Alumnus Douglas Arion Points to Mountains of Stars

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Published: Tuesday, September 08 2020 00:03

Ever since he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, Douglas Arion (M.S. ’80, Ph.D. ’84, physics) has been an innovator. He has always enjoyed the challenge of building things from the ground up—houses (he designed two), groundbreaking technology, unique academic programs and even college sports teams. 

“I think I’m inventive and creative and have always wanted to build and make things that aren’t what’s expected,” Arion said. “I’ve always been somebody who wants to make stuff happen.”

Douglas Arion. Photo by Rebecca SteevesAnd for 35-plus years, he’s been doing just that, thanks to his strong foundation in physics.

“If you understand physics you understand everything, because everything fundamentally is based on physics,” Arion said. “I don’t think there’s been a discipline I’ve worked in or a technology that I’ve worked on or used or a field that you can’t apply it to. If you understand physics, you can do anything.”

At UMD, Arion’s Ph.D. research was a complex blend of plasma physics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics. 

“I found a way to quickly determine when a magnetic field can rapidly change shape and  break—such as when there’s a flare on the sun,” Arion said.

Arion had plenty of inspiration. His friends and study partners included Penrose “Parney” Albright (M.S. ’82, Ph.D. ’85, physics), who went on to become assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and David Douglas (M.S. ’82, Ph.D. ’82, physics), who spent 35 years exploring the nature of matter as a senior scientist at Jefferson Lab in Virginia.

“The folks who graduated with me have gone on to do some really amazing things,” Arion said. “We were good friends. I still stay in touch with many of them today.”

Arion would begin making his own mark as an innovator soon after he left Maryland, when a connection he made on campus led to a job at Science Applications Incorporated (SAI), a Virginia-based defense contractor.

“I was first involved in modeling and analysis of radiation effects on spacecraft and missile systems, that was the first big project we worked on,” Arion said. “I ended up working on a whole bunch of different defense-related projects in radiation areas.”

Climbing through the ranks at SAI to assistant vice president, Arion led the design and testing of systems including space-qualified optics and high-precision structural measuring systems for more than a decade.

Then in 1994, he moved on to a completely different kind of challenge, inspired by an ad he saw for a unique position in academia—an endowed chair in science and technology entrepreneurship at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

“Carthage had received a donation from an alum, a former chem major, who said, ‘You need to start a program to teach science students how to launch ventures and how to run things,’” Arion explained. “So, I put in a resume and got hired. I built the country’s first program for undergraduates in science and technology entrepreneurship. And that was before it was sexy—you know, everybody has a program now. “

For Arion, it was another opportunity to build something from the ground up—this time, a program to teach science students the things they weren’t learning in the traditional college curriculum.

“When I created it, I started out saying in my head and then on paper, what’s all the stuff I wish someone had told me before I became a corporate exec, because there was a lot of stuff I had to learn on the fly,” Arion recalled.

Soon, Arion was teaching his students everything from personal finance and retirement planning to accounting, intellectual property and regulatory issues for business—all while coaching the college’s hockey team. His groundbreaking science entrepreneur program was so successful that it became a model for similar programs at colleges and universities around the country. 

In 2015, Arion’s efforts were recognized by his peers. Elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, he was honored for “groundbreaking work towards improving the educational impact of the physics degree by promoting the widespread adoption of entrepreneurship training and mindset within the discipline.”

Arion enjoyed academic life in Wisconsin, but as time went on, he missed the wild beauty of the New Hampshire mountains, where he spent summers hiking and biking as a boy. Arion never lost his love for the outdoors—or his passion for protecting the environment. And after more than a decade at Carthage College, he saw an opportunity to take his innovative energy—and science education—in a new direction.

“I’ve always been very unhappy with the general understanding of science in this country, and in particular when it comes to the environment,” Arion explained. “I wanted to do something different.”

His plan was to reinvent environmental education and change the way people see their place in the world around them.

“From my perspective, most people in western culture think that human beings are more important than everything else,” he said. “We look at every resource as something we can just take. If we’re more aware of our place in the universe we will become more protective of the resources that are all around us.”

That idea was the inspiration for Mountains of Stars, a program Arion launched in 2012 with a simple mission.

