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Dr. Richard E. Prange, Physics, a superb condensed matter theorist and great friend to many of us, died suddenly on Wednesday, September 24 of an apparent heart attack. A great loss to our community, Dr. Prange joined the department in 1961, loved the Department of Physics passionately, and was instrumental in its growth and strength during the past five decades. His cross-disciplinary intellectual breadth was a key to UMD physics becoming a top department in all areas of physics.  His generosity and unfailing support were inspiring.  The Department will have a memorial later this semester.

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October 22 at 5:00pm, Horvitz Lecture Hall, Room 115, Computer Science Instructional Center (CSIC). Reception prior to the lecture in the CSIC Lobby.

Dr. Robert E. Fischell, 1953 M.S. Physics, will give a lecture entitled “A Guardian Angel for the Heart.” The ‘Guardian’ is a computer controlled sensor placed under the skin of a patient’s chest with a wire having an electrode in the heart that can sense the occurrence of a heart attack even before there is any noticeable symptom of that heart attack.

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Rita Colwell, UMIACS, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oslo, on September 2.  Shortly before receiving the honorary doctorate, Colwell gave the Kristine Bonnevie Lecture on Evolutionary Biology with a topic of “Cholera, Climate, and Genomics:  The Saga of Vibrio Cholerae.”  The annual “Kristine Bonnevie Lectures” are part of the celebration of the University of Oslo’s anniversary and are organized by the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, a national Centre of Excellence.
 
Katepalli Sreenivasan, Physics and IPST, is the recipient of the American Physical Society’s 2008 Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach “for his commitment to mentoring students and junior colleagues and his significant contributions to fostering international collaborations and promoting the advancement and education of early career scientists from the developing world.”  The Medal was established in 1994 to recognize the humanitarian aspects of physics and physicists.
 
Dennis Papadopoulos, Physics and Astronomy, will be honored with a professional conference, “Modern Challenges in Nonlinear Plasma Physics: A Conference Honoring the Career of K. Papadopoulos,” June 2009. The conference will be held at the Sani Resort, Halkidiki, Greece, June 15-19. For more information: http://www.astro.auth.gr/~vlahos/kp/ <http://www.astro.auth.gr/~vlahos/kp/

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Welcome to the new and talented faculty members and research scientists who are joining the College and University community:
 
Ian Appelbaum, Physics, Associate Professor.
Sandra Cerrai, Mathematics, Associate Professor.
Michael Evans, Geology and ESSIC, Associate Professor.
Anna Herr, Physics, Associate Research Scientist.
Kayo Ide, AOSC and CSCAMM, Assistant Professor.
Stefan Immler, Astronomy, Assistant Research Scientist.
Ki-Yong Kim, Physics, Assistant Professor.
Karen Melnick, Mathematics, Assistant Professor.
Johnpierre Paglione, Physics, Assistant Professor.
Bo-Wen Shen, ESSIC, Assistant Research Scientist.
Carlos Romero Talamas, IREAP, Assistant Research Scientist.
Maria Tzortziou, ESSIC, Assistant Research Scientist.
Richard Wentworth, Mathematics, Professor.
 
 
Warm congratulations to the following faculty members and research scientists on their recent promotions:
 
Paulo Bedaque, Physics, Associate Professor.
Tony Farnham, Astronomy, Associate Research Scientist.
Ralph Fiorito, IREAP, Senior Research Engineer.
Lise Getoor, Computer Science, Associate Professor.
Francois Guimbretiere, Computer Science, Associate Professor.
Michael Hicks, Computer Science, Associate Professor.
Jonathan Katz, Computer Science, Associate Professor.
Leonid Koralov, Math, Associate Professor.
Lucy McFadden, Astronomy, Research Professor.
John Merck, Geology, Senior Lecturer.
Raghu Murtugudde, AOSC and ESSIC, Professor.
Igor Puchtel, Geology, Associate Research Scientist.
Anatoly Shkvarunets, IREAP, Senior Research Scientist.

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Steven Anlage, Physics, Office of Naval Research, $150,000, “Basic Research on Metamaterials Enabling Novel Disruptive Applications.”
 
Howard Elman, Computer Science and UMIACS, DOE, $226,701, “Navier-stokes Solvers and Generalizations for Reacting Flow Problems.”
 
