CHAIR’S WEEKLY MESSAGE
Contents
“Hack Your Teaching”
The last two weeks have been about upping our game, once again, on using digital tools to deliver something that we all, as faculty, already know how to package: education. The realities of COVID-19 have forced certain things on us: remote teaching; an asynchronous digital safety net to make sure remote students have access to classroom material, especially if they are sick or so far away in time zones that they rely on asynchronous access. However, what hasn’t been forced in one direction or another by COVID-19 is the thing I, personally, value in any setting: the trust I have in all of you, the instructors who craft and lead our courses, to deliver what is needed in this difficult time. I reiterate again that if you need support, you need only ask.
The teaching “hack-a-thons” in the past two weeks have been immensely successful. Thanks to all of you who have participated. Participants have come with questions and expertise. The results have been organic but informative. We’re watching courses grow in real-time. The expanding list of lessons is hosted on our new Department of Physics news and information site, https://blog.smu.edu/smuphysics. This site now feeds news back to our main department website (check the right-hand side). We hacked our website with a digital printing press the same way you are hacking your teaching to incorporate and merge new ideas and tools.
Instructors have been curious about a number of things, such as embedding LATEX in a Canvas assignment or quiz so you don’t have to retype equations you might already have in lecture notes; staging modules so that there are pre-requisites (recommended prior content) and/or requirements (tasks that must be completed to proceed); sending Zoom recordings straight to Panopto so you don’t have to manually conduct the transfer to Canvas; and many more. Our hack-a-thon site has been shared by the Dean with all other Dedman Departments, and we were grateful to receive both thanks as well as external offers of information sharing! An entire faculty-developed Panopto guide from Professor Eva Oberdorfer in Biology is now linked from the site! We’re now hosting that content on our page, with credit to the authors and their department. It’s an old lesson from childhood, but no less important now: sharing is caring.
“Hacking,” in the best sense of the slang, is merely the act of “…playful solving of technical work that requires deep understanding…” You all possess that deep understanding. It’s been fun to watch you play with new tools to find ways of doing what you already know how to do best. Our students will appreciate this. I know I do.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jacob Sekula Chair, Department of Physics |
DEPARTMENT VIEWS
Calls to Action!
August is the busiest time of the whole year for Department Administrators. Lacey and Michele are dealing with a lot, and appreciate your patience even while they recognize everyone has needs. They are working to make sure needs are met, but understanding and patience are welcome and necessary.
Lacey asks that all faculty, staff, and students provide to her as quickly as possible requests for office supplies, such as notebooks, pencils and pens, etc.
A reminder that Summer Research Assistantships all terminate on August 16, as per the agreement all parties sign at the beginning of the summer period. Hours logged after that cannot be compensated by the SRA program, so please make sure your SRAs are informed that their term of research concludes after August 16. If the student and you wish to continue the work, apply for a University Research Assistantship for the fall term.
Lacey would also like as many incoming and current graduate students as possible to participate in the “Hbar Coffee Bar (Zoom Edition)” next Wednesday, August 19, at 2:30pm US Central Time. It’s a great chance for some chatting and face time before the semester gets here! If you need the connection information (it’s usually mailed out on Wednesday morning), please contact Lacey.
SMU Physics Speaker Series – Fall 2020
Our colloquium and seminar series is growing quickly behind the scenes, and the leadership team (Steve, Fred, and Simon) especially appreciates the speaker leads and tips from all of you! Keep those coming. Based on input from the department, the leadership team is organizing talks and beginning to make invitations. The rhythm going forward will be as follows: a more general-interest Colloquium will begin each month, followed by seminars until the next month boundary; rinse and repeat.
The theme of the first month of talks will be “Computing the Cosmos.” Our inaugural colloquium of the Fall semester, on August 31, will be given by Professor Dan Coombs (University of British Columbia, Peter Wells Institute for Advanced Studies) on a timely topic that will no doubt be of interest to the department and beyond: modeling the COVID-19 pandemic. More details will follow as we firm up the information from the speaker, and of course we’ll make sure that Dedman College advertises the event, even as we advertise it to our pre-majors, majors and minors, staff, and faculty. Subsequent speakers will talk about the mysteries lurking in the nucleus of the atom, challenges in teasing information out of the cosmic microwave background, and the production of Higgs bosons by rare but distinctive means. It should be an exciting fall speaker series!
FACULTY NEWS
For recent fall teaching issues, please check out the Department Chair letter from August 10, 2020 to all the faculty. If you don’t have it in email, contact the Chair for a copy.
Masks in the Classroom – Faculty in Charge
A lot of you are concerned about setting rules in your in-person classes. I want to assure you that, in conversations with the Dean, it’s been repeated over and over that the instructor controls the classroom environment. Since the University is only requiring “face coverings” be worn at all times, many of you are concerned about being able to strengthen that to “masks.” You are indeed empowered to tighten such rules. In fact, you can be specific: you can say that only masks meeting the American Medical Association’s criteria are allowed in your classroom (e.g. covers the nose and mouth, fits well, contains at least three layers of material, etc.), and put the link to the AMA guidelines in your syllabus.
