Class of 2000

Aaron Dotter
Email: Aaron.L.Dotter@Dartmouth.edu
Address: P. O. Box 836
Hanover, NH 03755
URL: http://stellar.dartmouth.edu/~dottera/
Hello all. This has been a busy, difficult year but it's almost over and things are under control, I think. The high point of the year was my first time outside of the country (for a conference, of course). I got to spend a week in Rome and then a weekend in Madrid with Mr. Covey (en route to a conference). The conference was professionally productive and Italy--what I got to see of it--was beautiful. I was sorry to miss the 5-year reunion but duty called. I made a few of what I hope will be lasting professional relationships, learned a great deal, and drank more wine in five days than I will in the remainder of the year.
My thesis has been dragging along most of the year but is picking up speed now, maybe faster than I could wish. Then there's the joy of applying for work next year, a shout-out to Mr. Covey for his helpfulness in that department. It will be interesting to see if anyone will hire me strictly on the promise of good results...
On the home front, things are the same, for the most part, as they have been the last few years. I hope to see some of you at the AAS meeting in DC this coming January.

Ben Miller
Email: stopeape@gmail.com
Phone: (303) 489-4476
Address: 18858 E. Powers Drive
Aurora, CO 80015
URL: http://www.lewicki.biz
Ben@lewicki.biz
What happened to the last year! Bridget Johnson '00 and I are engaged and set to be married the second weekend of August next year. We'll be getting married in Ely, MN. The house we are renting from the bank (with Wells Fargo as a slum lord) has been fully remodeled in an attempt to keep me from being lazy. Unfortunately, this means we'll have to move to another house soon or I'll get fat. Work as an engineer is still getting in the way of life, but apparently this is the norm for far too many people. Bridget and I will be tearing ourselves away from work around Christmas for a trip to Japan. Originally we had planned for a spring trip to Australia, but a very good friend from Ely is getting married while he is stationed in Okinawa. Since statistically he'll probably only get married 2-3 times, we probably should go.

Class of 2001

Emily Baker
Email: paxemilia@gmail.com
Lotsa news from me this year, actually. Last year I left CU Boulder with my Master's degree. In a complete change of pace from the interstellar dust I was studying in grad school, I got a job working for CICLOPS, the team that runs the optical imaging instrument on the Cassini spacecraft. I'm basically a scientific gofer for Carolyn Porco, the head of the team. (Scientific gofer in the sense that I'm goin' fer various data, not coffee.) Part of my job is to write the instrument command files that basically tell the camera when to shutter, how long to expose for, what filter to use, all that good stuff. Since I'm working for Carolyn, I'm primarily doing ring images, and learning a lot about ring dynamics. By an odd twist of fate, I am now sharing an office with John Weiss ('99), who signed on as a postdoc this spring, and sometimes some of his guinea pigs, who are apparently just along for the ride. (Carleton connections really are everywhere. I also see Ben Luey '02 on the bus occasionally, and see Mike Borchert's brother every so often, as his girlfriend was also a grad student in CU's astrophysics dept.)
In my other large piece of news, as of this past August, I am a married woman. The new ball & chain, Nirav, also happens to be physicist. And yes, we met in a computer lab - a UNIX lab, at that. His research is currently in atomic theory and not astronomy. This probably explains why he doesn't trip over ground-based objects as often as I do. I got to see Erin Quealy at the wedding, which was in an amphitheatre on top of a mountain overlooking Boulder. Pretty awesome.
Overall, I am having fun in Boulder with Nirav and our one furry feline dependant, Mufasa, enjoying the mountains and the microbrews. Odds are I'll probably see some of you folks at reunion next spring.

Daniel Baxter
Email: dbaxter@mbakercorp.com
Phone: (216) 849-7802
Address: 1127 Euclid Ave #1024
Cleveland, Ohio 44115
This year I've been getting more comfortable in Cleveland, where's I've been for a little over a year and a half now. I've been enjoying my job as a bridge engineer, and have spent most of the year working on the design of a concrete arch bridge that will be built over the Cleveland zoo. This bridge will be assembled from precast concrete segments that will be spliced together on site, and the segments for a couple of the spans will be suspended on cables during construction because of obstructions below the bridge. By the way, I'd be happy to answer questions about the dual degree program in civil engineering from current students who may be considering it. I went through the Washington University dual degree program, and I remember having a hard time getting some of my questions answered (especially from practicing civil engineers) while I was deciding whether to go there.