“We call it environmental awareness from a cosmic perspective,” he said.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and other supporters, Mountains of Stars began as a partnership between Carthage College and the Appalachian Mountain Club, the oldest outdoor recreation, conservation and education organization in the U.S. The mission: use high-quality, hands-on astronomy experiences to change people’s attitudes and actions toward the environment.

Why astronomy?

“Two things. One: It’s actually the only science. Because everything is part of it,” Arion explained. “You can address and integrate and incorporate everything that’s out there, all of the processes that have brought us to this point cosmically. It’s all one system—geological processes, natural biology, it’s everything. The second aspect is that people like it. If you have a telescope, people want to look through it. That gives you an opportunity to talk about something.”

Through the Mountains of Stars program, college physics and astronomy students train to be better science communicators and can then become part of the program’s environmental outreach, which includes hands-on astronomy and nature activities designed to engage the public and raise environmental awareness, one person at a time. Over nine years, the program has reached more than 65,000 people.

“I hope, over the long term, that we're planting enough seeds that people will actually change what they do and thus change the course of human behavior,” Arion explained. “I know it takes time, but you have to start somewhere.”

Arion is technically retired now, living on the doorstep of a national forest in a New Hampshire home he designed and taking full advantage of the outdoor lifestyle that goes with it. He still does research and leads entrepreneurship workshops around the world, and he is also involved in environmental initiatives like the international Dark-Sky Association. But it’s Mountains of Stars, the mission closest to Arion’s heart, that continues to get most of his time and energy. He hopes over time, the program can make the kind of difference that matters. 

“This is the thing that’s most important to me right now,” Arion said. “I hope in the future, someone looks back at it and says we did something good here.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Faculty, Staff, Student and Alumni Awards & Notes  

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Published: Tuesday, September 08 2020 00:01

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

Faculty and Staff 

• Maissam Barkeshli was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
• Negar Heidarian Boroujeni was nominated for the Donna B. Hamilton Teaching Award. A nominator wrote: In high school I DREADED going to physics, but now it’s honestly so interesting to learn more!! You explain everything perfectly and you’re so good at communicating what you have to say to the students. 
• Bill Dorland will be working over the next year as the Associate Director of Computational Science at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. 
• Jim Drake was quoted in a Phys.Org story on solar flares.  
• Jim Gates, John Mather and Bill Phillips participated in an Oxford University discussion of the Greatest Physics Discoveries of the 20th Century.
• Michelle Girvan and her COMBINE team offered a program on network epidemiology in the time of coronavirus in April.   
• Nick Hadley retired from the department, but will remain active at the LHC's CMS experiment as a Research Professor.
• Mohammad Hafezi was named a Simons Investigator and a finalist for the Blavatnik Award. 
• Carter Hall is the department’s new Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education. 
• Wendell Hill is the new Director of the Chemical Physics Graduate Program. 
• Christopher Jarzynski was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, named a Guggenheim Fellow and awarded a Simons Fellowship.  
• Muge Karagoz was nominated for the Donna B. Hamilton Teaching Award. A nominator wrote: She is very knowledgeable in the material and is gifted in explaining it in a simple manner that allows me to understand it fully.
• Kiyong Kim was promoted to the rank of Professor.
• Daniel Lathrop described a plan to overhaul his experiment and create a better magnetic model of the Earth. In addition, he and his students were included in a Physics Today story about returning to the lab after the COVID-19 shutdown. He provided context on turbulence research for a recent story in Quanta Magazine.
• Vlad Manucharyan received his second Google Faculty Research Award to support work on superconducting quantum computing technologies. 
• Rabi Mohapatra’s work was deemed one of the three most important papers in the first 50 years of Physical Review D. 
• Chris Monroe was named to the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC).
• Edward Ott was elected a foreign member of the Academia Europaea.
• Joe Redish retired on June 30 after 52 years with the department. 
• Matt Severson was nominated for the Donna B. Hamilton Teaching Award. A nominator wrote: Professor Severson is the best overall science teacher I’ve ever had. The concepts I thought were impossible, he made possible. I am forever thankful for him.
• Arpita Upadhyaya was named Co-director of the Biophysics graduate program. 
• Ellen Williams spoke at the Accelerating Clean Energy Innovation workshop sponsored by the National Academies. She also discussed clean energy in an Al Jazeera interview. Williams was also named Director of UMD’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center.