Student Learning Outcomes – All Kinds
Another useful item that has arisen regards the Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). There are three kinds: University-wide Curricular SLOs (e.g. either for the University Curriculum (2012-2019) or the new Common Curriculum (CC, 2020-)); Program (Major) SLOs, also known as “WEAVE” to many people; and Course-Specific SLOs, which are managed entirely by the department. The new CC SLOs are available on the web and can be copied and pasted to your syllabus, as appropriate:
- Common Curriculum SLOs
- Graduation Requirement SLOs (Proficiencies)
If you’re not sure what SLOs you are supposed to include on the syllabus for your course, feel free to speak with the Department Chair and the Assistant Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Simon Dalley.
Intro Lab Videos: The Remake
Ever since COVID-19 forced the recording of laboratory training videos for the PHYS 1105 and PHYS 1106 sequence, Rick Guarino and Jingbo Ye have been planning to reshoot those videos. They were, at the confession of the instructors, hastily done in the spring. Some students experienced a “Blair Witch Project” effect, which was uncomfortable. Since the summer terms concluded, Rick and Jingbo have been on a filming spree, with 5 videos already done and many more being done this week and next to be completely ready for the fall term. When you see Rick and Jingbo, congratulate them on this mythological lab video filming effort and offer them your emotional support. Soon they will turn back to the important work of introductory laboratory reform, so your encouragement is appreciated.
“Graduate Advising Week in Physics” – What it Means for Faculty
Each semester, the week before classes start and the week after final exams are “Graduate Advising Week”, a tradition we started last year. This is especially the time that Lacey checks on unpaid account balances, registration for student health insurance, and enrollment in courses, as well as the posting of grades. For faculty, this means Lacey will ask you to make sure grades are posted for graduate students (this can otherwise prevent graduation or cause other problems for the students), and she will ask the students to handle unpaid account balances that might prevent registration. Please make sure to work with Lacey to remind your student(s) about their responsibilities, and make sure you post grades promptly at the conclusion of each term.
Postcards from the Faculty
From: Jodi Cooley
The big news of the summer was that the NSF awarded my group $750,000 in base funding over three years to support the SMU SuperCDMS program. In addition, I have been selected as a convener of the Snowmass CF1: Particle Dark Mattertopical working group. We have been busy preparing with the community for the decadal Snowmass Planning Meeting. Learn more and get involved here: https://snowmass21.org/cosmic/dm_particle. I had the pleasure of working with three graduate students and two undergraduates this summer. All three graduate students are new to SuperCDMS and have primarily been involved in service work.
However, I am happy to report that Jasmine Liu has joined the solar axion group and will be making projections for SuperCDMS SNOLAB. Ishwita Saikia is making measurements of devices to characterize the new SuperCDMS Detectors. During the course of his service work, Mike Litke found a mistake in a former student’s thesis result code! This was an important catch before the results go to publication, but fixing the problem appears as if it will have minimal impact on the major conclusions; computational work is ongoing. Finally, I serve as the new SMU Chief Marshal of Ceremonies and am very busy working with the academic ceremonies team to fulfill the University’s desire for a “safe” August commencement (in person and online) and a “safe” opening convocation (online only) and rotunda passage.
From: Joel Meyers
The most significant event from my summer was being elected as Science Council Co-Chair for the CMB-S4 collaboration, a position that officially began on July 1, 2020 and will continue for a two-year term. My research on various cosmic microwave background (CMB) and other early universe topics has progressed nicely. I will highlight two projects involving folks from SMU which are nearing completion. Patchy Reionization Reconstruction with Deep Learning: This work is led by Eric Guzman and focuses on applying machine learning techniques to search for modulation of the CMB caused by ionized gas surrounding the earliest stars and galaxies. Searching for Gravitational Waves with Fast Radio Bursts: SMU undergraduate Noah Pearson, postdoc Cynthia Trendafilova, and I showed how observations of strongly lensed, repeating fast radio bursts can be used to search for long wavelength gravitational waves that result from supermassive black hole binaries that form when galaxies merge.
From: Pavel Nadolsky
My research topics this summer revolved around the internal structure of elementary particles, proposals for future colliders, and the mathematics behind the design of the Citroën DS flying car belonging to Fantômas, the notorious French genius of disguise. [The incredible flying car is reviewed here. The video of the car in action is here.]
A large part of the summer was spent on writing a gargantuan reply (25 pages) to the peer review of a gargantuan research article arXiv:1912.10053 (100+ pages) about a large-scale theoretical analysis of the partonic structure of protons that we completed last year. In this article, we examined our latest understanding of the internal composition of protons from its quarks and gluons based on the results of recent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. We obtained lots of unique results by running detailed simulations on the ManeFrame 2 cluster. The results are still rolling in and will help us understand how the models for the proton structure can be improved in the next few years as we prepare for the most precise measurements at the LHC. I have been involved in the ongoing 18-month Snowmass 2021 study as a co-convener of one of the topical groups of the Energy Frontier dedicated to studies of QCD in future particle experiments. We had many engaging meetings and workshops with the participants focusing on attractive possibilities to study the hadron structure at the Large Hadron Collider, Electron-Ion Collider and other facilities.