Fred Ipavich, Physics, NASA, $344,000, “SOHO/CELIAS Data Analysis, Scientific Interpretation, and Mission Operations.”
 
Christopher Monroe, Physics, Army Research Office, $480,000, “Trapped Ion Quantum Networks.”
 
Christopher Monroe, Physics, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, $227,424, “Untrafast Robust Quantum Gates for Trapped Ion Qubits.”
 
William Phillips, Physics and IPST, NSF, $2,895.000, “Joint Quantum Institute: Processing Quantum Coherence.”
 
Edward Redish, Physics, NSF, $499,991, “Improving Students’ Mathematical Sense-Making in Engineering: Research and Development.”
 
Konstantina Trivisa, Mathematics, NSF, $116,437, “On the Dynamics, Structure and Stability of Certain Nonlinear Systems in Applied Science.”
 
Da-Lin Zhang, AOSC, NSF, $158,506, “Improving Understanding and prediction of Atlantic Tropical Cyclogenesis.”

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The National Science Foundation has awarded the Physics Department’s Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) $12.5 million over five years to create and operate a Physics Frontier Center at the University of Maryland. The center will pursue cutting-edge investigations of quantum science – the bizarre behavior of matter and energy at nature's smallest scales – with an emphasis on the fundamental physics of quantum information and quantum computing.
 
CSCAMM hosted a workshop on “Electromagnetic Metamaterials and their Approximations: Practical and Theoretical Aspects,” September 22-25, 2008.  The workshop was designed to bring together selected electrical engineers, applied physicists and mathematicians whose work could have implications as far as metamaterials and cloaking are concerned.  Speakers included Oscar Bruno, CalTech, Matti lassas, Helsinki University of Technology, Thomas Philbin, Max Planck Research Group of Optics, James Ralston, UCLA and Michael E. Fisher, University of Maryland.
 
ESSIC hosted the 4th Annual NOAA Climate Test Bed (CTB) Science Advisory Board (SAB) meeting on September 11-12th.  CTB was formed to accelerate the transfer of research and development into improved NOAA operational climate forecasts, products, and applications and serve as a conduit between the operational, academic and research communities.
 
Michael Brown, Geology, attended the GONDWANA 13 conference, Dali, China, September 15-17, where he convened the symposium, “Comparative Orogenesis: Brasiliano-Pan-African Belts vs. Altaid-Tethyan Belts” and gave a talk on “Metamorphic Patterns in Brasiliano-Pan-African Belts vs. Altaid-Tethyan Belts in Relation to Global Geodynamics.”
 
Rita Colwell, UMIACS, delivered the inaugural Environmental Microbiology lecture “Climate, Oceans, Global Warming and Cholera” on September 8 at the Royal Society of Medicine, London.  The lecture was co-sponsored by the Society for Applied Microbiology and Wiley-Blackwell.

 
Doron Levy, Mathematics and CSCAMM, was the presenter at a Congressional Briefing held on September 23.  Introduced by John H. Ewing, Executive Director, American Mathematical Society, Levy’s topic was “Can Mathematics Cure Leukemia?”
 
Jan Sengers, IPST, presented an invited lecture at a special symposium at the University of Bremen in Germany, September 12, on the occasion of the 65th birthday of Professor Wolffram Schroeer. His lecture, also on behalf of his colleague Mikhail Anisimov of IPST, was entitled "Light Scattering of Fluctuations in Polymer and Electrolyte Solutions.” At the 15th International Conference on the properties of Water and Steam held in Berlin, September 2008, the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS) adopted a new international standard for calculating the viscosity of water and steam. This standard was developed by an international group of scientists, including Sengers. For more info: www.iapws.org.
 
Amitabh Varshney, Computer Science and UMIACS, has been elected as the Chair of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) for the 2008-2011 term.  VGTC provides technical leadership and organization for technical activities in the areas of visualization, computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality, and interaction.

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Ashok Agrawala, Computer Science and UMIACS and Christian Almazan, Ph.D. student in Computer Science and advised by Agrawala, were quoted in PCWorld, September 20, in an article on building a mobile WiMAX network that will be used to test next-generation applications for mobile broadband services.
 
Rita Colwell, UMIACS, was mentioned in Popular Science and ScienceDaily, September 3, in articles on predicting outbreaks of cholera using remote satellite imaging.
 
