Berry College Physics & Astronomy News
2000-2001 Edition
Archive: 1999-2000 News
The new Berry College Science Center has opened with much fanfare and aplomb, and Spring 2001 courses were taught within its confines. See the picture below.
It is the end of an era. Dr. Malcolm McDonald is leaving us after 35+ years of service to the Department of Physics. His ready intelligence and wit will be sorely missed by many at Berry College. School meetings will be much less interesting without his keen humor and clear-headed manner. But most importantly, as many will testify, he never let up on his students, especially in his algebra-based introductory sequence. Not in many departments do you find students asking to drop algebra-based physics and pick up the calculus-based course with the hopes of making a better grade. Here, it has happened.
He was so good, it took two to replace him.We are now staffed by three tenure-track physicists. Drs. Chuck Lane and Todd Timberlake were hired to begin in Fall 2001; their arrival on Berry's campus is greatly anticipated. Chuck Lane received his Ph.D in fundamental symmetries from Indiana University, and Todd Timberlake hails from the Center for Statistical Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, where he recently received his Ph.D. in the field of quantum chaos. We welcome them heartily to the Department and look forward to the new energy and ideas that they will bring.
Paul Wallace will be away for the Summer of 2001 at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD as a Summer Faculty Fellow. There, he will be working with colleagues on a couple of papers on unidentified gamma-ray sources and helping to prepare a balloon flight prototype GLAST tower for a test flight in Palestine, Texas in June.