Group News

David Modarelli, now on the faculty at University of Akron, has been notified that he and co-principal investigators Lim and David Perry will receive a $850K grant from the NSF MRI program for a regenetively amplified femto/picosecond laser system. This will give an additional boost to Dave's already successful research program in photochemistry and photophysics. As he puts it, the new system is powerful enough "blow a starship trooper out of the sky at any wavelength!" Way to go, Dave!!

Andrew S. Ichimura, now on the faculty at the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at San Francisco State University, has been awarded both a Spring 2002 Cottrell Science Award for his project entitled Heterogeneous solid state reduction of organic electron acceptors, and a PRF Type G grant from the ACS. Way to go, Andrew!!!

Andrew also has been awarded a 2002 NASA Faculty Fellowship Program Award as an Ames First Year Fellow at San Francisco State University.  This new program is being initiated to offer science and engineering faculty hands -on exposure to NASA's research challenges through 10-week summer research residencies and extended research opportunities at participating NASA research centers, working closely with NASA colleagues on challenges important to NASA's strategic enterprises. Sounds exciting! Again, congratulations, Andrew!!

Post-doc Prasanna Ghalsasi has accepted a post-doc position with Prof. Joel Miller's group at University of Utah, where he will join Yi Liao as the second PML group alum working their.  Best of luck, Prasanna!

Burak Esat has joined the group of Prof. John McCracken at Michigan State University, where he will be working on ESR and ESEEM.  Have fun at MSU, Burak!

Undergraduate group alumnae Pamela Shields and Brigid O'Brien will be graduating this year.  Pam will be working for a while, and Brigid will be going to Johns Hopkins.  All the best!

Pamela Shields presented her research work at the 8th Annual Conference on Undergraduate Research, Scholarly, Creative, & Public Service Activities on 3 May 2002 in Boston.  Her poster was entitled "Phenols as Biologically Active Molecules".  Thanks for representing the group at this conference, Pam!

The well-known Public Broadcasting Company show Nova has made use of the PML group's 3-D pictures of carbon allotropes on its fascinating show "The Diamond Deception", which talked about the making of diamonds from graphite under high pressure and temperature. Go to the Nova archive site for this show, and scroll down to the section that asks you to "View a Diamond Crystal" or "View Graphite" or "View a Buckyball" to see the fruits of the groups work on Nova! Thanks, PBS, for using our pictures in such a great story.

PML's book, Magnetic Properties of Organic Materials (Marcel Dekker) is still available!  Buy it! Help advance his retirement fund!