Amy Bylsma Engebretson
Address: 4909 South Ash Grove Avenue, Sioux Falls, SD 57108
Phone: (605) 275-2334

Hi, I’m sitting here keeping Sam, age 2, company while he does art. We’re working on the concept of keeping crayons and stickers on the paper. Our big news is that we have moved to our hometown of Sioux Falls. A conversation at church turned into a job offer for Dan. He now writes grant proposals for Avera Research Institute. I’m staying home this year and enjoying on one time with Sam. Ben has started kindergarten and comes home excited with all that he is learning. Ariel is now in third grade and is turning into a “big kid” in front of our eyes. That’s the news from me. We are planning on coming to the reunion next summer and hope to see you there.

Mary Anne McLeod
Email: mamcleod@mindspring.com
Address: 2256 E Co Bar Trail, Flagstaff AZ 86001
Phone: (928) 779-6384

Another year gone by already, and it's now half my life ago that I showed up at Carleton vowing not to be a physics major because my dad and my brother were both physics majors. The process of selling one house and buying another has consumed life lately. This process becomes slightly more complicated than it should be when the home inspector finds mold in the attic of the house you're trying to sell. Scott and I moved, finally, in-between snow storms, a couple of weeks ago and have been occupied with building a habitable (and inescapable, we hope) yard for the dogs. The pack now numbers four—the newest addition is a black retrieverish mutt that I found as an abandoned puppy at a gas station north of Flagstaff. He was covered in motor oil, thus earning the name of Opec. Work is much the same; still spending summers studying willow flycatchers in the hottest, most humid parts of AZ, CA, and NV.

Mick Veum
Email: mailto:mveum@uwsp.edu
URL: http://www.uwsp.edu/physastr/veum/veum.htm

Dang y'all are getting old!! I wish I had something interesting to share, but the story of my year is wonderfully commonplace. Nina, Edie, and I are doing well. Edie just started preschool, leaving Nina and I to wonder when we granted permission for all this growing up that Edie has done. Nina and I are in the final stages of an international adoption. We soon will travel to Siberia to meet a fabulous little girl and hopefully close the deal. If you have any extra positive energy this autumn, aim it towards the Russian outback. I will see to it that your wildest dreams go fulfilled.

Hello, Mark! What little I can remember from your wedding was nothing short of paradise.

Neeraj Chepuri
Email: nchepuri@yahoo.com
Phone: (612) 920-0186
Address: 2833 Sunset Boulevard, Minneapolis, MN 55416

I'm staying busy with my kids (Ravi, 5 yrs old and Sujit, 1 yr old) and my job as a neuroradiologist at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. I have been very involved with getting the functional MRI program off the ground here and providing brain surface mapping to our neurosurgeons prior to surgical therapy.

More importantly, though, when I get home I have to ponder questions such as "Is a googol bigger than infinity?" and "Why do snowflakes have 6 sides?" and "Why is a crescent moon in the shape of a crescent and not a pie piece?" So at last, I may have found the ultimate application for a Carleton physics degree—to be able to keep up with my 4 year-old's questions about the world.

David Feldman
Email: dave@hornacek.coa.edu
URL: http://hornacek.coa.edu/dave

I'm now in my seventh year on the faculty at the College of the Atlantic and in my second full year as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. I have enjoyed much of my administrative work, but I am hoping to find a way to spend more time on teaching and research the next few years. A highlight this year was a trip to China to deliver a weeklong series of lectures at the Complex Systems Summer School in Qingdao, China, sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute and Qingdao University. The teaching was challenging and a lot of fun. There were around sixty students, half from China and half from the rest of the world. The students' academic backgrounds were diverse: physics, mathematics, biology, economics, and computer science, among others. My wife, Doreen Stabinsky, and I then spent an additional two and a half weeks traveling around China. We spent some time in Beijing and northern Yunnan province. The scenery in Yunnan is amazing, and Beijing is a fascinating city. Doreen and I continue to enjoy life in Maine. The College of the Atlantic is a great place to teach.

Andrea N. Lommen
Email: andrea.lommen@fandm.edu

The big news is that Steve and I are expecting twins in January. We were excited and stunned when we found out and we’re still excited and stunned.

