevanssiwaterworks.com

URL: http://www.siwaterworks.com

Hello to all. Sorry I haven't written in a couple of years. We have been going 100 miles an hour. My wife, Elizabeth Gearin, and I moved down from Berkeley to LA about 4 years ago, just weeks after getting married. Two years ago, we were blessed with Olivia, who is amazing and keeps us very busy. We also bought our first house the week before Olivia was born. Home ownership has been quite the experience. Elizabeth is now working on her dissertation at USC, and I am just about to finish my M.B.A. at Duke (thank you Lofgren Fellowship). I just recently left my job at MEMGen in Burbank, we just sold our house in LA, and we are in the process of moving to Arlington, VA. I am starting a job with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in November. You may recall that in the X-Files, DARPA is the organization that maintains all the aliens J. In our spare time, Elizabeth has introduced me to the world of pet ownership, and we now have two wonderful little guys, Mimi and Bear, as well as fostering dogs from time to time. I would love to keep in better touch with all. Please email or come visit us in DC.

David Feldman

Email: davehornacek.coa.edu

URL: http://hornacek.coa.edu/dave/

I'm in the midst of my fifth year teaching physics and mathematics at The College of the Atlantic, a very small, interdisciplinary college in Bar Harbor, Maine. Last spring I successfully underwent a comprehensive review, our version of a tenure review. I thus now have a long-term contract and am effectively tenured. Teaching a wide range of math and physics classes continues to be fun. I particularly enjoy the opportunity to teach classes on the intersection of science and politics. Last spring I co-taught a class on Gender and Science, and this spring I'll offer a history class on the Manhattan Project.

My wife, Doreen Stabinsky, and I enjoy living in the old farmhouse we moved into around a year and a half ago. We especially like the fact that we haven't had to move for 18 months. For a while we were averaging two moves a year. I'm currently one a one-term sabbatical. This has given me an opportunity to focus on research; I'm currently collaborating with a group at the Santa Fe Institute and another group at The University of Maine. Research has been going well, but I'm looking forward to getting back to teaching in January.

Andrea N. Lommen

Email: alommenscience.uva.nl

URL: http://www.astro.uva.nl/~alommen

Hello! My postdoc at the University of Amsterdam is coming to a close and my husband (more on that in a moment) and I are getting ready to move to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where I'll be an Assistant Prof of Astronomy at Franklin and Marshall College. I'm very excited about getting to interact with students again. In June, Steve Carlson (Carleton '91) and I got married! We vaguely remember seeing each other while at Carleton, but then we officially "met" at reunion last year. We wonder how we didn't meet for 4 years&endash;Steve's theory is that I was always in the library. Steve can't work here so he's the family web-master for the moment and the web page is pretty extensive! I have a couple web pages at the moment: http://www.astro.uvan.nl/~alommen/steve/wegpg.html

http://www.fandm.edu/Departments/Physics/faculty/Andrea/default.htm

On the first you can find a picture of a rather impressive Carleton physics showing at a recent Pulsar Conference in Crete. There were only 100 participants and 5% of them were Carls: me, Joel Weisberg, Steve Thorsett ('87), Craig Heinke ('97), and Robert Benjamin ('87). You can also see the picture on Joel's page: http://www.physics.carleton.edu/Faculty/Joel/astromeetings.html

Scott Nagle

Email: s-nagleattbi.com

URL: http://home.uchicago.edu/~sknagle

After finally having completed my MD/PhD at the University of Chicago, I'm now in the middle of my internship year at MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, IL. Jean and I are looking forward to our move this spring to California where I will be starting as a radiology resident at Stanford. Hope you all are well.

Dan Prince

Email: dan.princealumni.carleton.edu

Hello! I continue to write software for Integral7, Inc., a company co-founded by 2 of our (non-physics) classmates. It's not quite like the dot-com boom times, but working for a small company is still lots of fun. I enjoy biking/running/busing to our downtown office from our home in South Minneapolis.

Laura and I manage to keep up with our 1.5-year-old Grace most of the time, though she is getting quite quick on her feet. Laura continues doing community work in our neighborhood, lately with its sizable Somali population. We are expecting a sibling for Grace in April.

I enjoyed seeing many of you at Mike Casper's reunion celebration, and at Kris Wedding's wedding in CA. Have a great year, and keep in touch.

