New Faculty Members

Editor’s Note: As a major step in the development of the astronomy program at the U, we received permission to make an unprecedented number of new faculty hires this year. This expansion led to the department of physics being renamed the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Douglas Bergman joined the faculty as an associate professor of physics and astronomy effective September 1, 2009.

Bergman is interested in all aspects of ground-based observations of cosmic rays. He is a member of the Telescope Array collaboration that seeks to measure the spectrum and composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays and to determine their sources. The Telescope Array is located near Delta, Utah, and detects cosmic ray air showers both by collecting the shower particles as they hit the ground and by observing the fluorescent light emitted as they pass through the atmosphere.

Bergman comes to Utah from Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he was a postdoctoral student and a tenure-track assistant professor. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1997, working on a fixed target, high-energy physics experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He enjoys running, skiing, volleyball, and soccer.

Adam Bolton joined the faculty as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy effective September 1, 2009.

Before coming to Utah, Bolton was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.  His main interests are in observational cosmology – the formation, structure, and evolution of galaxies – and innovative methods of astronomical spectroscopy. Much of his research uses the phenomenon of strong gravitational lensing, the dramatic distortion of distant galaxy images by the gravity of intervening objects, to obtain uniquely precise information about the internal workings of the most massive galaxies in the universe. He is a founding member of the Sloan Lens Survey collaboration, which has combined Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectra with Hubble Space Telescope images to nearly double the number of known “gravitational lens” galaxies.

At the U, Bolton will continue his gravitational lensing research program and will pursue extensive involvement in the SDSS3 and other massive astronomical spectroscopic surveys.

Bolton also was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston, Massachusetts. He obtained his PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005.

Shanti Deemyad joined the faculty as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy effective September 1, 2009.

She completed postdoctoral work with Ike Silvera at the physics department of Harvard University and received her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis working with Jim Schilling. Her main area of interest has been condensed matter at extreme conditions.

At the U, the research in her lab will be divided in two major areas: studying the nature of electronic interactions in solid state systems such as quantum solids and highly correlated electron systems; and the synthesis (guided by high-pressure studies) of materials with new or enhanced properties for storage and transport of energy.

The unifying purpose of her research is to find and explore new exotic states of matter that have strong promise for material engineering.

“I enjoy a wide variety of activities,” says Deemyad. “I love watching stars and visiting archeological sites. I love the outdoors and mountains.”

Inese Ivans joined the faculty as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy effective August 16, 2009.

Ivans is an observational astronomer. She specializes in the application of stellar spectroscopic tools to investigate topics ranging from the origins of chemical elements in the universe to the formation and evolution of galaxies, including the Milky Way.

Ivans is excited to join the University of Utah faculty.  She is interested in developing applications to exploit large data sets such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) using statistical, data mining, and scientific visualization techniques. (The University of Utah is now a full-access partner in SDSS, an international collaboration that has mapped over a million objects covering more than a quarter of the sky.)

She recently relocated from Princeton University, where she held a joint postdoctoral fellowship with the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Previous to that, Ivans completed a fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. She earned a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002.

Saveez Saffarian will join the faculty as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy effective January 1, 2010, as part of the USTAR initiative.

He received his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis working in the lab of Elliot Elson specializing in fluorescence spectroscopy and single molecule analysis. In order to study an intriguing biological problem, he joined Tom Kirchhausen’s lab at Harvard Medical School where he focused on polymerization of multi-protein complexes on the plasma membrane. During his postdoctoral research he developed live cell high-resolution methods to visualize clathrin self-assembly. Clathrin polymerizes on the plasma membrane and results in membrane curvature toward the cell interior.

“In my lab I will couple the high resolution live cell microscopy with cell biological and biochemical assays to follow the assembly of enveloped viruses both in live cells and reconstituted systems. My long-term plan is to understand the budding of potent human pathogens like influenza and HIV with molecular detail,” says Saffarian.

Gordon Thomson was hired as a full professor and the first recipient of the Jack W. Keuffel Chair of Experimental Astrophysics, effective September 1, 2009.

As the Keuffel Chair, he will take a leadership role in the Telescope Array (TA) collaboration at the U. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a master’s degree and PhD from Harvard University.

“I worked as a graduate student and as a postdoc on both cosmic ray and high energy physics experiments, then zeroed in on accelerator experiments studying hyperons and neutral K mesons, mostly conducted at Fermi lab over a twenty year period,” says Thomson. “Finally I saw the light and came back to cosmic ray physics, joining the [University of Utah] High Resolution Fly’s Eye (HiRes) experiment in 1999. I’ve been working in this field ever since.”

“After being a professor at Rutgers University for many years, I am happy to accept the offer of joining the faculty of the University of Utah, and I greatly appreciate the honor of being named the Jack W. Keuffel Chair of Experimental Astrophysics,” he says.

“This is a great opportunity for me, and I look forward to working more closely with the members of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. I hope to add to the many important contributions that the department is making to the field.”

Frank C. van den Bosch joined the faculty as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in January 2009.

Previously, he was leading an independent research group in the Theory Division of the Galaxies and Cosmology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. He earned a master’s degree and a PhD in Astronomy from Leiden University in The Netherlands in 1997.

His research focuses on the theoretical aspects of cosmology, large-scale structure, and galaxy formation. In particular, he’s studying the structure and formation of dark matter halos – the hypothetical gravitational core of a galaxy, consisting of dark matter. In addition, he is analyzing the formation of disk galaxies, the galaxy occupation statistics of dark matter halos, and galaxy lensing.

Michael Vershinin will join the faculty as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy effective January 1, 2010.

Vershinin obtained a bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, located in New York, and a PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and additional biology-related training from postdoctoral work at the University of California at Irvine.

“My research interests are interdisciplinary and reside at the interface of biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science,” says Vershinin.

“I am using techniques such as optical trapping to investigate the function of single molecules and molecular complexes. I am also developing methods for better quantifying and modeling biological processes. My current focus is on molecular motors – how things are transported inside of cells, how this transport is regulated and routed, and ultimately how it can break down.”

The latter question is important for understanding many types of cell degeneration and associated diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.