This semester I’m teaching the “Physics of Movement” which a dance faculty member and I invented. We study various sports, martial arts and dance. We’re having fun. The students on the other hand occasionally look like we are making them drink caster oil or something. Something to work on, I think.

Dan Prince
Email: dan.prince@alumni.carleton.edu
Address: 3329 Garfield Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55408

Hi everyone, no big changes for me this year. I am still writing software for Integral7, Inc., a small software company in Minneapolis. We do data management for the certification and licensure industry, and we seem to have found a nice little niche for ourselves. My wife Laura is in her second year as director of a bilingual preschool near our house in South Minneapolis. Our kids Grace (3) and Theo (1.5) are growing fast and keeping us very busy. Hope you're all doing well, and best wishes for 2005.

Stuart Wagenius
Email: swagenius@chicagobotanic.org

Greetings, I work at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I do research on the conservation of native prairie plants (focusing on Echinacea angustifolia, purple coneflower). Most of my field research takes place in Minnesota. Peace!

Kris Wedding
Email: kwedding@carleton.edu

The only bad part about working at Carleton is that Jeff is still working in California, but he’ll start a MN job hunt this winter/spring. Because of Carleton’s schedule, I’ve also missed Burning Man for the past two years. Jeff has continued to go, though, so I do get many photos and stories, without putting up with all the dust storms. Jeff and I also enjoyed a backpacking trip to the Emigrant Wilderness area north of Yosemite in August. And of course, whether we’re in MN or CA, we always find a way to hang out with Carleton physics majors.

Jane Olson
Email: jane.olson@bvsd.org

After traveling to Prague, Crete and Paris this summer, I am back in Boulder for my fourth year as a public school teacher. I’m still enjoying the small condo I bought last summer.

Robbie C. Dohm-Palmer
Email: rdpalmer@comcast.net

I'm in my first year of voluntary unemployment. That's not to say I no longer work. With my son (Ethan, 6) and daughter (Celeste, 1), and a house, I am plenty busy. My family has been living in Eagan for just over a year now. We are VERY glad to be back in Minnesota. Although, I must say it was a little weird coming back to the political climate that Minnesota has developed. This is not the state I remembered, and it both saddens and disturbs me. The people seem the same though, so I can only hope the electorate comes to its senses next cycle. My wife is very busy in her OB/GYN career, lots of people still having babies. Well, that's all my daughter will tolerate. I wish everyone well.

Marcia Franklin
Email: mrfranklin@etmeli.us
Address: 1037 Arundel Street, St. Paul, MN 55117

Greetings all. Nothing much new since last year, other than adding more responsibilities at work (I am now Distance Education Coordinator as well as Librarian at Academy College in Bloomington). Steve (Wright, '90) and I are still in St Paul. Visitors are always welcome!

Kendall Read
Email: kendall@sysmatrix.net
Address: 916 Little Leaf Court, Longmont, CO 80503-6442

I got married this summer to Tim Dinnen from Cork, Ireland. Tim is also a physicist. I am in my fifth year as director of operations at Kapteyn-Murnane Labs. We are a small laser manufacturing company. During my first year, I was all alone in the owners, basement each day, but now we have eight employees and very nice labs! Business is good and growing! Best Wishes.

Michael Fleming
Email: mflemingmtsu.edu

Dear friends, I think it's been several years since my last update. Vital stats: still single; one cat, gainfully employed. Beginning in 2001, I spent three years as a lecturer in music technology and chief engineer of the recording studio at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. My time there was valuable—alternately frustrating and fun, lonely and busy, challenging and limited. I was lucky to receive a great job offer last spring, and as a result I began a tenure-track position this fall as an assistant professor in the recording industry department at Middle Tennessee State University (Murfreesboro, TN). The program here takes a remarkably "liberal arts" approach to a creative but also highly technical craft. My colleagues are great, and they bring a wide range of music engineering, business, and management experiences to the department. The undergraduate program in recording industry here is one of the largest in the country, and we're only 30 miles from Nashville, so I'm pretty optimistic about new opportunities to make connections, pursue projects and engage in research regarding spatial audio perception. (My comps project is returning to haunt me!) Several faculty members and I attended the Audio Engineering Society convention in San Francisco over the Halloween weekend and had a great time.

