Excited to be Along for the Ride

The University of Tennessee is one of the great land grant universities in the country, and our mission is clear: to serve all Tennesseans and beyond through education, discovery, and outreach that enables strong economic, social, and environmental well-being.

I took over the reins as Department Head of Physics & Astronomy from Professor Hanno Weitering this past August, who served us selflessly and tirelessly for 10 years, and to whom I am personally thankful for his mentorship and friendship. Hanno has successfully placed our department on a trajectory with a large positive slope, and solidified Physics & Astronomy as one of the largest and most productive on campus. This was possible through our hard work, and shared sense of purpose to elevate physics research and education in Tennessee.

The past nine months have been a whirlwind of exciting and complex challenges where I have leveraged my passion for teaching and research to serve the department through advocacy and collaboration. We are facing major changes at the University level and a reorganization of our college into divisions, including one focused on Natural Sciences and Mathematics. This offers the department novel and improved opportunities to align our strategic vision with that of the College of Arts & Sciences. We continue to focus on growing our undergraduate programs through the launch of a new BA program, allowing us to attract and retain a new cohort of diverse physics undergraduates with interests that span and cross disciplines. This is being implemented alongside a refresh of our core and advanced curricula with new exciting classes on modern, mathematical, and computational physics, as well as new experiments in our advanced labs. The feedback from students has been outstanding, letting us know that they feel both prepared and engaged to tackle not only deep fundamental physics problems but also applications in addressing climate change, clean energy, and transportation.

I have been incredibly lucky to have the confidence, support, and efficiency of an amazing team who have helped get me up to speed allowing me to focus on a number of initiatives. These include better communicating our shared successes through a new "This Week in Physics" update at the colloquium, new partnerships with Jefferson Laboratory via a Bridge Faculty position (stay tuned), streamlining our digital collaboration mechanisms, and investing in our large cohort of junior faculty members. This newsletter includes features on two of these amazing young professors (Yishu Wang and Wonhee Ko) who are members of our Quantum Materials for Future Technologies Cluster, which has made Tennessee a major destination for cutting edge research in this area. (Professor Alan Tennant, also featured in this issue, is part of the quantum cluster as well, bringing to our faculty the expertise of his distinguished scientific career.)

We celebrated one retirement this winter, with Joint Faculty Professor Mike Fitzsimmons leaving the department in January. Mike joined us in 2016, holding a joint appointment with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and demonstrated profound intellectual curiosity in all things he did. His service to the department will be sorely missed. We wish him all the best as he takes on new national challenges at the U.S. Department of Energy.

The University of Tennessee is one of the great land grant universities in the country, and our mission is clear: to serve all Tennesseans and beyond through education, discovery, and outreach that enables strong economic, social, and environmental well-being. The Department of Physics & Astronomy is committed to this mission, and I'm excited to be along for the ride.

ADM, April 2023

Back to Cross Sections, Spring 2023