Dear friends: It has been some time since I sent out an edition of the irregular 'News of the Department' -- so I'm not sure that I even remember all the noteworthy events that have floated under the bridge. But here are some, and I trust that what I forgot, someone will remind us about. with regards, Paul Grannis --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Stony Brook ranked number 3 in the nation for number of Physics PhDs granted for 2001-2 (behind Illinois and MIT). 2. Laszlo Mihaly won the Chancellor's award for Excellence in Teaching -- no doubt aided by the photographs of Phil Allen hitting a plank on Laszlo's chest with a sledgehammer to demonstrate how the force of the blow can be distributed widely enough to sustain no damage (well Laszlo is slightly flatter than before). 3. Norbert Pietralla will join the department late this fall as an assistant professor; his research is in many aspects of nuclear structure. 4. The work of Alfred Goldhaber together with Stan Brodsky and Jungil Li on glueball production in electron positron collisions garnered the cover picture for the Physical Review Letters of Sept. 12: http://ojps.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PRLTAO&Volume=91&Issue=11 5. Chang Kee Jung was selected as a teacher scholar with a special grant to develop his new course, The Physics of Sport. This course is now premiering with about 50 enrolled students from the Athletic Training program and other interested sports junkies. 6. Mike Marx is serving as project manager for the KOPIO experiment that as part of the RSVP (Rare Symmetry Violating Processes) initiative that has now been slated for funding by the NSF. KOPIO is a $50M experiment that seeks to measure the very rare decay of the K long meson into a pizero and two neutrinos, which can cleanly determine the nature of CP violation in the K meson system. The KOPIO summer interns invented a 'save the world' game found at http://www.phy.bnl.gov/~millerc/KOPhome.html 7. Hal Metcalf will serve as the co-chair of the Optical Society of America DLS meeting. 8. Adjunct Professor Steve Dierker was named Associate Laboratory Director for the Light Source Division at Brookhaven Lab. 9. New adjunct professors in the department include Luis Orozco (Luis is now on the faculty at Maryland), Sergei Tolpygo (now at Hypres Inc.), Ralf Rapp (now at Texas A&M), Peter Abbamonte, Chi-Chang Kao and Vladimir Litvinenko, all of Brookhaven. 10. The forward preshower module built by ex-grad student (now BNL postdoc) Abid Patwa and collaborators in Stony Brook and Brookhaven was selected for inclusion in an exhibit on Art and Science at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 11. Andrew Steiner who got his degree in 2001 with Madappa Prakash won the APS Nuclear Physics Dissertation award. 12. Jay Dickerson who got his PhD at Stony Brook in 2002 in condensed matter experiment working with Emilio Mendez has accepted a faculty position at Vanderbilt University. 13. Alumnus Keith Noll (PhD around 1985) is the winner of the 2003 Astronomical Society of the Pacific Klumpke Roberts Award recognizing outstanding contributions to th public's appreciation of astronomy. Keith worked with Roger Knacke. 14. Alumnus Li Hua Yu of Brookhaven Laboratory won the Free Electron Laser Prize for 2003. Yu was a student of Frank Yang in the 1980's. 15. Marian Zdrazil's thesis work setting new stringent limits on doubly charged Higgs bosons was featured in the 'Result of the Week' by Fermilab in November. 16. On September 9, we dedicated the Peter B. Kahn Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy Library, in honor of Peter's many contributions to students and the intellectual life at Stony Brook. 17. In commemoration of Einstein's "miraculous year" of 1905, 2005 has been declared the World Year of Physics by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). A number of outreach activities are planned, and we should consider organizing local events. The web site http://www.physics2005.org/ details the activities. 18. Fellowship and grant opportunities that have come to our attention include: Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program for faculty (up to $100K per year for 3 years); deadline Jan. 8, 2004 Rowland Institute at Harvard Junior Fellows in experimental physics for fresh PhDs or postdocs less than 2 years from PhD; deadline Jan. 15, 2004 The French Embassy offers Chateaubriand Fellowships to work in French laboratories for 6 -12 months. Stipends are 1680/2026 Euros for graduate students/postdocs, plus travel. information on these opportunities is available in the chair's office. 19. Hofstra University is seeking graduate students to serve as adjunct faculty teaching introductory astronomy.