Douglas Currie, Physics, was quoted in National Geographic News, September 10, in an article on a recently published theory on star death by Nathan Smith, UC-Berkeley.  
 
Sankar Das Sarma, Physics, was interviewed in ScienceWatch, September edition, on his highest cited paper in the research area of two-dimensional graphene, “Dielectric Function, Screening, And Plasmons in Two-Dimensional Graphene”
 
Nick Hadley, Physics and Sarah Eno, Physics, were mentioned and/or quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, in an article on the Large Hadron Collider stretching schedules, budgets and researchers.
 
Thomas Holtz, Geology, was quoted in ScienceNews, September 11, on a recently published Science article on the analysis of 437 skeletal features from fossils of 64 species of dinosaurs and their competitors, the crurotarsans, to determine if early dinosaurs might have superior physical traits.
 
Dan Lathrop, Physics, Geology, IREAP and IPST, was quoted in Popular Science, September 12, in an article on his research on the Earth's magnetic field.  Lathrop also featured prominently on the National Geographic channel, Naked Science, “Earth’s Invisible Shield,” September 25.  The episode explored the Earth’s magnetic field, its weakening over the south Atlantic and the possibility of a magnetic field reversal.
 
Chuan Sheng Liu, Physics, was one of four researchers cited in Science Centric, September 8, in an article on their study of the properties of quantum SPPs at the interface between an electron quantum plasma and a dielectric material.  Their research will be published in Europhysics Letters.
 
Douglas Oard, CLIS and UMIACS, wrote an article for Science, September 26, on storing digital speech.
 
Christopher Reynolds, Astronomy, wrote an article for Nature, September 4, about recent ultra-high resolution radio observations of the black hole at the center of our Galaxy.  A follow-up article appeared in Science News, September 27.
 
Roald Sagdeev, Physics and IPST, was quoted in NatureNews, September 2, in an article on responses to Russia’s military action in Georgia.  He was also quoted in the Georgian Daily, September 2, in an article on international scientific collaborations with Russia.
 
Da-Lin Zhang, AOSC.  As one of the co-chief editors of the journal “Advances in Atmospheric Sciences,” Zhang was interviewed by ScienceWatch in July 2008.  Founded in May 2008, the journal has been named a ‘rising star among geosciences journals’ by ScienceWatch. Follow-up articles appeared on Environmental-Expert.com and Springer.com.

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Sergey Brin, 1993 B.S. Mathematics and Computer Science, was mentioned in the Washington Post, September 6, in an article on the 10 year old company’s history and ambitions.  The Brin family was mentioned in the International Herald Tribune, September 19 and Baltimore Sun, September 16 on their endowment of a professor’s chair at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  
 
Robert Fischell, 1953 M.S. Physics, and his latest invention, Neuralieve’s Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) treatment system device, were the topic of an article in the Baltimore Sun, September 2. The hand-held device, which could provide relief for people who suffer from aura-accompanied migraine headaches, has successfully completed clinical trials and may be on the market, by prescription only, by early next year.  
 
Doug Fulton, 1985 Ph.D. Physics, advisor Hans Griem, has been promoted to the Physics Division Leader position at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  Fulton served as Acting Division Leader and, as such, brought a new program to the division and began a significant strategic planning effort.
 
Richard Herman, 1967 Ph.D. Mathematics, Chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with the induction ceremony taking place on October 11 in Cambridge, MA.  Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the current membership includes some 200 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

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WE GREATLY ENCOURAGE ALL OUR READERS TO KEEP US INFORMED OF THEIR NEWS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

PLEASE SUBMIT ITEMS TO: Mary Kearney (mkearney@umd.edu)

COLLEGE OF COMPUTER, MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Astronomy Department - Dr. Stuart Vogel, Chair
Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Department - Dr. James Carton, Chair
Computer Science Department - Dr. Larry Davis, Chair
Geology Department - Dr. Michael Brown, Chair
Mathematics Department - Dr. James Yorke, Chair
Physics Department - Dr. Drew Baden, Chair
CSCAMM - Dr. Eitan Tadmor, Director
ESSIC - Dr. Antonio Busalacchi, Director
IPST - Dr. Rajarshi Roy, Director
IREAP - Dr. Dan Lathrop, Director
UMIACS - Dr. V.S. Subrahmanian, Director

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