John Prineas

Email: prineasuiowa.edu

Address: 419 Ferson Avenue, Iowa City, IA 52242

Phone: (319) 335-3347

This is our second year in Iowa City. In the last year, we moved into our first house, which was exciting. My tenure-track position at the University of Iowa is keeping me busy. I've poured a lot of effort into the molecular beam epitaxy facility for semiconductor growth: Sara ('89) complains, "You love her more than me!" Sarah began working at the University in the writing center and, teaching a course on science fiction and fantasy. Maude began the 2nd grade and Theo is in preschool. Happy holidays to all!

Stuart Wagenius

E-mail: swageniuschicagobotanic.org

Hi, I'm still gainfully employed at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I investigate the ecological and evolutionary effects of habitat fragmentation on Echinacea angustifolia (purple coneflower), a native prairie plant. Most of my field research takes place in Minnesota. I enjoy taking the train to work. Peace!

Kris Wedding

Email: k_wedding yahoo.com

Greetings, all! I finished my post-doc in magnetic resonance imaging at Stanford in June 2001 and have kept busy since then teaching physics at Cal State University, Hayward. I continue to do a bit of consulting in MRI research, but my main focus has been finding interesting ways to teach physics to non-scientists as well as teaching E&M to the physics majors. I'm really enjoying the teaching and problem solving, but the administration of classes with 70 students when I have no TA's or administrative help gets to be a struggle. The E&M class, with 12 students, is much more fun and managable.

I got married in July to Jeff, my partner of 4 years. Many Carls were there including Andrea Lommen (on her own honeymoon!), Dan Prince, Shannon (Mullens) Wallis, and Jen McWilliams. Scott Nagle was present in spirit on one of the many colorful banners our guests made and carried in the parade we led through town after the ceremony. Residents of the small town (Foresthill, CA) initially thought we were staging a protest march of some sort, but they couldn't figure out for what. It was grand fun.

I took part in an actual protest march on Saturday, October 26 in San Francisco. It was a peace march, and I carried banner from our wedding made of >600 folded origami cranes strung together with fishing line. I attached a memorial to Paul Wellstone to the top as it was the day after the tragic plan crash. I was amazed at how many others were touched by it, and it helped me deal with the loss as well.

Hope you all are finding your own ways to survive and thrive. Peace.

Class of 1992

Jane Olson

Email: janeoltavista.net

Dear physicists, I'm in my second year of middle school teaching in Boulder, CO. In my free time I've been rock climbing, learning to kayak and I've recently joined/confounded an all-female rock band.

Class of 1993

Marcia Franklin

Email: mrfranklinstkate.edu

A year and a half after finishing my second master's (MLIS - library and information science), I have finally found a job in my field. I'm now the librarian at Academy College in Bloomington, MN, (right across the highway from the airport!). Not exactly what I'd call a prestigious job, but they're glad to have me, and they certainly need help. The collection is only about 1300 volumes, there's no working catalog (online or card), I'm not ready even to think about interlibrary loans, I've just sent out their first ever overdue notices, and they're still using paper pockets and cards for checkout! Got my work cut out for me, but after this job, no one will ever again be able to say I don't have experience in libraries!

Aside from that, Steve and I have been remodeling our kitchen, traveling more, and trying to deal with unscrupulous contractors (don't ask). I hope that everyone is happy and well, and feel free to drop me a line or arrange a visit if you're in the Twin Cities!

Eric Granstrom

E-mail: EricGranstromaol.com

An observation (by no means unique) of time dilation or general relativity as it applies to our personal lives past Carleton: not only is the universe expanding, at a rate varying in time, but time itself (past the age of about 30) progresses more rapidly. Corollary: I'm closer to 70 than to 20. Corollary: time has reference-independent meaning in only two contexts: measurements of it's deficit can be useful in correlating to blood pressure, and each week leads to a doubling of a child's capacity and energy, yet a one percent loss in mine.

Matthew, Leah, Aune and I are all happy and healthy. The kids grow fast and, as I become more sedentary, my waist tries to keep pace. I've recently decided that three years away from school was inexcusable, and took on a full time education (the University of Minnesota's Executive MBA program) in addition to my existing life. If that three-letter degree engenders any concern over the future well being of my soul, it's too late&endash;I've already sold out to the "dark side" and become a manager of a device physics group here at Seagate.

