Department News - UMD Physics

S. James Gates, Jr. Endows New Summer Research Award

Details: Published: Tuesday, March 15 2022 00:01

College Park Professor of Physics Sylvester James “Jim” Gates, Jr. joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1984, and as he rose to prominence in the fields of supersymmetry and supergravity—even being awarded the National Medal of Science in 2011—he never lost focus on his mission of educating the next generation of scientists.

Sylvester James Gates, Sr. and Charlie Anglin Gates

Over 20 years ago, Jim launched the Summer Student Theoretical Physics Research Session (SSTPRS), which offers a summer long experience for students interested in conducting mathematical/theoretical physics research. Approximately 250 students have participated in the program since its inception, exploring areas of theoretical physics and publishing refereed journal articles on their research findings. SSTPRS also has allowed him to teach for fifty-one consecutive years.

Now, Jim has created a new opportunity for undergraduates to conduct research by establishing the Sylvester James Gates, Sr. and Charlie Anglin Gates Endowed Summer Research Award. The award will support undergraduate students in physics or mathematics to pursue research during the summer break.

Delilah Gates, Dianna Abney, Jim and Sylvester Gates

“I hope that the award, like the Summer Student Theoretical Physics Research Session, will help students gain acceptance to graduate school and enhance diversity in physics and mathematics, which is integral to advancing scientific discovery and innovation,” he said.

Jim named the award to honor the memory of his parents. When Charlie died of breast cancer at age 42, Gates, Sr. raised his four young children while serving full time in the U.S. Army. After more than 27 years of service, he retired as a sergeant major—the highest non-commissioned military officer rank. Gates, Sr. was one of the first African Americans to earn this position of authority. He went on to have two more careers in public education and as a union organizer.

“I credit my father for emphasizing the importance of education and sparking my interest in science at a very young age,” he said.

Jim and his wife, Dianna Abney, sparked that same interest in their own children, twins Delilah Gates (B.S. ’15, physics and mathematics) and Sylvester Gates III (B.S. ’15, biological sciences). Both pursued undergraduate research while at UMD, and Delilah has since earned her Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and is currently an associate research scholar at Princeton. Sylvester is currently a biological sciences Ph.D. student at UMD.

Jim, Dianna, Delilah and Sylvester see the scholarship as a way to encourage young people to do theoretical research, honor Jim’s parents, and to encourage other African American families to give to UMD.

Reaching for the Stars (and the Exoplanets)

Details: Published: Tuesday, March 15 2022 00:01

NASA astrophysicist Christopher Stark (Ph.D. ’10, physics) is on a mission to broaden our horizons in space

Christopher Stark (Ph.D. ’10, physics) grew up in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, a small midwestern town known in part for one of its most famous natives, James Van Allen, a physicist who was very influential in the development of space science in the United States and even graced the cover of Time magazine in 1959.

“Van Allen discovered the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth and I feel like this was sort of common knowledge in Mt. Pleasant,” Stark explained. “I went to James Van Allen Elementary School and my parents happened to live in Van Allen’s childhood home at one point.”

You might think all that stellar influence would spark a childhood passion for astronomy or maybe even physics. It didn’t.Chris Stark

“In spite of those coincidences, I didn’t grow up wanting to be an astronomer,” Stark said. “I didn’t stargaze at night, I wasn’t big into science fiction and space travel, none of that.”

But Stark eventually decided to become an astrophysicist, inspired by a college lecture that quite literally changed his life.

“The lecture was about exoplanets,” he recalled. “I remember thinking it was unbelievable that we have the ability to detect planets around stars outside our solar system. It was like a lightbulb went off! I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”

Since then, Stark has spent nearly two decades unraveling the mysteries of distant planetary systems and developing tools to study them. In 2020, after years of exoplanet research and mission design, Stark became deputy integration test and commissioning project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—the biggest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space.

