Points of Pride

As an Advanced Lab design project, students created a trebuchet and tested its effectiveness by actually launching bowling balls into a large field. Now the ISU Physics Club has taken over this project, giving it a new look and entering it in the annual Morton "Punkin' Chuckin' " contest.

Student holding two tennis balls used in an Advanced Lab experiment with an air cannon.

Faculty are productive in obtaining grants from major national agencies such as NSF, NASA, and DOE and in publishing works that support the student learning environment.

Happy Halloween from the Physics Department! Live long and prosper.

Dr.'s Martin (left) and Rutherford jam at the annual department picnic.

Many opportunities and awards exist for students. Here, graduates and award winners receive a congratulatory party from the Physics Faculty!

The physics department is spearheading the ISU Solar Car project. Here students and faculty advisors discuss plans to modify the car body.

The department ranks as one of the top 2 producers of physics BS degrees in Illinois and in the top 4 of all 500 physics bachelor's-only departments in the nation.

Undergraduate physics majors participate in faculty research programs, present at many conferences, and co-author publications in major scientific journals.

Program alumni are successful in entering graduate and professional schools and in finding physics-related employment.

The department has received two national awards from the U.S. Department of Energy for its Computer Physics courses and degree sequence. Here Dr. Matsuoka receives the award for the complete sequence.

The department's Physics Teacher Education program has received national attention in an American Association of Physics Teachers white paper entitled "The Preparation of Excellent Teachers at All Levels", which states that the ISU program is considered one of the most innovative and the largest in the nation (Reference: Lila M. Adair and Christopher J. Chiaverina, AAPT Planning Meeting, July 27-28, 2000, Toronto, Ontario, Canada).

The department serves as a model for undergraduate physics programs on a national level. The department was a case study at a national conference on Revitalizing the Undergraduate Physics Curriculum in 1998 and again in 2000 at a national conference for physics department chairs.

The average ACT composite of Undergraduate physics majors is 27.5.

C. Robert O'Dell '59, Physics, L.L.D. '01, was a lead scientist in the development of the Hubble space telescope. He served as project scientist for the first 10 years of the telescope's development at NASA. His observations using the Hubble focused on a study of the great nebula Orion, leading to confirmation that all stars have planets or the potential for planetary systems. O'Dell is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Physics and Astronomy department at Vanderbilt Univeristy in Nashville, Tennessee.

Robert Wagner, '02, received the American Physical Society's Leroy Apker Award in 2001, making him the most outstanding physics undergraduate at a non-PhD granting institution the United States. Wagner, who also received a prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship for 2001, published nine articles as an undergraduate in the most prestigious physics journals. His work in the University's Intense Laser Physics Theory Unit was selected as one of the five best undergraduate research projects in the U.S. by the American Physical Society in 1999 and again in 2001. Robert is currently in the graduate program in physics at Princeton.

Dr. Shang-Fen Ren was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in recognition of outstanding contributions to semicondictor nano-physics and her contributions to international physics, including her Undergraduate Research Experiences in China program. Here an ISU student works with a Chinese student at Beijing University.

Rainer Grobe and Charles Su co-direct the Intense Laser Physics Theory Unit. They have received more that $500,000 from the NSF and the Department of Energy, and Research Corporation. Their work, including the discovery of cycloatoms, is featured internationally in elite scientific journals. Their work has placed them as two of the world's premier theoretical atomic and optical physicists. In addition, the U.S. Patent Office awarded a patent to Grobe for his innovations in the transmission of optical signals through an absorbing medium.
In 2006, the American Physical Society Awarded them the Undergraduate Research Prize "For their outstanding effort at creating a successful and renowned optical theory research program at Illinois State University, and for their exemplary involvement of undergraduates in this research."

Our favorable faculty:student ratio of 10:1 means students get all the help they need from their teachers. Here Dr. Holland works with physics majors on homework problems.

The American Institute of Physics places Illinois State among the largest educators of physicists in the United States.

The department's Planetarium educates and inspires more than 15,000 visitors annually, including school and community groups from Illinois. More than 300,000 people have visited the planetarium since it opened in 1964.