I spent part of last summer supervising the audio for the North Carolina School of the Arts summer festival on Roanoke Island, and then I had to relocate to Tennessee, so I was disappointed to miss the 10th reunion. But I may be here for a while, so please don't hesitate to look me up if your travels bring you to middle Tennessee. Best wishes to everyone.

Rik Gran
URL: http://neutrino.phys.washington.edu/~gran

I am still in Seattle. At home, Alex is 16 months old and he is a lot of fun. He thinks busses and trucks are fantastic, and he likes broccoli, at least for now. Karen ('96) is getting toward the end of her Ph.D. in Geology, and we both did an enormous amount traveling this past year. I still play Ultimate in the city leagues, and travel to a small number of tournaments.
For physics, I am still a post-doc at the University of Washington working on neutrino oscillations and neutrino-Oxygen scattering with the K2K and Super-K experiments in Japan. Almost certainly I will work on a small electron-nucleus scattering experiment at JLAB in Virginia to try to work out some unexpected discrepancies we see in our neutrino data. I also do some side work in cosmic ray air showers for a project here in Seattle that involves local high schools, which has been taking what I call "engineering" data, and will shortly start taking physics quality data.

Eric Hill

My wife and I enjoyed seeing everyone at my 10-year reunion this summer; Carls are such a welcoming bunch that it hardly matters that she is not an alum. We were also completely overwhelmed by the lush greenness of Minnesota in the summer time. I’m entering my fourth year of teaching physics at the University of Redlands (despite the name it is mostly a liberal arts college.) This semester I’m enjoying teaching thermodynamics/statistical mechanics using the excellent book by fellow Carl, Daniel Schroeder.

Mike Siegel

I just started my second postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm having fun so far. This summer, I became engaged to Sue Rutherford, a biology postdoc from Brisbane, Australia.

Kelsey Johnson

Dear friends, my life has been full of events, both good and bad, since I last wrote. Our daughter, Sophia, was born in the summer of 2003 (after 30+ hours of labor!). She is an incredibly happy kid, and just as full of energy. The week Sophia was due; my father-in-law was also hit by a car and critically injured (from which he is still recovering). My mother died of breast cancer last winter, and my closest cousin died a few weeks later. So last winter was a difficult time, and it caused me to rethink many things. But there is more good news to partially offset the bad news; we moved to Charlottesville this fall where I've joined the Astronomy faculty at the University of Virginia. I feel incredibly fortunate to have found such a great job, and I am thrilled to be here. Our new house is also pretty much our dream home; a log home on 5.5 acres, bordered on two sides by a 450-acre park with 20 miles of trails. We look forward to having many friends visit so don't hesitate to look us up if you're in the area.
Best wishes to everyone.

Kareem Kazkaz
Email: kareem@washington.edu
URL: www.livejournal.com/~wolfgangemilio
Address: 435 West 119th Street, Apt 10M, New York, NY 10027
Phone: (206) 931-1232

Greetings all! There have been a few changes in my life recently. I guess the biggest news is that I got engaged to Helene Wecker after an 11-year courtship. We just wanted to be sure, you know? The wedding is not until summer of next year. Also, this fall Helene entered grad school at Columbia University, so we left Seattle. As I'm not done being a student, though, I'm making a six-month side trip to Los Alamos National Labs to finish up my research. So my driver's license is from Washington, my official residence is in New York, and I'm living in New Mexico.

Los Alamos is a quiet town, but I've been spending a lot of time biking, climbing the local mountains, and camping out at Bandelier National Monument. I have a journal with pictures up at www.livejournal.com/~wolfgangemilio. As for LANL, my group was just recently brought up to Risk Level II work after this summer's lab shutdown. This means we can once again use liquid nitrogen, so this week I'm beginning the work I came here two months ago to perform.