Students

• John Collini received a Department of Energy Graduate Student Research award. 
• Kristi Lynne Engel received a Department of Energy Graduate Student Research award. 
• Anna Grafov received a Fulbright Scholarship and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. 
• John Hannegan was quoted about his work in Qudsia Quraishi’s lab. 
• Caleb Harada received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
• John Martyn received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
• Eli Mizrachi received a Department of Energy Graduate Student Research award. 
• Leeza Moldavchuk received a Subaru of America Foundation Scholarship.
• Scott Moroch received a Barry Goldwater Scholarship.  
• Michael Nastac received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the University Medal. 
• Nick Poniatowski was named a finalist for the 2020 APS Apker Award.  He has also been cited for his research accomplishments and was offered a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
• Mark Zic received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and was cited for his undergraduate research achievements  

Alumni

• Aziza Baccouche (Ph.D. ’02) was a featured speaker during Penn State’s Black History Month. 
• John Biddle (Ph.D. '16) was appointed as an assistant professor at Holy Cross College. 
• Christopher Eckberg (Ph.D. ’19) received the Charles A. Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award.  
• Leslie Atkins Elliot (Ph.D. ’04) wrote about maintaining students’ interest in the classroom for Education Week Teacher. 
• Yves Idzerda (Ph.D. ’86) was named Dean of the College of Letters and Science at Montana State University. 
• Joel Kastner (B.S. ’81) was part of a team reporting the first detection of X-rays from the earliest phase of evolution of a star like our Sun.
• Delilah Gates (B.S. ’15) was the inaugural speaker in the NSBP Innovate Seminar Series. 
• Alan Henry (B.S. ’02) was hired as service editor at Wired. 
• Jainendra K. Jain, a postdoctoral researcher from 1986-88, co-edited a book titled “Fractional Quantum Hall Effects: New Developments.”  
• Alan Nathan (B.S. ’68) is a frequently-quoted expert on the physics of baseball. 
• Elizabeth Paul (Ph.D. ’20) received a Princeton Presidential Fellowship.  
• Govindan Rangarajan (Ph.D. ’90) was appointed Director of the Indian Institute for Science.
• Sam Rombro (B.S. ’18)  was a quiz bowl champion at the University of Arizona. 
• Fred Strauch (Ph.D. ’04) was promoted to the rank of full Professor at Williams College.  
• Alexander Wai (M.S. ’85, Ph.D. ’88) was appointed president and vice Chancellor of Hong Kong’s Baptist University. 
• Thomas B. Wells (M.S. ’74, Ph.D. ’78) placed second in a congressional primary in Florida. 
• Stephanie Williams (B.S. ’19) was featured by the American Association of Physics Teachers in their August 2020 spotlight.  
• Jeremy Young  (Ph.D. ’19) received an Honorable Mention for the Charles A. Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award. 

Department Notes

• The Department participated in the American Institute of Physics Task Force to Elevate African American representation in Undergraduate Physics & Astronomy (TEAM-UP). College Park Professor Jim Gates and College of Education Professor Sharon Fries-Britt served on the task force. 
•  UMD & NIST hosted a Conference of Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) in January. 
• The Maryland Quantum Alliance—a regional consortium of quantum scientists and engineers from across academia, national laboratories and industry—launched in January. Recently, it was expanded as the Mid-Atlantic Quantum Alliance. 
• Research by a team that includes Assistant Professor Norbert Linke, Graduate Student Nhung Hong Nguyen, and Visiting Graduate Student Cinthia Huerta Alderete was selected as one of the 2019 Top Picks in Computer Architecture by IEEE Micro. 
• The Condensed Matter Theory Center launched a blog. 
• The Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics found that the department is a top producer of physics undergraduate degrees. 
• Negar Heidarian Boroujeni, Dave Buehrle, Tom Gleason, Jordan Goodman, Carter Hall, Kara Hoffman and Ted Jacobson received campus funding to adapt instructional methods in the wake of the coronavirus.  
• The Quantum Technology Center (QTC)—a joint venture between the A. James Clark School of Engineering and the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences—today entered into an education partnership agreement with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) to identify and pursue quantum technology research opportunities. 

A Physics Career of a Thousand Steps

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Published: Monday, September 07 2020 00:01

Despite growing up in an information bubble in a small town in western Iran, Zohreh Davoudi started down the path of becoming a theoretical physicist at an early age.

