Season's Greetings from the UNM Department of Physics & Astronomy!

We hope you are doing as well as possible under these trying times. It will be a strange holiday season for all of us with the pandemic preventing so many family gatherings. But we will get through this.

At UNM, we took the pandemic threat very seriously. This semester, we reduced our on-campus presence to a small fraction of the total enrollment. The measures worked; UNM had a low infection rate compared to other large schools.

Infections in New Mexico, like most states, rose in October, and all classes went fully remote on November 23. In Physics & Astronomy, our smaller classes were mostly in-person until then, but the larger classes were fully remote. We learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t in teaching remotely. We generally think that frequent in-person interactions are an important part of learning science (and being a scientist), and these are hard to reproduce in a remote setting. However, we’ve learned to adapt as well as we can.

Not being able to see and interact with each other in person has somewhat hurt our productivity and our morale. Faculty and staff with children who could not attend school have faced serious challenges. We expect the spring to be the same but we are hopeful that a vaccine might allow some sort of resumption of normality in the summer. Hopefully we can run our Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in-person again.

A highlight of the semester was the PAÍS virtual Ribbon Cutting Ceremony and Tour in October, featuring President Stokes, the Dean, our faculty, and others. Of course, it all had to be virtual but we think it was a nice way to ceremonially mark the opening of PAÍS. We hope you enjoy the videos made for the event.

There were several key additions to the department this fall. We welcomed our new assistant professors Diana Dragomir (astronomy, exoplanets) and Tonmoy Chakraborty (biophotonics), as well as our Lecturer Jessica Dowell. And we welcomed Youngwoo Yi, our new Advanced Lab Coordinator. We also learned that Gary Harrison and Sandra Ortiz will retire on February 1. They will be sorely missed. Gary was a well-deserving winner of a Gerald May Staff Award for outstanding service this year. Congratulations Gary! Sandra won that award some years ago.

Thanks for reading and I hope you will support our program. Any amount helps!