H ello PandA!

This is the second edition of our electronic newsletter. It's been an eventful time since the first one!

We just about got up and running in our fabulous new building PAÍS when the Covid-19 pandemic hit New Mexico and UNM. We had to rather quickly convert all of our classes to an online format, and start working from home as much as possible. Everyone stepped up to the plate: our instructors really took on the challenge of moving their classes online well, and our staff are managing to keep the department running largely from home and doing excellent work.

The biggest impact of the stay-at-home order has been on our graduate students who are conducting research in labs. They have not been allowed to come on campus, and in most cases they are unable to make progress on the measurements they need for their thesis work. This will delay graduation for many of them, unfortunately. And although they continue to get paid, it means that our Principal Investigators are spending their grant money without making progress on research.

On the brighter side, we have lots of exciting news to share with you this time. We have hired a new faculty member in Biophotonics, Tonmoy Chakraborty, who is a postdoc at University of Texas Southwestern and an expert in the exciting field of light-sheet microscopy. We look forward to his arrival in the fall.

We have also hired Jessica Dowell to be our new Lecturer for our introductory labs -- the position that was held for many years by Mickey Odom. Jessica has been doing the job on an interim basis this year and we are excited about welcoming her to our faculty in the fall.

With Diana Dragomir also starting her faculty position in the fall, we will have 31 regular faculty, equal to our historic high. With our lecturers, we now have 10 women faculty out of 34, nearly twice the national average for PhD-granting physics departments. We also had an excellent graduate recruiting season and we have a record incoming class of 19 this fall.

As always, there are many ways to help us reach our goals. A donation to one of our funds would help us continue to turn out very talented graduates and keep us on the forefront of research.

I hope you are staying safe and healthy. Please read on.