College of Science E-news

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1 College of Science E-news Fall 2012 College of Science meets with incoming President Daniels Gov. Mitch Daniels will begin his position as Purdue University president in January but the College of Science had a positive meeting with him Oct. 1. Type to enter text Just minutes before Gov. Mitch Daniels last public forum before he assumes office as Purdue president in January, College of Science administration had a closed meeting with him to introduce themselves and discuss important issues. It was a CoS 101 class for Daniels with good questions and discussion throughout. The value of a College of Science eduction was emphasized as was the campus-wide strengths of the departments. Outreach programs like I-STEM impressed the governor as did the high SAT/ACT scores of current Science freshmen. CoS welcomes gifts from near and far The College of Science showed its appreciation in October for two generous gifts from two successful companies that are 6,295 miles apart. On Oct. 10, representatives from Teijin Limited, a Japanese chemical company, visited campus after donating $450,000 to the Negishi-Brown Institute. Dr. Ei-ichi Negishi interned and worked at Teijin in the 1960s. Gifts continued on page 2 1 Just days later, the Department of Mathematics welcomed a $2.5 Etiam sit amet donec quis nunc Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ligula suspendisse nulla pretium, rhoncus tempor placerat fermentum, enim integer ad vestibulum volutpat. Nisl rhoncus turpis est, vel elit, congue wisi enim nunc ultricies sit, magna tincidunt. Consectetuer arcu ipsum ornare

2 Gifts from page 1 The donation further strengthens the bond between Negishi and Teijin. The gift provides resources to the Negishi-Brown Institute along with a limited term naming opportunity for the Negishi-Brown Institute directorship. Less than a week later, the Department of Mathematics announced a $1.5 million gift from alumnus Andy Zoltners, who received his master s degree in Mathematics in 1969 at Purdue. The donation will establish the Andris A. Zoltners Distinguished Professorship. Zoltners, who has donated funds to Mathematics in the past, is founder and co-chairman of ZS Associates, a global sales and marketing consulting firm in Chicago. After his years at Purdue, Zoltners developed integerprogramming algorithms during his PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Zoltners research has found solutions to a variety of sales and marketing applications. Today, ZS has offices around the world and serves dozens of companies and industries. New hires Dr. Elena Grigorescu Dr. Yi Wu Dr. Mingji Dai This summer and fall had a flurry of new hires in the College of Science. Here are some of them. Dr. Elena Grigorescu and Dr. Yi Wu are the newest faculty members of the Department of Computer Science. Grigorescu received her master s and PhD from MIT. Her CS focus has been on sublinear-time algorithms. Wu s research interests include approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, optimization and computational learning theory. His master s degree and PhD came from Carnegie Mellon University. Suzy Judy has accepted the position of Information Technology Director for Science Administration effective Oct 22. Judy comes to CoS with over 20 years of IT experience in both business and academic settings, most recently as a Manager for Messaging Services and Database Administration in ITAP. Tamara Clarkson joined the CoS family in July as Career Development and Retention 2 Specialist. She is fresh from receiving her master s degree in Professional Counseling from Texas State University. In August, the Department of Chemistry announced the hiring of Prof. Mingji Dai whose expertise lies in synthetic organic chemistry methodology, particularly aimed at biologically active natural products and smallmolecule collections for the development of biological probes and new therapoies. Prof. Dai has a PhD from Columbia and did postdoctoral work at Harvard University.

