Year: 2019

Clemson’s Physics and Astronomy department would love to welcome you back to campus! We are having events to connect PandA alumni with current graduate and undergraduate students! If you are interested in attending events for Clemson’s Physics & Astronomy Alumni Week (Oct 24-Oct 26), please use this Google form to RSVP. We hope to see you there!

Rama Podila has been recognized by the Clemson Young Alumni association with the Roaring 10 Award. Each year, the Clemson Young Alumni Council recognizes ten outstanding individuals for their impact in business, leadership, community, educational and/or philanthropic endeavors. The honor is given to those individuals who exemplify Clemson University’s core values of honesty, integrity, and respect. Rama is earned his Ph.D. from Clemson in 2011 and took a postdoc at the Brody School of Medicine in Greenville, NC. In 2013, Dr. Podila returned to Clemson as a Research Assistant Professor in our department and joined the tenure-track in 2015. His interdisciplinary research stands at the intersection of condensed matter physics and medical biophysics through his work on nano-biomaterials, nanotoxicity, nanobiosensors, and nanomedicine. Dr. Podila is extraordinarily productive with 83 peer-reviewed papers, four book chapters, and three patents to his credit, and this work is having significant impact in the field. His work has already garnered nearly 4000 citations and resulted in an h-index of 38. Please join me in congratulating our colleague for this well-deserved recognition from the Clemson Young Alumni Association.

The 2019 Methods & Applications of Fluorescence meeting was accompanied by a satellite workshop on Advanced Fluorescence Spectroscopy and Imaging with a focus on FRET. The workshop program was based on a bottom-up approach and geared to the specific requests of the attendees.

http://maf2019.ucsd.edu/program.html

Co-Organizers: Claus Seidel (HHU Düsseldorf, Germany), Hugo Sanabria (Clemson University, SC)

Professor Ding as published a paper in Nature titled “Inhibition of amyloid beta toxicity in zebrafish with a chaperone-gold nanoparticle dual strategy”. They describe the use of casein coated-gold nanoparticles to eliminate the toxicity of amyloid beta in a zebra fish. Amyloid beta is associated with various neurodegenerative disorders in humans such as Alzheimer’s disease. Please join me in congratulating our colleagues on this very exciting development.

Our colleague, John Meriwether, has been elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). John retired at the end of the 2017/2018 academic year and is now an emeritus faculty member. Only 0.1% of the members are inducted into the AGU each year, so this is quite an honor. The AGU boasts over 62,000 members from 144 countries and publishes the leading journals in geoscience and space physics. Please join me in congratulating John for this well deserved recognition.

Professors Sean Brittain and Chad Sosolik have been named to the second cohort of PhysTEC Fellows, a two-year program of The Physics Teacher Education Coalition, whose mission is to improve and promote the education of future physics teachers. The College of Science team is one of five chosen for this cohort to receive support to build and enhance high school physics teacher education programs. Read more about it here.

Graduate student Komal Kumari has been elected student representative to the NSF CEDAR Science Steering Committee where she will serve a two year term. The Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Program, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences Division, studies the interaction region of the Earth’s tenuous upper atmosphere. For over 25 years, CEDAR brings together the U.S. aeronomy community to combine observations from ground based and space based platforms, theory and modeling. As student rep, Komal will provide graduate student input to the CEDAR programmatic priorities and organize the one day student workshop that is part of the annual CEDAR conference. Please join me in congratulating Komal on this well deserved honor.

Bishwambhar Sengupta, a PhD student with Prof. Takacs, has just accepted an offer for a post-doctoral position at the University of Washington in Seattle. He will join the group of Eric Floyd in the department of Radiation Oncology. Let’s congratulate Bishwambhar on this next excellent next step in his career.

The Dept. of Physics and Astronomy hosted the latest meeting of the Southeastern Laboratory Astrophysics Community (SELAC) from May 13-16, 2019 at the Madren Conference Center. The meeting kicked off on Monday, May 13th with a graduate student symposium featuring graduate student presenters as well as panel discussions from faculty who discussed job and research opportunities in the field of laboratory astrophysics. The full SELAC meeting ran from Tuesday-Thursday and featured speakers from several of our Southeastern colleagues as well as from NIST-Gaithersburg, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Ignition Facility. Participants took time for a short outing into the South Carolina Botanical Gardens and the meeting closed with a vibrant discussion of future plans for the community to bring additional laboratory astrophysics opportunities to the Southeast.