Speaking of which, I have a dissertation topic (!): Double-Beta Decay of Ge-76 to Excited States. The research has come together over the past half-year or so, and I have a clear path to the end. Now I just need to take the data, do the analysis, write the dissertation, and take my final exam. Despite the amount of work I have left, I feel like I've definitely entered the home stretch of getting my degree. Hopefully by the time the next newsletter comes around I'll be typing from the plush, high-rolling lifestyle of a postdoc.

That's about it. I keep my Livejournal account updated pretty regularly, so if you'd like to read more, take a look. Take care.

Susan (Thysell) Rodgers
Email: susanerodgers@yahoo.com
Address: 2405 Kenmore Court, Schaumburg, IL 60193

Dear friends, the wonderful news this year is that our son, Alexander John was born April 26, 2004! He is a happy, healthy baby, already testing the law of gravity and brings entropy to our home. I am enjoying life as a full-time mom, and Scott is fortunate to continue working from home for IBM. We look forward to seeing many of you at my 10-year reunion next June. Best wishes for a happy holiday season.

Elissa Thorn
Email: ethorn@thacher.org
Address: 5025 Thacher Rd, Ojai, CA 93023
Phone: (805) 640-7897

Howdy! About a year ago I bought a new horse, the first horse of my own in several years. I'm really enjoying having my very own horse again instead of riding whatever horse needs work on a given day. And I think I can finally say that I have finally made a complete comeback from my accident. I'll always be more nervous about riding than I used to be, but the joy is back! This summer I completed the last of my jaw reconstruction surgeries, for a grand total of 31 general anesthetics over the last three and a half years. Ekes! But it's over. I'll need more stuff later, but for the next few years I can take a break. Yippee!!

I'm REALLY enjoying eating solid food consistently again! I still go to vision therapy, but I'm almost back up to normal functioning and I expect to be done with that in a few more months. As of the start of this school year, I'm officially back up to full time at work, both in the classroom and the horse program. That's a big milestone, and one that has been a long time coming. It's really hard, though; I'm exhausted. I sure hope that over the next few years I continue to gain back strength and energy so this gets easier! In other news, I'm excited to be designing an elective course on thunderstorms to be offered this spring (in addition to my usual load of AP Physics and 9th grade Conceptual Physics), and I'm planning to start a Masters in Science Teaching program at New Mexico Tech in January. I'm going to try to make it to reunion this summer, so see ya'll there, maybe!

Keith Barnes
Email: asherpaboy@hotmail.com
Address: 1330 W. Dundee St. Boise, ID 83706
Phone: (208) 336-0366

I moved to Boise, Idaho in August to begin a Master's degree in raptor biology studying the habitat and behavior of Flammulated owls, a tiny little-known species of forest owl. Joining me here is my new fiancé, Elizabeth Lester. We began this past summer working on a common raven research project on the north slope of the Brooks Range, Alaska, then finished the season working in ecology and environmental education at the Teton Science School in Wyoming. I hope everyone is doing well, and now that I have a stable place you are all more than welcome to stop by if you're in the neighborhood!

Kirk Damman
Email: mailto:kirk@kirkandbrenda.com
Address: 1715 Legend Lane, St. Louis, MO 63146
Phone: (314) -567-7953 (H)

Well, I've actually managed to get an update in this year without missing the deadline! I'm still in Saint Louis, Missouri working as a patent attorney with the law firm of Lewis, Rice, and Fingersh LC. Everything is still going well here for me and Brenda (and the two Guinea Pigs Spike and Sam) and my work is still both exciting and interesting. Our department is growing and I am getting to be involved in all kinds of Intellectual Property issues. On the personal side, we got to spend a couple of weeks on vacation in Australia this year which is an amazing place to visit and one I would heartily recommend to anyone. We have also been doing quite a bit of traveling around the United States as well, including getting to see many of the physics folks up in Northfield for Kisha and Charles' wedding. As always, if anyone is interested in patent law as a career, feel free to contact me and I can talk your ear off.