“It’s incredibly exciting,” Stark said. “Webb was designed to look in the infrared at the faintest galaxies that one would possibly imagine—galaxies so distant that you’re essentially looking back in time to the first stars and the first galaxies that were formed. It’s an amazing opportunity.”

Falling in love with physics

For Stark, growing up in a small town in Iowa was worlds away from a career studying extrasolar planets and planning missions in space. As a kid, he had plenty of energy and liked to build things, encouraged by his industrious parents.

“My dad was a carpenter by trade for quite a while, and I can’t remember a time when he and my mom weren’t working on a project,” Stark explained. “It’s difficult to recall being around the house and not helping them with something, like re-roofing their house or laying a limestone retaining wall.”

In 1999 when Stark enrolled at the University of Northern Iowa, physics and astronomy were the furthest things from his mind. He was taking economics and marketing courses, looking ahead to a career in business. At the suggestion of his brother, who was also majoring in business, Stark signed up for a course called “The Physics of Everyday Life” to fulfill the physical sciences requirement for his degree. He never imagined what would happen next.

“The class was all about the physics behind everyday things like frisbees, CD players and cellphones. I was enthralled, and I just fell in love with physics,” he recalled. “I was learning about the world in a way that I never experienced before.”

Stark immediately changed his major to physics and never looked back. His very first undergraduate physics class—and later, that memorable lecture on exoplanets—set Stark’s course toward the stars. In fall 2004, he began his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Maryland.

“What really appealed to me was that Maryland’s physics department was so flexible with what their students researched, like biophysics and chaos theory and astronomy, which is what I ended up doing,” he said.

For Stark, UMD’s proximity to major research centers in the D.C. area, including NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was ideal.

“I could literally drive 10 minutes to NASA and chat with people there at lunch to see if they had a research project that they would want me to work on,” Stark recalled. “I found my first opportunity to research exoplanets at NASA by doing just that.”

Gamma rays and debris disks

After his first summer at NASA working on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Stark started working with Mark Kuchner, an expert on debris disks, the hazy dust clouds generated by asteroids and comets around other stars. At Kuchner’s suggestion, Stark applied for—and received—a NASA fellowship that funded three years of his Ph.D. research. For Stark, graduate school provided a world of opportunities, not just in research but in academics as well.

“There’s some level of knowledge from the traditional academics that you’re taught in grad school that sticks with you for the rest of your career,” he explained. “I don’t know that a day goes by that some aspect of orbital mechanics or quantum mechanics doesn’t enter into my thoughts.”

After earning his Ph.D. in 2010, Stark moved on to a postdoctoral position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and spent three more years studying debris disks around distant stars. Three years later, he returned to NASA Goddard as a postdoc working with Aki Roberge, a research astrophysicist in the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Lab.

“I had been a theorist and an observational astronomer and when I started working with her, I said, ‘I’ve been working in this field for seven or eight years now I really want to get into mission design work,’” Stark explained. “And she said, ‘Have I got a project for you!’”

At the time, Roberge was studying a future telescope concept that would detect and image exoplanets. To determine what kind of telescope and other instruments would be needed, she had to develop a tool that could predict how many exoplanets the mission might discover.

“We talked through how we would develop this tool and it turned out that everything I needed to do that project, I had the pieces already,” Stark recalled. “Forty-eight hours later, after reading through published papers and a lot of coding, I came back to her with a functioning skeletal structure of how this would work, and I think it hit both of us that we were onto something big.”

On a mission: the James Webb Space Telescope and Beyond

Together, Stark, Roberge and their colleagues developed a mission optimization tool that’s still being used by NASA today and Stark moved full steam into mission design. By 2015, he’d been hired as an associate scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where he helped guide the design of future space telescopes and worked on the JWST, a huge NASA project that was still years away from launch.

“I was part of the team that prepared to align the mirrors of JWST after launch,” he explained. “Those golden hexagons, they all have to be aligned to within a fraction of a micron to work like one large mirror. The alignment is an amazing process, to be able to move around and shape a mirror segment more than a meter in size with such precision.”

