These are exciting times for our department. Our undergraduate and graduate programs in Applied Physics, Applied Mathematics, and Materials Science and Engineering are vibrant and expanding. Our medical physics master's program continues to produce many leaders in the medical diagnostics community each year. Our department has evermore beacons of intellectual excellence and displays an amazing degree of interconnectedness in research.

Our department is clearly uniquely constructed. We run distinct undergraduate programs in Applied Physics, Applied Mathematics, and Materials Science and Engineering, and we recruit doctoral students into these same three areas. However, it is the department research and activities that cut across the quasiclassical boundaries between these three areas that adds the exciting, as well as unique, flavor to our department. There are many intradepartmental interconnections in fields such as advanced computation, nanoscience, energy and the environment, imaging, atmospheric and earth sciences, optical physics, condensed matter and materials physics, and biophysics and biomathematics. This interconnectedness is enhanced by our very special program in medical physics. Our department also works very closely with other departments, national laboratories and companies in all of these areas.

Irving Herman
Professor and Chair