William Douglass Dorland, 1965-2024

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Category: Department News

Published: Tuesday, September 24 2024 10:24

Bill Dorland, an esteemed plasma and computational physicist who last week received the American Physical Society’s James Clerk Maxwell Prize, has died at age 58. Since a 2004 diagnosis of chordoma, a rare cancer affecting the spine, he optimistically pursued emerging therapies while advocating for the chordoma community, engaging in continued physics research and serving as a superb mentor and teacher.

After completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Texas (and winning the campus foosball tournament), Dorland earned both a Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences and a Master’s degree in public affairs at Princeton University. He returned to Texas, working at the Institute for Fusion Studies, before joining the University of Maryland in 1998 when his wife, Sarah C. Penniston-Dorland, accepted a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.

Early in his career, Dorland’s calculations revealed that an international plan to build a gigantic fusion reactor was based on flawed science, thereby saving $10 billion and preventing a probable scientific debacle.

His work modeling plasma turbulence merited the prestigious E. O. Lawrence Medal of the Department of Energy. A Diamondback profile described Dorland’s reluctance to leave his class for a call from “the secretary”, who turned out to be Secretary of Energy Steven Chu relaying news of the award and its $50,000 honorarium.

During his career, Dorland held appointments at the University of Vienna, the University of Oxford and Imperial College, London.  From 2020-23, he served as associate laboratory director for Computational Science at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, which is managed by Princeton University.

Dorland studied in Japan during high school, and found the experience invaluable and insightful. Arriving at the University of Texas, he was shocked by the paucity of such opportunities, and launched a vigorous campaign to direct a fraction of student fees toward international exchanges. The number of students studying abroad from UT grew from eight his freshmen year to more than a thousand four years later. In 2000, he received a special award by the Council on International Education Exchange.

At UMD, he co-developed new curricula, including Physics for Decision Makers: The Global Energy Crisis, a Marquee course to instruct non-science majors in perhaps the world’s most pressing challenge. He was a remarkable mentor; three of Dorland’s undergraduate advisees have received the University Medal.  Twice he officiated the weddings of UMD graduate students.

When his chordoma diagnosis prompted an assessment of his life and priorities, he sought the role of director of the UMD Honors College, recalling his own transformative experience as a UT undergrad. For seven years, he advocated for new programs and encouraged study abroad experiences. In a Maryland Today  article during that time, he described continuing his work through his tortuous medical odyssey with the support of his wife, a professor in the Department of geology, and his daughter Kendall.  The family asks that those interested in commemorating Bill do so with a donation to the Chordoma Foundation.

In 2010, Dorland was named a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher (DST). In a letter supporting the nomination, one student described Dorland as “the sort of genius who, while always impressive, is never intimidating….His cheerful encouragement, quirky sense of humor, and constant support were what kept me going in graduate school, even when finishing the dissertation seemed like an impossible goal.”

In his own DST essay, Dorland wrote that after his diagnosis, “I had occasion to reconsider all the decisions I had made in life, and to adjust my trajectory accordingly for the time remaining. I spent a few weeks thinking hard, and was extraordinarily happy to find that I was already doing exactly that which gives me the most satisfaction.”

He concluded: “I generally work as hard as I can to challenge the best students at the University of Maryland to perform at their very best level. This is my mission. It is nothing more than teaching, research, and love.”

Dorland received the E.O. Lawrence Medal from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2009.

Juan Uriagereka congratulates Bill Dorland on his Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award in 2010.

Dorland Selected for APS Maxwell Prize

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Category: Department News

Published: Monday, September 16 2024 15:24

Professor William Dorland was honored with the American Physical Society’s (APS) 2024 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for “pioneering work in kinetic plasma turbulence that revolutionizes turbulent transport calculations for magnetic confinement devices and inspires research in astrophysical plasma turbulence". This honor was shared with Greg Hammett, Dorland’s doctoral advisor from Princeton University. Professor Dorland died on September 22, 2024, just days after the announcement. 

The James Clerk Maxwell Prize annually recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of plasma physics.  The prize is named after a nineteenth century Scottish physicist known for his work with electricity, magnetism and light.Bill Dorland (photo by Mark Sherwood)

Dorland graduated with a B.S. in physics (with special and highest honors) from the University of Texas in 1988, and received his Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University in 1993. He also earned a Master’s degree in Public Affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in 1993, after completing a course of study focused on international science policy.