Stark returned to NASA in 2020, taking on a new role as deputy integration test and commissioning project scientist for JWST, which launched in December 2021 and is now orbiting the sun on its journey of discovery.

“On a day-to-day basis, we’re tracking the performance of the telescope and instruments, and making sure that all the information we need is available to understand how the decisions we make impact science as we go,” Stark explained. “Working on this mission is thrilling, it’s stressful. More than anything, it’s humbling. It takes thousands of talented people to put something like this together.”

Stark is all about putting things together, and not just space missions. After years of doing construction projects with his parents as a kid, he still has a passion for building things at home in his spare time. No project is too big or too complicated.

“At this point, it’s an obsession. Anything that I can build is fair game. Honestly, that may be why I ended up in the position I’m in at NASA,” he mused. “I think there’s an aspect of designing future space missions that helps satisfy my need to build.”

From Stark’s Ph.D. studies to his current work on the Webb, every research project and every NASA mission have brought him closer to the dream he’s had since his very first day at UMD.

“My goal is to help launch a mission that has the chance of finding another planet that looks like Earth, and maybe even has biosignature gases that could be indicative of simple life,” Stark explained.

Stark believes that mission will soon be a reality. And he can’t wait to be part of it.

“We have so many exciting missions coming up that get at fundamental questions that humans have been asking themselves for millennia. We’re going to fundamentally transform our understanding of our place in the universe,” he said. “The next few decades of astronomy is really going to knock your socks off.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Nicole Yunger Halpern Ponders Quantum Mechanics, Thermodynamics, and Everything Else

Details: Published: Tuesday, March 15 2022 00:01

There is a well-known saying, of disputed origin(link is external), that dissuades students and even working physicists from thinking too deeply about the meaning behind quantum physics. “Shut up and calculate,” it goes. Nicole Yunger Halpern, an affiliate of JQI and the newest Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), was never one to abide by this mantra.

Instead, Yunger Halpern, who is also a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, brings a vast intellectual curiosity to physics, from tackling abstract theory to collaborating with experimentalists, all the while drawing distinct connections between diverse disciplines of physics. She also brings her research to life through writing, imbuing it with historical, philosophical, and even artistic context.Photo by John T. Consoli/University of Maryland

Her self-titled research direction—at the intersection of quantum information theory and thermodynamics—is “quantum steampunk,” after the steampunk genre of literature, art and film that envisions a 19th century world where steam engines power futuristic gadgets, like flying boats and robots. Her book(link is external) of the same title is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2022. She will discuss it at the physics colloquium on Tues., March 29 at 4 p.m. in room 1412 of the John S. Toll Physics Building.

Thermodynamics, developed largely in the 19th century, is the “steam” in Yunger Halpern’s research, merging with the futuristic science non-fiction that is quantum mechanics. Quantum thermodynamics explores how quantum mechanics can impact and enhance thermodynamic problems, such as channeling energy and heat to perform work, and it raises new questions about information transfer in the process. “What steampunk fans dream,” Yunger Halpern writes in her Ph.D. thesis(link is external), “quantum-information thermodynamicists live.”

On top of helping bridge the 19th and 21st centuries, Yunger Halpern brings the tools of quantum information thermodynamics to other disciplines. Her work on quantum scrambling(link is external) is relevant to black hole physics; her thermodynamic theories(link is external) straddle physics and chemistry; experimental realizations of her proposals have brought collaborations with condensed matter(link is external) and atomic, molecular and optical physicists(link is external); her studies of quantum mechanics have touched on information theory(link is external); her work on thermodynamics ventures into machine learning(link is external); and she’s even proposed an idea for quantum voting(link is external).

Yunger Halpern’s voracious appetite for ideas from diverse disciplines dates to her childhood in Florida. “I grew up reading basically all the time,” she recalls. “I would read while waiting for my parents to pick me up from school; while standing in line; and while in restaurants, waiting for food to arrive. I was interested in everything.”