Carl Tape
Email: carltape@gps.caltech.edu
Phone: (626) 395-3825
URL: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~carltape/
It has been a good year. I volunteered to be on a geophysics cruise from McMurdo, Antarctica, to Christchurch, New Zealand. This brought me to two very interesting places that I had never been to before. While wandering around McMurdo (see preceding entry?), I was greeted by none other than Phil Spindler. That was a bit of a shocker, and it at least validated some of the "stories" he has been writing the past couple years in this newsletter. I made it up to Alaska for some quality midnight sun in July, and in the fall I made it back to Carleton for the first time since 2001. My purpose was twofold: to give a seismology talk in physics, and to play in the alumni soccer match. Both went over pretty well, I think. I am beginning my third year of a PhD in seismology here at Caltech. All is well.

Class of 2002

Henry Brock
Email: brock@wisc.edu
Phone: (680) 244-1545
Address: 1962 Heath Ave
Madison, WI 53704
I'm starting my second year as a graduate student in the materials science program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. At the end of October I will have submitted a research paper on the subject of the mechanical behavior of a particular shape-memory alloy. In January 2006 I will be leaving for Yokohama, Japan to work further on shape-memory alloys at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, taking courses on materials science and Japanese through the end of August. The David L. Boren Graduate Fellowship program provides the funding for this. Aside from school I've been playing a good deal of Ultimate, trying out a few marathons, persistently avoiding owning a car, and advocating the use of bicycles as transportation.

Dan Carlson
Email: concretecowboy@gmail.com
This is my first time reporting back to home base since graduating so many years ago. It has been an interesting ride since graduation. I spent all of my free time the first few years exploring the wild West on my motorcycle and fulfilling a life long dream. After having traveled the highways on a bike covered in animal hides and adorned with a 6 foot set of bull horns, one appreciates the ways of the unknown. I think if I had life to do over again, I would have been born about 150 years ago at the height of individual exploration, or lose significant weight so I can fit in a space capsule. Anywho, the long rides tamed my spirit a little so I can focus more on the next stage of my life with work and a career. I still work for Emerson, who hired me right out of the gate. I worked on a number of projects with optics and sensors, but have since become a field manager for new technologies. My new role is to bring proposed high tech instruments to the process industry for field testing and driving feedback into development. My latest project is testing new wireless technologies and proving next generation wireless instruments can form into a mesh network to provide reliable communications, yet be simple enough for someone with out a high school education to install and maintenance. I really like the role since I bring the physics, engineering, sales, and marketing into a role that shaves years off development cycles and gets global travel. Unfortunately, it also caused me to cross into the darkness in that I am in an accelerated program for a MBA, something I never though would happen.
Of all the years, 2005 has been the wildest ride. On January 29th I discovered a new mode in the oscillation of life when BP, 140billion dollar company, told my boss, "Dan has built the most productive technology partnership we have ever seen," only to come home and have an Army Major tell me, "Your brother, Sergeant Carlson has died in combat." There is no component in the brain to handle both elation and devastation in the same instant. But fortunately, family, friends, and a little whisky bring it all together to find happiness and appreciate sadness (ok, allot of whisky). In looking forward to better days, my family is close and strong, work is going well, and I have even found a woman who will breed in the next 10 years and tolerate me in the mean time.

Katie Devine
Email: devine@astro.wisc.edu
Address: 508 School of Mines Road
Socorro NM 87801
Hi all! I recently finished up my classes at the University of Wisconsin and passed my prelims in June, so now I have the luxury of doing all research, all the time, as I continue on for my PhD. Although I'm still technically a student at UW, I moved down to Socorro, NM in September to get my thesis data at the Very Large Array and work with the fine VLA radio astronomy community. It feels kind of crazy to be applying for my own telescope time. I guess that and a few extra grey hairs are making me feel a bit grown up these days. Socorro is quiet but lovely. I'm adjusting to small town life- it was kind of a shock to move here from Madison, where the University population alone is about five times bigger than Socorro's population. I've traded lakes for mountains, and so far it's working out well. Hiking, climbing, hot springs, skiing, mountain biking... life is good. As always, visitors are always welcome, should you find yourself in New Mexico.