Kisha Delain
Email: delaink@yahoo.com
URL: http://www.astro.umn.edu/~kdelain/
Address: 6211 Carol Dr Northeast, Fridley, MN 55432
Phone: (763) 572-5071

This year has been a hectic one for me. In terms of school, I have passed both my candidacy exams (written and oral), both of which involved huge amounts of stress but made it through with flying colors. So now it's research, research and more research. I've been involved with writing observing proposals, and will start now on some grant proposals as well. I think I have my fingers in too many pies (projects) but it seems to be the way things go. Another thing that kept me busy this year was planning and participating in a wedding. Yes, that's right; Charles Schmidt ('97) and I finally have gotten married (FYI I did not change my name). One of these days we'll send a picture in to the Voice of all the Carls who attended, including a number of physics majors. We went to France for two weeks for our honeymoon and loved it. I've also been having fun with Aikido, and role-playing, in the minimal "free time" I have, as well as doing yard work since last November we purchased a house in Fridley. It's nice that we now have enough space for all our stuff instead of being crammed in a tiny apartment. Also, we have several trees and even a hammock for those days when it's nice out. Ok, so I should be working right now….)

Chris Cooper
Email: ccooper@bos.fti-net.com

I am very happy at the job I started last year at Frontier Technology, Inc. I am doing physics again, although it also is related to my thesis work to some degree as well. One of the guys I work with was a fellow grad student with Joel at Iowa--R.B. Phillips. He has shared some interesting stories since joining us from MIT/Haystack! I was glad to go through my commencement in May, many years after starting grad school. Mary, the baby, and I are all doing well.

Nate Hultman
Email mailto:neh3@georgetown.edu
URL: www.georgetown.edu/faculty/neh3
Address: 2356 40th St. NW, Apt 208, Washington DC 20007

Hello friends. After living here for over a year now, D.C. has proved to be an enjoyable place though a bit zealous during election season. Linnea is 18 months old at this writing and is a delight. She especially likes giraffes, rhinos, lemons, chickens, lemurs, and "statues" (this last category includes such important objects as action figures and sandcastles). Ellen filed her dissertation in August and is on the job market. I'm having a good time at work and got to spend a month in Tanzania this past summer. Give us a call if you find yourself headed this way.

Kristin Poduska
E-mail: kris@physics.mun.ca
Phone: (709) 737-8890
FAX: (709) 737-8739
URL: http://www.physics.mun.ca/~kris

Into the second year at Memorial, and I'm still enjoying it all. I have a great bunch of graduate and undergraduate students working for me in the lab. Our latest toy is a scanning probe microscope, which we'll be using to monitor thin electrodeposited materials in electrolyte while they form. Teaching solid-state physics as well as introductory waves and oscillations has also been rewarding.

Outside of work, Erika and I have been doing quite a bit of hiking and maintenance work on the East Coast Trail, which is 220 km of preserved trail along the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland. I also joined the Newfoundland and Labrador Ultimate Association's inaugural summer league season, as well as the new provincial co-ed traveling team. Ultimate is a very new discovery for most people here, so I appear to be a bit fanatical (and old) when I admit that I've been playing ultimate for 11 years!

Visitors and science collaborations are always welcome! (In light of certain recent election results, I can also provide information about how easy it is to immigrate to Canada...)

Peter Czoschke
Email: czoschke@mrl.uiuc.edu
URL: http://users.mrl.uiuc.edu/czoschke
Address: 1105 Frank Dr., Champaign, IL 61821
Phone: (217) 356-1309

Hello all, the biggest news is that my wife Becky and I had a little daughter on January 29, 2004. Her name is Meredith and she has quickly taken over our lives. Luckily my advisor is very understanding and I have been able to spend a lot of time (ahem) working from home so that I can enjoy her as much as possible. I am continuing my research in experimental condensed matter physics here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel—I hope to graduate in May 2004. After I graduate, we'd like to move back to Minnesota (There's not enough snow in Illinois!) where hopefully I can find a job doing research in industry. I hope everyone is doing well.

Karen Griffith Dieterich
Address: 23 Naomi St., Bristol, RI 02809

I'm continuing to work at my dream job as a stay-at-home mom. However, at my department manager's request, I am still technically a "part-time occasional" employee for BBN Technologies. This means that I get to maintain my connection with my previous job and could do part-time work for them if we found it mutually beneficial.

Our son is now 15 months old and running all over the place. He is an active, enthusiastic, curious toddler who hates to miss out on anything. It is fascinating to see him figuring out how things work and studying each new object. I'm really enjoying being a mom, and I'm fortunate to be able to spend so much time with my son, watching him grow up fast.