3 Science news Here are some stories that grabbed headlines this summer and fall. Higgs boson discovery rocked science world On a day where fireworks light up skies across America, the world of science unveiled explosive news concerning a longtime elusive particle. Announced at 3 a.m. (EST) July 4, thousands of scientists and physicists from around the world, which included Purdue University Physics professors Ian Shipsey and Daniela Bortoletto, revealed their results for the search of the Higgs boson, a particle that was theorized by Peter Higgs in the 1960s. With much of the experiments held at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, the results are more than 99 percent positive that the Higgs boson has been discovered. EAPS looks at Martian moon dust for life Martian moon dust is being scrutinized under a joint project between members of the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Physics, and Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering programs at Purdue University. Led by Jay Melosh (pictured), a distinguished professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and Physics, and sponsored by NASA s Planetary Protection Office, the study was commissioned to prepare for a 2011 Russian space mission to Phobos, the moon closest to Mars. While the Phobos-Grunt mission failed with the spacecraft never making it to Phobos, Melosh and his team used extensive calculations and impact crater measurements on Mars to determine how much material from the Red Planet has collected on the Phobos surface in the past 10 million years. Signature of long-sought particle seen by Purdue physicist Leonid Rokhinson, an associate professor of physics, has observed evidence of long-sought Majorana fermions, special particles that could unleash the potential of fault-tolerant quantum computing. He led a team that is the first to successfully demonstrate the fractional a.c. Josephson effect, which is a signature of the particles. "The search for this particle is for condensed-matter physicists what the Higgs boson search was for high-energy particle physicists," Rokhinson said. "It is a very peculiar object because it is a fermion yet it is its own antiparticle with zero mass and zero charge." The pursuit of Majorana fermions is driven by their potential to encode quantum information in a way that solves a problem dogging quantum computing. The current carriers of quantum bits, the basic unit of information in quantum computing, are delicate and easily destroyed by small disturbances from the local environment. Information stored through Majorana fermions could be protected from such perturbances, resulting in a much more resilient quantum bit and 'fault-tolerant' quantum computing, he said. 3

4 Gleaning glaciers EAPS team headed back to Krgyzstan for climate watch research Casey Beel, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, was among a team that spent a part of its summer in Kyrgyzstan, a country formerly part of the Soviet Union that many Americans would struggle to Bind on a map, let alone spell. The country is known for its beautiful landscape and has become a scenic laboratory for climate change research as the EAPS team investigates the nature of how glaciers respond to climate change in Kyrgyzstan using paleoglacial records. Jon Harbor, EAPS department head, has been to the mountainous country multiple times. This summer marked Beel s Birst trip to Kyrgyzstan and he was thankful for this chance of Bield research. Continued on page 5 4

5 It was an amazing, beautiful country, Beel recalled. We got to spend the Birst day there walking around Bishkek, the capital city, before heading into the mountains. It was nice to get a small look into the culture of the people. Beel described the Kyrgyzstan landscape as stunning. Approximately 80 percent of the country is mountainous, so there are plenty of high peaks, some over 7,000 meters above sea level, glaciers and large rivers draining these areas, he said. Beel said glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate change. The goal of the research is to obtain accurate chronologies of glacier Bluctuations. The information will allow the EAPS team to understand how glaciers respond to ongoin climate change. Traveling across the terrain via helicopter, Beel and crew took 15 samples from boulders and other landforms back to Purdue for testing. But work in Kyrgyzstan is not Binished yet. Beel expects to return to the rugged, picturesque country. I m looking forward to getting back there next year, hopefully for longer this time, he said. Summer in Kyrgyzstan... 5

6 In on Higgs Jakub Zablocki in Geneva during a break from Higgs boson experiments. Graduate student was a part of the CMS project at CERN The discovery of the Higgs boson was the scientific story of the summer and has a good chance of being the science story of the year or maybe even decade. Purdue s Department of Physics faculty was in the trenches crunching data from the CMS detector experiments at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), the world s largest particle physics laboratory where the discovery was made. CERN is based out of Geneva. Several Physics professors made significant contributions to CMS: Virgil E. Barnes, Daniela Bortoletto, Laszlo Gutay, Matthew Jones, David Miller and Ian Shipsey were among the Purdue team. Jakub Zablocki was one of the few graduate students that assisted on the work leading up to the boson discovery. He was at CERN frommarch to June. He recalled a lot of emotions and excitement in the weeks leading up to the July 4 official announcement. A native of Terespol, Poland, Zablocki received physics degrees from the University of Torun in Continued on Page 7 6