Matt Hahn
Email: mathewhahn02@yahoo.com
Phone: (206) 524-5302
Address: 5228 15th Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98105
This past June, after 3 long years, I graduated with my Master’s degree from the University of Washington in Seattle. No more school for the present! My Master’s project dealt with physics education – the UW has a great Physics Education Group, and I was lucky to get the opportunity to work with them.
I really like Seattle and hope to stay here a while. Of course, I’m unemployed, so the future is a bit hazy. (By the way, unemployment is great aside from the inherent lack of funding.) I’m currently living with 3 other Carleton grads, including the infamous Hite Geffert, so please drop by if you’re in town.

Ben Luey
The major news is that I've decided to leave grad school at the University of Colorado at Boulder with a master in Physics. (That's a story for another day). Amazingly, it turns out that I'm employable. Vescent Photonics has hired me as a "staff scientist." I am Vescent's eighth employee and they just moved out of a garage and into a building. I'd tell you what it's like to work there, but I've only been on the job for a week, and that week was spent helping them move. What I've learned so far: optics tables and dicing saws are very, very heavy. ("Ramming speed" is a phrase never to be uttered when moving optics tables!) Otherwise, I've been keeping myself busy by playing the viola with the Longmont Symphony Orchestra and playing Frisbee whenever I can.

Liz McDowell
Email: semcdowe@umich.edu
I'm now in my 4th(!) year working toward a Biophysics PhD at Michigan, and it's been nice to have the chance to spend most of my time on my research project, trying to figure out how a (potentially therapeutic) catalytic RNA molecule really works. Outside of research, I'm still doing Aikido, still entertaining the cats, and this year I fought a fierce battle with some nasty weeds and slugs over tasty organic vegetables from my community garden plot. I hope life is treating you all well -- best wishes from Ann Arbor!

Class of 2003

Rebecca (Becky) Anthony
After a year in Oregon and some time in Michigan, I’m back in Minnetsota, studying Mechanical Engineering at the U. My research involves plasma-assisted production of nanocrystals for use in energy-efficient solar cells and LED lighting. Aside from school and research, I’ve been keeping up with printmaking and enjoying my jogs around the lakes.

Ghidewon Arefe
Email: ghidewonarefe@yahoo.com
I've recently moved to full-time student status at the University of Minnesota in Mechanical Engineering. My focus is on nanoparticle science and I am currently contemplating joining a research group involved with solar cells or using Qdots for medical applications. I'm still putting in some time at Rosemount Inc and have done quite a bit of traveling for them this past year. Carl Ebeling and I went on another adventure this past summer and plan on doing so again next year.
Bryan Donald
Email: bmdonald@gmail.com
I'm starting my second year in graduate school in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. I'll finish my Master's Degree this spring and then continue on to Medical School. In other news I recently got engaged, to Katie Lord, and we'll be getting married this coming May.

Brian Joyce
Email: brianjoyce7@hotmail.com
Phone: (773) 515-0303
Address: 641 W. Aldine Ave. #312
Chicago, IL 60657
I've been living in downtown Chicago for a little less than a year now, working at the same job I had a year ago (Research Associate/Tech Support Guy for a orthopedist in the suburbs). Since last year, I've co-authored a total of four published papers. Three were just little review pieces for a journal called "Techniques in Orthopedics", but the fourth was a fairly large meta-analysis that should be appearing in this October's "Arthroscopy", and I guess is a pretty big deal among the orthopedic community, at least. I should only be here another year or so, but I'm optimistic that I'll have my name on two other published papers before that year is done. In the meantime, I've been spending my down time at work (of which I have quite a bit) looking into graduate school. I reluctantly decided that it's something I need to do, and am now gearing up for the GREs. Don't be surprised if you see me on campus begging for letters of recommendation that I didn't get two years ago.
Other than that, things are pretty ho-hum. Got down to the University of Illinois a few weeks ago to see fellow Physics grads Ashley Ross '04 and Tim O'Connell '03, and Chicago's convenient location means I rarely have to go more than a few weeks without seeing a friendly Carleton face. So, if you're passing through Chicago and need to kill a few hours, drop me a line!

