April is the busiest month

So many things happened in the department in April that I got totally behind. In fact, April was so busy that I’ve only barely caught up here at the end of May.
But, some great things happened so I want to post about them even if it is a little behind times.

First – junior Maggie Lankford, a Clare Boothe Luce Research Scholar who has been working with Dr. Cody Leary for two years, had the opportunity to go to Prague to report on her results at the SPIE Optics + Optoelectronics Conference.  Although we take a good-sized group of students to the APS March Meeting every spring, this is the first international conference for a student that I am aware of since I came to Wooster in 2003, other than the year that the APS March Meeting was in Montreal.

Maggie is the first Physics Club Ambassador to the Czech Republic!

Second – we had another great IS Symposium on April 24.  Alums who graduated before about 2008 may not know that the College now completely cancels classes on the Friday of the penultimate week of classes to allow a campus-wide celebration of Senior IS. There are posters all over campus, as well as oral presentations.

Joey Smith gave both a poster and an oral presentation on his research combining topology with a study of defects in liquid crystals.

Jai Ranchod explained his idea for an Archimedes Drill Propulsion system to Dr. Garg.

Brian Maddock was as cheerful as usual, explaining glueball trajectories to the general non-science public.

Nicu Istrate looking snazzy in his bow tie. Bow ties are cool.

Min explaining some nuclear physics to Dr. Lewis.

The nuclei that Shawn studied are orders of magnitude larger than the nuclei studied by Min and Nicu!  Active galactic nuclei are unbelievably large and energetic, from our human perspective.