Dear Physics community,
Dear Physics community,
I’m pleased to introduce our Fall 2023 Newsletter, another full issue showcasing the latest happenings in the Department of Physics. As usual, we introduce our newest members, profile several others, and say good-bye to a few faculty and staff. We have so much exciting news to share with you — from research highlights to congratulations to our June 2023 PhD graduates and other awards and recognitions.
We have a busy recruitment season ahead, with four faculty searches getting underway, and in January, we will welcome Morgan O’Neill as Assistant Professor Tenure Stream in Theory, Modelling, and Dynamics of the Atmosphere. Meanwhile, in this issue’s Faculty Profile, we interview our newest faculty member, Boris Braverman, who joined us in August as Assistant Professor Tenure Stream in Quantum Information Science. Three new staff members recently joined the Department: Pam Mann as part-time Library Technician, Jonathan Hucker as Learning Technology Specialist, and Helen Pham as ATLAS Project Coordinator. In addition, Darlene Gorzo is currently working part-time as Graduate Assistant, replacing Beata Kuszewska who is on secondment from her position in the Graduate Office. We say good-bye to three departing faculty and staff: Carolyn Sealfon, Daisy Yuan, and Pius Santiago.
The Newsletter includes profiles of quantum optics Post-Doctoral Fellow Coraline Fujiwara, atmospheric physics PhD Student Sabrina Madsen, and Physics Specialist Angela Xiang. Our Emeriti Profile features nuclear physicist Tom Drake, who was a professor in the Department from 1971 to 2005. For our Alumni Profile, we interview Jaclyn Sikka, whose double Major in Math and Physics provided her with skills needed for her job as a specialty tax analyst helping businesses involved in research and development.
The Research Spotlight in this issue is on Prof. Anton Zilman and graduate student Tiantian Zheng and their recent PNAS paper in which they developed a physical model of the nuclear pore complex in cells to investigate how it maintains rapid and efficient transport between the nucleus and the rest of the cell. As always, you can read about other departmental news and research at Physics News.
Congratulations to our fifteen June 2023 PhD graduates and to all the Physics students, staff, and faculty who have received numerous awards and recognitions since our Spring Newsletter. I’m especially pleased to announce that we have awarded the Momentum Builders Scholarship to the two inaugural recipients: Taha Aboshanab and Ezra Msolla. Thanks to the generous response of many of you to our appeal for donations, we now have an endowment of more than $100,000 that will enable scholarships to be awarded annually to Indigenous and Black undergraduate students in Physics.
At our June end-of-year party, Nicholas Sullivan was awarded the 2023 Loudon-Hines Gold Medal, and the four recipients of this year’s Van Kranendonk TA Awards were announced: Nathan Carlson, Alistair Duff, Dylan Jow, and Emily Zhang. The Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (CQIQC) Scholarship was awarded to four Physics undergraduate students: Amirali Atrli, Tanmay Grover, Nicholas Taylor, and Qinyuan Yang.
The 2023 Department of Physics Staff Awards were also announced in June, with Michael Manley receiving the Award for Administrative Excellence and Lilian Leung receiving the Award for Technical Excellence. Steven Butterworth was honoured by the Faculty of Arts & Science with the Dean’s Outstanding Technical Service Award for his exemplary work as Manager of Physics Computing Services.
On the faculty side, the Physics Student Union announced the third cohort of recipients of their Teaching Awards to recognize exceptional pedagogy in undergraduate courses: Ania Harlick for PHY224, PHY293, and PHY424, and Bob Orr for PHY250. In July, Nikolina Ilic was promoted to the position of Institute of Particle Physics Continuing Research Scientist and to the rank of Associate Professor. New awards for our faculty include the 2023 IEEE Photonics Society Quantum Electronics Award for Hoi-Kwong Lo, the 2023 CAP/DCMMP Brockhouse Medal for Hae-Young Kee, the 2023 CAP Medal for Excellence in Teaching Undergraduate Physics for Jason Harlow, Fellowship in the UK’s Royal Society and the 2023 ACS’s Helen M. Free Award for Public Outreach for Dwayne Miller, appointment to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists for Debra Wunch, and a CAP Fellowship and the APS Hans A. Bethe Prize for Dick Bond.
Our physCAP Physics Mentorship Program launched with an event in early October and it was a busy spring and summer for Outreach in Action, including in-person school visits, Science Rendezvous, Girls SySTEM, Doors Open, and the Science Unlimited Summer Camp. A very big thank-you to 2022-23 Outreach Committee Chair Jason Harlow, Special Projects Coordinator Supreet Randhawa, and all our PhysCAP and outreach volunteers!
As always, we welcome your feedback on Interactions – please contact our new Editor, Supreet Randhawa, at newsletter@physics.utoronto.ca with your comments and news.
With very best wishes
Professor & Chair