Faculty and Staff
Cindy Blaha
Email: cblaha@carleton.edu
Nelson Christensen
Email: nchriste@carleton.edu
URL: http://physics.carleton.edu/Faculty/nelsonhome.html
This has been my busiest year at Carleton yet. Atomic and Nuclear went well; what a fun class that is. I am presently the co-chair of the Education and Curriculum Committee, so that has absorbed quite a lot of my time. The gravitational radiation detection work with LIGO is also cranked up; this summer I had three Carleton undergraduates working with me, (two sophomores and a frosh) and they got tons done! Next year I hope to spend my sabbatical in Pisa, Italy with the Italian/French gravity wave detector Virgo; planning for that has taken much time too. Oh yeah, then I sat in on Bruce's electronics class (I'm teaching digital next term). I took notes and did some of the labs, but skipped the tests. By the way, Bruce is an awesome teacher, and I learned a bunch. Family is good, kids are growing heaps. Life is good in Northfield!
Matt Mewes
Email: mmewes@carleton.edu
I've really enjoyed my first term as visiting assistant professor at Carleton. I got to know many of the wonderful students while teaching Statistical Mechanics and Waves. I am looking forward to teaching Quantum (and perhaps a little skiing) this winter. Adjusting to the other side of academic life has been a fun experience. My wife Erin and I, both natives of North Dakota and graduates of Concordia in Moorhead, are glad to be back in great white north after six years of graduate school in Indiana. It's good to be near family again and live in a place where the weather is predictable, or should I say predictably bad.
Rich Noer
Email: rnoer@carleton.edu
As planned, I ended my two years of half time, "phased" retirement in June and retired for real—at least from teaching. Trying for a gentle landing from so many years of intense work, I'm spending the fall semester at Cornell, re-joining a research group I've worked with off and on over the years. We're trying to perfect the superconducting microwave accelerator cavities that will eventually be at the heart of the planned International Linear Collider. It's a good way to keep myself active and stimulated, and they pretty much let me set my own schedule! From here, Raymonde and I spent a week in New York City last month, and will go to Montreal for another week around Thanksgiving to visit her family.
Steve Parker
Email: Sparker@carleton.edu
My first term at Carleton as a visiting assistant professor has been great! In the fall term, I taught a couple of lab sections of Atomic and Nuclear Physics (isn't radiation fun!) and intro labs (isn't TPOUR fun!). I'm looking forward to teaching a new crop of physics students the wonders of special relativity in P115 during the winter. Northfield is very much like I remember it from my visits to friends on the "other side of the river" during my undergraduate years at Lawrence University. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, so it has been real fun being back in the USA and playing ultimate Frisbee again (I had been in Denmark the previous 3 years, and we would always play football ... I mean soccer ... there). Happy Holidays to everyone!
Arjendu Pattanayak
Email: apattana@carleton.edu
It's been a different year for me, mostly because I have been on sabbatical this academic year and spending a fair amount of that time away from Northfield, although, it turns out, not away from Carleton. It started with KITP in Santa Barbara, where in between exciting conversations devoted to Quantum Gases, including the amazing Tony Leggett among others, I met alums Barbara Gross Levi and Zoe Leinhardt. Then I was at the Center for Advanced Studies in UNM, Albuquerque (where I met Matt Elliott, who is studying quantum information theory there) and most recently took a short personal trip to India (and I ran into current student Hans Bantilan at Amsterdam airport!)—Clearly my Carl radar has become suitably well developed. Intellectually, the year's been a blast, as I immerse myself for days in reading and calculating and chasing single ideas in a way that I haven't since…let's see, since graduate school, really. Teaching during Winter and Spring terms was fun before that—we had a somewhat new and improved version of my “sit-and-talk” solid-state class for example. My mid-tenure review process has also been completed (thanks much to those of you who filled forms on my behalf). Kathleen is now working full-time up at Bloomington, and given the hyper-articulate and bouncy 'almost two, Papa'-year-old girl in our life, that's all it takes to keep our days full. Until next year (or the next time I run into you!
Brian Rachford
Email: brachfor@carleton.edu
I'm the "temp" astronomer filling in for Joel during his sabbatical. I've been getting plenty of experience wrestling with the 16" telescope for the public open houses with Cindy and also in the big intro astronomy course (ASTR 110). The latter is a fun class to teach, and I will teach it again during Winter Term, but it is nice to have some smaller classes coming up, too.
Bruce Thomas
Email: bthomas@carleton.edu
I'm in the second of three years of “phasing” toward retirement. For me, “half time” seems to mean full time but at half speed in terms of productivity. But I am finding more time for other things: Last summer Alice and I spent a week in Los Angeles supervising the birth of our second grandchild. Last December and again in June we traveled to Ukraine, where Alice was engaged in educational consulting and I was engaged in sightseeing. Our hotel in Kiev was only a block away from Independence Square, which is at the center of the current protest rallies. So we're watching the election situation there with lots of interest.