He then accepted an appointment as a Department of Energy Fusion Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Fusion Studies of the University of Texas and rose to the rank of Associate Research Scientist before joining the University of Maryland in 1998. He holds a joint appointment in Physics and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP). Dorland has been a Visiting Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford since 2010 and held a previous appointment in the Department of Physics of Imperial College, London. From 2020-23, he served as Associate Laboratory Director for Computational Science at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.

In 2005, Dorland was elected a Fellow of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. He won the Department of Energy’s 2009 E. O. Lawrence Medal for “his scientific leadership in the development of comprehensive computer simulations of plasma turbulence, and his specific predictions, insights, and improved understanding of turbulent transport in magnetically-confined plasma experiments”.

Dorland is a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, a recipient of the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship and a Merrill Presidential Faculty Mentor. He served as Director of the UMD Honors College for seven years, and afterward was cited with an Honors College Outstanding Faculty Award. Three of Dorland’s undergraduate mentees have received the University Medal.  He has been active in professional societies, contributing to APS advocacy for the international freedom of scientists, human rights and national security. He has published more than 150 journal articles.

“With his brilliant insights, Bill Dorland has fundamentally transformed the exploration of turbulence in fusion and astrophysical plasmas, and the Maxwell Prize is an immense and appropriate honor,” said Physics chair Steve Rolston. “In addition, he has been an extraordinary teacher, fantastic colleague and superb mentor. I could not be happier about this recognition.”

The prize carries a $10,000 stipend. UMD physicists who have won the Maxwell Prize include Tom Antonsen,  Phillip A. Sprangle, Roald Sagdeev, James Drake, Hans R. Griem, and Ronald C. Davidson.

Bill Dorland died days after this story was published. Read more about him here: https://umdphysics.umd.edu/about-us/news/department-news/1982-dorland.html

Curious About the Cosmos

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Category: Department News

Published: Wednesday, September 11 2024 06:24

For the last four years, Aneesh Anandanatarajan has kept a running list of “big questions” about the universe and how it works. He started the list in high school but shows no signs of slowing down in his senior year as an astronomy and physics dual-degree student at the University of Maryland.Aneesh Anandanatarajan

“I am the type of person to ask questions until someone tells me to stop,” Anandanatarajan said. “I have about 40 questions on my list, and I like to return to them to see how I’ve progressed in terms of what I've learned and what I’m interested in.”

One of his early questions—how are electricity and magnetism related?—was written at a time when Anandanatarajan knew little about plasma astrophysics. Now, he’s conducting research in Physics Assistant Professor Sasha Philippov’s lab, where he uses physics-based simulations to study the turbulent environment and complex electromagnetic interactions around supermassive black holes.

While Anandanatarajan loves asking questions, he’s happiest sharing what he learned with others. As the tutoring chair for UMD’s Society of Physics Students, Anandanatarajan has become a physics ambassador while strengthening his knowledge of the subject.Aneesh Anandanatarajan and Othello Gomes

“As a tutor and as the tutoring chair, it has been important to me to know physics well. I want to fully understand where these different concepts and equations come from,” Anandanatarajan said. “One of the things I'm most excited about is sharing physics with other people.”

Virtually hooked

Anandanatarajan has been interested in exotic objects like black holes and neutron stars since middle school, but he didn’t discover this passion in a lab or a planetarium. While watching YouTube one day, he found a channel with buzzy animated videos about popular science topics, including astronomy and physics. A few videos later, he was hooked.

“It captured my interest in more ways than I expected because I didn’t really know much about those subjects before middle school,” he said. “Over time, I watched more videos and realized that astronomy might be something I’d like to learn more about at an academic and professional level.”

Anandanatarajan said he was initially attracted to UMD’s “great astronomy program,” but he was thrilled to learn that he could add a second degree in physics by taking a few more classes. He’s enjoyed learning from professors who are exploring diverse fields of research.

“There are a lot of really great research topics here at Maryland and professors that are doing active research in those fields,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of great experiences with professors that want me to succeed and have pushed me to succeed.”

One of those professors is Philippov, whom Anandanatarajan started working with in spring 2024. Philippov studies high-energy astrophysics through a blend of theory and computer modeling with a focus on the physics of plasmas—hot, ionized gas surrounding black holes, neutron stars and other celestial objects. 

Anandanatarajan is using computer simulations to study how plasmas composed of electrons and positrons interact with other particles in the corona, an extremely hot and highly magnetized region that surrounds black holes, our sun and other space objects. Through a process called annihilation, these interactions can produce gamma rays, a type of radiation that astronomers can study to learn more about the universe.