As early as high school, thermodynamics caught Yunger Halpern’s eye. She remembers learning about entropy, a measure of disorder in a collection of particles, in a biology class. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, once it increases, can never go back down—a familiar concept to anyone who’s ever tried to stuff toothpaste back into the tube or unscramble an egg.

Some physicists believe that this irreversibility is what gives time its forward direction. “I’m fascinated by entropy,” Yunger Halpern says, “because it’s this abstract concept, quantified with a funny-looking function, but it has such important real-life implications.”

Yet, despite the early fascination with entropy and a high school physics class she loved, Yunger Halpern was still not willing to put on academic blinders after enrolling at Dartmouth College. “Two physics professors helped me design a major that enabled me to view physics from many perspectives,” she explains. “It was partway between the standard physics major and the create-your-own major.” The bespoke major included conventional physics courses combined with some math, philosophy and history.

It was a history of science class in her final term at Dartmouth that further pushed Yunger Halpern to make physics her primary focus, and to pursue graduate school. She was the only student in the class with a scientific background, and she noticed this gave her a different perspective on the course. “I couldn’t help noticing that I understood these topics more deeply than my classmates,” she says, “and I realized that I wouldn’t have been satisfied if I’d learned the material strictly at the level required for the history course.”

Similarly, she realized, she wouldn’t be satisfied if she refrained from studying a host of other topics—cosmology, field theory, etc.—at the level required of a physics student. “So, I was determined to remain a physics student—to study physics more deeply,” she says.

After completing her degree at Dartmouth, Yunger Halpern continued to follow a somewhat unconventional path. She spent a year as a research assistant at Lancaster University in England, followed by a one-year master’s program at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. After starting a Ph.D. program at Caltech, she spent another semester as a visiting graduate student in Oxford, England.

It was during her master’s studies that Yunger Halpern had her first taste of combining quantum information theory with thermodynamics, under the guidance of then-postdoc Markus P. Müller and faculty member Robert Spekkens. They made use of quantum resource theories—a set of mathematical tools that look at quantum objects as resources that can be spent to accomplish a task—as a framework for thermodynamics(link is external).

Yunger Halpern reveled in the interdisciplinary nature of the work, as well as its real-world relevance. “That project was exactly the springboard that I’d sought to embark on research in quantum information theory and thermodynamics,” she says.

This set the course for her quantum steampunk career.

Propelled forward by her deepening passion, Yunger Halpern attended graduate school at Caltech under the mentorship of John Preskill, a giant in the field of quantum information science. “At the time, I was interested in a very theoretical, abstract flavor of quantum thermodynamics,” she explains. “Very few researchers in the United States supported it. But I told John what I wanted to do, and he said, ‘Ok. Do it.’ I felt that I’d have the freedom and support to undertake the research that I felt drawn to.”

This freedom brought her to a key insight(link is external) at the intersection of two seemingly disparate questions—how much work you have to do to push a collection of particles into a different configuration (like squeezing toothpaste into a travel-sized tube) and what happens when information is thrown into a black hole. Simply put, both processes depend crucially on the direction of time, like the toothpaste that won’t go back in the tube. Noticing this connection allowed Yunger Halpern to derive an equation relating quantum scrambling—the thing black holes are thought to do with information—to something that could be measured in the lab. Experiments realizing a simpler version of Yunger Halpern’s protocol were carried out(link is external), not inside a black hole, but in the lab of Kater Murch at Washington University in St. Louis.

Next, Yunger Halpern and her collaborators designed a truly steampunk invention(link is external): an analog of a steam engine that relies on an exotic quantum phase. This phase’s superpower is that it thermalizes very slowly or not at all, akin to an ice cube that stays cold on a warm summer day. It’s a collection of quantum particles that are kept in a box with a jagged and disorderly floor, creating a randomness that prevents the particles from freely bumping into each other and exchanging energy in a phenomenon known as many-body localization (MBL).