I have also recently started taking weaving lessons, and I'm really enjoying it. Whoever started the rumor that men have better spatial reasoning skills than women apparently didn't know much about weaving, quilting, knitting, or other crafts traditionally done by women. The more I find out about these crafts, the more amazed I am at the tremendous creative and analytical skills that go into them. Take care.

Craig Heinke
Email: cheinke@northwestern.edu
Address: 730 Reba Place, B1, Evanston, IL 60202
Phone: (847) 467-5076

Hello all, I've finished my Ph.D. in astrophysics at Harvard, studying X-ray sources in globular clusters with the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Some of these objects are neutron stars or white dwarfs accreting matter from other stars, others are normal stars with coronal activity like our Sun, and some are millisecond radio pulsars. One of the big challenges is telling them apart using small numbers of photons!

I started a fellowship at Northwestern University in September, continuing these studies and hopefully expanding my interests in other directions as well. Laura (my significant other) has returned to grad school, this time for a musicology master's at Indiana University. So I'm spending a fair amount of time driving down to Bloomington. Eventually I'll get around to exploring Chicago.

Daniel Narvaes
Address: 709 S Ramsey St, Stillwater, OK 74074
Phone: (405) 377-2518

I am still at Oklahoma State University studying electrical engineering. I suffered a setback during the summer when I chose to work full-time and attend a class simultaneously, and ended up working many more hours than I expected. This semester I am repeating some classes to get rid of some C's I made, so hopefully I can graduate someday with a master's degree. Control Systems is difficult for me because I don't know linear algebra well enough. Many times since graduating from Carleton I have picked up a linear algebra book and intended to study it harder than I did while at Carleton, but every time I find something else to occupy my time and don't get the studying done.

Depending on how I do this semester, I either will continue or drop out, so of course I am making the most of what may be my last semester at OSU. I attend interesting meetings and am active in pro-Kerry group on campus. I seem to be doing all right with the classes, though. I got a test back on which I placed 6th in a class of about 30 people, so that is enough encouragement to make me keep trying for now.

Steve Furlanetto
Email: sfurlane@tapir.caltech.edu

Hello all! Since the last time I wrote (two years ago, I think), I've been plodding along through the astronomy world. I finished my Ph.D. in 2003 and moved cross-country to Caltech for a postdoc. I'm continuing to try to find ways to observe the formation of the first galaxies and how they affected the universe around them. It's a field that's growing rapidly, and I'm getting the chance to become involved with some new telescopes (even though my work is all on the theoretical side of things). So it's a lot of fun, and I've gotten to travel quite a bit discovering the wonderful world of astronomy conferences.

I'm really enjoying life in Pasadena. It's hard not to like the sunshine, for example, and having the ocean and the mountains so close is a real bonus. I'm doing my best to explore southern California and I've even taken up surfing...it's not as hard as I expected, which is fortunate. If anyone's ever in the area, be sure to drop me a line!

Jeremy Wahl
Email: jaw45@cornell.edu
URL: http://torsoheap.multiply.com
Address: 5D Gaslight Village, Ithaca, NY 14850

Greetings Carleton physics department, it has been a big year for me. Standards continue to plummet and I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis, “Tapered Fabry-Perot Spectrometry: Towards Multiple Pathogen Detection,” in August. Due to personal reasons (*cough* girlfriend *cough*), I got not one, but two jobs in Ithaca. The first is a postdoc through the Nanobiotechnology Center (NBTC) in plant pathology at Cornell's agricultural extension station in Geneva, NY. I'm fabricating surfaces to find out why fungal cells do what they do. The other job is part-time and involves fabricating single electron tunneling transistors for NIST. Neither one is in my preferred field of optoelectronics, but they pay the bills more or less. I did figure that I could make more working at McDonald's than I do at my postdoc. The price we pay... I am now also intimately involved with the major science buzzwords of today: not just biotechnology, but nanobiotechnology. Not just science and technology, but nanoscale science and technology. For those who do not know, these words are meaningless as they include everything from colloidal chemistry to VLSI.