Tim O’Connell
Email: oconnelt2003@yahoo.com
Address: 3103 Yorktown Drive
Columbia, MO 65203
I'm starting my third year in the Electrical Engineering PhD program at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. I received a Master's degree in May and passed the qualifying exam in March, so I've been a little lazy the last few months. I'm working on electric machine analysis and design, which, as some of you may remember, relates to my comps project on motors. In March I went to a wedding in Austin, Texas and saw Nate Pogue ('03). We went down to the famous Sixth Street and enjoyed the Texas nightlife. In June, I flew out to Portland to visit Eli Morris ('03) for a week and we had a lot of fun visiting various breweries and seeing the splendor that is Portland. I'm currently taking two classes, captaining a men's league soccer team, and working on research. Ashley Ross ('04) also goes to school out here and we've been frequenting karaoke night at a local bar every Wednesday night. I was recently in Northfield for the alumni men's soccer match (the alumni won 1-0) where I saw Carl Tape ('01) and many other non-physics alums. It was a good time, and I finally got to see the windmill that I've been getting so many emails and announcements about. I guess that's about it. If anyone is in the neighborhood, send me an email and I'll show you around the prairies of central Illinois.

Nathaniel Pogue
Email: poguen@neo.tamu.edu
Hi everybody, its been an interesting year down here at Texas A&M. I keep plugging through classes as usual. This spring, Tim O'Connell and I, met up in Austin for two days and painted the town Maize and Blue. Then the next morning I blew off some more steam by taking a nice little trip to Cologne and Amsterdam to see an old friend. I had a great time, even started speaking fluent German again. I don't get much practice down here. This summer I started my research, and took a class at Cornell University to get out of College Station for a bit. It was a nice change of pace. Ithaca, the students, and the university were awesome. I met a lot of fun physics people from all over the world. This fall I will obtain my master degree in physics, and have already began working on my dissertation topic, "Killing the Electron Cloud Effect in the LHC Arcs." The preliminary tests on the whole assembly are starting in a week or so at CERN, so I am looking forward to spending a year in Geneva in the coming months if all goes well (Cross Your Fingers). Anyway, if anybody wants to see Texas, you got a place to crash.

Matthew Strait
Phone: (612) 788-0168
Address: 1004 1/2 Lowry Ave NE
Minneapolis, MN 55418
I’m now a second year physics grad student at the University of MN. Mostly this means more classes and more TAing, but now I’m also semi-officially part of the NOVA group, which is designing a next generation neutrino detector which will be built in northern MN. I worked for them over the summer doing an aging study of fiber optics in lipid scintillator and am now assigned to do software work, although after classes, teaching, and some small amount of sleep, I haven’t gotten much done. Looking forward to shifting the balance towards research next year.

Class of 2004

Adam Libson
Email: alibson@gmail.com
After taking a year off to contemplate life and what I wanted to do, I now find myself at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm working in Mark Raizen's lab studying atom optics and atom interferometry. The lab is primarily a BEC group, though I will be going in a different direction and using a supersonic beam. I don't know where the research is going to take me, though I'm finding I really enjoy my time in the lab. This is a good thing since I don't really leave much either. I have been rock climbing for fun, and I have continued the Carleton tradition of playing frisbee with my fellow physics students. I must say also that Austin is a really fantastic town. Feel free to look me up if you are in central Texas. I wish the best to all of you.

Clark Ritz
Email: ritz@physics.wisc.edu
Address: 2801 Century Harbor Road
Apt 4
Middleton, WI 53562
Already another year has gone by, but a good one. I’m still working on a physics PhD here in Madison, along with, what seems like, the rest of Carleton’s physics alumni. I did my year of TAing, eventually passed my qualifier, and now I’m moving on to research. I had done some materials science at Oak Ridge and maybe that ruined me for straight physics, because, some how or other, that’s what I’ve ended up working on; silicon and these fancy, new silicon membranes in particular. I like the work, and my research group is full of interesting people from all over the world who don’t take themselves too seriously. In that way, it’s kind of like Carleton; although, at Carleton I never had to work with anything as scary as hydrofluoric acid.
The degree is coming along at a reasonable pace, and I had thought that I’d just choose between working in industry and teaching at a small college when I finished. But now, when I read the news I just think congress needs more scientists. Any advice Rush?
Political aspirations aside, Megan and I are also enjoying our home in Middleton. It’s a pain to take the bus or drive in to the University, but it’s nice to be far, far away from the stadium on football days. We’ve passed the newly wed stage and so have begun to slowly replace our cardboard furniture with the real thing. I must be getting old. Now when I look at my holiday wish list I see things like arm chair, end table, nightstand, sofa, etc. I also find myself choosing to spend weekends putting extra insulation on the water heater and waxing the car. I’ll probably be mowing a lawn soon. At least I still have deadlines (like the one today for the newsletter submissions) to keep things interesting.

