People

Leadership
Chairmanship is currently held by Claudio Rebbi, who started serving as Chair in September 2008 and is now completing the second year of a three year assignment. A Faculty Director (William Skocpol) supports a wide range of administrative and teaching tasks. Two faculty are appointed to lead the teaching program, the Director of Graduate Studies (Shyam Erramilli) and the Director of Undergraduate Studies (Martin Schmaltz). Next year James Stone will resume serving as DGS, a position he held before leaving for the State Department in Washington to serve as a Jefferson Fellow.

Faculty and Research Staff
The Department houses 37 faculty members. Two hold full-time, administrative posts: Andrei Ruckenstein as the Associate Provost and Vice President for Research, and Scott Whitaker as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Arts and Sciences. Of the other 35 faculty, 26 hold the rank of Professor, 5 of Associate Professor, 3 of Assistant Professor, and 1 of Master Lecturer.  Two newly hired Assistant Professors will join the Department at the beginning of the 2011 academic year.

Thirty four faculty are active in funded research programs. The department has strong research programs in condensed matter, particle, biological, polymer and statistical physics. The faculty teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the major, service courses for CAS, ENG, SAR and SMED students, interdisciplinary courses for non-majors, and courses for K-12 teachers. In fall 2009, two faculty were active in the Core Curriculum.

We have 11 emeriti faculty, 5 of whom are still active in research and continue to contribute to the department.  Eighteen faculty hold joint appointments in the Physics Department, with contributors and collaborators from 8 different departments and 4 colleges. In particular, joint faculty from ECE and BME are very active in supporting our graduate students through to PhDs, as well as serving on admissions committees and faculty search committees. The Physics Department supports 8 research faculty and 33 other researchers (as post doctoral fellows or research associates) in our funded research programs, as well as 4 lecturers in the teaching program. The Physics Department has two permanent visitor programs in high energy and condensed matter theory, currently hosting 7 visiting scholars.

Administrative and Technical Staff
Supporting staff include 9 in the front office: a business manager (Rachel Meisel), a financial accounts administrator (Anita Gupta), a facilities and purchasing administrator (Lawrence Cicatelli), a program coordinator (Solomon Posner), a graduate administrator (Mirtha Cabello), an undergraduate administrator (Courtney Clark), an executive administrative assistant (Kelly Lyons), a senior administrative secretary (Winna Somers) and a senior accounts technician (Nancy Kostowski).

In support of the laboratory and lecture teaching mission, we have 3 staff: a laboratory manager (Erich Burton), a laboratory technical coordinator (Mark Badway) and a lecture demonstration coordinator (Valentin Vorosholov). In support of computing we have 2 staff: a computer resource manager (Guoan Hu) and a systems analyst (Richard Laskey). Several additional administrators support the Polymer Center, the Center for Computational Science and the Learning Resource Network.

The Physics Department operates two major cost units for the University. The Scientific Instrument Facility, which serves 30 BU departments, is run by a manager/machinist (Heitor Mourato) and a coordinator/welder/machinist (Robert Kingsland), with support from 3 experimental machinists (Umberto Fazio, Robert Snee and Jose Velho). The Electronics Design Facility serves several departments, and is run by a director (Eric Hazen), with support from 2 senior electronics engineers (Shouxiang Wu and William Earle), a production engineer (Paul Bohn) and an administrative coordinator (Chris Lawlor).

Students
The department supported 108 graduate students this past year, with 78 on external research grants and external research or teaching fellowships, 2 on Dean’s fellowships and 31 on teaching fellow support. We typically have an incoming class of 17-20 students and graduate about 16 PhDs per year. The graduate students have several internal organizations, including a physics graduate student committee that meets regularly with the chair and organizes events, an ad hoc graduate student teaching group that meets to discuss physics teaching, pedagogy and novel active learning, and a women in physics graduate student group that organizes and hosts events for female physicists.

The Physics Department had 121 majors this past year. We typically graduate about 20 students per year, ranking us as one of the top 25 departments in the nation in terms of physics baccalaureates. We support an undergraduate student organization, Photon, that meets weekly and plans and holds a variety of educational, outreach and social activities.

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