“The corona is a very mysterious region that a lot of astronomers are very interested in probing,” Anandanatarajan said. “It’s essentially a breeding ground for electromagnetic activity, so we'd like to understand the phenomena that occur in that region because there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to our observations.”

Through this research, Anandanatarajan learned how to run Monte Carlo simulations that predict the probability of different outcomes—a skill that proved useful on other projects, like the up-and-coming study of high-energy particle collisions.

When interests collide

During the spring 2024 semester, a project in Physics Assistant Professor Christopher Palmer’s PHYS 441: “Introduction to Particle Physics” course let Anandanatarajan play an unexpected role in the next Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

During the course, Palmer teamed up with faculty at MIT to give students a front-row seat to discussions involving the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a proposed collider that would push the boundaries of particle physics beyond the capabilities of the LHC. The hope is that an upgraded collider could discover new particles or find evidence that deviates from the Standard Model of physics, which describes the fundamental forces that shape the universe.

Anandanatarajan and other students at UMD and MIT analyzed Monte Carlo simulations to determine how to precisely measure novel processes produced in electron-positron collisions from the FCCee accelerator, the first stage of the FCC.

“Essentially what we wanted to do was characterize different kinematic properties, such as the energy, momentum and angles at which these produced particles came out,” Anandanatarajan explained.

In March, this culminated in a visit to the second annual FCC workshop, where students presented their projects and spoke with leaders in the field.

“We learned a lot about how high-energy physics is conducted and the planning that is needed for a mega collider that may or may not be built 30 years from now,” Anandanatarajan said. “We talked to many different experts in the field who were thankfully friendly and willing to talk to undergrads about these types of topics.”

This experience initially felt disparate from his other projects, but Anandanatarajan realized that electron-positron collisions and large Monte Carlo simulations play an important role in astrophysics, too. After he earns his undergraduate degree, Anandanatarajan plans to continue studying astrophysics in a Ph.D. program that will allow him to keep asking—and answering—those big questions he’s carried with him for years.

Until then, he looks forward to spending his senior year sharing his passion with anyone willing to listen. He has several ideas for the Society of Physics Students—including a possible YouTube channel, harking back to his initial inspiration—to get students more engaged in physics.

“Making people excited about physics has always been a passion of mine,” he said. “I feel like I enjoy physics more than the average person, so I want to share those feelings with others and show them all of the cool things that physics has to offer.”

Leaning into Lidar

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Category: Department News

Published: Wednesday, September 11 2024 05:24

Swarnav Banik’s (Ph.D. ’21, physics) parents were visiting from India when they saw a strange-looking car on a San Francisco street that stopped them in their tracks.

“They asked what it was, and I said, ‘That’s a Waymo car. It has no driver in it. It drives itself.’ And they were so surprised,” Banik recalled. “They kept looking at the Waymo and taking pictures of it, they were so excited. And I said, ‘Yes, this technology is indeed exciting. Until a few years ago, we used to think of this as some future technology—now this is what I do.”Swarnav Banik

And what Banik does might just be the future of transportation. Since 2022, he’s been working on sensing technology for the next generation of autonomous vehicles.  He first worked as a senior photonics engineer at Aurora Innovation, a company that’s developing self-driving systems for semitrucks and other commercial vehicles; now he’s at Aeva, a Silicon Valley firm developing sensing and perception tools for driverless cars and industrial automation. 

In his work, Banik develops next-generation sensors that use lidar—light detection and ranging —technology to help autonomous vehicles “see” objects on the road ahead and safely avoid them.

“A typical autonomous vehicle has three kinds of sensors—a radar, a camera and a lidar,” Banik explained. “I have been working on frequency-modulated continuous wave lidar (FMCW), which has several advantages over the more commonly used time-of-flight lidar. Unlike time-of-flight lidars, FMCW lidar detects both the position and velocity of obstacles. This is extremely useful for highway driving where maneuvering decisions need to be made quickly.”

For Banik, working with lidar technology means putting his physics skill set to work in a way he never expected.

“Lidar is an interesting application of lasers. It uses many of the optical spectroscopy principles that I used as an atomic physics grad student, but I never thought I’d be doing anything like this,” he reflected. “It just kind of happened and I’m happy about it. I really like what I’m doing.”