Scott Thacher

Email: thatchertruman.edu

Dear friends, my big news for the year is that I'll be getting married in June 2003 to a wonderful woman named Carol Hoferkamp. She's a Statistician here at Truman State University, where I'm also teaching in the Math Division. Reunion is part of our honeymoon plans, so I hope to see many of you there. In other news, I spent three weeks in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria this summer visiting grad school friends, and I got to put my experience in the Carleton greenhouse to good use helping to collect grass samples in central Europe.

Jenny Wurster

Email: jwurstermail.sctboces.org

Address: 29 Fenderson Street, Painted Post, NY 14870

Telephone: (607)0936-6065

10 years since Carleton and still in school. After getting my master's in Astronomy and a second master's in physics education I am now in my 5th year teaching physics and astronomy at a high school in Corning, NY. I have stolen a few ideas from Bill Titus. I have a stuffed chimpanzee named Newton who shows up in demonstrations and problems (everybody remember Clyde, the frog?) and I've started bribing, I mean, rewarding my students with chocolate. Thanks Bill. Outside of school my time is taken up with aikido. I'm now a second-degree black belt and completely addicted.

Class of 1994

Reed Busse

Email: reed.busse@pacbell.net

Address: 332 San Antonio St., San Mateo, CA 94401

Phone: (650) 375-8192

Greetings! 2002 has flown by faster than I can believe. We've settled more firmly into our new life in California&endash;Owen is now nearly 1 1/2, Sarah is to finish her MFA this spring, and I'm enjoying my work in MRI R&D for GE Medical Systems. And we bought our first house&endash;anyone passing through San Mateo (15 miles south of San Francisco) stop by!

Alan de Brauw

Email: Alan.D.Debrauwwilliams.edu

URL: http://www.williams.edu/Economics/debrauw

I had big changes this year. I took a job as a tenure-track assistant professor in Steve Lewis's old department at Williams (Economics). I'm teaching classes on East Asia and micro-development. I also got in a lot of travel, including a vacation to Angkor Wat and North Viet Nam. Drop me a line if you'll be in the Berkshires!

Rik Gran

Email: granphys.washington.edu

URL: www.phys.washington.edu/~gran

Hi folks. I defended my Ph.D. this summer with a sort of successful cosmic ray air shower experiment. In October I joined the Super-Kamiokande and the K2K neutrino oscillation experiments as a post-doc with the University of Washington group. Karen and I will be dividing our time between Tsukuba, Japan, and Seattle for the next couple years. I will also put a little time in on the WALTA experiment, a "small" giant air-shower array being run in conjunction with local high schools here in the Seattle area. Karen is done with her fieldwork in the Philippines, and is mostly focused on analysis stuff for her Geology Ph.D.

Time to get to work on my new side project, a numerology toolbox for Matlab and Octave, called GNUmerology. I hope it will allow non-numerologists to connect their Matlab analysis and data sets to it and learn more about their place in the universe. For numerologists, it is the next step toward a new era of precision in quantitative numerology. Need to apply for a research grant through the National Association of Psychics and Astrologers.

Andy Harkison

URL: http://www.harkison.net

Address: 4136 Bryant Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55409

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Greetings All! It's been a busy year for me. Most of it personal rather than professional. First, the slow professional front. I await the return of the Tech Sector in the economy. My business travel has slowed to such a crawl that I've actually been in the office for almost 8 consecutive weeks. This is the first time in 3 years that I've been in the office more than 4 consecutive weeks. It does allow me to focus on whole areas of documentation, online help, customer support, product development and other things that I can't do when on the road selling our products. On the positive side of our business, it seems that R&D budgets are the only ones that have not been completely shut off.

So, on the personal side of life I've been fairly busy. With work slowing down, I've had the chance to take much needed time off. I spent a week up at the family cabin this summer with a fellow Carl. We prepared for an upcoming Boundary Waters trip. The cabin time was boot camp for our out of shape bodies. We paddled sprints back and forth across the lake daily&endash;actually broke a paddle, we paddled so hard! Then two weeks later I had a week with fellow Carls in the Boundary Waters. We had great fun and perfect weather.

