Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Yesterday, my colleague Krzysztof Pilch and I decided to walk over to the Davidson Conference Center on campus to have a look at the undergraduates’ presentations of their research projects. USC is very committed to getting undergraduates involved in real research with professors, and every year they have a day of poster presentations. I became aware that it was this time of year because two of the students in my electromagnetism class who are usually almost flawless in their attendance missed class a couple of times. (I learned later that it was because of the final production of posters for their projects, etc, etc…..)

I think that this is simply a wonderful thing. It’s really excellent to see the students get engaged with a project, and begin to apply several of the things that they’ve been learning in class to new intellectual challenges. It makes it all worth it…..

So we went along to have a look, found the room where the Physical Sciences and Engineering projects were:

…. and presented ourselves to the students, and let them do their dog-and-pony show. You’ll recall me telling you about my being a judge of the wonderful California State Science Fair last year, where the participants were considerably younger….. Well, this was rather like that, except that I was not a judge, and the students were older, and I did not ask them what they wanted to be when they grow up. There was enthusiasm, a bit of nervousness, some glances over at the project of your neighbours to see how they were doing, etc…. all just plain valuable fun. (Go and have a look at my description of that event, by the way).

Here’s Michael Johnson, who’s in my electromagnetism class. He’s a double major (Mathematics and Physics) and his project (”Thermodynamic Properties of Liquid Helium Nanodroplets and Multielectron Bubbles”) gave him a chance to show off his skill set in both areas, doing some modeling of the droplets and bubbles in question:

He worked on this in my colleague Vitaly Kresin’s lab, where the focus is nanocluster physics.

Here a group on a joint project, including Chris Palmer (left, also in my electromagnetism class) who is a Physics major, and his two project partners, Robert Phair and Wendy Mata. The project (”Why Do The Solar Oscillations Change?”), was all about the variations of the properties of the vibrations of the sun:

They worked with Ed Rhodes, my colleague in Astronomy, who studies the properties of the sun.

Next to this group was another group with someone familiar, Pavitra Krisnaswamy (left, below), who was in my electromagnetism class last year. She’s also a Physics major, and you’ll also remember her as one of the students who came on one of the movie-going field trips (to see Proof). She’s been working (with Christin Chong, right, and others) on aspects of Biophysics, in the Pulsed Power Lab of my colleague Martin Gundersen. The project was entitled “An Interdisciplinary Study of the Long Term Effects of Nanosecond Electropulse Therapy for Cancer Treatment”:

While there, I ran into a number of my other Physics and Astronomy colleagues, which was nice. Everybody is so busy these days and so it is really good that we can at least encounter each other when coming to see what our young charges are up to…..

On the same day and on the same note, when I got back to my office there was a knock on my door and standing there was Tim Clunan, who was an undergraduate student in my Mathematical Physics class back at the University of Durham, in 2003. He happened to be in the area, visiting at Caltech, and thought he’d pop down to see me, say hello, and tell me what he’s been up to since I last saw him. Turns out he’s visiting Caltech with his Ph.D. supervisor, Stephen Hawking, and sounds as though he’s getting on rather well at Cambridge, enjoying his research. I took him for a late lunch and a tour of the campus.

There was further good news later that evening that I’ll tell you about later. A positive outcome of some hard (and very distracting) effort that I’ve been putting in for the last three months to make some exciting changes here in the Department.

So overall: Yes, that was one of those days that makes it all worth it.

-cvj