Drawing on ideas from her research at Perimeter, Yunger Halpern, with her collaborators, realized that a state that does not thermalize could be used as a resource. The engine, which they called ‘MBL-mobile’, is a four-stroke cycle that takes a collection of quantum particles in and out of the MBL phase to extract work.

At the beginning of her graduate career, alongside her research, Yunger Halpern committed to writing a blog post every month for Caltech’s blog Quantum Frontiers(link is external). This is a habit she’s kept to this day, having recently published her 100th post(link is external).

Through the blog, she’s managed to continue cultivating her lifelong love of writing. “I was writing stories as early as second grade,” she says. “The best physicists I’ve met explain their science in terms of stories colored by a few simple, basic equations, so writing stories about my physics regularly feels natural.”

Yunger Halpern’s blog posts touch on literature, history and anthropology from all over the world, drawing analogies and placing her work as a scientist into a larger context. “It provides a useful creative outlet,” she says. “Physicists value creativity, but there are some things that even we aren’t allowed to write in papers. I can write those things on the blog, which keeps my imagination in high gear and so enhances my physics.”

After Yunger Halpern moved on to a postdoctoral position at Harvard University, her writing landed her a feature story in Scientific American(link is external). Now, her new book, “Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow,”(link is external) is about to hit bookstores nationwide. “The book is almost entirely nonfiction,” she says, “but each chapter begins with a snippet from an imaginary quantum-steampunk novel. I also worked with my editors and illustrator to bring out the steampunk aesthetic of quantum thermodynamics—not only in the explanations, but also in the figures and even in the fonts.”

Photo by John T. Consoli/University of MarylandAt the University of Maryland, Yunger Halpern looks forward to forging new collaborations with senior researchers as well as training young scientists. “The people at Maryland—the colossal quantum and statistical-mechanics communities—certainly drew me. I have worked with Chris Jarzynski, who’s a wonderful scientist and a wonderful person, and I’ve visited the College Park campus several times over the years because I simply couldn't stay away from the research.”

She is also drawn to Maryland’s interdisciplinary structure, believing it will feed her insatiable drive to connect scientific disciplines. “I’m looking forward to making even more new connections,” she says.

Original story by Dina Genkina: https://jqi.umd.edu/news/nicole-yunger-halpern-ponders-quantum-mechanics-thermodynamics-and-everything-else

Faculty, Staff, Student and Alumni Awards & Notes

Details: Published: Tuesday, March 15 2022 00:01

We proudly recognize members of our community who recently garnered major honors, began new positions and more.

Faculty and Staff

Ruba Abukhdeir joined the department as the Director of Business and Finance.
Kaustubh Agashe, Mohammad Hafezi and Arpita Upadhyaya were elected Fellows of the American Physical Society.
Jesse Anderson retired on December 31 after 34 years with the department.
Lea Bartolome received the department's Staff Excellence Award.
Alessandra Buonanno received the Balzan Prize.
Sankar Das Sarma was named a highly cited researcher by Clarivate Analytics. He also wrote a commentary for Physics Today. He recently discussed the latest developments in topological phases in quantum computing at a Microsoft conference.
Work by Jim Drake on the heliosphere was described in Phys.org.
James Ellsworth joined the department as assistant director for of procurement, inventory and receiving.
Sarah Eno was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Manuel Franco Sevilla was named liaison between EF and Rare Processes and Precision Measurement group at Snowmass.
Victor Galitski was quoated in Physics magazine.
Jim Gates received the 2021 AIP Andrew Gemant Award. He was also profiled in Symmetry Magazine.
Carter Hall was featured on the Department of Energy website regarding what his 2011 Early Career Award had meant to his research.
Donna Hammer was named a Society of Physics Students Outstanding Chapter Advisor.
Eliot Hammer joined the chair's office as coordinator of administration.
Work by Anson Hook was described in Science Daily.
Ted Jacobson's idea of a black hole laser was discussed in PhysicsWorld.
Danae Johnson joined the department as a business manager.
Melanie Knouse received the department's Staff Excellence Award.
Alicia Kollár received a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Wolfgang Losert received a Brain and Behavior Institute seed grant award.
Howard Milchberg, Daniel Woodbury (Ph.D., '20), Robert Schwartz wrote a Physics Today Quick Study showing how revisiting early experiments with new tech leads to pinpointing individual electrons in ambient gases.
Rabi Mohapatra will retire on August 1, 2022.
Allen Monroe received the department's Staff Excellence Award.
Johnpierre Paglione was named an Outstanding Referee of the Physical Review journals.
Naomi Russo received the department's Sibylle Sampson Award.
Jay Sau was named UMD co-Director of the Joint Quantum Institute.
Yasser Saleh joined the department as procurement coordinator.
Brian Straughn received the Lorraine DeSalvo Chair's Award for Outstanding Service.
Fred Wellstood will retire on April 1, 2022.
LaVita Williams joined the payroll office as a business service specialist.