“There was no internet, a TV with only two channels” Davoudi said. “There were limited books, some newspapers. You had this sort of obscured picture of reality.”

But what she also had was two parents—both teachers—who were dedicated to giving their six children an education. With their support, her path ultimately brought her to the University of Maryland in 2017. As an assistant professor, she is dedicated to tackling challenging problems one step at a time and leaving a strong foundation for future scientists.

Her work can’t be neatly classified; it straddles the fields of high-energy particle physics and low-energy nuclear physics. In particular, Davoudi wants to uncover how the Standard Model of particle physics—the theory that describes the most basic known forces and particles—brings about the reality at the heart of every atom, which is the domain of nuclear physics.

“The matter portion of the universe that we can see is better known than the other aspects of the universe, like dark matter and dark energy, but the visible sector of the universe by itself is still full of mysteries,” Davoudi said. “While we understand the underlying mechanism—the physics framework that describes the interactions at the fundamental level—it is a very hard, complex problem to put together these elementary particles, these building blocks, and build up a complex, large, many-body quantum system, which ultimately builds up our universe.”

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the part of the Standard Model that elegantly describes the “strong interaction” that holds matter together. Exploring how it applies to creating protons and neutrons, and subsequently atomic nuclei, is a daunting challenge in modern nuclear physics.

Step-By-Step Progress

Davoudi’s drive to understand the fundamental underpinnings of the universe has origins all the way back in her childhood. Her parents instilled a love learning in their children, and Davoudi developed a particular affinity for math.

When Davoudi was around 10 years old, her father went back to school for a second degree, despite the demands of having children and a full-time job as a middle-school science teacher, because he wanted to teachDavoudi and her father Hassan, Summer 2018. a more challenging subject—physics. And as her father studied physics, Davoudi’s fondness for math found a practical application that caught her imagination.

“He would come home with physics books, and they were very complicated, of course,” Davoudi said. “I couldn't even pass the first page often. But there is always a page of introduction or preface that had something very intriguing. And this all just got me curious.”

Her father explained all he could to her, and the two of them began to dream of her becoming a theoretical physicist. One of the first big steps toward that goal was to get accepted to a good university in the capital city, Tehran.

“I went to college to do physics,” Davoudi said. “It was obvious that's the only thing that could keep me interested and curious for a long time.”

As an undergraduate and then a master’s student at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Davoudi was interested in high-energy physics and the big questions it tackles about the nature of reality, like the origin of matter and interactions and what drives the physics of the hidden “dark” sector of the universe. Then her hard work and interest in theoretical physics brought her to the University of Washington to do her Ph.D.

Once there, she took a step in a new direction when her previous, narrow perspective of nuclear physics as an old, tired field was overturned. She was drawn into nuclear physics by a class that she took mainly because she couldn’t find any other subject that she hadn’t already studied during her master’s degree.

“On the first day of the class, the professor comes in and writes the equations of the Standard Model on the board,” Davoudi said. “I was like, ‘This is not a particle physics class, what's going on?’”

She recalled him telling the class to “keep the QCD equation in your mind, and everything else I teach you in this course about nuclear phenomena, try to go back and ask, ‘How does this come from that equation?’”

That question and the approach of tackling nuclear physics from the foundation of QCD stuck with her. And that professor, Martin Savage, became her doctoral advisor.

“I just fell in Davoudi and Ph.D. advisor, Prof. Martin Savage, University of Washington, Fall 2012. Photo credit: Seattle Times.love with nuclear physics,” Davoudi said. “The way it was presented to me was that nuclear physics started around a hundred years ago, so you can consider it an old field. But it's probably one of the most difficult sciences out there and that's why the progress has been slow but steady. However, as new tools and new perspectives were developed in recent times, our chance of answering big questions has improved considerably, and that is what keeps the field alive and exciting.”

She decided to join a community of dedicated researchers that have been steadily developing new tools and perspectives that keep the field alive and exciting as it takes on big questions about the nature of matter and reveals new details of our universe.

