Hi PandA Alumni!

We hope you are all doing fabulously well out there in alumniland.

Another academic year has drawn to a close, and as usual there is plenty to let you know about in this, our latest newsletter.

Faculty Developments

Arash Mafi, our Interim Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, accepted a position at the University of Kansas as Executive Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. A talented researcher and excellent teacher, he will be greatly missed as a faculty member and as Interim Dean.

Elizabeth Crosson is also winding up her last semester with us before she leaves for new challenges.

We look forward to next academic year, when we will be searching for at least three and maybe four new faculty members! Most of these are associated with the impending formation of the Quantum New Mexico Institute, a center that will greatly expand New Mexico's footprint in Quantum Information science and technology. This will be a new Category 3 (i.e. across colleges) center at UNM and will also involve partnerships with Sandia and Los Alamos National Lab researchers. The timing is excellent given the explosive growth in this field.

Our other search is for a computational biophotonics researcher, part of a cluster hire in neuroscience that spans six departments in the College and focuses on underserved populations.

With any luck, we'll have significant growth of the faculty in these areas starting in Fall 2024.

Student Successes

Our students continue to achieve wonderful things. This spring, we graduated the first ever student in our Physics-EE dual degree program, Davyn Pierce-Montague. We're hoping this program will attract EE majors who want to get a more solid foundation in physics to our department. We think the program will open up a new, broad range of worthy career paths. Early signs are that it might be quite popular and we can look forward to more graduates soon!

Other notable successes this semester include graduating senior Will Crockett, who was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that he will take at MIT, Kelsey Adler, who won a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship, and graduate student Hijas Farook, who won an ATLAS Center Fellowship.

Progress on New Campus Observatory

We raised enough last year through our crowdfunding campaign (~$11k!) to begin the first stage of planning for the new Campus Observatory. The Feasibility Study will happen this summer, as a step toward the full design study. We're really excited to get started, thanks to your generous donations. The full design will probably cost >$50k, so we are looking for ways to fund this next stage. You can help by donating here.

Staffing Challenges

On the staff side, the sad news is that Sr. Academic Advisor Alisa Gibson is retiring in July, after 13 years of excellent service in the department. We're still trying to hire two other staff members, which has been difficult during this post-pandemic period.

October 14 Annular Eclipse!

We're very much looking forward to the annular eclipse on October 14. Albuquerque is right on the center of the eclipse path and we plan to take advantage. We're planning a huge event at Johnson Field. We don't have all the details yet, but we'll be handing out eclipse viewers and partnering with various organizations such as TAAS and NRAO, so there's bound to be plenty going on. Look for more details on our website as the date approaches. We hope you can make it!

There's a lot more to read about in this Newsletter, including stories on Physics Day, the Demo Show, and Convocation. Thank you for keeping in touch with the department!