Faculty Host the Graduate Students event 2010

December 2010
Physics research groups showcase their work and the annual graduate student recognition awards are announced.
Event Photos


The Wayne Bomstad II Memorial Award for Teaching Assistants

This award is in memory of Wayne Bomstad, an important member of the graduate student teaching team.

Discussion Sections

Ben Hall receives the Wayne Bomstad Award for Discussion Sections. Presenting the award are Physics Chairman, Prof. John Yelton, and Wayne's mother, Henrietta Shuminsky. Ben has been a TA in several courses for most of his time at UF, and for two summers, has been the lecturer for PHY2053, a course taken by 200+ pre-meds. Ben's teaching is remarkable and very well received. His research is done with Prof. Jack Sabin on Nuclear Wave Packet Dynamics on on Multiply-valued Potential Surfaces.



Laboratory Sections

Darsa Donelan receives the Wayne Bomstad Award for Labs. Presenting the award are Physics Chairman, Dr. John Yelton, and Wayne's mother, Henrietta Shuminsky. Darsa has a terrific style for interacting one-on-one with students in the lab. She shows up in a white lab coat with the nickname her students use for her---Captain---embroidered on it. Darsa takes care in seeing that her students are progressing through the experiments successfully, then takes it a step further by organizing several tutoring sessions during the semester when lecture exams were approaching. A helpful member of the overall lab teaching team Darsa is always on time and ready to go when it comes to preparation, grading and administrative duties. She integrates her caring and humorous personality into her effective teaching style.











Tom Scott Award

This award is made annually to a senior graduate student in experimental physics who has shown distinction in research. The award honors the memory of Professor Tom Scott who made significant contributions to the Department both as a Chair and as a noted researcher.

The recipient of this year's award is Kate Dooley. Kate works with Prof. David Reitze. Kate's research focuses on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and she has earned the reputation as one of the interferometer experts. The LIGO instruments are some of the most precise measurement devices ever made, detecting motion on the scale of 1/1000 of the diameter of proton. She has performed a vast number of measurements and made the related theoretical modeling to demonstrate that the input optics will perform under high power operations. Kate was awarded a LIGO Fellowship by Caltech to spend a year in residence of only 2/100 students. She has lived in Louisiana for 3 years, where she works with minimal supervision.




The Charles F Hooper Award

This award is made annually to senior graduate students in physics who have shown distinction in research and teaching. The Award honors the memory of Professor Charles (Chuck) Hooper who made seminal contributions to the Department as a Chair, as a distinguished researcher, and as a beloved mentor/teacher. This year there are two recipients:


One of the recipients of the Charles F. Hopper award is Ronald Remington. Ronny has played a pivotal role on the analysis of new data coming from the CMS experiment at the LHC in Geneva, Switzerland. He has mastered the software and is used as a resource by many of our collaborators. At CERN, many of our collaborators believe he is a post-doc already and his reputation is such that he was invited to Fermilab to give a workshop mentoring beginning graduate students on the CMS software, the only graduate student to do so. Ronny is pictured with his advisor, Prof. John Yelton.


The other recipient of the Hooper award is Daniel Barrow. Daniel is working with Prof. Katia Matcheva on the final phase of his doctoral degree, “Gravity Waves in the Ionospheres of Giant Planets”. His research has taken him to several planets starting with Mars, moving to Jupiter and eventually landing on Saturn. In particular, he has worked on the climatology of the Martian atmosphere. He has learned how to deal with large volumes of data and has become an expert in numerical programming. Daniel has four first-author conference papers as well as a full-scale publication. In addition, he has taught several courses and served as a co-lecturer over the summer.