Looking to the Future

Since joining UMD, Davoudi has continued chipping away at the challenge of applying QCD to nuclear physics. In 2018, she was awarded the Kenneth G. Wilson Award for Excellence in Lattice Gauge Theory, one of the highest distinctions for a junior researcher in her field. In 2019 she received the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship to support her work. She and her collaborators used the largest supercomputers in the U.S. to simulate the rate of proton-proton fusion in the Sun directly from the QCD equation, which they described as “a dream come true.” She sees this as just the beginning of understanding nuclear physics starting from the foundation of elementary particles and interactions.

As a new direction in her research, Davoudi is also partnering with colleagues who are pushing the frontiers of quantum computing. They are working together to lay a foundation for using quantum simulations to solve challenging nuclear-physics problems.

“The atmosphere here at Maryland around quantum is so vibrant and exciting, and there's so much good talent around that I just want to be part of it and bring something to the table that is not there,” Davoudi said. “And my expertise—lattice gauge theory and nuclear physics—it wasn't part of the program in quantum. So I thought, ‘Maybe that's something I can bring.’”

She collaborates with researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute and the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science. Her goal is to help figure out how to reframe her nuclear-physics problems into a form where a simulation can use quantum physics to do the tricky calculations that defy physicists’ current techniques.

“I want to see this quantum-simulation technology actually solve problems that I care about,” Davoudi said. “I want us to be able to simulate the collision of two heavy isotopes in experiment, and be able to track every step of the way after such a dramatic collision that mimics the universe after the Big Bang. It might not be possible today or tomorrow, even in a few years, but we have to start now. We must leverage the new computing resources that might be available in 10 or 20 years since they may revolutionize the type of computational problems we do in nuclear physics.”

She recognizes that these endeavors may not fully bear fruit until after she retires, but she believes now is the time to start building the foundation.

“I’m very hopeful about the future of this program,” Davoudi said. “I think new ideas and robust revolutionary tools arise when people with different experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives start talking to each other, and that can lead to something that had not existed before.”

Another way Davoudi is building this foundation is by mentoring students, whom she encourages to explore topics and classes beyond their current focus and to embrace challenges. She tries to show them the value of learning through tackling a challenging problem and to nurture their strengths as individuals.Davoudi at a summer school at the European Center For Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics (ECT*) along with participating students, including UMD students Siddhartha Harmalkar, Saurabh Kadam, and Andrew Shaw, Trento, Italy, Summer 2019. Photo credit: Andrew Shaw/ECT*.

“If the student is good and motivated, you should give them a problem that matters,” Davoudi said. “Once they learn to solve a hard problem step by step, they won’t be afraid to tackle the next.”

According to Davoudi, every student and postdoc is an individual bringing unique perspectives, strengths and sometimes weaknesses. She says that mentorship is about building a stronger whole by matching together the right people and then helping them spot the next step toward progress on problems of real value to the scientific community—an approach that she learned from her own doctoral advisor.

Davoudi’s efforts to combine multiple perspectives from her colleagues and students isn’t just something that helps her push the boundaries of research; it has always been a part of her life. Even off campus Davoudi values looking at the world from multiple perspectives. She tries to read on a broad variety of topics including politics and social trends from around the world.

“I try to keep up to date whenever I get some free time,” Davoudi said. “That is something that has been kind of a hobby for me since I was a child. I would sit next to my father and read newspapers, or go to my mother’s classroom and help her with teaching duties even if the subject material was something that I was not familiar with. I’d read every book in my parents’ small bookshelf on subjects from literature and politics to biology and cooking, all full of words I sometimes could not even pronounce or understand, but still reading those gave me the hope that the world is bigger than what I was confined to at the time and there’s so much to explore.”

Written by Bailey Bedford with contributions from Chris Cesare

Alumnus Charlie Husar Makes $515K Donation to Support Physics Students

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Published: Sunday, September 06 2020 00:01

It’s been almost 50 years since Charles “Charlie” Husar graduated from the University of Maryland with his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1971. And for him, now is the perfect time to give something back—to the university and to students who follow an academic path similar to his own.

Husar donated $515,000 to establish the Charles T. Husar Endowment for Physics, which will provide fellowships and summer research and travel awards for physics students. The inaugural awards will be given in January, 2021.

For Husar, who paid his own way through college—starting as an assembler at a local electronics company—it just felt like the right thing to do.

“I don’t have any kids and I was thinking about something I could do that would be useful,” Husar explained. “I like to help those who are trying to help themselves. This is part of my rationale for the UMD endowment in a tough discipline. I like the idea of helping someone along the way.”

