CHAIR’S WEEKLY MESSAGE
Contents
“Anxiety”
We are all anxious about the fall term. I’m just going to acknowledge that aloud right away. Faculty are nervous about delivering their courses in new ways. In-person classes with remote participants (“SMUFlex” or “Hybrid Courses”) feel particularly scary, as none of us is provided a tech expert to “manage the room” while we focus on our primary classroom mission: teaching. Instead, faculty are left to be the director, editor, board operator, health policy supervisor, and teacher for the whole room. In that sense, remote-only classes provide a sense of relative calm and order.
Students are worried about the buffet they face every day. Am I red or blue cohort? Is this a red or blue day? How do I book a physical space to attend a remote class, or do I just attend from my residential commons room? Will my roommate embarrass me during class if I stay in my room? Is my next class in-person or remote? If I am remote only this semester, but the class is SMUFlex, will I hear questions in the in-person class over the Zoom connection? Will my professor wander too far from the mic? What happens if my internet connection fails or if I lose power due to summer heat-related blackouts in parts of the U.S.? Am I getting the same education remotely as in-person? We must acknowledge their anxieties, too.
Before we all dive into this semester, let’s just admit something: none of this is what we signed up for. Faculty didn’t sign up to spend their precious summer months being asked to obtain teaching certifications when that never before mattered at the college level. Staff didn’t sign up for office rotation schedules and concerns about signing telecommuting agreements. Students didn’t sign up for all this pressure to be in the classroom, driven by preconceptions about what education is and what it is not, while fearing complicity in the spread of an easily transmitted and devastating virus. Acknowledging reality is the first step toward confronting it.
I especially want the faculty in this department to know that the College has analyzed the class evaluation data from the spring, and there is no evidence at all that students were overwhelmingly unhappy with the spring term. Compared to Spring 2019, in all the metrics that were comparable between the two terms, there wasn’t much numerical difference in the student feedback. The College has expressed to me, therefore, that they know you all did wonderfully. The tangible evidence says that you heroically rallied to the cause in the spring – something we already knew at the department level. As I have said before, you have got this.
As we wade into this semester, let’s take a breath and remember what we did sign up for: learning and discovery. We will teach, and discover, and learn … we’ll just do it in new ways. Things are not the same now as they were a year ago; this is not a usual fall semester. But you’ve already shown you know what to do next. When we come out of the other side of this, we will have transformed the academy for a long, long time to come.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jacob Sekula Chair, Department of Physics |
DEPARTMENT VIEWS
Calls to Action!
The registrar sent out their beginning-of-term newsletter on Thursday, which we reprint here for your convenience:
Meet and Greet Event: August 26, 2020 – 6pm
Zoom-in on Wednesday, August 26, 2020 at 6PM for an official gathering to meet the department. All Faculty, Staff, Students, Post-Docs, and Visiting Scholars are highly encouraged to attend this one-hour event to welcome new faces, meet your faculty & staff, and greet the student body and visiting scholars. Pick your best Zoom background and come prepared to tell us something interesting about you. The session will conclude with a Q&A. Ask us what you want to know – academics, best burgers, how to get pastries delivered to your home, best sight-seeing, etc. Send your questions to mhill@smu.edu.
Information on how to connect to the event will be shared in email.
SAVE THE DATE: Undergraduate-Oriented Social Event: Evening of September 2, 2020
Save the date on your calendar: there will tentatively be an undergraduate-oriented social event on the evening of September 2, 2020. Details are still being finalized between the Assistant Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Simon Dalley, and the Society of Physics Students (SPS) student leadership. We’ll have more to report in the newsletter next week.
Departmental Research Assistants
Starting in August, the Department Chair received formal applications and proposals from faculty advisors and graduate students seeking departmental support for their Ph.D. research. This is intended to help doctoral candidates who need brief support for a period during which there is no external grant money to provide that support. The Chair is pleased to report that due to savings elsewhere, it was possible to fund two such students for Fall 2020: Jing Xiaoxian (Advisor: Pavel Nadolsky) and Yingnan Xu (Advisor: Roberto Vega). In addition to the research proposal, students are required under the terms of support to provide a mid-term update (e.g. a presentation to their Ph.D. committee) and a department-level seminar at the end of the semester. These seminars are scheduled for November 30, where they will teach the department about the results of this semester’s research.
Please find below a brief summary of the proposed work.
Jing Xiaoxian
Supervised by Pavel Nadolsky, Jing will perform a detailed analysis of the impact of different groups of the experiments of the same physics process on the CJ15 and CT 18 Parton Distribution Function (PDF) fits by applying the L2 sensitivity method. The results of this research will guide their selection of experiments for future PDF fits. In addition, Jing will study the impact of the APPLGrid calculations on the ratio of down-to-up quarks (d/u ratio) and various parton flavors in the CJ15 PDF fit. Jing has introduced some high-precision experimental datasets, such as those from the LHCb Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, into the CJ15 PDF fit, he will assess the impact of these newly added datasets.
Yingnan Xu
Supervised by Roberto Vega, Yingnan will focus on the investigation of new theoretical effects from dark sector physics, specifically dark photons. A “dark sector” is a mathematical landscape of new forces and particles that could, in part, explain the existence of dark matter. However, the richness of this landscape has implications for a host of other phenomena. Yingnan will first review the literature on this subject in preparation for a few projects. One is a one-loop calculation of the mixing between the dark and Standard Model (SM) photon in models with an extra U(1) symmetry. Yingnan will use this to develop and avenue toward a unique and well-defined problem on which he can work as part of his thesis project. Since Dark Photons have implications for the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), there is additional computational work with Joel Meyers (learning standard codes like CAMB and Cobaya) needed to prepare for analyzing cosmological data. A merger of these projects is eventually foreseen.