The path to physics

Growing up in Mumbai, India, Banik was a curious and enthusiastic student, especially when he started taking high school physics.

“I really loved physics. It felt very logical, and I had a lot of fun solving physics problems,” he said. “In a way, it was like applying mathematics to real-world problems, and I believe that’s what interested me.”

In 2009, Banik entered the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi as an engineering physics major. As a sophomore, he landed an internship developing mathematical models for a cosmic ray experiment at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Then as a junior, he interned in the U.S. at Fermilab, near Chicago, where he tackled the challenges of avalanche silicon photodiodes that are used for detecting high-energy particles.

“The idea was that these photodiodes would eventually be used in the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, and I was involved in the development of the photodiodes,” Banik explained. “I wasn’t married to particle physics back then, but I enjoyed designing engineering solutions from first principles: I learned how to break complex problems into smaller pieces and tackle them one by one, and I really appreciated that.”

After earning his undergraduate degree in India in 2013, Banik headed back to the U.S. to begin graduate school at the University of Maryland, where he hoped to find his niche in physics.

The thrill of research

“The Department of Physics at Maryland does very good research in almost every possible field of physics,” Banik explained. “I thought it would be a great place to get exposure and decide what I want to do.”

Banik connected with as many grad students and faculty members as he could, exploring everything from plasma physics and condensed matter theory to atomic, molecular, and optical physics and quantum information. Atomic physics won him over.

“The quantum computing applications that come out of atomic physics experiments were very exciting to me,” he recalled. “I saw grad students building atomic physics labs and I saw all the skills they had developed just by doing this research. I was impressed, and I wanted to be one of them.”

Working in UMD’s Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), Banik’s Ph.D. research focused on simulating cosmological inflation, such as the expansion of the universe, using a Bose-Einstein condensate.

"We start with sodium atoms and cool them to ultra-low temperatures of less than 100 nanokelvin using techniques like laser and evaporative cooling," Banik explained. "These atoms then form a quantum degenerate gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, and we use this as a platform to simulate phenomena like cosmological Hubble friction, which is impossible to study experimentally due to the massive scale of the universe."

For Banik, the thrill of successfully simulating Hubble friction—and working in the collaborative culture of JQI—energized and inspired him.

“I was working with Gretchen Campbell and Ian Spielman and they were really great,” he said. “The whole JQI ecosystem is so supportive. There are so many people you can rely on—the professors, the older grad students, the postdocs, we were constantly exchanging equipment and ideas.”

Lidar on a chip

After earning his Ph.D. in 2021, Banik charted a course toward industry.  And he saw a unique opportunity at Aurora. 

“Aurora makes autonomous freight-hauling trucks, and they were looking for someone with a physics mindset, someone who would approach solving problems from first principles,” Banik said. “Most of the people there were electrical engineers, and they needed someone who could think about next-gen architecture because they were building a newer version of the lidar sensor for fleets of vehicles.” 

Over the next two years, Banik and his colleagues met that challenge, developing and patenting a cost-saving, integrated, chip-based lidar sensor system.

“Making a lidar sensor is not that tricky—but the company wanted to mass-produce them,” Banik explained. “These chip-based sensors have the same capability as the traditional bulk optic sensors, but they could be produced more cheaply and in volume, meaning more lidars for more trucks.”

When Banik took a test ride in an autonomous semitruck equipped with lidar and other sensors (and a human “operator” on board as a backup), he got a whole new perspective on what driverless technology could do.

“It was fascinating—I was in this big self-driving truck, not a simulation, this was the real thing,” he recalled. “It was highway driving, there was heavy traffic, and the operator wasn’t doing anything. He was just sitting there while the truck drove itself. And then when we weren’t on the highway, there was a pedestrian who came all of a sudden, and the truck stopped for the pedestrian—just like that. The truck did exactly what it was supposed to do.”

Earlier this year, Banik moved on from Aurora to become a senior photonics module engineer at Aeva, where he continues to work with lidar and sensing modules, advancing autonomous driving technology that could be on the road in the not-too-distant future. 

“I feel that, if not today, then in a few years this technology is pretty much within the reach of the companies that are trying to do it,” Banik explained. “Aurora will be launching its self-driving trucks commercially by the end of this year, and I know of some other companies that are also doing that at the end of this year or early next year.”

There are still plenty of challenges on the road ahead, but Banik wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

“It feels very good to be making an impact,” Banik said. “That’s the thing that motivates you and keeps you going. It’s pretty exciting.”