And, if that’s a student whose background is similar to his own, he’d like that, too.

“I would say my background is a little unusual,” Husar said. “I think I didn’t recognize at the time how different it was.”Charlie Husar

Husar was born in Czechoslovakia just after World War II. 

“My mother was born and raised in Poland. My father was a colonel in the Czech army who spent the war in a German labor camp. He was assigned to the Czech Embassy in the USA after the war,” Husar said. “So, my mother had to bring my 1-1/2-year-old sister and me at 4 months to America herself. My family skipped out from the embassy and hid out for a while in Virginia when the communists took over Czechoslovakia. Long story short, I consider myself very fortunate.”

By the time Husar finished high school, he was living in College Park, just a few miles from UMD. With his academic interests, attending Maryland seemed like the obvious choice.

“I’ve always had a strong interest in science and how things work, and my enjoyment comes from building things and doing things,” Husar said. “Chemistry didn’t impress me, biology looked pretty messy and physics was the hardest thing they had, so I said I’ll study physics. It’s a great process, how to think about a problem and find a solution. I found it pretty challenging and I found the thought process neat and I found myself anxious to apply it all over the place in my engineering career and elsewhere.”

Even in music.

“Did I mention that I also played guitar in rock bands while going to school and working?” Husar asked. “I just didn’t sleep much in my school days.”

Husar’s love for science and problem-solving and music carried him through college and beyond. For years after graduation, he worked as a design engineer for the same electronics company where he worked to pay for college. Then, after a recommendation from a friend, he joined the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked for 35 years as a secure communications engineer until his retirement six years ago. 

During most of his professional career, Husar was also pursuing what continues to be one of his greatest passions away from work: sailboat racing. After his first sailing trip in the early ’70s, he was hooked and soon began rebuilding boats and competing with his own 25-footer—which he named “Chicken Little.”

“Ever since 1980, I’ve been racing my own sailboat,” Husar said. “I still have it and a couple other sailboats, too.”  

For the problem-solver in Husar, the challenges of sailing were a perfect fit.

“Learning how to sail a boat well, to manage the wind and handle the seas, is a really complex thing,” Husar said. “In terms of learning how you maximize your use of the wind with the sails, it’s how you handle the lines and do the tricks, and how you better set up the boat to do what you’re trying to do.”

Husar, who’s been called the “Godfather of the Cal 25 Fleet,” spends hundreds of hours a year supporting the sport of sailboat racing—heading up the Annapolis Cal 25 owners’ group, keeping season-long scores for eight different racing fleets, and volunteering at the Annapolis Maritime Museum.

Now in his 70s, Husar still sails and still plays music, sitting in for the occasional gig now and then. And he hasn’t stopped learning. Husar found a niche on the website Quora, providing answers to a wide range of complex technical questions—from “What is a simple but detailed explanation of logic gates?” to “Why does a thermocouple record a high value of temperature?”

“I am an answerer on Quora,” Husar explained. “I find some of the questions intriguing, and I further find that I sometimes need to do research to come up with a proper and accurate answer. In this way, I find answering the questions to be more educational than asking them.”

From answering online questions to running sailing events to creating the endowment for physics students at UMD, Husar finds a special satisfaction in doing good things for others. He hopes his donation will make a difference for students who appreciate the challenges of physics and problem-solving, just as he did as a student—and still does 50 years later.

“Whether it’s the volunteerism thing or this new endowment, I’m really pleased when I can help somebody out, it feels good to do it,” Husar said. “I guess that is what I enjoy in life—making a difference.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Donna Hammer Takes Outreach Online

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Published: Saturday, September 05 2020 00:01

As director of education for the University of Maryland’s Department of Physics, Donna Hammer (M.E. ’95, curriculum and instruction) wears a lot of hats—supervisor for the Office of Student and Education Services, instructor, conference organizer, department ombudsman and University Senate committee member, among many others. But in all of her roles, Hammer never imagined herself as a video producer. Then COVID-19 came along, and suddenly, she had to think about things like camera angles, lighting and audio quality.

During the summer of 2020, when she would normally have been juggling the needs of nearly 200 students in four different summer camps, Hammer was directing three video shoots a day, three days a week—all the while making sure her team wore masks, observed physical distancing guidelines, and fastidiously cleaned their equipment and makeshift studio.