FACULTY NEWS
Course Syllabi – Upload Today!
A reminder from Randy Scalise, who monitors and publicly posts our course syllabi, that all faculty need to at least get a draft of their course syllabus into the official SMU syllabus library today.
Establishing a Best Time for Faculty Meetings
Faculty should complete the poll, circulated by email, to establish the best possible recurring day and time for periodic faculty meetings this fall. The aim is to have our first meeting in the second week of classes, with a focus on budgets and spending for the academic year. We should have a meeting next Friday (August 28) dedicated to sharing stories about the first week of classes and collect what worked and what didn’t.
Harvard Radcliffe Fellowships
Faculty are encouraged to apply for Harvard Radcliffe Fellowships. Each year, fifty Radcliffe fellows are based in Harvard University’s Radcliffe Yard in an interdisciplinary and creative community.
Eligibility requirements are outlined below, and more information on the fellowship program can be found here.
The deadline for online application for the 2021-2022 fellowship year is October 1 for the sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
Applicants in science, engineering, and mathematics must:
- Have received their doctorate in the area of the proposed project at least two years prior to their appointment as a fellow (December 2019 for the 2021-22 fellowship year).
- Have published at least five articles in refereed journals. Most science, engineering, and math fellows have published dozens of articles.
Helping your students find help
If your students are worried about participating in remote or virtual classes, or in taking digital exams, please help them find help with the following information.
The Altshuler Learning Enhancement Center (ALEC) will be running workshops for students on digital exam-taking. This is to help them with best practices, faculty expectations and variations, and establishing discipline and focus for the digital environment. Direct students to the ALEC: https://www.smu.edu/Provost/ProvostOffice/SAES/StudentSupport/SASP (ALEC is physically located in Suite 202 of the Loyd All Sports Center and can be reached by phone at 8-3648). Their workshops are listed here: https://www.smu.edu/Provost/ProvostOffice/SAES/StudentSupport/SASP/Services/Workshops.
STAFF NEWS
Staff In-Office Schedule for Week of August 24
The in-office staff schedule for the week of August 24 is as follows:
- Monday: Lacey
- Tuesday: Michele
- Wednesday: Michele
- Thursday: Lacey
- 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
Physics Chair’s Student Advisory Council
The Department Chair received 9 self-nominations from undergraduates or graduates to serve on the newly constituted Physics Department Chair’s Student Advisory Council. While first-year and doctoral student self-nominations are still under consideration, the following students were selected to serve as the Sophomore-Year, Junior-Year, and Senior-Year representatives to the Council. They represent a cross-cutting segment of our program, including Physics Majors and Minors, the Biophysical Science Major, SMU scholar and pre-health programs, etc.
| Council Position | Student Representative |
| First-Year | IN REVIEW |
| Sophomore Year | Elena Henderson |
| Junior Year | Stephanie Gilchrist |
| Senior Year | Noah Pearson |
| Doctoral Program | IN REVIEW |
New Graduate Student Orientation
We were grateful for the turn-out of both first-year and upper-level doctoral students at our orientation on Thursday, August 20 at 4pm. Students heard from the Department Chair and the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, as well as department administrative staff. The goal of the orientation is to help especially the newest doctoral students to acclimatize to the expectations and structure of our program. This included honest discussions about how to participate and engage in the digital-driven era forced on us by the pandemic.
Welcome to our newest doctoral students!
How Do Students Get a COVID-19 Test On-Campus?
Many students have complained that it is difficult to figure out how to get a COVID-19 test on-campus, and how it is paid for. The difficulty of finding this information was confirmed by the Department Chair this week, and a suggestion to improve its visibility was passed up through the College administration. While we expect things to improve, here is what you need to know.
Digging around, we found the information buried in one of the “Mustang Strong” newsletters, which was sent on August 11, 2020. This is archives on the web here: https://www.smu.edu/Coronavirus/Students/Mustang-Strong-Newsletter/Maintaining-a-Healthy-Campus.
The salient language is as follows:
How COVID-19 testing works at the Dr. Bob Smith Health Center: (1) Students experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, along with those who believe they’ve been exposed, will be evaluated by our physicians to determine if testing is warranted. (2) If you are enrolled in the University insurance: Costs are fully covered without additional paperwork. (3) If you are enrolled in a non-University insurance plan: Costs are typically fully covered with a claim. (4) If you do not have insurance and are unable to pay, contact the Health Center to see what options are available to you.
From the “MUSTANG STRONG” Newsletter on AUGUST 11, 2020.
If a student in this department is having a difficult time securing a COVID-19 test at the Health Center, but feels that they clearly meet the eligibility criteria, this should be brought to the attention of the Department Chair.
THE BACK PAGE
It’s important that we celebrate and share, as a department, the accomplishments of faculty, staff, and students. Especially on the research side, it’s important to keep a public record of the discoveries, ideas, and accomplishments of our department.
All faculty are especially reminded to please inform Randy Scalise of new papers and publications so that they can be listed on the SMU Physics Research Pre-Print site, our rolling archive of research accomplishments. To whet your appetite, here is what is listed as having been published this summer. We are sure there is a LOT more, so please make sure Randy knows about your papers so that they can be recorded here!
SMU-HEP-20-06 nCTEQ PDFs: neutrino analysis , F.Olness et al.
SMU-HEP-20-05 Charm jets as a probe for strangeness at the future Electron-Ion Collider , Miguel Arratia, Yulia Furletova, T. J. Hobbs, Fredrick Olness, and Stephen J. Sekula
SMU-HEP-20-04 W/Z analysis notes , F. I. Olness et al.
SMU-HEP-20-03 Parton distributions and lattice QCD calculations: toward 3D structure , F. I. Olness, T. J. Hobbs, and P. M. Nadolsky et al.