This canoe adventure interrupted my experience of buying my first home. This too was interesting and unexpected. I had thought about a home in general terms, but no specifics. I unfortunately mentioned this to my very well networked family. Within 3 days I had a Realtor, and within a week I had seen 8 houses and made an offer on one. It was accepted the following day. Egads!! A Home. My sister has moved in with me while she's working and going back to college. Minneapolis has hooked me, at least enough to "set down some roots".

I also took another week vacation to go on a Caribbean cruise. We got diverted by a hurricane, but made it to Haiti, San Juan P.R., and St. Thomas. Did some parasailing and snorkeling. The snorkeling was quite nice: saw rays, eels, coral, a sea turtle, and other wonderfully colored fish.

Anyhow, sounds like a lot of free time, but that's what I get for not taking vacations for 3 years, not exactly the healthiest thing to do, so this was a very welcome break. In all seriousness, though, I wonder about the state of the world. I have a few more months obligation of Inactive Reserve status with the USAF. We all wonder how bad things can or will get with Iraq or with "Homeland Security". Based on my time in the military, I only know that there is A LOT that we don't know. I have yet to decide if that's good or bad. Having known certain things isn't necessarily any better. Well, we live in interesting times and I do know that we can all make a difference at a basic level. By educating others about what we know and listening to what they know, we can reinvigorate a sense of community, and citizenship.

It would be great to see any of you if you're passing through Minneapolis. Drop me a line. I look forward to reading the newsletter to see what everyone is doing.

Martine Kalke

Email: MartineKalkealumni.carleton.edu

A lot has changed since last year. In July, I graduated with a Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from Indiana University. I even got my diploma in early September, so it must be official! I am so glad to finally be finished with formal education! My husband, Mike, finished his PhD in Instructional Technology and Science Education in November. In addition to writing dissertations, last year we both looked for jobs.

The results of the many months of stress and traveling were surprisingly good. Mike is teaching at Boston College as a Science Education/Technology Education visiting professor with excellent job prospects for next year. At the beginning of August, I became a member of the Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Ballistic Missile Defense Division. I am still doing many of the things that got me interested in computational physics in the first place, but what I'm doing now is much more applied to the "real" world that I'm really enjoying. Overall I'm very excited, thought I never though I'd have to learn this much about radar.

Mike and I now live in Waltham, MA approximately halfway in between Boston College in Newton/Chestnut Hill and MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington. We bought a wonderful house near downtown Waltham within walking distance of the Library, Post Office, many restaurants, a great store that sells Construction Toys for Boys and Girls, and a surprising a number of furniture stores. Being homeowners has been a lot of work, the house was built in 1882 and needs some work, but, after renting for the last eight years, it has been wonderful!

Boston driving and traffic has taken some getting used to, but we live so close to where we work that our daily commutes are pretty easy. When we were planning on moving here, we realized that we knew a large number of people who lived here, some family, some Carleton folks, some Indiana folks, and some family friends. It has been great getting reacquainted with people we haven't seen in a while, and I'm looking forward to getting together with the ones we haven't managed to hook up with yet! I even managed to find multiple handbell choirs, so playing bells is the one thing that wasn't interrupted by our move to Massachusetts.

Becky Lien (Roy)

E-mail: beckylienmsn.com

Address: 1159 Hoyt Avenue West, St. Paul MN 55108

Phone: H: (651)-487-2261

This past year I switched gears in my career from IT Consulting to a great nonprofit. I'm working for The Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis as the IS Administrator. Mostly, I help them sort out their data and application issues. So far the change has been very rewarding. The organization is crawling with Carleton and Mac grads, which I love. Check us out on the web http://www.cvt.org!

Michael Siegel

Email: msiegelstsci.edu

I am now in my second year at STSCI, working on establishing Post-Asymptotic Giant Branch stars as standard candles. I am in the usual postdoc state, trying to finish up the last few projects from grad school while simultaneously working on my current project, and trying to locate my next job. It makes for a busy schedule that doesn't leave much time for a, um, what do you call that thing? Oh, yeah . . . a life. I continue to run into numerous former Carleton people, especially as STSCI is a crossroads of Astronomy. If you happen to pass through, be sure to drop by my office.