“We’ve had to learn a lot all at once,” Hammer said. “But we’re actually thinking we might be able to reach more people now with some of the things we’re developing to deal with the pandemic.”

As one of the college’s more active outreach programs, Hammer’s office already has a broad reach. In addition to directing the summer camps, HDonna Hammer ammer oversees a free public demonstration program called Physics is Phun for high school students; Physics Discovery Days for elementary school children and parents; and the demonstration facility, which contains equipment for more than 1,600 physics demonstrations.

As the pandemic shut down in-person activity across campus, Hammer has been reimagining her programs to serve a remote audience. She started with the demonstrations, which are used by faculty throughout the college.

With the help of a small Teaching Innovation Grant from the university, Hammer hired four undergraduate students with video editing skills and began videotaping demonstrations in the John S. Toll Physics Building physics lecture hall where they would have plenty of room for the videographer and presenter to physically distance.

Her team shot 40 demonstration videos, including a Tesla coil, a magnetic track that suspends a chilled puck in the air, and an apparatus that launches two balls along separate paths to demonstrate conservation of energy and velocity. Hammer’s videos generated plenty of interest, and colleagues she discussed them with at other universities have asked if they will be publicly available.

“I’m committed to making them available, but also I think these are just the beginning,” she said. “If these are well received, we’d like to do another series focused more on public engagement, incorporating more graphics and with a more fun tone.”

That second series of videos could become a temporary substitute for Physics is Phun, one of the department’s most popular public programs that is now on hold due to COVID-19.

The pandemic also shut down the department’s popular in-person summer camps, which led Hammer to experiment with a new approach, guiding small groups of elementary school students through Zoom-based workshops on gravity and Newton’s laws. Her team donned masks and gloves to stuff baggies with take-home physics kits that parents picked up before the workshops. Over Zoom, participants conducted demonstrations for each other while Hammer guided the sessions.

Hammer’s summer camp experiment was a success and provides a model for an online version of Physics Discovery Days, which traditionally provide on-site, hands-on demonstrations and workshops. Hammer is adapting the workshops into online offerings with the help of a generous gift from Freda McCann (Lee) (B.S. '65, M.A. '70, mathematics) and her husband Kevin. Their $10,000 donation will also help support next year’s summer camps, but the online component Hammer’s building now is sure to have a lasting impact.

“I don’t think COVID is going away any time soon, and all of these things we’ve been working on are things we can use into the future,” she said. “And they’re expanding the number of people we can reach.”

In December, the department will host the Conference for Undergraduate Underrepresented Minorities in Physics (CU²MiP), which Hammer helped found at UMD in 2016. As she develops virtual programming for the event, she plans to add a component for high school students—something similar to the programming she included in the annual Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) that UMD co-sponsored in previous years.

“I’ve never had a high school component to CU²MiP, and I'm hoping through this venue, I will be able to connect with some of the same families that we ended up missing this past summer after canceling the camps,” Hammer said.

Hammer is eager to reconnect with families that missed out on summer camps this year, many of whom have sent their children to her camps for years.

Hammer first joined UMD 22 years ago after meeting a faculty member who suggested she apply to be the coordinator for UMD’s National Science Foundation-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). The job turned out to be perfect for her, and she grew with the center, eventually becoming the assistant director. After the center closed in 2013, Hammer turned down offers to lead MRSECs at other universities and instead stepped into the role of director of education in physics.

“I love working at the University of Maryland in this capacity,” she said, “I love the students. I love the university environment. It’s a very rigorous program, and seeing the students succeed is what keeps me going.”

Her energy and dedication have earned Hammer recognition at the department and university levels. She has received numerous awards, including a Staff Excellence Award from the physics department in 2019, the Outstanding Advisor for a Student Organization Award in 2016 for her role as UMD chapter advisor of the Society of Physics Students, the George A. Snow Memorial Award for advancing the representation of women in physics in 2011, and the Dean's Outstanding Staff Award in 2009.

From the moment she began working at UMD, Hammer has risen to the challenge of learning new material and stepping into new roles. Adapting a program steeped in hands-on, in-person education and outreach to a virtual world during a pandemic has pushed her yet again to learn a whole new set of skills and don yet another hat.

Written by Kimbra Cutlip