I would like to announce that as of October 1, I am a career employee at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I am the Beamline Scientist for the infrared Beamlines at the Advanced Light Source facility here in Berkeley. This will continue the work I have done here for the past 1.25 years, now as a full staff member. I am pleased to have such an excellent position where I will be able to continue my research as well as collaborate with many other scientists as they come to use our IR beamlines.

Heather is now chief resident in her third and final year as a Family Practice Resident at the San Jose Medical Center. She received her M.D. from Stony Brook in 1996. In all likelihood, we will move closer to Berkeley when she completes her residency in June.

(Class of ‘95, Advisor: Laszlo Mihaly)

It has been almost twenty years now since I completed my Ph.D. at Stony Brook. Following nine years in particle physics research - including two years (D0: ‘the early years!’) back in Stony Brook with former advisor, Paul Grannis - I branched out into the world of commerce.

After several, hectic years with Boston-based supercomputer manufacturer, Thinking Machines Corporation, I am now a Program Manager with Origin, the IT services division of the Philips group.

With Sioned in junior high school and Holly and Marlowe at either end of primary, Jo is launching the French office of UK textile-printing company, Electronic Clothing.

I still look back with fondness on the Stony Brook years, keeping in (irregular!) touch with Paul and Guido Finocchiaro. I hope to visit in January of 1999!

...and I am a Stony Brook undergraduate Alumnus, Class of '82. I received my bachelor's degree in physics that took me a long way in life and right now I am a Senior Research Assistant at Cornell University. I obtained my Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from Harvard University in 1988 and completed two post-doctorate programs at Caltech. I would like to send my most sincere regards to my fellow physics alumni and the department that made me who I am. We will always represent the very best in Stony Brook's tradition of excellence. Long live Stony Brook!

Hi, I was a Stony Brook graduate student in the physics department from January 1983 to July 1987. I did my degree on high spin gamma-ray spectroscopy working with Dave Fossan and his group in the Nuclear Structure Laboratory. Stony Brook has some very special memories for me, including a memorable snow storm when I met this girl Cindy, a musician, now my wife - a long story. After Stony Brook I postdoc'ed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before accepting a staff position at the University of Liverpool, U.K. This was great fun, being an Irishman living in England (honestly), and great physics, Liverpool being one of the world's leading centers for gamma-ray spectroscopy and detector design. While here we did some kick-ass physics on superdeformation, a rather exotic state of nuclear matter and I was intimately involved in the design, construction and running of the Eurogam array, at the time the world’s most sensitive gamma-ray spectrometer.

Two years ago my wife and I oscillated back across the Atlantic and I now hold a junior-faculty position at Yale, working in the Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory. Yale in general is great, for physics, for music, for sailing (I am the new faculty advisor for the Yale Corinthian Yacht Club. Onerous duties include regular dinner at Mory's). Since moving to Yale I have built up the YRAST Ball array, the largest university based gamma-ray spectrometer in the U.S., and probably the world. This spectrometer has been operational for just about a year now and physics results are beginning to roll off the press. I have also organized the first ever Yale Physics Olympics. This is an idea I developed in Liverpool based on a similar project I saw years before in Stony Brook (organized by Cliff Swartz). The Physics Olympics (not Olympiad) is a day-long experimental physics competition for teams of high school students. The idea is to enthuse the students and to show them that physics can be, and is, fun! During the day the students, working in teams of four, and using simple apparatus participate in a series of common-sense based physics experiments. At the end of the day the results are tabulated and the winning teams get to take home prizes to show off to their athletic department jock-friends. This year the Olympics has gone intercontinental with simultaneous competitions being held in Liverpool, U.K., Perth, Australia and Yale, U.S.A. (Class of ‘87)

As "transplanted" New Yorkers from Taiwan, we are finally "repotted" in New York, after eight years in Michigan. After a long year and six interview trips, I settled on the position of Director of Medical Physics in the Radiation Oncology Department of Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan (14th St, Union Square area) and St. Lukes Roosevelt Hospital Center (near Lincoln Center area). Beth Israel (affiliated with Albert Einstein Medical College) is making a major effort to become a top medical center. That is why I was attracted to it. I was also awarded an NIH grant on "a Dosimetric study of intravascular brachytherapy. My husband, Hung-Sheng (Dr. Tsao, Class of ‘72, worked with Ben Lee), got a transfer to New York with Sun Microsystems, as a system engineer. I am very lucky to have a supportive husband. Most of our relatives are in the Metro New York area. Our children stay in Michigan. Our older son, Lee, graduated from U of Michigan this year and took an entry level job as system engineer at Sun Microsystems in Michigan, following his dad's footstep, in a way. Our younger son, Hwa, will be a junior in U of Michigan. He is more interested in social studies.

Sou-Tung (Class of ‘74) also writes that she is looking for a good post-doc, and that the Stony Brook physics department has the kind of applicant pool she needs. (Advisor: Peter Feibelman)

"I’ve lived in Israel ten years already. Almost all that time I’ve been connected with Tel Aviv University in one way or another, working with Yakir Aharonov. Fred Goldhaber participated in some of the work.

Recently I’ve had a half-time research position there plus a half-time position teaching at an engineering college nearby. This arrangement has some chance of becoming permanent. I’ve been writing a book on quantum paradoxes with Aharonov and have become interested in quantum information theory.

(Class of ‘86, Advisor: Max Dresden)

After having spent a few years at Saclay and UCLA as a postdoc, I joined the University of Kentucky in 1980. Currently I am a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. My research emphasis in the last decade has been lattice gauge theory and calculations of hadron structure. The quantities that we calculated include the quark spin content, pion-nucleon sigma term, and various form factors of the nucleon.