Class of 1995

Wade Crow

Email: wcrowhydrolab.arsusda.gov

I finished a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University in spring 2001 and, after a one year post-doc, took a position as a civil servant scientist at the USDA's Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory in suburban Washington D.C. That entailed a move from Princeton, NJ, to College Park, MD, this summer which - thanks to years of grad-school induced poverty - I was able to manage using only the trunk and backseat of my '93 Buick. Also spending a great deal of time in Cambridge, MA, as my girlfriend and I try to figure out our two-career strategy (so far it involves a lot of flying between Boston and Washington). I'm enjoying the job and new city but hoping things will settle down a bit in the near future. Best wishes to everyone in coming year.

Deepa Iyengar

Hello, I hope everyone is well. Since I last wrote, I left MIT, worked in a bookstore, joined a startup and learned I don't want to be a programmer, worked for a tour company, went to Reunion, and went to art school for a year. In the last couple of months I have been working as an artist's assistant and have been starting up my own studio (12' x 9' space). This May I went to Jason's wedding, where I also met Kareem (who bears an astounding resemblance to Steve Jobs). In August I married Hannes Vilhjalmsson (who some of you have met), and we met Scott Thatcher and Craig Heinke at our reception in September. Occasionally we run into Paolo when he is visiting Cambridge from Dublin, where he works. We are looking forward to the next Reunion. Practically halfway there already (scary)!

Kelsey Johnson

Email: kjohnsonaoc.nrao.edu

Hi everyone, this past year has been hectic and fun. I've been splitting my time on an NSF postdoctoral fellowship between the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison. This has worked out surprisingly well, but the commute gets old. My research is going very well, and I seem to get (almost) more observing time than I know what to do with. I had fun writing a semi-popular article for Science last summer (Aug 2 issue) that overviews the sort of research I'm doing these days. I've also been continuing my work evangelizing pedagogy&endash;last year I had the opportunity at UW to give the graduate seminar I developed in Boulder on college science teaching. In personal news, my husband and I bought a house in Madison about a year ago and have discovered the joys of "sweat equity". We are expecting our first child in June, which is both exciting and terrifying. I'm sure I'll have more on that next year. Best wishes to all of you!

Kareem Kazkaz

Email: kareemu.washington.edu

Greetings everyone! Here's what hasn't changed: still here in Seattle, still in grad school at the University of Washington, still doing neutrino physics, and still teaching Aikido.

Here's what different, I've left the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory experiment to work on a search for neutrinoless double beta decay. The experiment is called Majorana and is in its early stages yet. It's really exciting to be part of the experiment at the beginning before the majority of the equipment is fully designed, let alone manufactured or assembled. I get to be around for all the decisions that others who aren't around to the process might term "bone-headed", but are actually very sensible given the surrounding circumstances. I'm also learning a lot about the politics behind running a collaboration and getting funding for a 12-year experiment.

Oh, yeah! I passed my General Exam on the Majorana experiment at the end of September. Now I'm officially doing Doctoral Research. Woo hoo! Only one more exam to go, but that won't be for a couple years yet.

As part of Majorana, I have been traveling all over the place. I drove to South Dakota in a 1-ton "dually" to retrieve some 400-year-old Spanish lead from the Homestake mine (the site where Ray Davis's chlorine neutrino experiment is located). The Spanish lead was at the center of a larger lead shield. We ended up moving roughly 20 tons of lead, brick by brick, by hand. I've also been traveling to Pacific Northwest National Labs to help build the Majorana sub-experiments. Later this year I'll be at the University of Chicago or Duke to assemble another sub-experiment, before heading to Carlsbad, NM, in January for training to go underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

So things are going well, and I'm pretty happy. Busy, too, though I'm sure that's part of what's contributing to my happiness. Ta da. If you're going to be in the Seattle area, let me know. We'll get dinner at Taste of India, where they serve bottomless chai.

Susan (Thysell) Rodgers

Email: susanerodgersyahoo.com

Happy Holidays everyone! It's been a very busy and wonderful year! I finally passed the PE civil exam, so I'm a licensed civil engineer in California and in Illinois. Scott and I moved back to the Midwest, and we're happy to be here. We're settling into our beautiful house, where Scott enjoys working for IBM from his home office. I'm looking for a new civil engineering job in the area. The fall colors here are great.

