The annual Summer Research Poster session will be held Thursday, September 16th in the Department, from 12:20 pm to 1:40 pm. Pizza and soda will be available in room N304 for people attending the poster session. You can check out the list of presenters and poster titles to get an idea of the range of activities.
This is the official kick-off of the fall colloquium season. Come see the fascinating things our students did on their summer vacations.
Associate PRofessor Rebecca Surman was invited to present her research at two international workshops this summer. She gave a talk on Neutron capture in the r-process at the ExtreMe Matter Institute (EMMI) workshop on Neutron Matter in Astrophysics: From Neutron Stars to the r-Process in Darmstadt, Germany, and spoke about “Neutrinos and nucleosynthesis” at the NOW 2010 neutrino oscillation workshop in Conca Specchiulla, Italy. She also submitted a poster to the Nuclei in the Cosmos IX, July 19-23, in Heidelberg, Germany with collaborators from the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The colloquium coordinator for 2010-2011 is Prof. Jon Marr, and the complete Fall schedule is here.
The winner of the second annual Physics and Astronomy Chili Cook-Off is Prof. Scott LaBrake for his beef and venison chili. Second place went to Prof. Newman.
The winner was determi
Michael F. Vineyard, the Frank & Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Physics, presented a poster titled “The Upper-Level Laboratory at Union College” at the 2010 Gordon Research Conference on Physics Research and Education at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass. in June, and at the 2010 Summer Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in Portland, Oregon, in July. The poster, co-authored by physics senior lecturer Scott LaBrake, professor Seyffie Maleki and associate professor Chad Orzel, highlighted some of the development work they did on experiments in an advanced laboratory course.
Once again, we are happy to have a large collection of students and faculty working on research this summer. Many (but not all) of them are shown here:
In this picture: Front row (left to right): Katie Schuff, Ana Mikler, Katie O’Brien, Colin Gleason, Chad Harrington. Second row: Anna Sise, Erin Osgood, Prof. LaBrake, Prof. Maleki. Third row: Prof. Orzel, Tim Kuehn, Prof. Reich, Mark Sullivan, Prof. Marr. Fourth row: Pavel Aprelev, Hannah Ryan, Rob Moore, Prof. Koopmann, SreyNoch Chin, Colin Turley, Prof. Vineyard. Back row: Adam Margulies, John Sheehan, Pengfei Zhang, Prof. Wilkin, Prof. Newman, Amer Khraisat, Prof. Amanuel.
For more information on summer research at Union, see the Undergraduate Research Page, or come to the Summer Student Seminar Series.
Members of the NSF-sponsored Undergraduate ALFALFA Team met June 30, 2010, for a Summer Research Workshop. 20 participants from Union, Siena, Skidmore, and Hartwick Colleges reported progress on their research projects analyzing data from the Arecibo Legacy ALFA Survey, a survey of gas in nearby galaxies. In the afternoon, students and faculty at more distant institutions joined the group at Union for a
Summer Research Progress Telecon. Students presented brief summaries of progress at their institutions. Many of the schools are
researching the gas content of galaxies in moderately dense “group” environments and collaborating to compare and publish the results.
Union students SreyNoch Chin, ’12, Halley Darling, ’13, Ana Mikler, ’12, and Katie O’Brien, ’11, participated in the workshop and
presented their results during the telecon. Ana Mikler was the leader of an activity to demonstrate how to create contour maps of gas emission from galaxies. Each group followed her instructions to produce a contour map for one of their galaxy sources.
The Joint Meeting of the New York and New England sections of the American Physical Society will take place April 23-24, 2010 at Union College. The topic for the meeting is “Modern Nuclear Applications: Medicine, Power, and Non-Proliferation, and the meeting program includes talks by experts in all three fields, as well as an after-dinner lecture by Union College professor of history Mark Walker.
There will also be a student poster session on Friday from 5-6pm, including several posters by Union students.
Assistant Professor Samuel Amanuel and Associate Professor Chad Orzel traveled to the 2010 March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Portland, OR. The March Meeting is the largest physics conference in the world, with over 7,500 papers presented over the course of the week.
Prof. Amanuel presented two papers on his research on phase transitions in confined materials: a talk titled “Melting and Freezing of Decanol inside Nanoporous Silica,” and a poster titled “First Order Phase Transition of Primary and Secondary Decanol Inside Nanoporous Silica.” Both papers were on research conducted in his laboratory at Union, with first-year students Amer Khraisat and Jargalsaikhan Dulmaa.
Prof. Orzel gave an invited talk titled “Lasers in the Undergraduate Laboratory: Precision Measurement for the Masses” as part of a special session organized for LaserFest, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first working laser in 1960. (The idea of the laser had earlier been developed by several scientists, including Union Physics alumnus Gordon Gould ’41.) He discussed a number of laser experiments done in physics classes at Union, and how they illustrate techniques used in ultra-precise measurements.
Jay Newman, the R. Gordon Gould Professor of Physics, presented a paper at the Biophysical Society annual meeting in San Francisco in February. “Amyloid Gels: Formation and Mechanical Properties of Insulin Fibrillar Networks” was co-authored with four Italian colleagues. Related work, titled “Amyloid Gels: Precocious Appearance of Elastic Properties during the Formation of an Insulin Fibrillar Network,” was recently published in the journal Langmuir by Newman and the same colleagues. This study demonstrates the unexpected onset of a macroscopic elastic modulus during the initial lag phase of insulin aggregation, earlier than has ever been observed before