Author: Eric Chapman

Congratulations to Dr. Thonhauser for his promotion to Full Professor of Physics. Professor Thonhauser is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Director of the Center for Functional Materials.

Professor Timo Thonhauser has been featured by Wake Forest News for his efforts with the local science museum, Kaleideum North in creating a new exhibit. This exhibit, Molecules, allows visitors to learn about and construct models of a variety of molecules. The exhibit is a result of a close collaboration between Dr. Thonhauser and Kaleideum funded through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The Wake Forest News article can be found at https://news.wfu.edu/2019/02/28/wfu-professors-expertise-and-nsf-grant-make-new-exhibit-at-kaleideum-north-possible/ .

The Physics department is pleased to announce that Dr. Randall D. Ledford (’72) is the winner of the annual Physics Department Outstanding Alumni Award.  The department solicits nominations from alumni and a committee selects the winner. Dr. Ledford will accept the award at a special physics colloquium on April 3, 2019. Dr. Ledford is Chief Technology Officer of Emerson Electric Company, one of the world’s leading electronics companies. Before joining Emerson Electric, Dr. Ledford was president and general manager of several divisions of Texas Instruments Inc. including software, digital imaging, enterprise solutions and process automation. He began his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories where he worked on UNIX development, fiber optic communication and microwave transmissions. While at Texas Instruments, Dr. Ledford led the company’s development of the Digital Light Processor (DLP). Dr. Ledford also generously sponsors scholarships for physics undergraduate majors here at Wake Forest University.

On Friday, November 30, 2018 the Department of Physics held a reception in honor of Terra Dwayne Colvin, Jr., who successfully defended his M.S. thesis entitled: “Assessing Mutations In a Zinc Finger Domain of NF-ΚB Essential Modulator (Nemo) Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations“. Mr. Colvin’s thesis was completed under the direction of Professor Fred Salsbury.

Please click here for photographs highlighting the event.

On Tuesday November 20, 2018 the Department of Physics held a reception in honor of Lauren Nelson, who successfully defended her M.S. thesis entitled: “Interactions Between Heme-Globins and Ligands“. Ms. Nelson’s thesis was completed under the direction of Professors Daniel Kim-Shapiro and Sam Cho.

Please click here for photographs highlighting the event.

On Tuesday, June 19, 2018 rising junior and biophysics major Bingrui (Zach) Zhang passed away.  We mourn the loss of a wonderful person, friend, student, colleague and researcher.   Our deepest sympathy goes out to his family.

Zach joined the Physics department in the fall of 2017.  He had taken several classes in the Physics department and he worked as a researcher in the Guthold/Bonin lab.  He was an excellent student, and an enthusiastic, deeply involved student-researcher.  He had also won a $4000 URECA fellowship to be a full-time researcher in the Guthold/Bonin lab for the summer of 2018.  Zach is remembered as cheerful, hard-working, helpful to everybody, and also as very inquisitive and interested in his research project.  He was working on the characterization of electrospun nanofibers that might be used in tissue engineering and biomedical research.  His goal was to go to graduate school in biomedical engineering.

He had made significant progress in his research project and the data he obtained were of such high quality, that they will be published with him as co-author, which is the real stamp of approval in the scientific community.

A longer memorial with thoughts and contributions by many of his colleagues and friends can be found at this link (http://wfuogb.com/2018/07/in-memoriam-zachary-zhang/).

On Thursday July 26, 2018 the Department of Physics held a reception in honor of Eric Henderson, who successfully defended his M.S. thesis entitled: “Effects of Gate Thickness, Gate Morphology and Emissive Layer Material On Organic Light Emitting Varactor Capacitor Performance“. Mr. Henderson’s thesis was completed under the direction of Professor David Carroll.

Please click here for photographs highlighting the event.