Elissa Thorn

Email: ethornthacher.org

Address: 5025 Thacher Rd, Ojai CA 93023

Phone: (805) 640-7897

Hi everyone! I've had several more reconstructive surgeries and still have at least four more before I have a functional upper jaw, but I'm finally starting to feel like a real person again. My energy level is up enough to enjoy life, I'm closer to working full time than I was last year, and I'm even riding horses again, although still not as much as I'd like. I've been running a lot, and have started racing at the 5K distance. That's been REALLY fun! If all goes well, NEXT newsletter I'll be able to report that I'm all done with surgeries, working full time again, and riding daily. In the meantime, teaching and dorm parenting continues to be fun and fulfilling day in and day out...I'm really lucky to have a job I like so much!!

Class of 1996

Kirk Damman

Email: kdammanmindspring.com

URL: www.kirkandbrenda.com

Address: 1715 Legend Lane, St. Louis, MO 63146

Phone: (314) 567-7953

Well it has been a most busy year and I missed the update for last year. For those of you who don't know, Brenda Kirchhoff and I got married back in 2000 and moved to Saint Louis in 2001. We have since managed to buy our first house and are happily turning into suburbanites.

I work for Lewis, Rice and Fingersh, a law firm in downtown Saint Louis, and still practice patent and other Intellectual Property law in a variety of fields.

`

Email: kdelainastro.umn.edu

Well I gave up my cushy job working for SAO for going back to graduate school, this time at the U of M in Minneapolis. So far I'm liking it&endash;it's a lot of work but the profs are nice and the classes are interesting. We'll see what happens with quals in January! :)

I've taken up Aikido, I can't recall if I wrote before, but passed my 3rd kyu test recently. Look on Caucus for contact information, or ask the alumni office since we plan to be moving in January to a nicer (larger) place.

John Everett

Email: everettapollo.uchicago.edu

URL: http://astro.uchicago.edu/~everett/

Address: 5738 S. Stony Island, Apt #3E, Chicago, IL 60637-2039

Phone: (773) 493-1672

Good Day everybody, I'm still at the University of Chicago, and am now starting to wrap up my thesis, which basically consists of a model of out-flowing gas from accretion disks around black holes at the centers of quasars. Mostly, this work keeps me in the office, but this summer I took my first trip overseas to Paris for a conference, which was incredible. Anyway, as I start applying for postdocs, I'm wondering if it might be useful for future astro and physics grad students (and Carleton students looking at grad school?) to create a web page entitled something like: "How to keep your sanity in astro/physics grad school" or something similar? I'm thinking of web page including brief recommendations from different people on choosing a grad school, an advisor, a thesis topic, being a TA, doing research, etc. Now, it's debatable whether I've succeeded in keeping my sanity :), so if any of you have suggestions for it, I'd be happy to add them&endash;just e-mail me. Thanks!

Nate Hultman

Email: hultmansocrates.Berkeley.EDU

Address: University of California, 310 Barrows Hall, Berkeley CA 94720

Phone: (510) 912-2493

The biggest news here is that Ellen and I are expecting a baby in mid-April. Other than that, we are both finishing our dissertations (yes, hopefully before April) and looking for jobs. Next year at this time I will be able to report more specific developments on all three fronts. In the meantime, if you find yourself in Berkeley, do say hello.

Karl Vollmers

Email: vollmerkme.umn.edu

Address: 2748 Fillmore Street NE, Minneapolis, MN. 55418

Hello folks, lots of stuff going on in my life. Got a house, got married and getting ready to move to Switzerland for a couple years. My advisor here at the U. of Minnesota is moving to ETH, so I'm taking the opportunity to live internationally for a little while. I'll be leaving in January while my new wife; Megan Cassidy, will be staying in Minneapolis until next summer when she'll be done with her classes. She will then join me and we'll do our best to enjoy living in Europe. If any of you are going to be passing through Zurich in the next couple years look me up.

Neal Weiner

Email: nealwphys.washington.edu

URL: http://www.phys.washington.edu/~nealw/

I'm entering the third and final year of my postdoc here at the University of Washington. As great as it's been, it's time to move on so I'm making plans for next year. I'm in no rush for committee assignments, so I'll apply to only a few faculty jobs, and will most likely take a fellowship in Boston or Baltimore, but I don't know where yet.

Physics is fabulous! Particle theory has allowed me to continue to learn a wide variety of fields. The past few weeks I've been working on inflationary cosmology. Great subject, but I'm still very ignorant!