Bill Titus
Email: btitus@carleton.edu
Well another year just flew by. It amazes me that I still love teaching, in spite of all the grading, and that the student are as talented as ever. My travel highlight was spending a month this summer serving as my daughter field assistant, while she participated in a gravity survey on Vinelhaven, a small and picturesque island off of Maine. It was a great experience to be able to interacting with Sarah on both a personal and professional level. May this year bring you joy and peace.
Kris Wedding
Email: kwedding@carleton.edu
It’s with great delight that I continue my work here at Carleton. Sadly Jeff is still finishing up some projects in California so I’m living in an on campus apartment, the same house Cindy and her family resided in for a time. This fall Nelson let me take over the medical physics class he created. I had 9 physics majors and 2 biology majors. I continued Nelson’s approach of going on many field trips, and added in a 2-day trip to my other alma-matter, Madison. The Department of Medical Physics helped sponsor the trip, and the students got to tour eight different labs and meet with the primary investigators of many of them. We also chatted with alum John Graner ’02. The students were particularly delighted to meet the author of one of their text books (particularly when he performed an ultrasound of his tongue as he was talking). They also met one of the inventors of Tomotherapy, a machine that delivers radiation therapy and takes CT images. Most amusing, though, was meeting Jamie Weichert who attended Carleton for 2 years in the 70’s and now heads a micro-CT imaging lab. He talked about carrying a VW bug up the steps in front of Sevy, providing easy access to the keg hidden inside. He also mentioned the new tracer he’s developed which appears to target cancer cells, and could be used in both diagnostic as well as therapeutic applications. This spring I’ll be tackling the contemporary research in physics class. Wish me luck!
Joel Weisberg
Email: jweisber@carleton.edu
Greetings from Sydney! We are spending this academic year here on sabbatical. We are living in a funky district of town, right off the harbor. It's taken a while to meet people, but things are finally starting to come together. Ben is enjoying his "year 2" classes, and tries to teach us the Aussie way of saying things. Janet is getting to know the city from top to bottom. I split my work time between the University of Sydney and the Australia Telescope National Facility. The research is very stimulating. Two Carls, Kassie Wells '07 and Kyle Willett '05, joined me for a week of observing at Parkes. You can see pictures of them and our special observing assistants on my "students at observatories" web page (where many of you reside as well!): http://www.people.carleton.edu/~jweisber/scopes.html. Three more Carls will join me over the December break: Charlotte Christensen '05, Karl Isensee '05, and Sarah Vigeland '06. Unfortunately we'll miss the canoe trip and reunion this year, so this will be our last chance to be with Carls for a while. While this experience is fun and intellectually enriching, my heart is back at Carleton.
Staff
Josh Allen
Email: jallen@carleton.edu
I might as well start off by introducing myself to all of you. My name is Joshua Allen and I am the "new Drew" of the department. I graduated last spring from Carleton and happily accepted the position that Drew so magnificently occupied for two years. I love my job. I have learned that the faculty, staff, and students of the physics department are some of the best people to be around and work for. I have enjoyed working with students in labs, whether it is for presentations, lab reports, or the famous Physics 115 movies. I look forward to the New Year and the new experiences it will bring.
Tom Baraniak
Email: tbarania@carleton.edu
This year my wife (Chemistry professor Trish Ferrett) and I welcomed our second adopted son Alex home from Korea to join his brother Adam. They are both toddlers separated by 10 months in age. Needless to say they keep us busy. They are wonderful little guys and I still get a little misty eyed just thinking about them. This past year saw the start up of a robotics club that I help out with. I also had my usual projects, including a wireless link to the radio telescope on the roof. I have big ideas for projects next year, like adding to the weather station and....
Ann Passe
Email: apasse@carleton.edu
The house has a “For Sale” sign on it, and as soon as “Sold” appears, I am retired! We have downsized and purchased a small house on the Mississippi River below Wabasha, Minnesota. It will become our home base. We plan to head south before that first snow flake flies and spend the summers traveling the byways with the motor home. The hardest part will be leaving Carleton; I miss it already. It’s been a great run, thank you.
Warren Ringlien
Email: wringlie@carleton.edu
The news in the mechanical department is Carleton's installation of a 1.65-megawatt wind turbine just east of campus. As a self appointed representative of the department regarding the construction and operation of this machine I can now report that as of the last of November it has produced 1 million kilowatt hours of electricity since it was put on line September 17th. I have also been working with Facilities and the Biology department on other Environment and Technology courses. The newly formed Robotics Club has been putting the shop to good use building a competition robot. As in previous years, the students in Contemporary turned out their versions of a "C" clamp as a lab exercise.