Students

Elizabeth Bennewitz, a graduate student working with Alexey Gorshkov, has been named a finalist for a 2022 Hertz Fellowship.
Yonatan Gazit and Yanda Geng received the Richard and Anna Iskraut Award.
Donovan Buterakos, Haining Pan, DinhDuy Vu won the Richard E. Prange Graduate Student Award.
Sagar Airen received the Kapo-Barwick Award.
Batoul Banihashemi, Yan Li, Braden Kronheim, Edward Broadberry, Jeremy Shuler, Subhayan Sahu, Saurabh Kadam, Nathaniel Fried received the Ralph Myers Award

Alumni

Vakhtang Agayan (Ph.D., '00) was named Chief Technology Officer of KMK Consulting.
Beatriz Burrola Gabilondo (Ph.D., '10) was named an APS Equity, Diversion and Inclusion Fellow.
Laird Egan, (Ph.D., '21), was quoted in a Physics story on quantum error correction.
Alexei Fedotov (Ph.D. ’97), received teh Dieter Möhl Medal in the field of beam cooling.
Salman Habib, Director at Argonne Lab's high energy division was a PhD student of mine (1988).
Ruth Kastner received a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Philosophy of Science.
Ying-Cheng Lai (Ph.D., '92) was named a Regents Professor at Arizona State University.
Thomas Mason, B.S. '89, physics; B.S. '89, electrical engineering https://www.chemistry.ucla.edu/news/mason-group-research-featured-science-advances
Elizabeth Paul (Ph.D., '20) and Matt Landreman published work on a twisty stellarator in Physical Review Letters.
Denjoe O'Connor (Ph.D. '85) is now the Director of Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, the position Erwin Schrödinger held during World War II.
TC Shen (Ph.D. '85) is a professor of physics at Utah State University.
Chris Stephens (Ph.D. '86) is the director of the Center for Complexity Science at UNAM, Mexico City.

Book Marks

Victor Yakovenko's work in econophysics was discussed extensively in the book Anthill Economics.

Department Notes

The UMD Society of Physics Students received an Outstanding Chapter Award. It also launched a newsletter, The Tortoise.
UMD President Darryll Pines spoke with CNBC about quantum computing.
IonQ, a company founded on research based at the University of Maryland Department of Physics, joined the New York Stock Exchange.
IonQ also joined the University of Maryland in creating National Quantum Lab at Maryland (Q-Lab). The Q-Lab will be the nation’s first user facility that enables the scientific community to pursue world-leading research through hands-on access to a commercial-grade quantum computer.
Women in Physics was featured in The Diamondback.

Creating an Inclusive Physics Community

Details: Published: Tuesday, March 15 2022 00:01

When University of Maryland senior physics majors Ela Rockafellow and Kate Sturge entered the lecture hall of their honors math course freshman year, they quickly realized they were two of three women in a room of about 25 people.

All through high school, Rockafellow noticed how the number of women, gender minorities and students of color diminished in her advanced STEM classes, especially physics and math. When she asked her friends why their passion for science had faded, they told her they didn’t feel smart enough for the coursework—and often mentioned specific experiences or interactions that had discouraged them.