7 Poland before coming to Purdue in Since 2009, he has done research under Bortoletto, which helped stamp his ticket for CERN and to be a part of science history. Question: What was your role in the experiments? Answer: To find such a rare particle, we needed to analyze a lot of different decay modes the way a particle decays and later to combine all of the data and analysis. Through statistical methods, you can differentiate if you Bind the Higgs ornot. Each of these decay modes need separate analysis. Right now there are more than 10 different analyses. I was involved in one of those analyses, along with many others. After each presents their analysis and gets approved, we combine all the data to get a Binal result. This requires advanced statistical methods, which allow you to potentially differentiate if yo Bind the Higgs or not. I was working on one specibic channel or decay mode. Q: What s the atmosphere like in Physics since the discovery was announced? A: DeBinitely in the summer, people were very excited about it. I had a lot of people asking me about it that aren t connected with Physics at all, along with other grad students in this Bield. It was something special. There was a lot of buzz and a lot of people wanting to understand it. I had a lot of friends and family contact me. To us, it s not like this discovery closes things. It closes one period and opens a new area for us. Some people worked for years very focused on it. When all the emotions calmed down, a lot of people Binally went for long-deserved vacations. The Birst paper on the discover went to journals on July 31 and longer papers describing the analysis will be published very soon. Q: This discovery was big but from your point of view, just how big was it? A: In our Bield, this is a major discovery debinitely the biggest discovery since the top quark in But I think it s even bigger. The top quark was almost sure it was there. It was just a matter of proving it. The Higgs, people waited for 50 years and they weren t sure it existed. It s very important for physics. Q: How important? A: It helps us to understand how the elementary particles in the universe have mass. This was a big question in physics for many years. This also proves that the theory ofmost fundamental interaction we have so far are working properly. Q: What was it like over at CERN for you? A: It was aperiod of a lot of hard work of developing analysis. Finally, when we looked at the data, I remember about two weeks before the announcement; people were so excited when something was starting to show up. For a long time, we weren t sure what we would Bind but during these meetings we started to see something. People were in euphoria: a lot of people clapping and cheering. At that point, we knew what we found but we still didn t know what Atlas had (a competing experiment searching for the Higgs). We finally saw around July 4 that they saw the same thing. 7

8 50 years of Computer Science We are proud to be celebrating 50 years of computer science here at Purdue University. The nation's first Computer Science Department was founded here in October of While 50 years has passed quickly, the numerous accomplishments of the department, its faculty, alumni, and friends should not be allowed to slip by without acknowledgement. It is with this sentiment that we invite you to celebrate a historic, accomplished 50 years. Fall bash With distinguished alumni speakers, a robotics demonstration and fellowship, Computer Science commemorated 50 years with an all-day event on Oct. 5. Lectures were made by television science consultant Kevin Grazier, Yelp vice president Mike Stoppelman and Dan Reed, a vice president and computer science leader at the University of Iowa. The event was followed by a dinner. Distinguished Lecture Series and spring event The CS 50th celebration will continue into the spring. A big event is in the works for April 5. See 50th.cs.purdue.edu for details. Throughout the fall, a Distinguished Lecture Series promoted the present and future of computer science. Computer scientists like Dr. C. Mohan of IBM ( Implications of Storage Class Memories on Software and Hardware Architectures ) and Prof. John Hopcroft from Cornell University ( New Directions in Computer Science ) presented new, exciting ideas. The next lectures are slated for Nov. 1 with Dr. Iain Duff from CERFACS and Nov. 28 with Prof. Tom Mitchell from Carnegie Mellon University. Both events take place in Room 1142 of the Lawson Computer Science Building. Recent alumni success Stats alumnus puts the science in statistics After obtaining his Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at Purdue in 2010, Paul Livermore Auer is now a staff scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. His collaboration with Purdue scientists helped propel him to his current position, where he keeps the collaboration with experts in different disciplines going. Auer credits his years at Purdue as a huge help in his current field. My education in the Statistics department provided me with a sound foundation from which to approach the myriad of technical difficulties that I encounter on a daily basis, Auer stated. I was lucky enough to have a fantastic advisor (Rebecca Doerge, Statistics department head), who helped me prepare for a life in academic research, specifically in Statistical Genetics. 8