Anyhow, if you find yourself in Seattle or want to know anything about the department, let me know.

Class of 1997

Peter Czoschke

Email: czoschkemrl.uiuc.edu

I'm now enjoying my third year now as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in condensed matter physics. I'm studying thin film growth and structure using surface x-ray diffraction. For those of you who I didn't see at reunion: I got married in August '01. We've bought a house in Champaign that we're both enjoying very much. And we adopted a dog in January that is brightening up our lives. I hope everyone is doing well.

Karen Griffith Dieterich

Mark and I are still living in Rhode Island. I am still working for BBN Technologies, and Mark is still working for Brown University, although he is now doing system administration for the whole Computer Science Department rather than just the Graphics Group.

This past year, Mark has become very active with ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) and he has become the Section Emergency Coordinator for amateur radio in the State of Rhode Island. Mark has also gotten interested in woodworking, and over the summer he started building a cedar strip canoe. I have gotten more involved in youth activities at our church, and I am currently trying to get a high school youth group started, a feat, which is proving to be "character building". I have also taken up quilting, and by the time you read this I hope to have started hand quilting my first quilt!

Unfortunately, we were not able to make it to reunion this year, but we did make it back to Minnesota in August to go to Karl Vollmers's wedding. While we were in Minnesota, we also went canoeing in the Boundary Waters with Dan Celotta and visited with a number of other Carleton friends.

Craig Heinke

E-mail: cheinkecfa.harvard.edu

Address: 31 Varnum St. #2, Arlington, MA 02474

Phone: (617) 495-2536

Hello all, I'm now in my third year of astronomy graduate school. I'm playing with a huge new batch of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, studying pulsars, X-ray binaries, etc. in globular clusters around the Milky Way, especially 47 Tucanae. Recently I saw several other Carleton physics alums (Andrea Lommen, Steve Thorsett, Bob Benjamin) and Joel at a radio pulsar conference in Crete.(see http://zon.wins.uva.nl/~alommen/steve/cr4.html).

Daniel Narvaes

Email: dnarvaes@vigoris.net

This year was good overall, especially between November and July. No serious girlfriend yet. I'm still living in Tulsa. In June and July, I attended a summer program to prepare for graduate studies in Electrical Engineering. It was fun, and I'll definitely be going back to school to get a Master's degree. I just mailed my application today; hopefully I'm not too late to start this spring. Right now I'm still teaching during the days (working for the Jenks district some days this year, though, which has much better students), and shelving books at the West Regional Library in the evenings. West Tulsans don't read much, so that's pretty easy. I also will be installing Christmas lights this year again; unfortunately, I haven't yet sent out letters to my customers from last year. I must do that next. Have a great year!

Class of 1998

Amanda Babson

Email: babsonaocean.washington.edu

Hi all, I'm still in Seattle and love it here. I got my master's in oceanography last June and have decided to stay around for the long haul to the Ph.D. I like being a student, and what I'm working on (modeling Puget Sound circulation) and whom I'm working with. I've also been dating another oceanography student for almost 2 years, so that's another incentive to stick around. And with all the kayaking, backpacking and snow shoeing available here, I keep myself quite busy. Plus I've been trying to get more politically active lately. So that's my update. Take care.

Steve Furlanetto

Email: sfurlanecfa.harvard.edu

Phone: (617) 661-1813

Hi all! I am still in Cambridge, MA, finishing up my astrophysics Ph.D. at Harvard. I am working on feedback from galaxies and quasars into the intergalactic medium, and I have been greatly enjoying the research. I will finish this spring (if all goes according to plan) and then I will be off to a postdoc somewhere. Work keeps me busy, of course, but I've found time to train for and finish a marathon (last fall) and a half-iron man triathlon (this summer). Spending all that time running by the Charles or on a bike did a good job keeping me out of mischief this summer. Anyway, I hope the New Year finds everyone happy and healthy!

Nick Larsen

Email: nlarsenutsoughwestern.edu

I will receive my Ph.D. in protein x-ray crystallography in December. Thus, I've been very busy writing everything up. After defending, I'll hang around here in San Diego for six months and then move to Boston, where I'll do a post-doc at Harvard Medical School again studying protein crystallography. My wife is expecting again, this time a boy due in January. Our daughter Anna is already 2 1/2 and growing up quickly. I enjoy inventing mind game experiments with her to see how her brain works. Look us up if you are in town!