Ashley Ross
Email: aross2@astro.uiuc.edu
Phone: (802) 989-1591
Address: 1977 Orchard Street
Urbana, IL 61801
Things are going pretty well here in Urbana-Champaign. I've passed my qual and research is going strong. I've been working with Sloan Digital Sky Survey data and hopefully I'll have my first paper sent out by the end of the term. It is tentatively titled "Precision Measurements of Higher-Order Angular Galaxy Correlations Using 25 million SDSS galaxies". It will (hopefully) be followed by a similar paper using a (photometrically identified) quasar catalog drawn from the same Sloan data set. That should be the first such published measurement of its kind done with a quasar sample. So look for my name on astro-ph in coming months!
Otherwise, Mikel has joined me here at UIUC, she is in the Social Work department and doing well. Wednesday nights I've been joining Tim (O'Connell) for Karaoke, which has been a lot of fun. Tim does a mean 'Without Me'. John Everett gave an impressive colloquium talk here earlier this week on AGN winds. It was good to have another Carl astronomer around for a couple days.

Class of 2005

Daniel Brooks
Email: d.will.b@gmail.com
As of writing this, I am almost half way through my first semester in the physics Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley. After the initially frightening time of moving to the opposite coast without knowing where I was going to live, things have settled down quite nicely. So far grad school has been quite well (as long as I pretend the preliminaries aren't waiting around the corner in January), and surprisingly not too time-consuming. I've even been playing in a pickup Ultimate game a couple times a week that a fair number of other Carls sometimes show up to, including fellow physics major Nick Auger '03. I enjoy my TA position as a lab assistant in the advanced lab class for juniors and seniors where they each do a selection from 18 or so different canned labs. It's been a great way for me to get my hands on a fair number of labs I haven't seen before. I am missing the quality of teaching that I received at Carleton though. Not to say my classes are rotten, I like the second semester undergraduate quantum class I'm taking, but my other class, graduate-level Classical E&M, is basically read directly from PowerPoint. I’ve also begun attending the lab meetings of Professor Dan Stamper-Kurn's group. He's doing research on a couple different areas such as spinor BECs and cavity QED, and I may start working with his group next semester. At this point though I'm keeping the door open in case I get swept off my feet by someone else's research. I miss Carleton and all of you there and those who have left, and hope to get the chance to come back and visit sometime.

Kira Grogg
Email: grogg@wisc.edu
Address: 745 E Gorham, Apt. D
Madison, WI 53703
Not much news. Just getting used to graduate school, actually enjoying being a TA (especially since I don’t have to grade homework). Extremely glad I took most of the elective “advanced” classes while at Carleton. Also enjoying living in downtown Madison and getting (almost) everywhere by bike.

Kyle Willett
Email: kyle.willett@colorado.edu
Address: 3009 Madison Ave #j427
Boulder, CO 80303
Hi to everyone in the dept - I think I'm too recently removed from graduating to post in the alumni newsletter. Sigh. I'm in my first year of grad school at the University of Colorado, working toward a Ph.D. in astrophysics. So far, it's a bunch of coursework and TAing (I'm missing the bright and engaged Carleton students), and I'm trying to see if I can get some research going involving astronomical constraints on the fine structure constant. Boulder is an incredible town for physics and astro - among the ex-physics cohort out here are Ben Luey '02, David Steussy '04 (grad students in the physics building next door) and Peter Delamere '91, who works as a post-doc in planetary sciences. John Weiss '99 and Emily Baker '01 also work in town and make a lot more money than I do (not that that's saying much). The mountains and wilderness are incredible and taunt me daily from my window. Cheers to everyone back in Northfield - hope to see you all soon sometime.