Jim Andrello and the Newly Renovated Applied Physics Teaching Lab

Since the founding of our department, both undergraduate and graduate students in Applied Physics have planned, executed, and reported experiments in the Applied Physics Teaching Lab. This year, we had our highest student enrollments, and students conducted twelve weeks of experiments in a newly renovated laboratory space. Jim Andrello, who manages and maintains the Applied Physics Teaching Lab, worked with the Staff of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science and designed the new laboratory space. New lab benches, new lighting, new safety features, and new lab utilities were made compatible with twelve project lab stations. Student teams conducted experiments to measure the speed of light, the concentration of semiconductor dopants, the supersonic speed of plasma shock waves, critical properties of superconductors, high-vacuum technology, and Paschen's law. Besides instructing all of our applied physics students on safe laboratory techniques, Jim is manager of the Plasma Physics Laboratory and chief research technician on the HBT-EP Tokamak.