It'll probably take my girlfriend three to four more years to finish up at Cornell so I'll need to find a temporary permanent position. If one of you would like to give me lots of money to pursue my own ideas in the clean room, I would be glad to take it.

I hope that everyone is happy and healthy.

Alisa I. Walz-Flannigan
Email: alisaiw@umich.edu

This has been a big year for me. To top the list, my husband and I welcomed our son, Ellak Benjamin Flannigan-Warren, into the world about 2 weeks ago (October 28th). He's such an amazing little guy. I figured that newborns would be rather boring. For the most part its true that his life is pretty simple, consisting of eating, filling his pants and sleeping, but it's fun watching the subtle changes even in the last two weeks. He's starting focusing on and following objects, and he's started chattering when he's calm. And he's already grown 5cm since birth. Interestingly, one of my Carleton roommates also gave birth to a boy this fall, about 2 weeks before Ellak.

In other news, I finished my Ph.D. in Applied Physics at the University of Michigan, defending it in July. My husband suggested that Ellak be given an honorary degree for withstanding the whole stressful process. My thesis was titled, “Cold Rydberg Gas Dynamics.” Basically I cooled and trapped Rb, excited the atoms into Rydberg states and observed what happened. Because Rydberg atoms are so sensitive to external fields, and each other, the cold gas typically is converted, at least in part, to an ultracold plasma and many interesting interactions between the systems ensue. It was a fun project, I was able to build it up from scratch (apparatus/electronics, etc), and with a newly explored regime, and we developed the theory along the way. However, I'm ready for a change. At the last atomic physics conference I went to, I preferred hiking in the desert to listening to sessions. It could have been that I'd not had a vacation in seemingly forever or that a lot of the issues in atomic physics aren't as interesting to me as they once were.

The last few years, I've been working toward transitioning to medical physics, and in January I'll be starting a post doc in nuclear imaging at Johns Hopkins University. I'm hoping someday to be a bit more employable or at least to diversify my research background, which I hope, will make me a better teacher. I'm really excited about my new project and making the transition. Though I'm not sure leaving Ann Arbor will be easy, nor shall going back to work. However, my husband is planning to stay home with Ellak for the first while, so hopefully that'll make the transition a bit easier. I'm really hoping that we can get back to the Midwest one of these years. I so wish I were closer to family, especially with the new little guy.

I hope everyone is well. Look me up in Baltimore come January!

Bill Dicks
Address: 100 W. Chestnut Apt 2301, Chicago, IL 60610

Pretty busy time in my life right now—I got engaged in May and will be getting married in June 2005. My fiancé and I just moved in together two months ago after about 2 years of dating (my apartment is much neater than it was in the previous 4 years!).

My career is pretty hectic too—coming out of college in 1999, I started with the small technology consulting company several friends and I had started. At that point we didn't have an office (we worked out of one guy's living room) and only 3 employees. Now we've got 40 people, were bought out 3 years ago, and we've acquired 2 smaller companies. My role now is Director of Engineering, so I'm responsible for all the consultants, project managers, and service offerings.

We just had our 5-year reunion this past summer, which was lots of fun—it was good to see people I haven't seen in awhile. It brought back lots of good memories when I stopped and visited the labs that we spent so much time studying, discussing, and generally just wasting time and having fun late at night...

Though it's been awhile since graduating, this is my first real response back to the department. So for all the profs and prospective physics majors, even though I didn't end up going into a career in physics (although if the classes like the Material Science class I took my senior year were offered earlier, that may have been different), the most important things I took away from the physics major were:

• How to balance a heavy workload with other aspects of my life.
• How to break down complex problems and situations into the root issues and concepts.
• How to work efficiently in peer groups.
• How to honestly accept criticism and realistically look at my own abilities.

Hopefully things are going well in the department for all and for those current majors. I hope Mathematica doesn't crash too often on you.

John Weiss
Email: weissj@Colorado.edu

Not much to report from Boulder. I've started Writing my thesis, which is keeping me out of trouble. The research is really shaping up into something interesting, at least.

Also, I'm busily applying for positions for after I finish the thesis thing. So it's pretty crazy around here right now.