Kristina Maria Visscher

Hello, newsletter, I've been in neuroscience graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis for over 3 years. I'm working on functional neuroimaging using fMRI. I get to take pictures of the inside of people's brains, which is always pretty exciting. It's been quite a change from physics, but I like it a lot. Life here has been good. I just got back from a conference in Florida where I got to see manatees in the wild&endash;wow!

Jeremy Wahl

Email: jawahl7hotmail.com

Hello physics newsletter, Nick's response last year shamed me into responding, though I have nothing interesting to report. I'm still at Cornell though I'm finally a Ph.D candidate in applied physics here. I'm looking to make my break in May 2004. My thesis is tentatively titled "Silicon-compatible Optoelectronics." Right now there is a big debate about whether Cornell grad students should unionize. If you have the misfortune to be in Ithaca sometime, look me up.

Class of 1999

Elizabeth A. Leimer (Boehme)

E-mail: lizsonicarmy.com

Hello everyone! I have been a piano/guitar teacher for 2 years now. I teach with my mother-in-law in Chanhassen, MN. I have about 50 students and I LOVE IT!!!!!!!

My husband Jason and I just bought a house here in Chanhassen and after a couple weeks it is really starting to feel like our home! We have 2 cats named Tiger and G.G., and when we bought the house, we got a dog named Colby. He is a German Shepherd/Pit Bull mix and he is sooooooo cute!

Jason and I also have a small recording business. We record about 10 high school and community concerts a year, including Northfield High School Choirs. We are working on expanding our capabilities into websites, audio/visual presentations and video production.

Hope all my late-night physics friends are doing well. Yeah, you know who you are. Did we really work on those problems all night!?!?!?!? Oh...yeah we did.

Greg Stinson

Email: stinsonbluemoon.astro.washington.edu

Address: 4100 Densmore Ave., Seattle, WA 98103

Phone: (206) 632-6089

I'm now fairly well settled in Seattle as I start the second year of the UW astronomy graduate program. As you might expect, I've been playing a large amount of frisbee. The astronomy team was able to win an IM championship t-shirt, something that remained ever elusive during my time on physbee.

I am still trying to figure out what direction I want to head for my thesis. I worked on a webpage this past summer that displays many objects found in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in my idea of a user friendly format. There is much talk of a National Virtual Observatory, and making that happen seems like it could be a fun thing to do. I still want to know how stuff forms, and the stuff that people are forming out here are galaxies and planets. While I try to figure out what I will do, I have been TAing a couple of sections every term. It seems that teaching gets a bit easier with repetition.

I look forward to seeing anyone who might be coming out to Seattle for AAS this year. If you need a place to stay, feel free to email.

John Weiss

E-mail: WeissjColorado.EDU

Another year gone by, and I'm still a graduate student in astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. And, no, I'm not ready to graduate. So please don't even ask.

Despite lack of an end in sight, it's been a fun and eventful year. Last January, I wrote my first grant application to NASA. I found out in April that I landed the grant. This was a relief since my advisor doesn't have the funds to pay me. Equally exciting news hit around the same time when I heard that I had won the annual Boeing science writing contest through Griffiths Observatory. I had a popular-level astronomy article published! I want to do more of that. On a less popular level, I was also asked to write an appendix for the upcoming Jupiter book. (University of Arizona-style, for those readers who know what that is.) It would be a lot easier if the guys out in Hawaii would just stop discovering new moons ever other month.

Since I have my own grant money, now, I no long have to TA to support myself. At least for now, that's a good thing. (They make you do this research stuff to get a degree. Who knew?) However, I was named the Lead Graduate Teacher (I like seeing that title in capitals, don't you?) for my department last spring. (A position once held by Kelsey Johnson, '95, for those playing the home game.) So I'm getting to teach the teachers, as it were. It's been a lot of fun, if pretty hectic.

Oh, and the research thing is going pretty well, too. I've been modeling dense planetary rings, both numerically and analytically. I've found some really weird, but utterly cool, behaviors. And on the side I've been learning how planets can loose their moons. The latter work is currently being written up for publication. (Read as: "John has written the title and first 2 lines, all of which will be revised beyond recognition by the time the paper gets shipped off.")

That's about it. Time to get back to making pretty movies of my data.