The CT18 parton distributions that have developed during the last two years are rapidly employed by experimental collaborations. Parton distributions describe probabilities for finding quarks and gluons inside protons or nuclei. The functional form of parton distributions is not exactly known, but it can be approximately deduced from a large-scale data analysis of data of experimental measurements. In the CT18 analysis, we parametrize parton distributions by Bézier curves — ultra-flexible polynomial functions that you may routinely use in Adobe Illustrator or Powerpoint to draw curving lines. Bézier curves were invented in 1950’s to design curved bodies of new cars by Citroën and Renault. These futuristic cars were an immediate success. It turns out that Bézier curves are also very handy for parametrizing the internal distributions for composite microscopic particles. No neural networks are needed! This summer, we have studied nice mathematical properties of Bézier curves and applied them to understand how we can learn about the non-perturbative dynamics in QCD from scattering of pions or protons.
From: Fred Olness
Graduate students Lucas Kotz and Brandon Stevenson worked with me over the summer and presented their research at the Electron-Ion Collider’s Inclusive Reactions subgroup meeting on 4 August 2020. The nCTEQ Collaboration released the new nCTEQ15WZ PDFs which include LHC W/Z production data. The xFitter Collaboration released a set of pion parton distributions functions (PDFs) for their open source analysis fitting framework. Finally, my son Ben and I got bored while stuck at home, so we made a special version of the SMU Physics Circus.
From: Krista Lynne Smith
I moved to Dallas! In addition to that milestone, a lot happened. I got approved a program for monitoring accreting supermassive black holes with the NICER X-ray instrument aboard the International Space Station, simultaneously with the TESS optical satellite, to search for periodicities. This came with my first SMU-won grant money!
Speaking of TESS, the satellite (intended to discover exoplanets) accidentally saw a gamma ray burst (GRB). Although GRBs are a completely new field for me, I was interested in the high-energy implications and have completed a paper on the object which has been submitted to the Fermi collaboration for review.
My large radio imaging survey of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) host galaxies finally concluded on the Very Large Array in New Mexico, after three years of imaging. We now have a huge catalog of star formation and black-hole-driven outflows to study how black holes affect their host galaxies, a great jumping-off point for student projects at SMU.
Finally, our paper on the possible self-lensing flare of a binary supermassive black hole I discovered, with modeling analyses and the paper itself led by Harvard undergraduate Betty Hu, is published.
STAFF NEWS
Staff In-Office Schedule for Week of August 17
The in-office staff schedule for the week of August 17 is as follows:
- Monday: Lacey
- Tuesday: Lacey
- Wednesday: Michele
- Thursday: Michele
- Friday: Lacey
Of course, both are always available on Microsoft Teams, by Email, or by phone.
Full staff in-office calendar for this month:
STUDENT NEWS
Congratulations to Ryan Staten, Ph.D.!
The Department would like to express congratulations to Ryan Staten, who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in July and graduated in August! Ryan’s thesis subject, on constraining the Hubble Constant using both robotic telescope (ROTSE) observations of certain supernovae and using baryon acoustic oscillations measured using coming surveys of galaxies and quasars using the DESI project, was of immense interest and generated questions and discussion. Congratulations, Ryan!
Progress on the Chair’s Student Advisory Council
The Department Chair is pleased to report that calls went out for pre-majors, majors, and minors to self-nominate for the 4 undergraduate positions on the new Physics Chair’s Student Advisory Council. The enthusiastic series of responses to this resulted in 6 self-nominations for 3 upper-class positions. The Chair will continue working to cultivate outreach to the pre-majors (first year students) to fill that position, and begin reaching out to graduate students to get self-nominations for the graduate student position. The timeline for decisions is next week, to establish the council by the first week of classes and call a meeting in the first month of the semester.
First-Year Graduate Student Orientation
The First-Year Graduate Student Orientation (Zoom only) will be help on Thursday, August 20 at 4pm US Central Time. Connection information has been shared with graduate students; upper-level graduate students are welcome to participate at the beginning, to make introductions, but don’t have to remain for the whole event. Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, and the Director of Graduate Studies, Fred Olness, is organizing this event with input and support from the Physics Main Office.
“Graduate Advising Week in Physics” – What it Means for Graduate Students
As mentioned above, the week before classes start and the week after final exams are “Graduate Advising Week”, a tradition we started last year. This is especially the time that Lacey checks on unpaid account balances, registration for student health insurance, and enrollment in courses, as well as the posting of grades. For students, this means Lacey will ask you handle unpaid account balances that might prevent registration and to check your health insurance and class enrollments. Help Lacey out by curating your grades for graduate classes, including research classes (e.g. PHYS 8X00), and encourage your faculty supervisors and instructors to turn in grades before the last day of the term (e.g. not later than 72 hours after the final exam).
THE BACK PAGE
Try to take a breath in the next 9 days. The University is making constant demands on all of us. Trust in your teaching. Trust that you’ve got this, because you do.
And don’t forget to breathe.