I was a recipient of the Humboldt Senior Scientist award in 1991 and consequently my family and I spent 8 months in Juelich, Germany. I was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997.

I have learned a great deal from the nuclear bull-sessions on Thursday nights to discern the difference between brute-force number crunching and hand-waving arguments. Perhaps the greatest benefit I gained at Stony Brook is experiencing the building of a group. I came here as a lone theorist in nuclear and particle physics. Now we have 7 faculty members, one staff member and several postdocs and students in the group. (Class of ‘75, Advisor: Gerry Brown).

...formerly the Einstein Fellow of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and the Department of Physics Nuclear Theory Group, is the Chairman of Pacific Gold Coast Corp. located in Locust Valley (Long Island, NY) and established in New York since 1988 as a privately held software developer and publisher that specalizes in Windows software, which is actively marketed worldwide in English, French, German, and Japanese versions. Just this last October, Pacific Gold Coast Corp. announced the release of their latest new software, Turbo ZIP Express v1.0 for Windows 95/98/NT 4.0. The designer of this new compression utility to make file extraction as effortless as possible, is David Sun, currently a freshman at Cornell University and the son of Dr. Tan-Na Lee Chu, co-founder of Pacific Gold Coast Corp., and Dr. Yao H. Chu. Aside from the excitement of this release, Yao would like to donate a TurboZIP Express site license to SUNY Stony Brook, which will allow all university-owned computers to use this new product. TurboZIP Express also makes sending and receiving large files over the Internet a much easier task. Many thanks to Dr. Chu!

(Class of ‘77; Advisor: Gerry Brown)

Bill’s first employment (1977-85) after graduation involved the creation and direction of a $25 million/year energy management program at Pacific Gas & Electric based in San Francisco, CA. This effort promoted voluntary reductions in energy use by residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural customers during times of peak electrical demand. During the summers of 1983 & 1984, Bill was able to avert invoking the statewide electrical emergency plan by operating this program.

He subsequently moved on to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) where he has held several positions that have led to national recognition for leadership in energy, electronics, technology research/commercialization, and industrial competitiveness. This last activity led to the formation of the EPRI Partnership for Industrial Competitiveness (EPIC) that developed environmental, energy, and productivity improvement recommendations for manufacturing industries. His most recent exploits include a collaboration with SEMATECH, the international semiconductor research consortium, in forming the EPRI Center for Electronics Manufacturing (http://www.epri.com).

Bill and his family enjoy sailing (on the Bay!), scuba diving (warm water!), skiing, and bodysurfing (well, at least Bill does). They live in the Oakland hills with a magnificent view of the Bay. Bill’s son (class of ‘98) just graduated from Stony Brook with an M.S., Materials Science from the Engineering Department. His first job is with Caterpillar, Inc. in Peoria, Illinois at their Technical Center.

Bill’s advice to physics and astronomy students: the background of knowledge you are building will provide you with enormous versatility that will enable you to pursue a variety of interests and disciplines after you graduate - use this to your advantage! (Advisor: Frank Shu, currently at UC Berkeley)

I completed my Ph.D. studies in March, 1998. In my research, I used the techniques of high-spin gamma-ray spectroscopy to investigate collective rotational properties of Sn, Te, and Xe nuclei in the mass-110 region.

Towards the end of my studies, I decided to pursue a most unusual course for a physicist: I applied to law school. My decision was motivated by my interest in law and my desire to apply my physics background in a novel way. I am currently a first-year student in the JD program at the School of Law of New York University. While the curriculum does present its share of new challenges, the skills of analytic thinking which I learned in physics have proven quite useful in this endeavor as well. I eagerly anticipate being able to apply my technical expertise in the near future to the complex legal and scientific issues involved in patent litigation. (Advisor: David Fossan).

I recently returned from a sabbatical in Europe and South Africa with my family (Mary, Elizabeth and Mark). We started out in the fall of 1997 in Darmstadt where I worked at GSI and was supported by a reinvitation from my Humboldt Senior Research Award in 1991. We spent November in Thessaloniki, Greece and Tel Aviv, Israel. December and January were spent in the warmth of the South African summer where I was a Visiting Professor at the University of Stellenbosch (near Capetown) working with my colleague Werner Richter. We spent the last six months in Oxford, England, and happened to end up renting a house a few doors away from the house I rented in 1980. My host was Nick Stone in the Clarendon Laboratory. The children came back with the appropriate combination of German, South African and British accents. (Advisor: David Fossan, Class ‘74)

writes to say he has been at Notre Dame since 1982 following his postdoc stint
at Texas A&M University. He’s not made it back to Stony Brook in many years and asks,
"Are they still digging up all over the campus?" followed by "I understand the ‘Bridge to
Nowhere’ now goes somewhere and Stony Brook has a genuine football team! At Notre
Dame, we take these things seriously!" (Class of ‘78, Advisor: David Fossan)

is currently the Astronomy Editor for Nature. (Advisor: Phil Solomon)

"I am currently a postdoctoral physicist in the High Energy Theory Group at Argonne National Laboratory. My Stony Brook education is serving me well and my respect for the place continues to grow. I’m looking forward to the alumni meeting in 2000!" (Class of ‘95, Advisor: Jack Smith)

"I am Professor of Theoretical Physics at theUniversity of Valencia in Spain. Besides physics, I enjoy cycling and skiing. My memory of my graduate student years is still very vivid. It was a very profitable experience both professionally and humanistically." (Advisor: Gerry Brown)

Return to electronic yearbook

Last modified 1/28/04