We just heard that Corinne Manogue is the APS Woman of the Month

August 2016 Woman of the Month: Corinne Manogue, Oregon State University 

Corrine Manogue
Corrine Manogue

Corinne Manogue obtained her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. She studied black holes with Denis Sciama and field theory in curved spacetime with Bryce DeWitt, and joined the physics faculty at Oregon State University (OSU) in 1988 after postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the University of Durham in England, and as an Indo-American Fellow of the Comparative and International Education Society. Professor Manogue played a key role in the early work relating division algebras and supersymmetry. In her infinite free time, she continues explore how to use the octonions to describe the symmetries of high-energy particle physics.

Since its inception in 1996, Professor Manogue has been the driving force behind the Paradigms in Physics project at OSU, a complete redesign of the physics major. This redesign involved both a rearrangement of the content to better reflect the way professional physicists think about the field and also the use of a number of interactive pedagogies that place responsibility for learning more firmly in the hands of students.

Her curriculum development/research interests are in helping students make the difficult transition from lower-division to upper-division physics. Professor Manogue is the recipient of a number of teaching awards, among them the 2008 David Halliday and Robert Resnick Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the American Association of Physics Teachers.  She was voted a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2005 and named a Fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2014. After more than three decades in her career, she continues to be amazed to find herself a physicist.

Mateus Carneiro in the neutrino lab worrying about meson exchange currents.
Mateus Carneiro in the neutrino lab worrying about meson exchange currents.

Please welcome Mateus Fernandes Carneiro who has joined the Schellman neutrino group as a postdoctoral scholar.  Mateus just completed his dissertation “Measurement of Muon Neutrino Quasi-Elastic Scattering on a Hydrocarbon Target at Enu of 6 GeV” at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas using the MINERvA neutrino detector at Fermilab.  He will be working with Heidi Schellman and Amit Bashyal on studies of neutrino cross sections.  Mateus will be working from Fermilab most of the time but will visit us frequently.

Janet Tate setting up her superconducting demonstration.
Janet Tate setting up her superconducting demonstration.

The Spectrometer has been operating from the Oort cloud for the past few months, hence some delays in the signal reaching you.

A big event Spring quarter was Janet Tate’s masterful Gilfillan Lecture, “It’s a Materials World” on May 9th.

If you ever wanted to know what goes on in her lab, this is the lecture to watch.

You can find photos at:

Scenes from 2016 Gilfillan Memorial Lecture

and a video, featuring some great superconducting material at:

Congratulations to a physics major Alexander Quinn who received an Undergraduate Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Creativity (URISC) Award for Fall/Winter 2016-2017 sponsored by the OSU Research Office. Alex (pictured while performing experiments) will work with Prof. Oksana Ostroverkhova on a project titled “Investigating Xylindein, a Fungus-Derived Pigment, as a Candidate for use in Sustainable Optoelectronic Devices”. Alex is planning to graduate in the Spring of 2017 and continue his education as a graduate student in physics. His longer-term plan is to work in the area of sustainable materials and renewable energy.

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Hiral Patel and Kyle Vogt are Physics Ph.D. students in the Graham Lab.  Both contributed to a major conference called CLEO in San Jose (4,600 attendees) that is sponsored by APS, OSA and IEEE.  Kyle presented his paper as a talk.   Hiral’s poster received the highest traffic and the most votes, and the Optical Society of America awarded her the “Outstanding Student Poster Presentation Award” from the OSA Optical Material Studies Technical Group.

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Congratulations to a physics major Graham Founds who received an Undergraduate Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Creativity (URISC) Award for Summer 2016 for his project titled “Optical Tweezers-Based Probing of Charge Transfer in Organic Semiconductors at Microscopic Scales” ! The URISC program is a university-wide competition of undergraduate proposals sponsored by the OSU Research Office. Graham’s proposal was among 8 compelling undergraduate proposals that were selected for funding. Graham (pictured below) has been a member of Organic Photonics and Optoelectronics Group led by Prof. Oksana Ostroverkhova at OSU Physics department since September 2015. With the URISC funding, he will continue working with Prof. Ostroverkhova over the summer towards demonstrating a new experimental technique for measuring charge transfer between molecules with elementary charge resolution. Graham is planning to graduate in the Spring of 2017 and to continue his education as a graduate student in physics. His longer-term plan is to join the US Air Force laboratories as a research scientist.

Physics undergraduate student Graham Founds setting up his experiment.
Physics undergraduate student Graham Founds setting up his experiment.

The Department of Physics is proud to announce that four undergraduate students are recipients of the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience in Science (SURE Science) Scholarships. Jeremy Meinke will be working in Prof. Weihong Qiu’s Lab to determine how OsKCH2 –a nanometer-sized biological motor protein– moves on the filamentous microtubule track using high precision single-molecule microscopy. Mirek Brandt and Ikaika Mckeague-McFadden will be working in Prof. Matt Graham’s Lab on the novel electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional and organic materials. Katelyn Chase will be working in Prof. Bo Sun’s lab to develop microfludics endothelium-on-chips devices for studying the collective endothelium shear stress sensing during embryo development. Many thanks to the College of Science and to the scholarship donors that made theses full-time summer-Science research scholarships possible.

On April 12, Physics cohosted the Science Pub at the Old World Deli.

Crowd waiting for the talk to start.
Crowd waiting for the talk to start.

Shane Larson of Northwestern University/Adler planetarium ( BS Physics 1991)  presented the latest news on gravitational waves from the LIGO experiment to over 170 enthusiastic attendees after a pub quiz that no-one, including Shane and Physics Chair Heidi Schellman got 100%.  VP for Research Cindy Sagers won a prize for being one of 3 people to get 8/10!

 

 

Physics alum Shane Larson demonstrating gravitational interactions.
Physics alum Shane Larson demonstrating gravitational interactions.

Shane’s talk is posted at This location.