Studies show that since the ’90s, young women and men have earned about the same number of math and science high school credits, with women performing slightly better than men in these classes. But men are more likely to take the advanced placement exams to receive college credit. Seeing this themselves, Rockafellow and Sturge wondered how the dynamic could be changed so young members of underrepresented groups would feel empowered to pursue their goals in STEM.

“I think everyone in physics has felt like they’re not smart enough at one point or another,” said Rockafellow, a 2021 Goldwater Scholar. “But the compounded effect of society’s assumption that certain people aren’t as intelligent as others, especially in STEM spaces, can make it significantly more difficult to stay in the field.”

Crafting a Curriculum

Rockafellow and Sturge, now co-presidents of the Society of Physics Students (SPS), decided to develop a class that would provide undergraduate students with the tools to counter society's assumptions about students in STEM. The idea for the course had initially been raised by attendees in an SPS town hall meeting in fall 2020. As SPS co-presidents, Rockafellow and Sturge decided to push the concept forward and create the course themselves in close collaboration with the director of education for the Department of Physics, Donna Hammer.

For months, Rockafellow and Sturge brainstormed the right course structure with Hammer, determining the necessary elements to make the course a reality. Together, they landed on a one-credit speaker series seminar to pilot the class, which became PHYS 298D: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Physics.

“The idea was that from listening to a variety of speakers, students would gain a broader perspective, both validating the experience of minority students and increasing empathy and understanding of what minority members of the physics community go through,” Rockafellow explained. “Once we put together a rough outline for a curriculum, we sent it to everybody we knew who knew had experience in DEI work, and we got tons of feedback on how to make the course most effective.”

To host this seminar, Rockafellow and Sturge first needed to find speakers. Starting with the American Physical Society’s climate report author list, they emailed hundreds of DEI experts to find the right mix of perspectives.

“We ended up getting a lot of really well-known people in the field to come speak just from asking,” Sturge said.

Speakers they chose ranged from Sandy Springs Friends School Head of School Rodney Glasgow to Harvard University Department of the History of Science Chair Evelynn Hammonds to UMD Counseling Center Research Director Yu-Wei Wang. Rockafellow and Sturge publicized the speaker series to SPS and physics department faculty and staff, expanding the reach of each lecture to the greater UMD physics community.

“The seminar format was a natural fit and an exciting student-driven curriculum endeavor,” Hammer said. “Ela and Kate have excellent leadership skills and true dedication to addressing and solving DEI issues.”

When freshman physics major Alejandro Escoto registered for PHYS 298D, he already had some understanding of the challenges underrepresented minorities have faced in physics. But he didn’t realize just how extensive those challenges were.

“In this class, we explored in-depth why women and people of color have been excluded in physics, how it continues to happen and what each individual can do on a small scale to change that narrative,” Escoto said. “I left the class with a better understanding of how my own privileges play into my navigating of the field and how the things I say will end up affecting other people.”

Plotting the Future Course

For the course’s final project, students proposed projects to advance DEI efforts in their academic communities. For example, Escoto proposed a follow-up course to PHYS 298D on the history of science, focusing on the achievements of a wide range of scientists rather than just white men.

“There’s a culture of there being one type of physicist,” Sturge said. “Usually, that physicist is white, male, cisgender, straight. That’s the box that you have to fit in. It’s our responsibility to use our privilege as white women to speak up and work toward a goal of dismantling that ideology in physics.”

With the successful pilot behind them, Rockafellow and Sturge are looking for ways to grow the size of the course the next time it’s taught and they’re revising the PHYS 298D curriculum to meet the Understanding Plural Societies general education requirements. They also hope to continue their outreach work toward building a more diverse, inclusive physics community as they apply to graduate school.

“When you have a bunch of diverse minds together, science really flourishes,” Sturge said. “That’s why this work is important. We’re all working toward a better physics community.”

Written by Katie Bemb